A network engineer in search of greener pastures | Hacker News Reader

A network engineer in search of greener pastures

cropp.blog

99 pointstekeous111 comments

Not to step on the authors toes, but it’s not the job searching that is broken - it’s the market that has shifted to favor companies and to put applicants at a disadvantage, something that hasn’t happened in the IT field for a long time. People reject candidates without a college degree because they can afford to - they still have plenty of applicants to pick from after filtering out the rest. There is no need for them to pay time and money to filter for diamonds without a college degree - they will find someone suitable for the opening even with the crappy applicant experience outlined in the article.

The current system is not broken, it works just fine - for the companies.

There's that but there's also this:

> However, after heading over to Y Combinator to check out startup jobs, I was again frustrated by the findings. YC Jobs has a category for Engineering, but it's all software. There's a category for Operations, but it's all CEO, CTO, management positions. After searching and searching I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/engineer lines. How on earth are all these startups operating without a network person? You don't have someone running your server or your VPN?

These "operational" jobs where people manage servers without engineering knowledge are much rarer today. Most people run their services on cloud, you need ops people that can code and do engineering as well, the people that used to cable and connect servers are not as important anymore, as the market moves more and more towards cloud or managed providers.

If i was the OP i would start thinking seriously about pivoting careers to a devops kinda job instead, where they will find many more options. The "tinkerer" network jobs just aren't that available anymore, it has been heavily abstracted away and the little work that there is the engineers will do as well.

Startups are too cheap to pay for someone running a proper VPN. Some rather buy some proprietary appliance and call it a day, even, if it ruins workflows of employees for years. (source: experienced this)

Yeah I've only worked for one company that had a dedicated Network guy, and his work was being phased out as we moved everything towards AWS. Eventually the only work to do at the company was managing security for the company wifi network

I think there are still a fairly significant number of these jobs, but they just aren't at small companies, because you can get extremely far without even one person doing it full time. Like, into the thousands of employees in most cases, I think? Certainly into the hundreds.

So I think this role just isn't very compatible with startup job boards, specifically.

Even at large companies you see less of that, I don't think it's a particularly bright career path right now.

those "operational" jobs exists today. just not in the small startups, that still didn't figure out, that despite running in the cloud you need networking and cybersecurity people

The longer my career goes on, the less a lot of these cloud services make sense to me. I know why we have AWS deploy our production instances, but why are all of our staging and dev instances running on EC2? Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that? Sure it might be slow, but it's not meant to handle 100k QPS, it's just for QA

> Can't we just buy an old PC and put it in the office and run dev builds on that

It's cheaper to pay for those cloud resources than hiring 2-3 more people.

I think if you had a whole server rack, you might have to hire someone for that, but if you're just running one or two servers with containers to run your dev builds, you could get that set up on K8s and manage your deployments the way you would with AWS. I don't think it would require hiring new people, an existing devops guy should be able to do that

It's still additional operational overhead for marginal RoI.

If you're an organization that already has a SRE or Infra Eng hired, there's no point supporting a niche setup when every other team is using a prebuilt and troubleshooted environment.

Edit: Can't reply to OP atm, but he makes a good point. For a higher margins and less commodified segment like ML Compute, on-prem computing still makes financial sense.

That said, that's still managed by actual SWEs not a generic Sysadmin, due to intricacies of GPU Architecture and Model Development, and OP is extremely underskilled for this role.

I think if all you're running is web microservices, then it's probably not worth it. But my company builds machine learning models offline and I feel that if we bought a dedicated GPU machine (literally just build one and put it in the office, not a rack mounted thing), we would save money in the long run after building a custom training pipeline

Why would you have your QA environment unlike you prod environment? Even the infra setup should be as close as possible, so you can test infra changes in QA before promoting them to prod.

I can't see how it would make sense to deploy in two completely different environments that are not alike at all.

> I can't see how it would make sense to deploy in two completely different environments that are not alike at all.

Because you are not saving that much money by having multiple bespoke on-prem environments per team.

Troubleshooting, management, and security headaches grow.

It's just easier to have everyone use a pre-built and troubleshooted environment.

in higher management there is aversion to any spend on physical stuff. where i work, we as everywhere look to cut costs. one of ways allowed to save ~$1.5M on aws costs over 5 years, by one time investment of $150k into physical equipment. It fell through.

The other aspect it's that somebody needs to manage old PC. usually there needs to be a team managing this infra and it creates friction between developers and infra team. so devs run into cloud and try to manage everything on cloud themselves. but at some point arrives consolidation and new team dedicated to managing same infra in aws.

