Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload | Hacker News Reader

Recruiters are going analog to fight the AI application overload

wired.com

46 pointschapulin115 comments

https://web.archive.org/web/20240505164924/https://www.wired...

My experience the last few months is that the saying "It's who you know, not what you know." is alive and well. For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond.

Obviously there's some alignment - I know people working in the area I know best - but from what I've experienced the hiring teams at small companies are struggling almost as much as candidates to figure out this brave new world.

> For jobs where I met the hiring manager (referral, networking, etc.) I had 2 out of 3 applications lead to offers. For resumes submitted online I had 1 out of 50 even respond.

I don't think this means what you think it means. In fact, I only see survivorship bias in your personal anecdote.

Meeting the hiring manager usually takes place after resume filtering. This means that you received offers in processes where you weren't rejected at the very first stage. That's what's expected, isn't it?

Also, it's quite plausible that those hiring processes where you received no feedback happened to be fake job postings where, even though a job ad is posted, there is no job offer at all.

I don't know. Every job since the one out of grad school--admittedly only a few (I tend to stay at jobs for a long time)--involved pinging someone I knew well (former co-worker/client/consultant who worked for us). HR or recruiter was never involved until later in the process so no HR filtering involved.

I think the question is how are you meeting the hiring manager?

If you submit a resume to a recruiter (or worse, online job posting) and get to the hiring manager you've absolutely gone through a bunch of formal screening steps. However if, as I believe GP is describing, you're able to connect with them through a side channel (such as a referral) you usually haven't gone through the formal screening so much as you've skipped it entirely. That obviously will dramatically increase your odds of success but it's not the same as getting through the resume scan and HR filter

> I think the question is how are you meeting the hiring manager?

In each and every single time I met a hiring manager, that took place after the early interview rounds where the bulk of applicants were filtered out.

In some cases, the hiring manager was the very last interview.

To me, claiming that meeting the hiring manager is somehow the key step to get hired is like stating that the key step to get hired is to not be rejected.

The entire point was that you meet the hiring manager via personal referral and not by running the gauntlet.

Otherwise, yes, it’s tautological.

> referral, networking, etc

Presumably not through the bottom-up filtering process.

All of my current jobs (I'm in my 40s, been working for money outside the family since my teens), and most of all the jobs I've ever had, were thanks to reaching out to individuals to make a connection, or leveraging an existing connection.

I got my first job through family. From then on, I found all jobs through job ads.

A new problem I'm facing on the hiring end is an influx of imposters from Asia. Everything they claim is a lie, from their name, citizenship, location, picture, to their job history. They even set up fake company sites. And of course they use LLMs to help them pass the interview. I assume it's so they can bilk gullible companies and perhaps do some corporate espionage. I don't know. I haven't encountered anyone try to deepfake their voice and appearance but I assume it's a question of time.

Telltale signs: stilted English, poor internet connection, lack of LinkedIn connections, and an inability to drill down on their fake histories. One claimed to have contributed to an open source BI project while working at Facebook, so I pulled up its GitHub repo and said "Let's see your code". "It's on Gitlab!" he protested. No, it's not; I'm staring at it on GitHub. Another claimed to have worked as a front-end engineer at Netflix. Great, I have friends there. Which team? "The front-end team". I understood that you were a front-end engineer, but which team? Again: "The front-end team!"

In that instant I recalled the scene in Coming to America where Eddie Murphy's character is asked about his education and he confidently replies that he's attended "The University of the United States".

https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/4378beae-fdfb-4e6b-a7a9-667f365...

Last year I was reviewing about a dozen answers to the questions we were sending candidates to complete at home. In all cases those a*holes used ChatGPT to write answers and what did ChatGPT use? Original Python docs recombined with blog posts. I was able to verify this by copying passages from their answers and pasting them into Google. When I showed this to the hiring manager they had a serious conversation with the agency. It would have been hilarious if I did not know that some of the candidate were real people with good experience but too lazy to write simple code.

You can't assign homework any more. I was never into them anyway.

