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Comment by ChicagoDave | Hacker News Reader

Resume culling has been going on forever. It’s just a part of the game. This is why you need to make connections with actual people. Not networking. You need to build relationships and those relationships will automatically expand your ability to find work.

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There also used to be Triplebyte. It filled a niche of talented people who have bad resumes and don't know anybody. Found a great job through them when I was starting out.

Real shame there's nothing to replace it, there's huge arbitrage in the market of good people who don't know people. If I were starting out now I don't know what I would do, how do you even meet people.

How did triple the identify those people? I remember the name, but not their service.

They did tons of open tech interviews for basically anyone who could pass an online quiz, and if they thought they found a good candidate Triplebyte would provide them as higher quality / prescreened candidates to other tech companies looking to make a hire (for a recruiting fee).

I got my first job through Triplebyte actually. I think I would have gotten one without it since I was getting interviews and getting better at them. Even though I had passed the Triplebyte tech screen I got very few company "matches" or opportunities through them, but one ended up working out for me to get my foot in the door.

I recall that they were on HN previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23279837 (I haven't looked at their service and don't have plans to.)

They shut down in 2023. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35184546

I'd take this advice with a grain of salt. The best jobs I found in my life (n=1) were outside of my 'connections'. They were in other countries, continents and with some degrees of separation between the people involved and anyone I've ever built a connection with. Connections are important, but if you want to be seen, you need to put yourself out there, perhaps more important than making a connection with Ricky.

I'd add the caveat that relationships matter more as your career matures. If you're in the beginning or middle, regular job postings are probably a larger target.

I got my current job few years ago by just responding to a public posting, but I have noticed that nowadays most of new hires actually come recommended by someone. I wonder why the switch happened. Is it the community responding to lower demand for IT professionals?

IMHO, not lower demand but higher supply, especially with all the big tech layoffs, and so we have a glut of applicants who know enough about tech in general to make it tough to tell if they're lying about their specialized experience until after you hire them, and they're desperate to get hired because either they were laid off, or they know they're competing with all the people who were, so they're more likely to take a job they're not really qualified for because it takes at least 6 months to let a new hire go, and that's 6 months of rent and food, so it's an easy choice.

The first 5 years at my current job (7 years total), my team had *one* person join and leave. The past 2 years, we've had 3. No change in team leaders, style, nothing. In one case, they were just straight not doing anything. Like legitimately just not online for a whole week, except to pop into the daily standup on Friday, with their camera off and muted.

They were given a task to complete as basically a "complete this or you're out" ultimatum, and they came to me to help them with doing it because they were totally lost. I tried to give them advice, but when they saw I wasn't going to do it for them they just went AWOL, and quit the next week.

I'm lazy AF, and that shit was *wild*.

Wow! What do you work on? Is the problem the ability of the candidates -- do you think it's possible for a "good" engineer to get productive on six months?

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