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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

As I become older (and grumpier) I have realized that not engaging is the best thing to do, wherever possible. Dirty restaurant / rude staff? Don't go there. Don't like dark patterns on a website? Contact forms don't work? Don't use those sites. And so on. Two reasons - first, most of the time, these businesses know their shit is broken or they're doing low quality work etc. They just don't care. Second, it is good for our own stress levels to avoid dealing with shitty stuff.

Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like healthcare etc.

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I've been doing this for years. Unfortunately I'm looking for a job now and there's no escape from it. The job sites, the agencies, the employers' sites - they are all awful.

The best one was an employer's site that described itself as "Easy Apply"! You had to give it a resume, which it parsed, badly, and sprayed randomly into about a thousand text boxes. I thought maybe the problem was starting with a pdf, so I began again with a Word document. The results were exactly the same, suggesting they exported to pdf and used the same shitty parser.

Having to rearrange all this text into the correct boxes was annoying enough, but they weren't just vanilla text boxes. They were janky javascript abominations that responded to input really slowly.

And employers moan that they have trouble finding good staff.

> And employers moan that they have trouble finding good staff.

Employers have trouble finding good staff that they can pay peanuts.

A shitty application form is a great filter for people who are desparate and will put up with low pay and toxic corporate idiosyncrasies.

Reminds me of ASML's yearly whining (they form cartels with other tech businesses in the region to keep max compensation down and are then acting surprised that they can't find local engineers who deliberately avoid the company).

Nice, I can't understand their growth potential could be like infinite they operate in the right space and have the right tech and fill in a nice niche. But C-suite and shareholders dividends need to be maximalized and engineeres enslaved I guess. Man I love latestage capitalism /s.

I bought capitalism.boo last night. wanna do something with it?

> engineers who deliberately avoid the company .. engineeres enslaved

Not sure how you equated the two.

Who/what is ASML?

I believe they are talking about ASML fab for semiconductors[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding

But on the other hand many really well skilled would avoid the application

"Thank god, they would have left anyway."

Recently I almost completed one that was equal parts data harvesting form and job application.

The original link was through a third-party job board. The job board tried to trick me into signing up in order to jump to the posting.

The job "app" itself was actually two applications. One was an automated resume parser that was just... incorrect. The second was a manual-entry form that asked for the same information. :D

Funny enough, I got to the "Why do you want to work for A Shady Company with Questionable Morals?" series of questions I was actually given a chance to stop and sober up to the idea:

A human being (allegedly) put together the most byzantine hiring process to conceal something, and if they actually do hire someone, it will be a self-selected fanatic who needs the cash more than the indulgence.

One recruiter asked for my high school scores, from 20 years ago. For a 3 month contract job. Another recruiter wanted to know my salary expectations first, before giving me a single detail about the job. When I refused politely, she yelled at me.

There are lots of adults who never grew up, never learned words like please or thank you, feel super entitled etc.

It is not our job to help these people (unless they happen to be friends or family, even then we can only try). Best thing to do is avoid, and look for good people to talk to, do business with. Life is too short to waste on shitty stuff - people or otherwise

It’s actually good that they are so stupid so soon. It’s nice to filter those people early than to spend time on the application to learn how stupid the organization is.

Yeah, Canonical asks you how you performed in your high school English class as if that's something you're supposed to know.

Is that really a valuable metric for a software engineer?

Tell them you graduated with honors from AP English and your teacher called you "the next Faulkner".

Or tell them that your high school didn't offer English class, learning was student-led and project-based.

Or you took the GED at 12yrs to skip high school and study puffin colonies in Alaska with your aunt.

How are they going to fact-check any of that?

One memorable part of getting paid coaching for interviews was the admonishment "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview. No one is going to check on your story."

A coach that you paid money to advised you to lie during a behavioural interview?

Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

I wonder how many lies the coach told you about themselves and their qualifications, on the belief that you'd never check on their story.

It makes sense though. The employer will lie constantly in one of those interviews. It's best to shore up your chances. This is the system employers wanted so give it to them. It's not like you'll be working there in three years anyway.

> Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

That's the beauty; how would they know? The information is completely unverifiable so all such an interview does is find the person best at telling you what you want to hear.

> Well, that could certainly give the prospective employers plenty of information about the way you behave.

How? Do you think he was wrong about them checking?

> I wonder how many lies the coach told you about themselves and their qualifications, on the belief that you'd never check on their story.

None; he was randomly assigned to me by the platform.

My guess is that they are trying to vacuum as much information as possible. It is easy to do ("I can do nothing, the client is asking for the high school scores, not me!"). Who knows what they are doing with that data

No, the CEO is just fucking weird and doesn't seem to mind that he puts people off with his low wages and idiosyncratic, drawn out hiring practices.

Is it possible they’re trying to separate out candidates who studied English literature as a matter of typical high school education vs those who studied ESL back in their home countries?

Knowing your ability to communicate in English is a useful metric, but asking for your high school English grade is definitely not the right way to go about it.

For sure, job application submission is an awful mess. As a rule, I won’t apply anywhere that uses Workday, considering they require you to create an account to submit your application.

Truth is, any company that makes getting a job an awful experience (despite every incentive to the contrary) won’t be any better once you’re an employee.

> As a rule, I won’t apply anywhere that uses Workday, considering they require you to create an account to submit your application.

At work, we've made chat interface product that takes data from (account-less) visiting applicants and makes Workday job-applications on their behalf.

So maybe that makes the world just a slightly better place... Or it's maybe it's the opposite because it enables Workday? Hard to say.

On the flipside, there's Oracle HCM which doesn't let you create an account and makes you verify your email address with each subsequent job app. They rely on cookies for all of this.

No thanks. I'll take workday over that. I like using passwords and don't like tracking cookies, so I guess I'm weird.

I remember how difficult it is to find a job nowadays. It sends shivers down your spine. Good luck to everyone who is searching!

Culture permeates

Greenhouse and Lever have the most convenient job application interface IMO. The application area is one page, which means you can navigate using tab. There's also no need to create an account and verify email address (Though I understand why some portals do that to prevent spams).

> The best one was an employer's site that described itself as "Easy Apply"! You had to give it a resume, which it parsed, badly, and sprayed randomly into about a thousand text boxes. I thought maybe the problem was starting with a pdf, so I began again with a Word document. The results were exactly the same, suggesting they exported to pdf and used the same shitty parser.

Ohh, let me guess. Workday? There are a few application systems that offer this functionality but workday is _consistently_ the worst at parsing whatever I give it (text, markdown, html, pdf...).

More than one university in the UK had exactly this procedure. I eventually gave up on applying, but even before that I was 90% sure no meaningful information would reach the hiring committee.

A few things for when applying for jobs-

* use a dedicated gmail * use a dedicated google voice number * have your PDF resume up to date, maybe a few versions of it for different types of jobs * keep a formatted text version of it as well for those horrible text boxes

i have found the recent crop of SotA LLMs to be extremely useful for the latter few tasks you mentioned. Give it my full, comprehensive CV, as well as a prospective job description, then ask "tailor a condensed resume from the info in my CV to match this job description."

Of course you'll want to review and edit, but it's taken a huge amount of drudgery out of the process, for which I am grateful.

I hate writing job applications, so even if LLMs aren't good enough yet, at least they are a start.

This gives you some structure to start with.

Oh god job application forms are a travesty. Every single company seems to do it differently, about half of them seem to like making the form ten times longer than necessary and good luck figuring out whether your submission will actually get checked by anyone or thrown straight into the trash by an automated system.

And I definitely emphasise with the 'easy apply' auto fill crap. Those are incredibly unreliable at the best of times, and a waste of time all around.

But the worst ones to me have to be the incredibly lengthy 'ask everything' forms that way too many large companies and government agencies like too much. The ones which feel less like a job application, and more like filing your taxes. Way too often you'll go for something on LinkedIn, see a form, then notice it says something like 'part 1 of 20' at the top of the page because someone at Microsoft thought letting companies add a ton of unique questions was a 'great' feature.

