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Comment by MrMember | Hacker News Reader

I'm seeing a lot of back in forth in the comments between hiring managers and employees discussing who is more responsible for the current situation, but from the perspective of someone looking for a job what should I be doing?

I've been pretty aggressively looking for a job for the past six months or so. I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions. I haven't used LLMs at all in my resume, cover letters, etc. I only apply to jobs that I believe I meet the requirements for and that I would likely accept if given an offer. How do I signal that 1) I am a real person 2) I really do have the job experience and skills listed on my resume, and 3) I really am interested in the specific job I'm applying for. Because doing this my hit rate has been abysmal. I've had maybe 10-12 initial phone screens (never an issue, I easily make it past these). Past that I've had maybe 3-4 interviews that get into the later rounds. From that I've had zero offers.

So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements? The only other way I've seen suggested to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do).

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> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere? Why shouldn't I switch to an automated "shotgun" approach that applies me to as many jobs as possible to which I vaguely fit the requirements?

I’m in a big semi-private Slack where people have been discussing CS application strategies for a long time (since before ChatGPT).

The desperate people usually go through an arc where they try automated applications and embracing LLMs. Their response rate is dismal, but they make up for it with shotgun volume.

The catch is that when they finally get a job, it’s usually at a company that sucks. Some place with incompetent hiring managers who can’t tell the difference between LLM slop and a genuine application. Interview processes that leave so much room for LLM cheating that all of your coworkers are going to be LLM jockeys too.

So you can try it. You might get something out of it, which is better than nothing. However, if you’re expecting a good job at a good company then it’s not going to deliver what you expect.

This is just the first pass. There are second pass strategies that could improve and are even more insidious: - review your generated CV pre-submission, make changes, do this a lot. Eventually you'll have a training set to fine-tune the model - throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks. That's your training set for that job. Now you have tuned the hiring manager's preferences. Follow up with your actual CV. Side benefit is it will jam up other candidates.

An arms race is afoot

This is just fear mongering. If a job posting got spammed with 200 fake resumes from multiple fake applicants then the first thing we’re doing is cancelling our job postings with whatever service is so poor that it can’t reject basic spam attacks like this.

Honestly, I think people vastly overestimate how much hiring managers use AI for filtering. Blaming AI for rejections has become a common coping mechanism because it’s easier to think that a broken AI filter rejected you instead of the company making a valid decision to go with someone else.

> throw 100-200 CVs at a job and see what sticks

If your experience wasn’t good enough the first 10 times, doing another couple hundred rounds of LLM word manipulation isn’t going to make it better.

see comment below- " belinder 1 day ago | parent | prev | next [–]

I was hiring manager for 3 positions about 4 months ago and the amount of fake applications out there was mind boggling to me. I would say 90% were either entirely fake or had the exact same generated ai text. It got so bad that we started only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link.

Also after so many bad resumes I started being very forgiving for the ones that didn't fully match the job requirements if they had something in them that made it seem like a real person, e.g. a personal hobby section. I think a lot of people discourage writing that but I argue it makes you stand out in an ocean of fake and copy pasted junk."

is it "fear mongering" or is it reality?

You don’t need to blame “AI” (or LLMs specifically) for the rejection mess that, good old fashioned ATS (applicant tracking systems) already automated rejection either outright or due to selection priority, filtering for keywords or phrases, biasing towards certain more easily parseable document formats, and so on was already happening around 2018-2019, probably before.

And resume refinement representing and reformatting essentially the same information has always been a commonplace trick to improve your odds. My simple first pass resumes around that time must have never seen the light of human eyes because optimizing things around such systems, adjusting formatting, pushing docx versions, and so on increased my return response rate per submission for the exact same information. People just tend to forget they’ve gone through such processes or are moving positions through networking. The cold market has been abysmal for quite some time, even if you’re qualified.

Naysayers haven’t been submitting to cold options I suspect which is why the trend has always been denial. But with mass layoffs, people are having to resort to cold application processes and finally experiencing at scale how terrible the process has been.

> Naysayers haven’t been submitting to cold options I suspect which is why the trend has always been denial. But with mass layoffs, people are having to resort to cold application processes and finally experiencing at scale how terrible the process has been.

Aye, this. Got all of my jobs historically though word of mouth. Sat next to someone at a wedding reception, or talks at a Linux User Group, or colleagues from one job going to the next and pulling everyone with them, etc.

cold applying was brutal. worked out, eventually, but it feels/felt like such a waste of time.

Hiring managers don’t have infinite time and resources, they’ll just pursue other more fruitful avenues where a DoS attack isn’t possible.

This is a great way to entrench the recruiter middleman further though, because paying them a 20% cut to bypass the bullshit is already what they sell (and sometimes deliver).

Where are these places where the interview processes allow for LLM cheating? I'm desperate.