Sorry, this won't cut it anymore. You would loose all the fun instabilities when the cluster is upgraded again, the round trip times could not be optimized by distributing things further, the magic of all the different translation layers between you and the hardware would vanish. Worst of all is not all the money and headache you would save but you also would save time. Why would you do that?

Right, much better to deal with all of those issues in production only.

As a startup CTO, I agree you need networking And cybersecurity. I am not sure if you need fulltime people specializing in this though.

I used to work for large companies with big on-prem footprint. Networking and security in that world is a different game and warrants dedicated people.

But for a startup with two services running in the cloud, with so many out of the box tools? (IDS, WAF, log based monitoring, SDN and all the configurability that comes with it). That can go a long way, without dedicated people.

>As a startup CTO, I agree you need networking And cybersecurity. I am not sure if you need fulltime people specializing in this though.

highly depends on function of the service and it's scale

>I used to work for large companies with big on-prem footprint. Networking and security in that world is a different game and warrants dedicated people.

>But for a startup with two services running in the cloud, with so many out of the box tools? (IDS, WAF, log based monitoring, SDN and all the configurability that comes with it). That can go a long way, without dedicated people.

maybe for network. but in my experience most of engineering (starting with junior developers and ending with vp/cto level) doesn't understand cybersecurity specifically or security in general . so even if there is tooling available, people don't understand when, how or most important why to use them.

That's fair. It's a red flag in general if VP/CTO doesn't have the basics of security in place anyway. My experience in my peer group is that they are all fairly knowledgeable about security, if not experts.

Most startups don't have the scale, there are exceptions of course.

i worked in variety of companies that varied from development of security products and were very security oriented to companies where security were driven by client needs (telecom industry for example), to "other places" where management grew with the company and it's case of "you can't teach old dog new tricks". there are always security departments, but unfortunately most of the time their thinking is "slap crowdstrike everywhere, it will solve all problems" and "here is sdlc that engineering must to follow" (lol)

Indeed, I've seen that latter behavior in large companies back in the days. A security department that refuses approvals to upgrade operating systems because it's too risky, a full-blown ops team that doesn't know how to do it without killing all services for days on, doesn't have recommendations on security patches, doesn't know if a CVE is actually exploitable in that setup or not - the list goes on.

i work now on fedramp certification (essentially leading scoping and solutioning) and interaction with security department is both funny,sad and scary af. i discovered that they developed risk assessment policy for system components (in commercial environment) whose purpose to drop down risk level of components in order to remove need for security patching for SOC. and crowdstrike in monitoring mode (nobody knew that it's in monitoring mode) because they afraid of enforcing mode. and that temporary access from/to production network is actually permanent because there is no flow in ticketing system to remove it .

> I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/engineer lines

OP has actually fallen behind skills wise.

This is why companies have been moving Cloud First - your DevOps/SRE or even your Dev team can also be your Networking and Security team.

The writing was on the wall for Network Engineers and old school Sysadmins almost a decade ago, and why so many transitioned into becoming Infra, DevOps, SRE, or Security SWEs or joining Security and Cloud companies as Sales or Support Engineers.

Edit: OP seems technical enough (assuming they know how the difference between Podman vs CRI-O, how to code a DFS from scratch, and what Netlink is), but isn't selling their skills right. They need to invest better and think about how to better tailor a resume.

Not having a LinkedIn is also career suicide at this point.

> Not having a LinkedIn is also career suicide at this point.

Not a single job I worked I got from LinkedIn. LinkedIn seems to be spam-only site to me. Thus not sure about that.

I wonder how much it matters been just having a LinkedIn account vs actually and actively using it. IE not having a presence on the platform ends up as a negative for whatever reason.

> After searching and searching I was unable to find any listings for any network or cybersecurity jobs along the sysadmin/engineer lines. How on earth are all these startups operating without a network person? You don't have someone running your server or your VPN?

For smaller companies the answer is: "VPN admin is just one of many hats that a given generalist might wear"

It would be very costly to pay a FTE just for that one thing, it wouldn't make economical sense until the company reached a certain size and could afford a dedicated IT dept.

> a given generalist might wear

That generalist is your SRE/DevOps/Cloud Engineer in most cases.

This is why companies try to be increasingly cloud first - you can have 1 person do 3 jobs at once.

In very early stage startups you won't even have one dedicated SRE/DevOps/Cloud Engineer, you'll have a few Software Engineers who wear the DevOps hat as needed.

Even once you get a little bit bigger, I lean towards having a few generalists who wear more hats over breaking out a hat and putting it on a team of one.

Yep, more cloud native companies don't need a dedicated network guy. How do I get networks and VPN? I declare them in Terraform and they pop out the other end. Done, no weird Cisco CLI commands required.