One clumsy candidate accidentally revealed his cards by pasting the prompt he'd used in our chat window, like that paper whose introduction began "Certainly, here is a possible introduction to your topic." https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/1beaqya/obvious_chat...

Another was unable to explain why his code was structured the way it was. I asked a multipart question that required refactoring, knowing that these tools are not good at that, or enforcing a consistent style. His initial code was a self-contained class and the refactor introduced a function outside of the class that also should have been a method. I asked him why he did that and, of course, he froze.

AI code also alternates between technical levels IE: you'll see a part that looks like it was trained on beginner tutorials followed by another part that's looks trained on ripped open source projects.

Sometimes just really silly things like 3D vector math written in a form that would easily support higher dimensions for whatever reason.

Did you tell them that AI was not allowed?

We did not, but using AI to generate or reformat answers is a big red flag to me, because it shows that a) you do not have the experience you claim to have, and b) you do not have written communication skills or knowledge of English required to do your job.

People you're calling assholes - did they get paid for the take home task? We're they instructed not to use llms? Have you confirmed they used them and didn't Google the same things you googled? Was the homework not correct?

They were not paid, but we spared them the stress of a timed online coding exercise which a lot of devs hate. We told them we expect short snippets of code to illustrate the answers to six questions which progressed from the obvious (if you code in the language for a few years) to more of "there are many was to do it, here is mine" to judge their ability to turn requirements into code. You could do the whole thing in half an hour. It was fair.

We're really struggling to find good people. We do it the old fashioned way, just a one hour 4 dev interview. We don't ask really tough questions or anything. An example is, "can you describe normalization and what it's for?" I think the market is just supersaturated with bads right now and all the bads are the ones applying.

The good developers we have we got from knowing them in previous jobs, etc. You might wanna hit up your current team to find better devs. You should probably pay your team a finder's fee if you hire from that. Also, if you are paying what you paid before covid, it's probably too low today.

Times are tough for building good teams right now. You need to adapt. The same ole "call a recruiter and get 1 good guy out of 10," isn't a thing anymore. You might wanna pay 10-20% over market and see if that works. To justify that, just calculate what you are paying to not find good people now.

> I think the market is just supersaturated with bads right now and all the bads are the ones applying.

This is what it looks like where I work, too. There's been a huge decline in the quality of applicants over the past few years. I think the percentage of applicants that could be called "competent" has fallen to below 20%.

Speaking of pay, rates for contractors in the UK went backwards. The top end evaporated despite the rise in cost of living, taxes, and inflation. Businesses are expecting to find good devs for half the rates they were paying in 2019. This is not sustainable, you cannot buy talent for that money so experienced devs are leaving the industry and the cheap devs are just no good. I see signs of businesses dealing with this problem by building smaller teams and paying them 2019 rates, we'll see how it works.

I predict that high profile employers will soon start forcing job applicants to go through an identity verification service like Clear before allowing them to even fill out an application form.

https://www.clearme.com/clear-verified

A former co-worker mentioned to me that his dad runs a side business where he creates fake work and education histories for people coming to the US from his home country on work visas. He said that it works because employers never bother to verify work or education histories from said home country.

how long you been doing hiring mon ami? that's been a thing since long before AI, the difference is that instead of getting slammed via Craigslist, now AI can handle Taleo

Not long at my own company, but I never encountered such brazen impostors while working at other people's companies, either. I guess they were filtered out by recruiters before they reached me. Now it's something I'm developing a nose for.

My partner has been searching for an SDE job for 8 months and recently received an email requesting her to do a recruiter screen. She responded and got a call instantly where the “recruiter was a text-to-speech AI.

Presumably the entire process was automated; I’m assuming if they’re using text-to-speech, the selection and initial email was all AI.

It’s an arms race on both sides.