Unless the place has had 100% turnover in the last two years it sounds a bit dubious. Even some of the worst places to work that I know of haven’t churned through their entire development staff since ChatGPT first released.

And that's not even enough: A few weeks ago I had to interview someone who had what appeared to be a realistic profile. Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in.

At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity, because the percentage of straight out fakes is too high. Even the questions to ask me at the end were GPT provided.

Start every interview asking the candidate how many rs are in strawberry.

Apparently outdated, ChatGPT 3.5 answers correctly here.

Try raspberry? Both fail for me, but I'm not a paid user.

I don't pay either (anymore), but is correct as well. (Via chatgot android app)

From iOS app, paid 4o

> There are 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”

Follow up with, "Please check again"

You’re absolutely right to ask for a recheck! Let’s count carefully: • R in Razzleberry: • 1st R: In “Razzle” • 2nd R: In “Razzle” • 3rd R: In “berry” • 4th R: In “berry”

Total: 4 Rs in “razzleberry.”

No changes—still 4 Rs! Let me know if I can clarify further.

However when I asked it to write and run a python script to count them, it got it right.

ChatGPT-4 (free) on Android just told me:

> There are two "R"s in the word "cranberry."

Same for me.

Good example to illustrate how LLMs work, if it is not correct for cranberry, but correct for raspberry or strawberry.

you're not on 3.5 anymore

Well, I use the free version and just checked, but I cannot even see what model is used.

Either way, if my cheap standard unpaid ChatGPT version gives the correct result, I don't think it counts as a valid catch anymore.

Anyone affected by this and in the US might consider calling or writing to their congressman. The time to do that is now when the demand is high to bolster jobs but low for excessive laws. Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to.

The fake job applicants are only siphoning resources from the economy at the high expense of all other parties involved. The ones who are getting screwed the most are the applicants, some of whom are concerned about making ends meet and getting auto-rejected constantly despite decades of experience. No one should stand for it.

If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire. As far as I can tell the advocacy is for either companies to be empowered to sue people who apply to work with them (seems like madness) or to set up a situation where the government enforcement arm pro-actively goes out and harasses unemployed job seekers. Either way that sounds like a recipe for disaster for unemployed persons.

AI has made hiring especially in technical industry an absolute shit show. I agree with parent comment that ideally government could do something about it but agree with you on how would you even do that. Maybe if they required all the job board companies like indeed and glassdoor and LinkedIn to properly vet candidates else those companies would be fined, but it's hard to imagine a solution that doesn't also hurt unemployed legit human beings

And then you run into problems on the corporate side: fake job listings to build up resume databases for comparison shopping of applicants. Regulations in this area should have to cut both ways.

This the end game that Silicon Valley created. An automation arms race between two competing groups that were initially trying to save a little time or cut down on staffing but escalated it to the point where the default approach would be considered unforgivably assholish 15 years ago, people that don’t buy into it at least somewhat are drowning in bullshit, and nobody’s happy— but on paper everybody’s got record productivity!

With LLMs, this same exact scenario is playing out in other realms. Look at writing and publishing. Sure you’re on top of the world before everyone else catches up, but when they do, there’s now just a boilerplate of exponentially expanding bullshit and counter-bullshit that everyone has to circumvent to do anything.

This has already happened long ago with Google search results. The first tier of results is won by reasonably well-funded entities that provide a legitimate service, and have the means to optimize the signals feeding the search rankings, putting them higher than the next tier.

The second tier of search results tends to be dominated by imitators that don't really add anything of value (SEO spam, blog posts that tell you how to write a for loop in Ruby despite knowing full well that the reader already had no problem finding that information, etc.)

Then finally at the bottom are the little guys who try their best, but haven't learned yet that it's a waste of time to try to self-publish any content because there's too much actual spam masquerading as content, and Google can't tell the difference.

The search results effectively became a list of content approved by a single publisher (even if automated) rather than a melting pot of freely-expressed ideas.

I sincerely hope that we can prevent the similar nullification of the software developer's career accomplishments as carrying any weight, but I am starting to have doubts. If it even goes as far as the erosion of incentives to accomplish things, then we may actually end up needing that AI to do the work for us, as there will be few people left who give a shit.

Yes, that’s a good example, and I share your concerns.

As an aside, I shudder thinking about what a heavily ‘SEO’d’ LLM experience would be like.

Somebody convince me LLMs are not net-negative productivity.

They seem much better at producing bullshit that’s difficult to filter through, than performing actually useful work.

I have found copilot autocomplete to be somewhat useful for small blocks of code.

Coca-Cola and Toys R Us have found them useful for making terrible commercials cheaper than making terrible commercials by hand and way cheaper than making good commercials that actually improve their brand image. Seems weird they’d do that for immensely expensive holiday television spots rather than throwaway 5 second YouTube spots or something but hey — I’m clearly not a corporate genius.