The two places I've worked with dedicated networking people have both been relatively small non-tech businesses. In one case a third-party logistics company and in the other a manufacturer. Roughly a few hundred people in both cases.

Just pointing out that these places exist but openings are rare and often not paying competitive salaries. I agree that a career pivot to "devops" or "site-reliability engineer" would probably be the way to go for a networking person of yesterday to make a competitive salary today while retaining the relevance of their expertise. (Of course, if the salary is less important, there you go!)

“the people that used to cable and connect servers are not as important anymore”

What an arrogant take. As someone who does this, and is also a self-taught, no-degree-having troglodyte, I am forced to completely disagree.

Your cloud servers are built by people. That you don’t value those people says WAY more about you than anything else. I understand the abstraction— but that isn’t gonna matter when the PDUs are offline or the fibers get cut.

Tinkerers still exist and still get hired. Just not at FAANG. There is an entire world outside FAANG.

You're free do disagree, doesn't change the reality that most infrastructure will be running on monopolized data centers that need less and less people to operate.

I'm not devaluing anyone here, just stating that, as running infrastructure becomes a more and more concentrated business, there will be less jobs because the small shops/ISPs/data centers are disappearing, and what will be left will be the large cloud providers and equinixes out there.

They're all centralized now, though. It used to be that every medium-to-large business needed in-house networking expertise and ran their own small data centers, or at least ran a server room that required a couple full-time people to manage. Now everything is cloud-hosted, and those kinds of jobs have all but vanished, unless you work at your regional AWS data center.

Offices don't even need simple cable runs and switches/routers anymore. A basic consumer-level network connection and ISP-provided WiFi AP are all the vast majority of businesses need. Everyone has a laptop and there's nothing to plug in or manage.

> thinking seriously about pivoting careers to a devops kinda job instead

I wouldn't even necessarily consider this a career pivot, it's just a matter of them embracing the evolution of their field. Most of the other "network people" saw the writing on the wall years ago and re-titled themselves and got whatever new training and certifications were needed to use the new tools. They're a bit late to the game, but they can take the same path that tens if not hundreds of thousands have already taken.

I think the key is being a generalist who can take on whatever systems the place uses. I think that no matter what, you still need someone who knows how all the pieces fit together and can troubleshoot it when it breaks. Obviously I'm a bit biased since that's how I see myself. I do actually still rack a server now and again and set up a switch or a firewall or whatever is needed that day, but it's not something that takes up much of my time. That stuff is pretty mature so it just doesn't need a lot of attention even for companies like mine who still have some on-prem gear as well as cloud.

I think the cloud's impact on the hiring market is steeply underrated from what I've seen in the discussions. More business seems (to me, anyway) to be ran by cobbling together these services rather than developing technology in house. Unfortunately this devalues more general skills like networking, security, DBA, SWE, etc. for proprietary stack specializations.

Somewhat of a cynical take, but a lot of programs called DevOps and SRE are actually the same old ops people armed with some scripts and better BI tooling.

It's rare to find definitional SWEs in these spaces and when you do you should cling to them. Even then, it's hard to resist the urge to revert back to ops because toil is somewhat addicting to companies.

From what I can tell, there's very little value in putting a SWE into an ops role, regardless if it's SRE. The open source (CNCF in particular) tooling is really good these days. Hiring an SWE for ops results in them building a bunch of custom tooling that needs to be thrown out when they leave.

I couldn't disagree more. The tooling that is Kubernetes was written by SWEs in ops roles and there's many more examples like that. Much of the CNCF donated tooling wouldn't exist without SWEs in ops roles.

"These "operational" jobs where people manage servers without engineering knowledge are much rarer today"

They never existed.

This. There was a power shift and now that companies are sitting on their capital making interest, they are acting on a more selective pattern then years prior. There was also way too much hiring during COVID, so new people thought that was the market... but it was inflated and so now it is also more competitive for the all applicants.

Best advice as others have said- get out there and network, join side projects, contribute to open source.

Time to start a labor cartel.

only works if you have bargaining power, which is determined by supply/demand

Hmm, what if we gatekeep the profession through licensing requirements?

Isn't that what OP is complaining too? Cybersecurity have above average licensing requirements

P.Eng required for, checks notes safety rated javascript web app dev.

I am 100% opposed to BS licensing requirements. They are intended to protect the income of the few at the expense of productivity for the many.

Too many strike rats

Companies still have to contend with wasting time interviewing candidates who look good on paper.

At least they save on the interview travel costs now since most interviews seemed to have moved to Zoom and ilk.