Nah. If you see that kind of thing, just nope out from that place and move on to the next one.

There's no shortage of places looking for people. :)

fr easy aply is so dogshit, most of these parsers for your cv can't handle the most basic shit, with my limited knowledge dealing with headless browsing with phantomjs I could come up with a better solution in an afternoon easily. Sorry but using a parser that can't even read experiences or education section to easy in a >10k+ tech company that does software is just not bearable.

> I could come up with a better solution in an afternoon easily

I once did some contract work to write a parser for that. It wasn't long before I realized the variety of resumes made it completely impractical, and had to abandon the project. (I didn't charge for my time on it.)

If you could do a better one in an afternoon, you can make good money doing that.

Not a core competence so vendor solution is used.

That's financialisation. That's maximising value. Right?

I do my own mechanical work, but am a disaster at painting. So I hire that out.

It's not "financialization". It's the economic Law of Comparative Advantage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

It only makes sense to do in business what one has an aptitude for, and pay others to do the other stuff. I bet you don't grow your own food, or make your own soap, either.

Hopefully one of the areas that LLMs can actually improve. I expect an LLM to fairly accurate parse content from resumes. Maybe we even start using plain text resumes.

I'd expect LLM parsers to enforce a monoculture in that small variations from the norm will mess it up and it will downrate/discard lots of edge cases

That's already the case with existing resume parsers and evaluators. LLMs might at least broaden the monoculture somewhat.

I expect that LLMs will be used aggressively by a subset of employers for exactly all the lazy and asymmetric power reasons that an employee can think of.. being automation, the footprint of that employer subset will be much larger on the whole, and often be the first or only resort for the desperate, uninformed etc applicants

I agree. I’ve noticed a strong correlation between friction (such as newsletter modals, cookie consent modals, register to read, etc.) and low-quality content that is just a waste of my time to read. Since I realized this, I’ve saved a lot of time and effort by closing a tab as soon as I see one of these tells and not looking back.

I'm really grateful to the low-quality content creators for making it so easy to recognize.

That moment when you want to read a tweet just to be prompted to login.

If someone uses Twitter that's a pretty good indicator that I don't need to interact with them nor their content.

One of the wisest pieces of advice my mother gave me growing up was always to think about what you want out of an interaction. Before you send a text, prepare an email, write a comment, argue a point, etc: what is your goal, and what's the best thing you're going to get out of it?

It's really good advice, because it makes it so much easier to just let things go. Yes, the website I'm using is awful and could easily be done better. Yes, the person I'm taking to is obviously wrong. But I'm not going to get anything out of getting involved - at best some mild catharsis - and I'll just waste everyone's time doing so. So let it go.

Hear hear! Seconded! And all of the other similar phrases of support.

However...I was recently at my neighborhood tavern, and the group down the bar from me got my attention in a way that moved me to action by wanting to donate to their cause. I asked how, and they provided me a URL that took me to a payment portal. It should have been that easy.

Instead, it wanted full account creation with username, email, phone number, and password with specific requirements. After 3 attempts of not being able to generate a valid password, they decided I had too many at the pub and decided to "help". After multiple attempts, they were also unable to generate a password to create the account to take my money.

Their own website and all off the unnecessary account creation policies actively prevented a successful conversion. I laughed and laughed at their folly. Of course, the individuals receiving the laughter were not the ones that mattered regarding this, so I stifled my smugness in this victory and suggested they tell their coworkers.

A principle I learned from Eric Engstrom is "if you want to succeed in business, make it easy for people to give you money".

It's true, too. By making payment easier, sales volume doubled.

The fact that it's a "shut up and take my money" is a meme says enough as well. Probably reach more younger people that don't read and only speak in images /s

Completely agree. It may be considered a "loss" if you encounter rude staff, but fighting back won't make you "win", even if you technically do. Your stress and mental state is much better if you just let some stuff go. Obviously not everything, but I'd say that probably goes for the majority of small annoyances in your life.