It's the curse of scale. Automation allows there to be plenty of job postings and job applications, but it sidelines the human part of actually talking to someone. Those in the know will end up sidestepping this altogether and using their networks to get a direct line to a real hiring manager or applicant. I've done this myself where I talk to past collaborators and professors I know and ask "Do you have an intern/soon-to-graduate-student you recommend with skills X, Y, and Z?"

This is admittedly unfair to outsiders, but if you talk to someone, there's a high reputational pressure that assures you're dealing with a real person who's likely a decent match for the job/applicant. This is valuable precisely because there's high friction and doesn't scale.

That’s why we’re building Touvlo.co (for hardware engineers) - human engineer interviewers, interviewing humans on real world applicable engineering skills, more fair to outsiders, standardized, scaleable!

I generally agree that relying on a network and human referrals is the way to go but building an effective network is much harder than it used to be. Meetup groups and local conferences were a good source to make connections pre-pandemic but that has really withered in the last couple years.

Past collaborators are also a great source but she is junior and doesn’t really have any she can leverage.

My initial advice to her was do some real projects, document her work and insights in a blog and engage with others on social media but that’s mostly screaming into a void.

My approach to hiring is to focus on competencies (what do I need them to accomplish) rather than skills (how many years of JS) but that doesn’t cut down on the number of applicants any, just makes initial eval a little easier. I was pondering the idea of leaning in more on AI to screen on competencies which might incentivize higher information density on resumes but the quality of that eval might not actually be any better and only increase the “black box”-ness of it all.

> building an effective network is much harder than it used to be

If you’re in an American city, go to cafes and bars. Be the annoying person who asks what someone does and persist. It’s absolutely annoying. But I’ll also always follow up on it, because that skill in itself is differentiating.

Absolutely pathetic. Might as well become worm.

> Absolutely pathetic

It seems to be a class-based social more. Among the rich and upper-middle class, approaching someone to introduce yourself isn't unfavourable. If anything, it's seen as a right and children are taught to do it. Among the lower classes it's seen as uncouthe.

You see it strikingly at e.g. birthday parties and galas. (Particularly in the U.K., Western and Southern Europe. Though there, unfortunately, such cold introductions usually aren't enough to cross the barrier. Hence my qualification for this only working in American cities. Also Nordic countries. It even extends to the design of social spaces, with private clubs and even elite airline lounges having chairs face each other while tables at fast food places are more isolated.)

You rang?

My suggestion is to focus on a fewer number of companies, instead of sending resume in bulk. When you narrow your choices you can study well and notice bugs or issues that need to be addressed. Fix them, send the results to someone in the company, it will increase your chances substantially.

It's a sad day when the answer is "do unpaid labor for a chance to be noticed."

The people doing the interview are being paid but the company itself isn't making any money from the interview process either and it's dedicating resources that could be more productively used elsewhere for immediate results.

Both parties are making short term sacrifices in hopes of finding a mutually beneficial relationship.

When you have 500 candidates applying to the same job you have to find a way to stand out.

Tried this before, doesn't work.

I've had more success sharing financial models on printed paper, than on working on code for free, building plugins and the like.

I can understand having to respond if it's been 8 months, but this is a pretty big red flag that the company doesn't respect humans.

It’s a giant telecom company that already had some pretty big red flags around how they treat employees from my own network.

The best part is that she already interviewed there a while back. She got a backend interview and didn’t pass (she’s primarily frontend); not a big deal but she gets a message from a new recruiter about every 2-3 months about the same role. This time it was just AI doing it.

Someone is getting poor quarterly review results, and is looking to see how to replace them once the quarter is up; rinse and repeat

AI startup idea, CaaS, candidate as a service.

Anyone have a text-to-speech AI to talk to recruiter text-to-speech AIs?

I love that idea. Record the messages and use that to fine tune your own language model to improve the chances of talking to a real person? If she does that and can’t get a job, the market is officially broken.

Yeah but if it's a local minimum and legal too, nothing will change.

This is Real Genius but on the job market

yes interested

Yep, I just had this happen too. I'm not looking nearly that seriously but the position as described was nearly perfect. The AI phone call plus a couple other minor details (slight changes in the description/requirements) which could probably be easily cleared up with a human made me distrust the entire process and walk away.