Arguing against this; the system doesn't work fine for the companies either. They're wasting huge amounts of capital on candidates that they're distrustful of as they ultimately leap away anyways for slightly higher returns, repeating the cycle. This leads into a whole lot of internal issues as well.

The system is broken. It's just that companies can weather the storm.

Also job searching on its own is broken even when you ignore the market favouring the employer, as online submissions are still disastrous from companies asking invasive questions, to demanding LinkedIn profiles so they can apply through there instead of their own network, to automatic resume apps most companies rely on not even doing their basic job properly, to forcing companies to have to invent weird ways to verify the person who is applying is even a person at all. It's all a huge mess nobody wants to tackle because again, companies can weather it fine, and eventually everyone gets a job somewhere that keeps them too busy to care.

On /r/sysadmin and /r/itcareerquestions I have long been downvoted when I disagreed with the mantra of "just get a cert, college degrees are worthless". I do think that most valuable learning happens on the job and on your own. However, the job market is not always so hot for developers and IT, and like now it will have down turns. I always recommended younger people that even if they could get a job off of certs, they should strongly consider part time classes to get a degree.

While a lot of the IT jobs are cert and experience focused, more like a blue collar job. They are still in white collar companies, in offices, and play normal office politics. So eventually having a degree can be a filter to moving up, so its better to get one sooner rather than later.

The other side of this is what this person is facing. Operations jobs are becoming rarer than they used to be, and operations jobs that do not require coding are even rarer. Just having skills doing set ups is a lot less valuable if you can't script everything to happen automatically in a cloud environment.

At the end of the day you might be a good candidate, but on paper 5 years of experience vs 5 eyars of experience AND a degree, the degree wins.

The software business has been trying to break the back of its workforce for decades. There was a huge anti-trust lawsuit about it in like 2011 and there will likely be another about the mass coordinated layoffs and hiring freezes in 2023 (complete with tacky EPS beat on tacky EPS beat).

This isn’t unique to software of course, the attack on working people is broad spectrum in 2024, but it’s probably the last white collar profession to go down in terms of labor pricing power. Even five or ten years ago it was a seller’s market.

> there will likely be another about the mass coordinated layoffs and hiring freezes in 2023

Did you mean 2024?

> This isn’t unique to software of course, the attack on working people is broad spectrum in 2024, but it’s probably the last white collar profession to go down in terms of labor pricing power. Even five or ten years ago it was a seller’s market.

I'm curious of where we are on the curve. Is San Francisco 2024 anywhere near Detroit 2013? My guess would be that it's a "no": San Francisco is in a much more attractive natural location and white collar professions tend to have more flexible individuals than blue collar ones.

Since 2009 only once has someone asked me about a college degree. Once you hit 30 (27?) I don't think it really ever comes up in conversation in a professional context. Your resume shows where you worked and how fast you progressed, which is a much more accurate description of your ability to work in that capacity.

People in software really don’t like hearing this, but we should be coordinating as a group for political protection. The reason is very simple. Even if you think you are a 10x engineer, you’ll be replaced in a heartbeat as soon as a fresh MBA finds out you can be replaced with 4 people willing to work for well below market. Maybe it’s shortsighted but guess what? Companies are shortsighted.

What does that mean? At a minimum, there should be much more strict enforcement of prevailing wage pay for immigrant labor.

The H1B should be used to hire experts which can’t be found in the US, not to chop the floor out of the market. There’s no reason Zoom should be able to hire an “AI Scientist” for 75k, but they can because no one is checking. And they did.

Political action means coordinating as a group to apply pressure. Politicians need you to vote for them, so we need to make it clear that our votes are contingent on their action.

"I noted, too, that some of these rejections came instantly after turning in an application. [...] I determined that I was automatically being filtered because I didn't have a college degree. Sure, the job posting says it's required, but you do know I have more experience than the average college student my age, right?"

Sure, I never studied medicine and the hospital stated that they are looking for a doctor, but the experience should count no?

Oh man. I keep thinking about Software Engineering as a craft. Only in our profession is it considered completely acceptable to work without any professional education.

Lawyers, doctors, nurses, even tax accountants go to jail if they practice without being licensed.

You wouldn't get your house wired by some random dude, instead you're looking for a proper, licensed electrician.

But in tech? Somehow we normalized random kids just building critical architecture.

I wonder if that's an anomaly from the exponential, chaotic growth that happened to software engineering since the 60s. I wouldn't be surprised if things normalize, like in a lot of other, mature fields of professions.

When I started it seemed like everyone needed a MSCD or some certification but then people figured out how to cheat and made them worthless.