Unfortunately companies like Anthropic like to provide web sites that work long enough to obtain your credit card information, then break them in a way that prevents you from unsubscribing.

Or have it so it's trivial to sign up online, but cancelling requires contacting them via phone/post/whatever. 'Funny' how well these systems seem to work when people are giving you money, but how much of an unusable mess they turn into when it's the other way around.

State Farm wanted me to speak to my agent directly (who they had never bothered to change from one down in Texas when I told them I moved to Montana), so I gave them written notice through the contact form on their website and then had to file a chargeback when they charged me again.

Got a check from them in the mail a couple weeks later. (For $13.83, I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to represent)

Virtual credit cards and masked email addresses have been amazing.

Some banks offer virtual cards directly, but there's also Privacy (.com). For masked email I find Firefox Relay works pretty well.

I like Privacy because they let me switch banks easily, as well as place spending limits, pause or close cards, etc., just like Firefox Relay would allow me to switch emails easily.

I believe I use Firefox Relay for everything email-related now (I pay $1/mo for my own subdomain), and also use Privacy for everything money-related (given they accept Privacy cards).

https://emkei.cz is a good "fake mailer" for getting outbound email from a Firefox Relay address, for those companies that want you to send them an email from the address on your account. Basically you send something from the company's email to your relay address, then reply to it and Firefox Relay will send it to the real company's email, but from your relay address.

(You know, this sounds like it could make for a great phishing exploit because Firefox Relay doesn't check or notify you if SPF/DKIM/DMARC fails on an incoming email, and the forward that it does to your personal email will be entirely lacking those indicators. So aside from email content itself looking suspicious, it could be possible to perfectly spoof a real email because the relay step strips all the original authenticating information.)

I’ve been using catchall email for everything for well over 5 years now, and it hasn’t been useful once since. Regular spam filters from my provider and occasionally hitting “Unsubscribe” once seem to do the trick.

I co-sign. If I could expand:

When you must engage with sub-par experiences, look to redirect in a positive manner. Don't try to brute-force a solution, rather, suggest an alternative that the counterpart may not have considered.

As I've grown older, I've learned unsolicited advice is almost universally despised (and you have a > 50% chance of making an ass of yourself due to lack of context/armchair general). Therefore, start with a complaint, and if they truly want your feedback, offer it.

It’s such a shame. I think I can feel what others do when I get unsolicited advice, but I’m able to regulate my emotions and either take the advice or explain why it’s missing context. If only others could have more humility and analysis ability. But you can’t do too much to change others.

Yes. I browse, I see banner (slide, popup, sidebar), I close tab.

I have friends that ask me if enjoyed the paragraph about something they shared a link to only for me to have to come back and say I closed it after reading two words and getting interrupted by ”Put your email here to read more". Nope. I tell them that is not a good web experience for me.

I just hope that more people start doing this.

> Obviously this can't be applied to essential services like healthcare etc.

And that's the reason why you have to engage. Allow things to go that way one time, you'll get them all the time. Protest, politely but effectively, all the time and things will change.

We all suffer crappy services, if almost nobody protest they'll not change, because much of them are used by people with no choice, starting from fiscal stuff.

Totally agree - I will just add that 1 or 2 times a year I do the opposite. I call out stupid when I see it and spare nothing. Clear, straight criticism leveled at management if I can find them.

Your right: they know it's screwed up most of the time. But the front line is not at root responsible ... and I get a bit of extra satisfaction flushing management out into the open so they can't hide out.

I’m getting close to completely abandoning Amazon over this. I recently unsubscribed from Prime and the number of dark patterns in every single checkout, attempting to get users to sign up for Prime, is unconscionable. No wonder so many people are subscribed, the user has to actively fight against it.

I can't remember the number of times that I've selected "Afghanistan" from the contact form list as my country of residence because it was the first option in the dropdown.

> Don't use those sites.