Yea, I couldn't tell if the original comment was satire but the number of phishing ads that existed in the past for bogus positions, to pool candidates for later hiring, to farm market rate data, and who knows what else… makes me have very little empathy for the employer side.

It’s been a mess for awhile due to economies of scale benefiting the hiring side to manipulate and abuse the market. The fact it’s become more affordable for job seekers to do a bit of the same is just ironic.

I would REALLY love if job postings had to go through a government clearing house. Only real jobs get posted. Only real applicants can apply.

Bonus: jobs would have to be classified according to a single government standard, so it should be possible to search for a good job match by at least limiting the field and (allowed) location(s).

making the jobs application (and hiring) market a single market will make it more efficient, and cut out a lot of middlemen inefficiencies. I like it.

You as a hiring company can pay to have a 2nd website, but posting it to the gov't portal is a requirement. The information, such as conditions, salary (range), experience, location etc, are all in standardized format. If you're found to be lying, it's a federal crime (because of fraud and interstate commerce for example).

Applicants also must have gov't issued ID (such as social security), so you cannot be fake.

If you look at some of the problems of USA Jobs, you may not actually want this.

Hiring in tech has been pretty awful even before AI.

> If I didn't know better I'd think this was satire.

It’s actually a constant them on HN to imagine that passing laws will magically make problems disappear. The realities of enforcing the law or even identifying perpetrators are imagined to be the easy part.

People seem to want to pass laws that treat the symptoms, not the cause.

“You keep getting the stomach bug. Here take this, it’ll calm your stomach. No no, you can keep eating that expired cheese, it’s all good”

> you can keep eating that expired cheese

Why are you anti French ?

My oldest kid hate experiencing vomit, she transferred that on to me as a “gross gross thing” and it was the first thing that came to mind.

I’m a huge fan of French onion soup.

Ah, the ol’ “manufacture an argument that wasn’t made, then shoot it down it in front of an audience” trick. I suppose I’ll be advocating for the outlawing of those kinds of comments, and anything else deemed as misinformation next.

A more realistic scenario would involve no enforcement by the government (except perhaps in extreme cases, like with the 'spam king' back in the day). ChatGPT's terms of service would already cover it under the "shall not be used for illegal activity" language, and it would be just enough of a deterrence to benefit a larger number of people without creating new problems. But I wasn't advocating for a specific solution, just a call to a congressman. Despite their faults and flaws, they're probably still going to do a better job than I am at making the call, or maybe it won't even be a priority for them and they'll do nothing.

I think the GP is suggesting that making, distributing, and profiting from such software should be made illegal. If an engineer can make this software, they are probably a good fit for many jobs in the market.

I'm suggesting that you should call your congressman and say that getting a job is a problem right now and automated applicants could be contributing to it (we don't know the full story, but making noise about it might at least inspire some investigation by those who have the ability to get the facts). I don't think it should be a crime to automate a job application, and I have no problem with it from an ethical point of view long as the application is made truthfully and in good faith by a reasonably qualified applicant and there is real intent to follow up on it.

But if that isn't the case, there's no reasonably good safety mechanism to mitigate the massive amount of harm that a determined bad faith actor could cause to the economy.

But making false claims about your work history (as could be the case with the one using ChatGPT to answer questions) is a problem, isn't it? And it's wonderful to see these rebuttals made against a hypothetical something that already happened. https://www.lawdepot.com/resources/business-articles/legal-c...

> situation where the government enforcement arm pro-actively goes out and harasses unemployed job seekers

Why wouldn't this be a desired outcome? Unemployment doesn't give a carte blanche to send spam.

> Nobody innocent is going to be wronged if this is made into a crime or otherwise regulated to put a stop to.

Good luck.

The applicants doing fake job applications do not care about your laws at all. Many might be in foreign countries. They might plan on applying with stolen identities.

Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore in their backlog forever?

> Making a law isn’t going to change a thing. Even if you did, what company is going to spend resources tracking down the likely fake identity of someone applying for a job just to hand it to law enforcement for them to ignore in their backlog forever?

I missed the part where I included that or any strategy on how it would be used as a deterrent. Clearly that's not how it is done as you pointed out, but you make it seem as if laws have no value at all, which is a rather naive take. Fraud is already illegal FYI.

I don't have a solution, other than to make a call to the people who are elected to find those solutions, if they are able to. If they can't or won't, then it is a good thing that phone call was free anyway.

How exactly does someone who applies with a stolen identity get anything out of doing so?

Absolutely correct, just making laws themselves have little effect over anything. Enforcement is the key. For most laws that step is an afterthought. But there are creative ways to do it.