License requirements for those professions you listed are for safety of the public (and for the worker in the case of electricians). Without a basic level of understanding electricity will kill you. Without knowledge of the body you will kill the patient.

Doctors, Lawyers, etc can act as notary so they are given additional powers and must follow a code of conduct.

Anyone can lay concrete, anyone can chop down trees, can paint/grass cut, lay tiles or put in a new floor. Electrical or Plumbing require a license because it would be dangerous not to.

Lawyers, accountants, financial planners, etc are licenses because they represent a public trust.

I don't think developers fit into any of these categories. Scientists or artists do not need a license to do their craft. CEOs don't need a license either.

> Lawyers, doctors, nurses, even tax accountants go to jail if they practice without being licensed.

Basically never happens where I live, and precisely for the reason you mentioned - those are cartel jobs and cartel protect its members.

> AI is probably losing you a lot of good candidates. It can be easily gamed, and then you'll end up with someone who watched a TikTok video on "how to fool any ChatGPT in ten seconds". I also fail to understand how I can have multiple years of experience in a job as well as active certifications, and somehow still get filtered. My resume isn't that bad...what on earth is your AI doing? Do you know?

While the ol’ prompt injection tactic may soon stop working, tailoring your resume for each job to increase your interview rate won’t stop working anytime soon. Specifically, knowing which of your experiences align well with the requirements is super useful in tailoring. If you’re interested, I made a quick app[0] that does cosine similarity of your bullets to the job requirements to help visualize how well your resume aligns with the job description.

[0] https://resgen.app

Nah, tailoring resumes doesn’t work either. This isn’t my glib take, it just doesn’t work.

I tried it in the not so distant past and it just seemed to just be a great way to spend way more time on each application and then get rejected automatically by some bot as well.

Tailoring for every job is a waste of time and overkill. I do find that keeping 2-3 similar resumes highlighting different parts of my skill set can be useful to pick the one best suited for the posting, but as others have noted it’s not worth spending a lot of time on each application when the response rate in the overall market is so poor.

The highest order bit about job search being broken at the moment is that the supply of jobs has fallen. It was bad before, too, but that's the primary thing making it worse. The main solution is to spend more time in person networking: find companies you like, and attend any tech talks they host at their offices.

> First, after turning in over 50-100 applications, I didn't have a single email or phone call from a human.

No, that sounds about right.

I came to the conclusion over a decade ago that firing off resumes into the cold dark void of the Internet was a loser's game.

Every single job posted to a electronic jobs board receives hundreds or thousands of applicants. And the MAJORITY of those are people who are actually unqualified according to the requirements of the listing. (A smaller but rapidly rising percent are AI-assisted scammers.)

And, you have to take into account the fact that MOST online job listings are posted because they couldn't find anyone to fill the role who wanted it within the company, or through word of mouth. In other words, most of them are bullshit jobs. Bad culture, low pay, boring work, or all three. Again, not all, but MOST.

Last year I was looking to move onto greener pastures and I tried to prove my hypothesis wrong by dusting off my LinkedIn profile, fluffing up my resume, and hitting the job listings. I applied _only_ to jobs that I knew I was going to be a good fit, skill-wise. The whole year I did not get a single response. The closest thing I got was a cold call from a consultant who sold some complicated mobile backend to the NBA, sat on it for months, then only decided to implement it a week before it was set to go live. I noped out of that one pretty hard.

I did land a job via LinkedIn, but not how you would expect: I sent a message to a former co-worker to see if he wanted to catch up. We had a phone call, he mentioned that his company was hiring, I applied, he referred, and I eventually got the job.

100% of the jobs I have had in my 2.5 decade career, I got through referral or reputation. If you are not including your personal network in your job search, you are very unlikely to find what you are looking for.

> I need to obtain a job that requires a clearance, and the job has to "sponsor" the application for the clearance, before I can get one. Well, this is a catch-22, since I can't obtain a job without a clearance, and I can't get a clearance without a job. Although I'm qualified for these jobs(sometimes overqualified), I can't have them, because of this paradoxical security clearance.

Most jobs that require a clearance only require you to be eligible for one. That is, you’re a US citizen and are truthful on your clearance application form. There are indeed positions that require you to have one going in, but those are few and far between. From my experience, it’s limited to highly specialized staff/principal/management openings where the company would rather hire through their networks than randos applying through an ad.

Many companies are indeed looking for an active clearance, because they want to start someone immediately and don’t want to take the risk of hiring someone whose clearance doesn’t come through because they smoked pot or got busted for underage drinking in college.

Some companies are willing to do this, or they might make an offer contingent on receiving a clearance, or they have an arrangement with their sponsoring agency where they can begin unclassified work while waiting on their clearance.

