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Comment by glial | Hacker News Reader

It's brutal on the hiring side too, FWIW. I'm getting lots of "cover letters" that are written to other orgs, e.g. Hugging Face.

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After addressing the companies correctly and compiling latex CV for the specific posting, the smartypants will still find repulsive three months of a gap here and there and few failed trial periods... so here it is - "Dear McCompanyFace, ....".

"Yeah, Karen, I took 3 months, cuz I would like to enjoy life while I can and not have to wait til I'm 90 and frail and dying before I get time to myself. I'm responsible enough with my money I can do so, I see that as a benefit, but you do you. See ya, hope you find a more satisfying job that can see hope and potential in people and liberated desires instead of being chained to that desk and wanting others to suffer just as much as you."

Oh yeah, I hate that. I know a guy who is a network engineer. He got burned out by the workload at his old company, quit, and took 6 months to hike the entire Appalachian Trail because old company wouldn't let him take that long of a break. So after finishing up and taking a maybe two week vacation to recuperate from the hike, he starts applying for jobs again and whaddaya know: "We see here that there's a 7 month gap here, have you been on the market that long [gasp!] or did you have another role after that?"

As an interviewer or hiring manager why wouldn't you ask about it?

Because it’s none of their business. An interview is there to evaluate a candidate’s suitability for a role, not to dig into their personal life. What they did at work is relevant, what they did when not working is private. You wouldn’t ask what someone did on a Saturday night.

Maybe they were sick, maybe they were pregnant, maybe they were looking after a dying relative, maybe they were backpacking across South America, maybe they were sitting at home watching every episode of Star Trek, what people do in their own time is a private matter.

One has to be at least in their 30s and absorb at least one failure in life to understand this.

That is correct, which is why the hiring atmosphere reeks of ageism. There's a lot of people in this industry that are over 40, healthy, of sound mind, and have a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience that are being overlooked because they're supposedly "not agile enough" or whatever.

When you have 168 resumes to skim through, you can “afford” to just pass on this application and choose some others to interview that would be less offensive to office sensibilities. The impact of accepting so many false negatives is difficult to quantify because you don’t know which ones would have truly been good fit.

I suspect that among the hundreds of discarded resumes for a particular role was a candidate who actually believes in the company, would have been fully engaged with the work, and made a serious positive impact on the company’s success.

I do not understand the point you're trying to make here.

One can do best sending the right signals - custom motivation letter, custom CV, but some interns or overzealous puritans will dig out other non-negotiable red flags. Thus, the tiny probabilities of success make it not worth to address the CV and letter correctly.

Translation: It's not worth it to write a cover letter or optimize your resumé for a particular job, because you won't make it through the screening process anyway.

Cover letters are a scourge on society anyway.

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