It's incredibly annoying

> It’s an arms race on both sides.

In my experience, the AI-vs-AI hiring battle takes place in parallel to normal hiring pipelines. Even before ChatGPT went mainstream, recruiting for key roles was largely happening via referrals or scraping LinkedIn for people at target companies.

When I posted jobs (for a moderately well known company name) on public job boards, we'd get 1000s of applications within the first week long before people were using ChatGPT to fill out applications. The majority of the submissions were absolute junk: People spamming their resume to every job out there, resumes from people completely unqualified (like tech support people applying for Staff Software Engineer roles), or mad-libs style resumes where people threw word salad into a PDF while forgetting to tell me what they actually did ("spearheaded initiative to reach across the company and leverage synergies, increasing company revenue by 23%")

It has been like this for a long time. ChatGPT only seems to have emboldened more people to switch to spamming resumes and sending vacuous applications everywhere.

The interesting thing to me reading this is that it's basically saying how much recruiters and hiring managers dislike/are wary of this AI-infused job application process. On the flip side, I've heard tons of complaints on the other side from job seekers: not just that job hunting is hard in a down market, but that the reign of modern ATSes means that it's a constant "battle against the algorithm" to even get noticed, tons of fake or outdated job postings, and rarely even an acknowledgement about the state of the application.

I mention this because this seems like an area where lots of people wanted to throw AI at the problem, but I have a tough time finding anyone, on either side, that thinks that automation and AI improves the process in any way.

You hit the nail on the head there.

All these applicant aid products like AutoApplyAI are solving the problem that employers created. It’s been a huge burden for applicants to go through the process. Any tool I can use to automate my job application process is something I’m going to immediately be interested in.

Plus, applicants need the job to survive, while the employers aren’t really on that same level of desperation.

Serves them right. Employers have been using AI and algorithms to weed out resumes/applications for years. To the point that the only way to get seen by an actual human is the game the system.

Exactly, I came here looking for this comment. Many companies have been using AI tools for years to power recruiting. Now they're upset that candidates are using the same technology. The recruiters turned their profession into a tit for tat arms race.

Hard agree. It’s infuriating that automation is continually added to human centric processes that it is ill-suited and anti-social to be used in, very much including most LLM applications, always in the name of more bloody cost-cutting that almost never leads to lower prices for consumers, just more yachts for the executive class.

The thing that especially infuriates me is recruiters in this article turning around and trying to throw LinkedIn under the bus.

No one likes the nightmare dystopia of a platform that is LinkedIn. The only reason most people I know have LinkedIn accounts in the first place is because HR types have outsourced so much of their job to LinkedIn that it's viewed as professional suicide to not have a LinkedIn profile with 100s of contacts in this industry.

Recruiters don't like the GenAI and Easy Apply features on LinkedIn, it makes their jobs more difficult? Then stop making LinkedIn a mandatory account for tech workers. You have NO ONE to blame but yourselves.

It would be interesting if they just went back to paper resumes and applications. That takes effort, only a little bit, but it takes effort.

And for the in-demand FAANG jobs: we only accept applicationa written in blackletter on vellum

What gets me is that they request a CV even though my whole work history is already on LI. My CV is just a reformatted LI profile. But then again, recruiters are mostly sociology, political science, or philosophy grads who chose an easy degree thinking they were clever and found themselves being used as a mop in the Victorian sweatshop that is the recruitment industry.

They require your cv for at least two reasons: 1) to figure out how serious you are, or do you expect they send a screenshot of your LinkedIn profile to their client? if you want to talk to their client, do your homework, if you can’t be bothered, well, will you be bothered when you join? 2) due diligence-are you who you say you are? is your cv in line with your LinkedIn, or are you just one of those AI generated clowns?

I like linkedin. It got me my current job. I get a constant stream of recruiters looking for people in my field; if I want a new job I'm pretty sure I can just reply to a few of them and not have to actually apply at all.