Go harder on that – block those sites in your network outright (such as in Pihole). Else you may end up on them in future, either by accident (clicking a link) or temptation.

This is my habit as well. If the company is owned by real people (rather than a corporation), then I'll do the courtesy of sending an email or something to explain why I'm no longer going to use their product/service. Either way, though, I just remember not to use that company anymore and get on with my life.

There's no reason for me to spend my time and energy any further on nonsense.

>these businesses know their shit is broken or they're doing low quality work

I'm honestly sure about this often, since bad staff might not be obvious to the manager without someone pointing it out.

As a general rule though, just giving up on something bad is not a terrible strategy.

Avoiding Stress is the best way to keep it together for me lately

My favorite person on twitter (plinz) had advice that I loved and try really hard to follow that’s similar to this. If you see a discussion or comment online that bothers you or is frustrating, the best thing to do is not engage with it. Engagement causes that person to post more and effectively creates more of the content that you dislike.

E.g. if no one on the internet ever responded to pro Trump stuff, pro Trump people would get tired of yelling into the void with no reaction.

So true! And then you jinx it when you start talking about ...

Yup, Trump would have likely not won in 2016 if he wasn't pushed by the media. I remember the media would not cover Bernie, even when he got big crowds. But the media would wait for Trump to take the stage, showing empty podium live. ALL media (mainstream or social or legacy) know to push controversy, negativity etc because it gets them engagement which gets them dollars. It is also easy and lazy thing to do.

There is a reason politicians push "the other guy is bad" rather than "I am good" narrative in their ads. It works short term at least while doing long term damage

There’s a meme that we are where we are today in the U.S. starting with the Reagan presidency, and there’s certainly a lot of truth to that. But personally I believe American politics began a long downward trend once television became the primary medium. We’ve all heard how JFK outsmarted Nixon during their televised debate by wearing a blue shirt, because blue showed up as white whereas Nixon’s white shirt showed up as gray. The visuals of candidates began to dominate politics, and people made their judgements based that. Would Reagan have even become president if he wasn’t so good in front of a camera?

> We’ve all heard how JFK outsmarted Nixon during their televised debate by wearing a blue shirt, because blue showed up as white whereas Nixon’s white shirt showed up as gray.

Huh. I always heard that Nixon refused makeup and JFK didn’t, with the result being about the same: Kennedy looked healthy and Nixon looked like a sweaty corpse. But considering the quality of TV screens and broadcasts in 1960, the shirt thing sounds more realistic.

JFK didn't just wear shirts on TV.

He managed to convince the dead in Cook county, Illinois to vote for him, often several times each! I'd consider that a much more impressive first. It eclipses hanging chads and Russiagate in more recent elections. JFK won the election because Nixon conceded even though there were plenty of suspicious circumstances - more than enough to justify challenging the results of a very close election.

Today the people have so little faith in the system and in the candidates that almost half of them don't vote.

I have heard this accusation made about every election my entire life the only change.is the canidate and district. but when you look into it the numbers of voter fraud cases found have been in the low double digits. I think its an urban legend at this point.

As I stated above, the Daley machine rigged the 1960 election. 3 people did prison time for it. That absolutely happened.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidentia...

It doesn't actually matter whether or not election fraud is "an urban legend." Faith in the system has been lost. That was Nixon's fear and the reason he didn't contest the election results.

Then Nixon destroyed faith in the system and set us down this path. Maybe the treason guy isn't who you should prop up as some vanguard of democracy.

This is basically that Treehouse of Horror episode of the Simpsons where the ads go on a crazy rampage and to defeat them all you have to do is "just don't look"

That’s what I figured, too, and then I joined Truth Social to that a peek behind that curtain. It really is just all pro Trump people posting pro Trump stuff and upvoting everyone else’s stuff. There’s little discussion, debate, or internet-typical arguing. It’s everyone just +1’ing each other in the weirdest, most boring echo chamber I’ve seen online.

You've just described /r/politics as well as most political dialogue on reddit.

It’s a really loud minority and bots. Point being, it’s boring

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