> applicants doing fake job applications … stolen identities

What I don’t get is what’s the economic incentive for this behaviour

- It can be a side effect to keep your unemployment insurance which is conditional upon proving you are sending applications at a given pace. I'd probably need to apply to random jobs if I qualified for it because there isn't a role opening in my niche weekly to fullfil the criteria here. I never had to because I was ineligible for other reasons every time I was unemployed and could have used support but that's a whole other can of worms)

- I heard its a thing to get n jobs you're not qualified for to get at least the first few month salary "for free" (as an individual or as a pawn from a larger organized fraud). Not sure how common or how much truth there is to it though.

But this chaos fits Big Tech's claim that there are not enough American workers, so they can then turn around and onshore H1Bs from the hiring manager's hometown back in the old country.

Hundreds of comments, and this is the first one that mentions perhaps the primary root cause of the situation.

Do you work in tech? Have you ever seen any pressure to create LLM-driven chaos with the goal of increasing support for encouraging immigration in future years?

It’s too elaborate of a Rube Goldberg strategy to take very seriously. Companies struggle to achieve simple, clear, short-term goals in tight-knit, well-aligned teams. Ain’t nobody got the skill to pull off that level of conspiracy.

There often isn't a nefarious scheme. Humans are better at spotting patterns than they are at mass coordination.

then move abroad and get your dream job there?

Huh? Is this a 'love it or leave it' comment? I genuinely don't understand what you're meaning to say here.

What I mean is unless your ideal is autarky or USSR under Joseph Stalin, it is hypocritical or ingenuous to expect having a market where you can sell goods and services worldwide but not allowing workers applying and getting jobs worldwide for same companies. That is called free market.

So if you happen to think you are missing jobs because they are given to people living in another country, you also have the choice to play by the same rules, relocate there and apply for the same job. Or ask for a lower salary where you already are to be competitive. This is fair competition.

ha lets see…

In economics, a free market is an economic system in which the prices of goods and services are determined by supply and demand expressed by sellers and buyers. Such markets, as modeled, operate without the intervention of government or any other external authority.

if you think america is “free market” I have some Enron stock to sell to you :)

Lol wat. 'Free market' is a spherical cow in a vacuum. Its an abstraction that people like to make to reduce complex reality to something small and comfortable. In reality, the world is not driven only (or even mostly) by market forces. All players in modern economies are subsidized by and beholden to governance by nation states. That wildly warps what actually happens outside the textbook.

>Everything that came out of their mouth was from chatGPT It was suspicious, but the ruse became clear when they shared the wrong screen, so we could see his prompt, and how everything we said was being read in.

Wouldn't you notice a lag between your question and the candidate's answer if the candidate had to type your question into chatGPT?Or does the candidate use some software/tool with transmits your question to chatGPT directly?

there is no lag, voice to text to chatgpt then read the answer

Thank you. (Haven't been up to date with the hype.)

> At this point every remote internet checklist has to include checks for humanity,

I genuinely don't understand this requirement. Isn't an interview exactly that? It's a conversation pretending to be about a technical problem/question/challenge but in reality its purpose is to find out whether you click with the person and would want to work with them. If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway and everybody joining your company can expect colleagues selected by this sub-par process.

> If some ChatGPT text can trick you then your process is broken anyway

This is pretty unfair and seems like victim-blaming when we have companies spending billions of dollars to create these programs with the specific intent of trying to pass the Turing test.

There’s a bit of an echo chamber on HN where people convince each other that all LLM-generated text is easy to identify, riddled with errors, and “obviously” inferior to all real-human writing. Because some LLM writing fits those criteria and is easily identified, these folks are convinced they can identify all LLM writing and anyone who can’t must be a dunce.

I didn't claim anything about identifying writing. That's a strawman. I'm talking about humans talking to each other. Even if it's in a zoom call. Any interview process that doesn't include that is broken, and that's my claim. Echo chamber or not.

Apologies for misunderstanding you, then. Agreed that human to human is critical, especially for identifying culture fit (not homogeneity of course, just interaction styles like openness, etc).

I do think people cheat video interviews with LLM help, but in-person should always be required anyway, even if it’s via proxy (“meet with a colleague from our Madrid office”).

How widespread is LLM cheating during video interviews these days? Honest question.. How do people even do it? Let an LLM app listen in and suggest avenues of discussion and lists a bunch of facts on the side to spice things up?

Even if that's the case, isn't it just a matter of conversing in a way that the LLM can't easily follow?

An interviewer is a "victim"? Maybe they should just, you know, speak to their interviewees. At least in 2024 that's hardly faked by an LLM. Therefore, if you are fooled, you cheaped out, and you are hardly a victim.

Someone being deceived is a victim, yes.

I left LinkedIn years ago, because everyone and their dog was copying my entire profile.

I was happy for that info to go to potential employers, but not to random company and its canine friend.

Then MS bought LI and I was so glad I'd left years ago already.

I've seen one of two places have mandatory URL fields for LinkedIn profiles.