Honestly, I'd like to see the candidate's CV. This description seems off to me:

> I've got a lot of skills - video production, security, Linux, Mikrotiks, Ciscos, virtualization, cloud, domains, DNS, the list goes on and on.

Based on this gumbo of skills (why is there "video production?" And what does even "virtualization" and "cloud" mean in this context?), I would have 0 confidence in the candidate.

> My homelab is probably bigger than some businesses and it's taught me a lot. Even got an SD-WAN site to site VPN set up to my parent's house so they can watch movies off my home Plex server

This gives me a bit more confidence about the candidate, but setting up a VPN is not really a complex task. Is that all there is to the "big homelab?"

> With a fresh CCNA cert in hand, and a CompTIA Security+ to back it up, finding a network or security job should be no problem at all.

CCNA and CompTIA are junior-level certifications. Having a "Security+" cert means nothing if you have no experience in security to back it up.

I don't mean this negatively, but either OP is overestimating their abilities, or is vastly underselling them.

Writing a good CV is a skill... Learn it, or pay someone to do it for you.

I am aware that the font is a divisive choice, lol. I wanted it to look like my scribbles on the page, because that's exactly what it is. Most people I know who read my blog use RSS anyway, and reader mode is a thing that exists.

However, reading over some of these comments, maybe I'll switch it back to Quicksand.

Edit: Fine, I changed it to improve readability.

The font makes this practically unreadable for dyslexic folks.

Typography aside, the frustration of this early career network engineer is palpable and understandable. The open call job situation has always been a mess, but automation and the internet growth has just made it messier.

It's worth remembering, though, many/most jobs don't come from this process. It's worth trawling jobs postings of course to see what's going on, but if that's all you are doing you'll probably have a hard time.

In tech circles, I see mostly two camps of process. One is big and/or established companies that have a bureaucratic evaluation process, the other being more "bespoke" hiring at e.g. young startups.

Navigating both processes is vastly easier if you have some sort of personal connection. It doesn't have to be a deep one, but it gets you out of the slush pile.

Any large company application with an attached internal recommendation will at least be read by someone. Any small company is more to reduce the crapshoot aspect of hiring by convincing themselves they know something more about this candidate because so-an-so's cousin's brother used to work with them.

My most effective advice to younger job seekers has been to get themselves out there in face to face settings (e.g. hardware/software meetups, conferences, etc.) and to directly contact (ideally through a colleague or common connection) companies they already know they'd like to work with... you have no idea what they are thinking internally but don't have posted on a job board.

Also, senior people in your life can often help you with contacts and recommendations, and often are more than happy to. Don't hesitate to ask if you have a good relationship.

For what it's worth, nearly all the jobs I've had in my career haven't been posted. The one that was, reached out to me with an internal recommendation. This only happens with some sort of networking, but that naturally comes with time. This post was by someone 5ish years in, if I recall correctly, and that's long enough to be effective relative to entry candidates.

I’m part of a community that helps connect applicants interested in working in the climate change field with companies in that same space.

Companies browse the list of resumes and invite candidates directly to apply.

After being asked directly by a couple of companies to apply for a position, I was auto rejected nearly immediately leading to awkward follow-ups. In each case there was profuse apologies and eventual interviews (and job offers), but I wonder how many good candidates are getting squashed by a black box AI.

I hadn’t considered the prompt injection trick, but it might be the best defense for a candidate with 10+ years in the field but without a CS degree (but still a MA in an unrelated field).

For years, I've been hoping some startup will finally "fix" hiring.

When I was in college, we had CyberCoders, which was a job search engine.

Then we got Monster, which was a job search engine.

Then we got Indeed, which is...a job search engine.

I do think a good job search engine could solve many of these issues:

1. You should only have to enter your info once, except for certain job- or application-specific items.

2. Inaccurate listings should be removed. If you miscategorize your non-remote position as remote, you should be removed/penalized, same as an Etsy seller would be if they listed polyester sheets as linen.

3. Email delivery would be a non-issue.

But what it's always comes down for me is stuff like his "security clearance required; you can't get security clearance without a job" (change it to "experience" and it applies to most new grads), and the fact that the biggest things are intangibles.

The best way to get a job is to know someone who's worked with you in the past and can say "yeah, I like working with this person". You can't automatically filter for attitude, or communication skills, or productivity. Do you know python? Cool. Are you going to show ownership of your projects, though? Are people going to find you easy to work with? Will you meet deadlines? Can you make good time estimates and properly negotiate deadlines? (Similarly, how can an applicant vet the company culture around these and other intangibles?)