Just don't read any of the nonsense that people post.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

AI being weaponized on the application side hurts us all, and leads to an environment that's extremely difficult to get noticed in as a job seeker. Yes, networking helps but that's not always possible, especially if you are trying to change industries or have generally worked with smaller companies where your networking doesn't expand out much.

It also leads to less diverse environments where hiring managers only look at resumes given by friends or friends of friends.

> …in one case when the person moved on to the next interview, they couldn’t answer questions about the task. “Not only have they wasted their time, but they wasted my time,” says the recruiter. “It’s really frustrating.”

I’m on the prospective employee’s side here. If I had to do a complex task for every application I’d be driven mad. That’s a waste of the applicant’s time.

Plus, the employee you should want to hire is the employee that can do tasks in the most creative low effort way. Why should I hire the employee who takes 8 hours to grind through a task when the employee who uses ChatGPT to bust it out in 1 hour gets the same correct output?

Company recruiters have had the leg up on applicants for years with ATS systems. I’m glad the applicants have flipped the script and forced the recruiters to actually do work to find good candidates.

> So far, over 3,000 people have applied to one open data science vacancy at a US health tech company this year. The top candidates are given a lengthy and difficult task assessment, which very few pass

Obviously the company should select one large project, break it down (with the help of AI) into 1500 steps, and farm it out to candidates as "task assessments" that can be cross-checked and then folded together into an app.

This problem is exasperated by the fact that recruiters are often the ones getting laid off first in a downturn or cost effiency initiative. So there’s even less humans filtering through applications.

Even though it’s an issue I really don’t see companies spending a ton of time and energy fixing it. As mentioned in the article, they could simply stop posting jobs on LinkedIn or rely only on inbound candidates. It’s not rocket science. Just like dating, if you get bombarded with peoole knocking on your door, simply stop putting yourself out there.

Exacerbated*

Both words are appropriate, as exasperated means “made worse or more intense”. They are synonyms.

Exasperated, or exasperation, is a feeling experienced by a person. Exacerbation describes a change in quality of something (usually inanimate).

Correct, although IMHO it’s also fine to use exacerbation in this specific example (if you see the problem from a process standpoint instead of the frustration faced by job seekers and recruiters).

This has long seemed like the obvious solution, to me, for publications that saw an untenable spike in submissions for the same reason.

Just make ‘em print and send a it in the mail. Instant reduction by 95+%, most of the best stuff still comes in.

> most of the best stuff still comes in

I don’t see why “the best stuff” would be more acceptant to printing than the rest. Actually I’d expect that the best candidates won’t bend over backwards to submit their application, they have choice

I suspect it's not the printing but the postage that adds the most friction.

If you can provide much-faster decisions, that’s huge. You’d not turn off serious submissions that way. Many of these want to have an exclusive option at the story for months because their workload is so high. Cut that to even 60 days and you’d make writers very happy.

I think this is conflating some things,

I’ve had interviews where AI use was encouraged. I’ve used a coderpad screenshare that had an LLM tab you could write with.

so in this article, where they mention some of the respondents disclosed using AI, it doesnt say if that was a “good” or “bad” thing for that company

its not accurate to assume, despite the article reinforcing a bias towards it being a problem

I've participated in a coaching and resume review program for many years. Most college students always struggled to write resumes, but at least they were aware of their shortcomings and reached out for help.

Something about ChatGPT has convinced a lot of them that they don't need help or even to put much effort into the process. They hate writing resumes, so they just dump some words into a ChatGPT prompt and copy-paste into a resumse.

To the inexperienced, the ChatGPT structure feels like brilliant, polished content magically appearing on their screen. They aren't looking at the content, but rather the structure, which ChatGPT can formulaically provide.

Then recruiters get their resumes and instantly recognize ChatGPT garbage, because it's their job to read resumes and they've become good at recognizing low signal to noise ratio ChatGPT output.