One of the impressions I've been getting is that if you do not fit exactly into an recruitment agencies process, you're DoA, and I have begun to suspect the only work they do is look at LinkedIn.

Well LinkedIn does a lot of stuff around making sure the accounts are for real people. Kind of helps with many of the issues people are complaining about. I mean they can improve it, but they do some level of effort.

Who cares if someone is copying your profile?

Having an established LinkedIn profile with their simple identity verification tool is such a trivial amount of effort for de-risking your job search that it’s hard to justify boycotting LinkedIn at this point.

If an application looks suspicious for some reason, I’ll look for their LinkedIn profile as the second step. If I can’t find one or if the profile is also questionable, I move on. LinkedIn is far from perfect, but it’s at least some signal in a world where the noise level is rising fast.

LinkedIn locked my account for no reason awhile ago and apparently want me to send a photo of my ID to some sketchy “verification” third party. No thanks.

I’m glad it’s a trivial amount of effort for you, I guess.

> only looking at resumes that had a working LinkedIn link

wait shouldn't that already have been the case? lol

I haven’t been job hunting since around 2002, so I’m completely out of the loop. Why are people submitting fake resumes? Are they hoping to get hired despite having no skills beyond using ChatGPT? But, what happens after that? They don’t have the skills to do the job, so what was the point of getting hired?

I can only think of a multiple-salary for onboarding period scam, where they llm all their job and get fired everywhere after a month with a couple years worth of money. You can’t really fire a hired guy without paying them at least once in US, can you?

You (almost always) have to pay them for any work they actually did. If you catch a North Korean citizen day 1 of onboarding, you're obligated to kick them out immediately, and you might have to pay them for the few hours they were there. If you catch them before they start, you (usually) don't have to pay them.

A growing scam involves people applying to remote jobs under fake or stolen identities. The work is then done by someone else or an agency that assumes the identity and collects the pay. They know it won’t last long so they try to target companies that look like someone could become another generic name on a spreadsheet for a year or two.

There’s also a rise of “overemployed” people who farm out second and third jobs. Again, they don’t care about anything other than collecting paychecks for a while until they go through the long onboarding, ramp-up, and PIP process, by which time they may have collected $100K for doing barely any work. They use fake backgrounds and resumes as a way to avoid their primary employer getting notified and as a sort of filter for companies who aren’t looking closely at the details. If you can trick them with a fake application, you’ll probably be able to trick them in the interview and then trick them into paying you for a long time too.

It is mind-blowing that this happens but I suppose totally logical too. Scammers are out to extract money from people and companies by any method possible, so in the world of remote-only work, it's just another extraction angle for them I suppose.

Wild.

(Thanks for sharing this info btw.)

You can often work days to years before people catch on that you are (a) unqualified, (b) underqualified, (c) not legally allowed to work in a particular jursdiction, (d) overemployed, (e) leaking company secrets to ChatGPT, ....

On top of that, you have a number of people who are just trying to get hired and perhaps are skilled, but the market is so shitty (in part because of the AI resume slop) that they're resorting to various services to lessen the workload of shotgun resume posting. If you pay a person to send out resumes, you get email notifications that the resumes were submitted, and that person was just asking an LLM to spit out a resume, you'll be hard-pressed to figure out that the resumes are fake (and so on for a variety of other similar reasons, where spray-and-pray resumes are sent out in moderate good-faith but the resumes are BS).

What I find mind blowing is how unqualified people manage to land jobs while qualified people may not even land an interview. How does this even work?

What if we don’t like linked in? Is it effectively mandatory?

Well, that's some handy information. I had no idea any employer would care one whit about my LinkedIn, or that a personal hobby section was considered anything but totally superfluous and irrelevant.

I suppose I am supposed to actually fill out my LinkedIn too?

What did the working LinkedIn link help validate?

That you have a decent number of connections and some of them are mutuals so I know you're a respected part of the software community.

Sorry about your search, and sorry to be another reply that you’ve already been inundated with, but in my experience job boards are nearly useless. Especially now that every job on LinkedIn has hundreds (or even thousands!!) of applicants. I’m sure indeed/zip recruiter/dice are all similarly flooded.

During my last job hunt I applied to nearly 300 jobs. Then I recruiter I met at a tiny JavaScript meetup messaged me about a position, and boom. New job.

It’s just one anecdote, but it changed my perspective, that’s for sure. When I’m getting serious about my next hunt I’m just gonna attend tons of meetups and get real active in open source

I think that’s the gold standard for finding engineering (software) and work. Get out into the world by attending meet-ups about technology and start contributing to real world open source projects or volunteer at the many projects looking for devs. It may not be a job overnight but it will keep you busy enough to not stagnate and you will also open yourself to bumping into someone who may be looking for someone at one of the meet ups.