I don't know how a startup would fix these problems, but I hope someone figures it out and builds it soon. We should be able to dramatically improve hiring, both for companies and applicants/employees.

TL;DR:

- The author noticed that he's been auto-rejected when applying for jobs requiring college degrees without having one, and when applying for jobs requiring security clearance without having one.

- The author tried putting an invisible AI string into his resume, noticed a potential (but undefined) difference in the rate of auto-rejections, and because of that, believes companies in general are using AI to make the majority of their hiring decision-making.

- The job market is weak right now.

Unlike a few other commenters, I personally didn't have an issue with the font. It made me do a double-take at first, but once I started reading, my eyes didn't stop (and I was able to understand it just fine).

I just started to fill out a job application from the HN "Who's Hiring" thread, and it required a Loom video of me describing why I'd be a good fit for that specific position. The fuck? Abandoned the application process at this step. I'll do an interview, but creating a video just to get rejected for each job? That's a bit much.

I've never come across that myself, but the audacity of some firms is outrageous.

To play devil's advocate: There are many more applicants for tech jobs than there are tech jobs available. When you are drowning in applications for a particular role, anything you can do to slim down the pool to only those who are actually interested is going to be a win.

And I know this is going to sound glib, but it sounds like it worked...

And to play devils-devils-advocate (angels advocate?), these kind of “now dance for me monkey” tests filter more for desperation than enthusiasm.

I'm a civil engineer and self taught developer. I've done software development at an internship, twice. I wasn't even hired to do so, I was in operations, I just found a need that I could fill with their system and taught myself SQL, VBA, stuff like that. I didn't end up going full time because I didn't want to move to the company HQ. Fast forward a little bit, I'm a couple years out of graduation. I've resigned myself to the fact if I want a software job my best bet is use my civil degree, get a civil job, and work my way up in the company, find a niche to target, fix it, and just do that all over again.

I really wish you all the best. As many have already said, pure sys admin is a thing of the past for most companies

My advice is, ask you social network. Most engineers I know have friends who are engineers, too.

A simple recommendation is often enough to get a interview where you can then show your competency

  It's an incredible security risk to have asked my address, work history, contact info, sometimes my SSN and demographics, and have me trust that you won't have that leaked.

I have immediately closed applications asking for a SSN. You know you are going to reject all but one of the candidates. Why are you hoarding this PII? Is it just an implicit way to reject immigrants? Also the ones that ask for sexual preference (or however it is worded to get you to say straight/gay/other). As a pedestrian straight white male that question makes me uncomfortable. What is the goal?

> Also the ones that ask for sexual preference (or however it is worded to get you to say straight/gay/other).

The goal is to hire someone other than a pedestrian straight white male, of course. They can't outright say it.

It's shocking that it's even allowed to be asked.

In some jurisdictions it's not legal to ask, so they have to wait until the interview stage to suss out how non-heterosexual, non-white, and non-male you are.

That's actually not true. At a certain size of company and especially if the company does work for the federal government they are required to gather demographic information to ensure they are trying to not just have a bunch of white dudes applying for their job. Those questions should not influence the hiring process at all (if they do then it's illegal since those are protected traits).

If you don't want to answer them then just answer it by stating you don't want to tell them. It's an option on every application I applied too.

In theory that information can only be collected for statistical purposes and should have no bearing on the hiring decision. Any well run org will not show that information to people reviewing resumes, the liability is just too great.

A senior Disney exec was recently caught on hidden camera saying:

> Certainly, there have been times where, you know, there’s no way we’re hiring a white man for this…. There are times when it’s spoken.

> Reporter: How would they say it?

> There’s no way we’re hiring a white man for this role. They’d be very careful how they’d message that to agents.

But this was captured by a controversial source, James O'Keefe's company, whom some consider an old-school journalist and others consider a prima facie con-man.

Whether or not this particular admission is 1) true and 2) from a real Disney exec, would it surprise anybody if this sentiment were common and barely concealed in large orgs?

You can only vilify a demographic group for so many years in a row before university students get into positions of power in big orgs and make sure that the vilified demographic gets shafted whenever possible, in the interest of "fairness".

It sucks the tech market is ultra competitive.

Everyone and their grandma transitioned to tech.

Some raw thoughts:

* Its been about 3-weeks since the author was laid off. Personally, I would expect that being close to a job offer from cold intros in that time frame could also signal a broken job market.

* Quick rejections are a good thing.

* Resume screening tools are a necessity for HR. Candidates robo apply for positions that they do not qualify for (such as requiring clearance)

* There are jobs that will sponsor security clearances, but those tend to go recent grads. The expectation is that for more senior positions you already have a clearance.