One of our local college programs had a company reach out and ask to be removed from their referral pipeline because the majority of the resumes submitted by their students were clearly ChatGPT drivel. It was a real blow to the people who had been working hard to set up these relationships and give the students opportunities to apply for.

The exact same dynamic used to happen with Word templates, and I'm sure there were something similar before it.

Then entire idea of a resume is garbage, the thing is useless for filtering candidates, and everybody that actually succeeds at either side of the hiring game does it by not relying on resumes. Yet hiring professionals insist this is the way, worldwide.

Honestly I hate the process of writing resumes, too, and having to tailor an application creatively to a specific job to even be able get an initial interview is draining and my time would be better suited.

I am hoping for a world where more automation leads to better match making so that the right candidate can more quickly be found for the right role.

If we are at a point where there are 3k applicants for a job because writing the application is easy, that might suck for recruiters having to filter those, but for the company hiring I'd imagine it's a benefit that there is a larger flow of candidates that they can choose from. Now the filtering just needs to get better.

Attention is all you need. This is the success formula. You can get attention via referrals or some other hacks.

Please let this become a trend elsewhere as well.

> That came after LinkedIn began rolling out a new set of generative AI tools for recruiters to source candidates in October. With the sourcing tool, recruiters can search a phrase like “I want to hire engineers in Texas,” and profiles of people that may meet those criteria appear, as do other specific skills that may be related to the role. They can also send messages written with generative AI and set automatic follow-up messages.

What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter?

(Not just another company that wants to behave like LinkedIn when they can get away with it, but that wants to be and is a lot better.)

Go rockclimbing and meet cto’s there.

> What are better alternatives to LinkedIn, for people who want to get that rare serendipitous message from a recruiter?

The only one I know of is to have a personal social network of people who know you and are directly familiar with your work. Every rare serendipitous message from a recruiter I've received resulted from a referral from someone I directly knew.

But rare is probably the correct qualifier. I have 25 years experience, I've received four, followed up on two and only one resulted in me changing jobs. None came before I had 10 years of experience. YMMV

Hacker News monthly threads for “Who wants to be hired” and “Who is hiring”. That’s how I got hired for my current job (2019) and that’s how I’m hiring currently.

All I got from that was some spam and "defi" recruiting for whatever Ponzi scheme the cryptocoin community is hot on right now.

I got my current job from it.

No idea which experience is more typical.

Yeah I'm still getting spam from sketchy crypto orgs months after I put my email into a HN hiring thread once. Don't recommend.

Consider a "burner" email alias for such situations. Fastmail makes creating them easy enough.

Apple’s iCloud+ also includes “hide my email” which creates randomized addresses that forward to your main account.

Most industries have some kind of private discussion forums, which could be sponsored by a professional organization or related media company or just some guy. Those used to be email lists and web discussion forums but now some have moved to Slack or Discord. Find those forums for industries where you're interested in working and start actively participating.

+1! think your local tech scene (my city has a general dev slack), language or framework specific chats for web or mobile dev, hackathons/conferences, etc.

Would personally stay away from anyone offering to be part of a “community” for a fee

Is there an alternative we can practically move to that will turn LinkedIn into an abandoned property like MySpace?

(Ideal would be a distributed approach with semantic Web and such. But I'd settle for a centralized site that wanted to be a lot better, and was capable of that.)

still waiting for the LLM driven 3d avatar robot voice during my 10th hr zoom interview "can you eve scale bro? Can you even AWS firehose kafka kubernetes bro? Good! now show me how the minimum subsequence of this array in Ologn"

Dead Internet Theory in a nutshell

Recruiters are the problem =)

Is it possible to waste a recruiters time?

Out of pure frustration, I have written code to do this.

To summarize the article though: Online hiring continues to be overwhelmed by huge numbers of low quality applications, now with some extra AI tools that make it easier to lie about your experience.

Same issue as before, now wrapped up in OpenAI API calls.

you forgot the second part -- a rush by industry management to open the gates to low-skill people for lower pay, while specifically and exactly firing or replacing more experienced people who ask for higher compensation and employee rights (for example working parents or a slower pace over a long time)

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265635.