Whether you consider this "networking" or not, the approach is to know relevant people in whatever way. Code, write, talk to people at events, etc. Ideally before you really need a job though because, as you suggest, it's not an overnight thing.

Both this and the OP you responded to are good advice if you aren’t in a situation where you needed a job yesterday.

What about situations where you were laid off and can’t really wait months to get a new one?

The advice is probably to promptly ping obvious connections (which is what I did when I was laid off and it worked out). Failing that, depending on financial situation, either do unpaid work or become a barista.

That’s grim, to say the least.

I also think it’s more proof that tech hiring is broken. When good candidates can’t reasonably get in front of hiring managers without an “in” that means they’re missing out on a lot of really good candidates.

Think that’s the part that bothers me about tech hiring right now. You can’t even really get away messaging a recruiter at the company to start a conversation, I’ve heard from friends that recruiters simply don’t respond in most cases and I’ve heard from a few recruiters I know that they won’t consider it anymore because it became swamped with spam

I'm not sure why you think this is something about tech specifically or even something recent. Most hiring has always been about knowing people and/or some other signal rather than walking off the street other than in a really would-be employee's hunting environment.

ADDED: To be fair, it's probably the fact that, in tech, junior people coming in without any real credentials or otherwise out of the blue at this point probably face a lot of headwinds--especially relative to the last decade or so.

I don’t know about that with other industries

I know a few mechanical engineers and they haven’t seemed to have the same hurdles. One works in the car industry, a few others in industrial areas, they all switch jobs by simply applying online to their desired companies.

I know some accountants and people who work in logistics who cleared lower bars to get interviews, though I suspect the accounting shortage had some to do with the former.

Finance is very networking heavy but clearing their interview process in some respects sounds easier than the leetcode engineering grind but that may not be representative of the situation as a whole.

Networking never hurts, no matter the industry but tech has a self inflicted wound around hiring practices few other industries seem to have

I guess the idea is to do this while you are employed so that you already have the connections when you need them. I can't think how anyone finds the energy to do this after a day at work though. You may also build this at work via former colleagues, but it depends a lot of the type of org and specific job.

It's absolute insanity. Something has to give, or we're about to see some big changes in how hiring is done.

I don't want to retype my recent experiences, but I have a thread from about 6 weeks ago that goes into my specific details here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42137229

I was in a good position so I could take my time, but I honestly don't know what I would have done if I had needed a position quickly.

All of you are being fed nonsense. During my 10 years of being a salaried employee I interviewed for only the first one.

All of the rest including Faang companies I went in without any interviews by knowing people and pulling strings. You shouldn't have to "apply" for anything.

what if you don't know people or have strings to pull?

You start looking at industries you are interested in, then look at companies which are on an upward trajectory in those industries, look at people who recently joined those companies, find their github / blogs / emails. Start talking to them about some common ground.

You can get away without applying, yes, if your network is strong enough to get referred wherever you want to work. FAANG and similar companies absolutely will not hire software engineers without interviewing them, since the cost of a bad hire is too high.

What I have seen on occasion, especially for more senior people, is a carefully constructed charade. We're not interviewing you, that would be so uncouth, we're just having a chat!

At a bigger company, they need to more or less go through the motions even if the top person has basically made a decision after a chat and they're writing a job description for you.

At a small company, a chat over lunch that you didn't even go into thinking of it as interview may be enough.

Ask me how I know in both cases :-)

Software should have some universal competency baseline, like a license. If AI resume spamming is that straw that breaks the camel’s back then so be it.

The best defense against AI would be a license number that identifies a person uniquely, provides their relevant job history from a database, proves some minimal common competency baseline, and confirms conformance to some ethical norm against known liabilities.

Every certification I have is numbered.

I've often thought that this would be an actually useful use of Blockchain tech.

In some industries, unions fill this nieche.

Come to think of it, this might be a good way for software unions to get a hold in the US. The Union will have a process to validate the competency if its members, and validate their careers, meanwhile hiring managers who are looking for guaranteed engineering quality will be able to find them, and unemployed engineers will be able to find work quickly, only bye the may benefit from the power of collective bargaining.

Kinda like a recruiting agency, but without for-profit motives and the shareholders will be the union members.

I don't see any downsides, except dkr the usual "corrupt men on top" problem which plagues any hunan organization, though mandating that leaders have extencive industry experience could slightly mitigate that.

It's called a PE in the US. But, for software, it was discontinued because it wasn't really used. And, indeed, it's pretty uncommon for most engineering disciplines except those interacting with regulators--civil engineers in particular.

But it comes with requirements like 4-year degrees, having worked under a PE, etc.

Was there anything distinctive about the position or the process for the one that you did land?

Yes! A few things stood out from my POV:

1) They didn't waste my or their time. Interviews rounds clearly progressed towards a hiring decision.

2) Their version of an AWS-style "loop" was a half day with people I'd be working with directly in various capacities. Questions were directly relevant to work culture and function.