* Startups and networking engineers: you really dont need networking specialists my guy. AWS and the other pickme IaaS platforms have made it trivial to get code in the hands of customers,that your company can operate for years without needing to invest in dedicated sysadmins.

* AI is losing candidates, however there enough candidates that it does not matter. The issue is that there are too many candidates, and just not enough time to screen them all. False negatives is not an issue when you get 100's of resumes.

I think that if a site asks you to fill a form along with attaching a résumé, then it's a scam, and they're just using you to train their AI.

Part of me thinks that you're right, but I've applied to _so many_ jobs over the years (prior to AI) that use workday and required that I fill in all the info again. I've also never ever heard back from a company that used workday.

Today I will only apply to a job that requires me to make an account (like workday) if at least one of these criteria are met (i) I am exceptionally qualified (in my own eyes), (ii) I have a reference, (iii) I already have made an account previously. Though thankfully there are many (smaller) companies these days (at least in my current field) that don't require me to make an account.

I think I found OP's cv, if anyone is interested in seeing it https://read.cv/ncropp Also his WiLine employee card: https://www.signalhire.com/profiles/nicolas-cropp%27s-email/... (funny, last year<Aug> he was listed as tier3 tech, maybe he fudged a little, or the company was unaware of his skills "shadow IT talent"..lol. Please be nice guys, could be any of us out there in the cold. Here are my suggestions OP,

Seeing how you are in Oregon, choices may be smaller, but, it all depends what you wanna do. A)get a job which affords you free time and energy (yes, a boring desk job where you twiddle your thumbs)...use the free time and your free time to make your skills crowd ready!!. A couple of certs and reach out to the colleges that the NSA is certifying/approving for cyber-training to either get certification from them or full fledge degree (some college should be able to gvie you credit for work experience). B)If you want to stay on the ground(non-cloud), find and old school fortune 1000 company in an eare you want to live and target them with your resume, but tailor your resume to their needs (look at their website, query their MX/DNS/etc, look at their website code etc. In my humble opinion, a package like this will keep you marketable for a few more decades <skills package> Network/WEBSITE/MTA/pbx/hvac/timeclock/CCTV/BIOMETRIC-ACCESS-CONTROL/CYBER SECURITY/ASSET-INVENTORY control </skills package> These are skills/technologies that 99 percent of fortune 1000 companies NEED. And I bet you very few have all these skillsets in one person, and it is doable at the server/platform management level, not the menial manual level of inventory control and badge scanning level.

As for access to the humans in the company, do what we've seen in the movies, you know, where the aggressive intrepid protagonist waits for the ceo or manager at the elevator, or follows him to the restaurant. I realize this is 2024 and you might end up in Jail, but I'm talking about the cyber version of that. I just did a lil web snooping and I got your resume link, I'm sure you can do the same and get linkedin of the hiring person, or the ceo if you prefer. Anyways, the idea is that youresearch the company, find their deficiencies, or maybe you spot a new project in their latest Q report and you see something you can help them with, so your letter goes, "hey yo chief, Here's my bag of skills, also in your latest Q report you mention you guys are expanding in shipping, I can setup a fleet monitoring system for you"

Best of luck buddy, go after the unlisted job vacancies now buddy, or better yet, fabricated your own opening.

Cool font. Fun to see someone customize their website in a way that speaks of them!

[stub for offtopicness]

Friendly advice, learn more about typography and readability.. Had to copy&paste to an editor to read the text.

I agree the design choices are unfortunate, but (all?) common browsers have a readability mode like a single click away.

my HN client (Octal) opens reader mode automatically. i had to re-open the site and disable it to see this font! i was not disappointed, that was very... unique.

Is it just me, why is it so so difficult to read? the fonts are hurting my eyes.

Just tou, i like the font

Don't worry, it's not just you :)

I also had to close the page immediately.

If the author thinks that page looks good, no wonder they are having trouble getting hired.

Super easy to read, but I prefer darkmode

That font and the contrast gives me a headache.

Most comments so far seem to revolve around the look of the blog post. Mine will be no different, since I just barely avoided a migraine headache by not reading more than a sentence. The contrast is way off.

Apologies for the irreverent comment, but what an amazing example of typeface not matching the tone of the content!

It's not irrelevant. I think the whole post was close to illegible.

Hopefully he didn't use the same font for his CV

To everyone bitching about the font: get a life and stop allowing custom fonts if you're going to be whining about things you don't like. NoScript, uBlock, they all do it.

I didn't like the font.

Please don't be acerbic in HN threads.

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

Ok, fair.

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