To dang, is this a bug? This was posted 8 minutes ago with 8 points yet has 40+ comments

Some of the comments were from 2-3 hours ago. I think someone bumped the story's time by resubmitting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40265420 made the front page but chapulin was the first user to post the article and I wanted them to get the credit. Their original submission was too old to re-up (a la https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) so I made a fresh copy of it and moved the comments.

It does make the timestamp thing (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...) even more confusing than usual. Sorry!

If they use recruiters, I'm out. They are part of the problem.

Do you differentiate between a full time recruiter employed by the hiring company and 3rd party recruiting firms? A recruiter on the payroll can be a useful first screen and usually has good knowledge about what the company is seeking.

I have to say that recruiters are worthless to me because they don't have the authority to actually decide something. They know nothing about the role, they don't disclose their salary range, I don't trust them with mine either.. but hey, if it's a short call, it a hoop you have to jump through.

At least the company recruiters never call you again.

Fo any other professions have thse challenges?

Our lack of basic professional certifications has just led to nonsense in every corner of the hiring and job seeking process.

There are professional certifications they are just useless. The same goes for university degrees. The field moves too fast for certification to have any value. Perhaps if you do something very “enterprise” it might be useful.

The uselessness of professional certifications isn't because things move too fast. The fundamentals don't really change.

The certifications are useless because they're paper mills, driven by the same incentives as grade inflation. People get upset if they pay for the certification and then fail the test -- and those are the certification mill's customers, so that can't be allowed or people would get some other certification. Or worse, some other vendor's certification. So they make something easy enough for the 10th percentile to pass, or publish a study guide that effectively gives you the answers to the test, and then it isn't serving as a useful filtering mechanism.

Meanwhile the strongest applicants rightfully see it as a waste of money because they can get in on their other qualifications or find a job through their networks, or use not having it as a reverse filter to eliminate excessively bureaucratic employers that use it as a prerequisite, causing anyone who requires it to be filtering out more of the best applicants than the worst ones.

The fundamentals change all the time. When I learned to code everybody was high on Java, you had to know your design patterns, craft beautiful inheritance hierarchies and all kinds of other things that we now laugh at as being very silly. But people were dead serious about it!

This art is still young, we are still finding our feet and I don’t think certifications are beneficial until we do. What we need is more experimentation and free thinking not a general ossification.

The things that change aren't the fundamentals.

Meanwhile people still read the papers that came out of Bell Labs in the mid-20th century, boolean logic is boolean logic, exponential time algorithms are slower than polynomial time algorithms for large N, the lambda calculus is still taught, etc.

What are you talking about? We have tons of professional certifications. We also still have all of these problems.

Can you please make your substantive points without swipes? Your comment would be just fine without that first bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The challenge for certifying in software engineering seems similar to the challenges you'd face in any creative, building oriented professions. That is you can't test for it with some sort of standard exam. You need to have the person build something and then have established masters of the field evaluate it. But that requires a professional structure we don't have.

Relatively few engineers of any kind (outside of Civil Engineering)--much less other STEM--have PE licenses in the US. They're mostly required if you're going to be signing off on things for regulators etc. You could do it but now you require a 4+ year degree, exams, and some years of working under a certified engineer.

Many other engineering disciplines have a PE exam, including mechanical engineering and electrical engineering. I'm not sure why you believe that software engineering is somehow more difficult to test in a rigorous manner than those fields.

In point of fact, computer science did at one point have an official equivalent PE exam, but it was bafflingly removed a few years ago though I'm not entirely clear on the reason.

This is exactly what happens when you don't gate keep enough - employers lose all trust in potential candidates core competencies, and thus we have the increasing arms race of 40 hour multi project 12 course interviews.

> In point of fact, computer science did at one point have an official equivalent PE exam, but it was bafflingly removed a few years ago though I'm not entirely clear on the reason.

It was removed because 100 people registered in 6 years.

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