3) After the first couple of rounds (recruiter screen, then first tier) all interviews were in person at their office. Interviews were conversational, open, and honest on both sides.

4) The final interview round with the hiring manager was structured as a round of questions to find possible match among the choices of equivalent openings I was likely qualified for.

5) At offer time, I told them what I'd work for and they told me what they couldn't exceed. We discussed total package and wiggle-room. The final offer they made had both no surprises and was also better than other incoming offers.

The position is not specifically rare in my industry, but I am specifically well qualified for it. None of us had worked together before, but we did have some shared clients so they were able to check my bona fides.

In comparison:

- AWS's process, while highly structured and tries for impartiality, is a massive time suck for all involved and as a result is kind of a mindless assembly line. However, it's kind of a good first interview among many companies since it preps you well for everybody else.

- There's more to this story, but briefly, I had two prior near interviews through a strong internal referral and another recruiter who put me into the wrong funnel then disappeared along with the position.

- There's also more here involving friends and former colleagues but to put it short, Google's process is stupid, disconnected, and broken while being far too self-congratulatory. It's a surprisingly good match for what they appear to be as a company externally, and from what I hear, how they are these days internally.

> So why should I keep doing what I'm doing when it's getting me nowhere?

I'd go the other way, towards more schlepping and less automation[0].

Are you reaching out to anyone in your network and asking if they know anyone who needs your skills?

Are you joining communities (online or offline) that match up to your skills and interests?

Doing either of these, so that you can be warm intro-ed to hiring managers by someone who knows you (or maybe knows someone who knows you) will typically get you to the front of the line.

That's the approach I would take if I were looking today. Too much noise otherwise.

0: Works for startups: https://paulgraham.com/ds.html

This is generally how I've gotten jobs. People who know people, or gladhanding at an event.

Today, the hardest part is to get to said first interview, because we are all flooded with fake resumes. Incomprensible amounts. So what you have to do is not send blind resumes, but get a warm intro from someone with a connection to the company that vouch that interviewing you will not be a total waste of time. Networks have never been more important.

Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say what you are doing wrong.

> Now, if on interview you pass rate is low, it's hard to say what you are doing wrong.

Yep. But this question has answers. You just don’t know what they are. Ask some friends to help you practice by getting them to give you mock- interviews and get feedback about what you need to do better. If you’re unemployed, you have time. Be resourceful and you should be able to figure out where the problems are.

(That said, solving your problems may be much harder - especially if you’re going for senior roles. I have met plenty of people who have 10 years experience who are nowhere near qualified to work as a senior engineer.)

What do you do if you don't have any way to get a warm intro? People still need to get a job even if they don't have connections.

> what should I be doing?

The current hiring market mirrors online dating.

Swiping right as much as you can (as a man) will get you more matches for sure, but is unlikely to result in a long term relationship.

There isn't much you can do. It comes down to two things: luck and timing.

I do think there are actions you can take to improve your odds, but you gotta figure out what will work best for you. If those actions were somewhat obvious, I'd imagine thousands of others are doing the same thing.

> know someone in the company who can vouch for me

It didn't take long to establish myself as a relatively skilled engineer in a discord community specific to a mobile development framework. I was able to help many junior engineers solve issues. If I was looking for a job, that community may have provided me an opportunity to at least get my resume in front of a few hiring managers.

Me personally, with all these seemingly out of work programmers who are likely as skilled. or more, I'd look to network with a few of them and do something interesting. Start a programming community that lets engineers self organize and launch a projects. Keep the bar to join very selective much like those dating apps that target VIPs and elite people.

Did you get (or asked for) feedback from the interviews you failed? Hiring managers / recruiters are sometimes quite transparent on this front.

Ask them if it is possible to re-apply in a few months.

Show your resume to friends and colleagues you trust and ask for honest feedback.

Personally, I've just been getting generic rejection responses from no-reply email addresses. There's no way to get feedback. My guess is that they're just sending out mass rejections for anyone except a few candidates they've selected to interview, and the other 1000 applications just get automatically tossed.

I was just hiring for an associate role recently and we got more than 800 applicants within a day, and our recruiter had a short list within a few days. If we gave everyone individualized feedback we wouldn’t do anything else for months. You might need to pay someone to look at the roles you’re applying for and the resumes you’re sending in for the kind of feedback you’re expecting.

Did more than a few ask for feedback?

I'm not the OP, but I've paid many people for feedback, and I actually have a very strong resume when a human being looks at it. I suspect that I'm being filtered out automatically because I don't meet the parameters of some automated system, probably on some relatively arbitrary metric set by the recruiter or hiring manager to filter the thousands of applications they receive.

If you required applicants to pay a sufficiently high cost to apply you wouldn't get 800 applicants within a day.

I want to see a site or ATS that makes it non-free to send an application and non-free to ghost an applicant.

I think that getting a good job nowadays requires having a strong referral.

The referral is not sufficient, but unless you have an MIT PhD in Machine Learning, or similarly rare and in-demand credential, it is necessary.

Makes me wonder if we should just mail in our applications by snail mail at this point.

I've wondered the same.

Or, better yet, literally knocking on doors.

I tried that too e.g. messaging talent recruiter managers on LinkedIn - never got a reply or “accepted” to start chatting

No no, literally literally knocking on doors. Go to a company's office and ask of they have a job.

It depends on the type of job. The receptionist at Google or IBM or wherever is going to give you a URL at best.

I am in the exact same situation

And I wish I had something encouraging to tell you, but I don’t. I’m extremely broke and getting ghosted on application after application, or turned down months later via robot email. Never any human contact any step of the process.

I’m looking at getting into another industry, tbf.

I've been looking for a few months. I've got 20 years of professional dev experience, including in an eye-catching domain and haven't used LLMs in the process either.

Since university I have never not been offered the first job I've applied for. For 10 years now I could ring any of the firms working in the niche I've been in and more or less set my rate. I still could, but I'm trying to get out of that niche into the wider world. I've put hundreds of tailored applications in and basically had nothing (literally a few interviews with Canonical, which is a complete car crash of a process and an HR screening call for a role on half my previous income where she said they were struggling with the number of applications, that I didn't hear back from).

It's an absolute bloodbath out there. I regret I don't have any answers, but good luck with your search.

Similar story here. 20+ years experience in leading dev, pm, and UX teams. Launched multiple 0-1 market leading products, worked with dozens of Fortune 500s.

Applied to more than a hundred positions - one phone screen and one interview.

Then I just went to my large network and within a week I have multiple opportunities - companies creating positions so they can hire me.

Spoke to a number of colleagues in recruiting and who are hiring for their teams - the number of ghost jobs, and frozen but posted positions is staggering. Something is fundamentally broken in the hiring world today.

If this is a true story, then it means there’s no point in applying at all. You should just go full LinkedIn, and networking, preferably when you still have a job.

I’m not gonna do that so I’ll just keep my job until layoff, and then panic, automate my applications and belatedly start connecting.

I think that's more or less true. Outside of school (one of which was way back in spray and pray physical letter days), my few jobs have always been through personal connections. Any online applications pretty much resulted in nada.

This is the way. Submitting an application is useless. We've reverted back to networking for jobs. You have to connect with actual humans, as nobody is going to wade through 5k resumes and pick yours out no matter how good it is...

As someone who works on the other side of this... if you're getting through 10 phone screens and not getting an offer, something is wrong with the way you're interviewing.

You've gotten 10 phone screens, so you can probably double your activity and get to 20. If you're actually going for jobs you're qualified for, 20 screens should net you ~3 offers, if not more.

My suggestion: record yourself on your interviews and have friends review the recording and offer critique. You have blind spots you need to address to achieve the outcomes you want.

> I have 10+ years of professional software dev experience so I've mostly been looking at senior dev positions.

Is the job market just as bad for juniors, people looking to enter the field right now?

Probably worse from what I understand. Seniors are more specialized but also (hopefully) have a network.

Most likely. I was seeing people with a few years experience willing to accept a fairly junior role. As a result we passed on some people that I would’ve hired and trained in years past.

I'm a junior; even getting internship in my city was impossible. And it's a requirement to graduate.

I had many of my peers pay people for signing off that they had an "internship" at some companies.

It’s always hard for juniors, but it’s always possible as well.

IMO job boards are almost entirely useless. Going to meetups and making friends in open source communities is the way to go.

I have found that this is the case for really good people, but if you dont have a degree and dont have much experience or expertise yet then this is a great way to totally destroy your confidence

It is way worse for juniors now. There was a time where merely reading CtCI printed your job offer at Google right out of school.

Doesn't seem like your resume or approach in applying to open positions is your problem. It seems like you're not connecting well with the interviewers in some way.

And how does one know how to connect with interviewers when every individual is different, and when there is no feedback from the interviewer’s side?

Some people are able to do that subconsciously. If your not one of them you should probably learn some basics in how to read body language.

Then you should also apply some mirroring. I wouldnt overdo it with body language, but mirroring with spoken language can be quite powerful (and is more stealthy). Normally there are many different ways in our language to express an idea. Try to do it in a way that is natural to your counterpart.

Look at what you can infer from the appearance of the interviewer. Maybe you can also find out more about him before the interview. What generation does he belong to? Is he conservative/progressive/whatever? What programming languages is he familiar with? ...

Does he look rather old and conservative? - Maybe dont talk about your love for the newest tech hype. Put an emphasis on your good cs fundamentals.

Is he a Java programmer? - use the word interface

Is he a Haskell programmer? - use the word typeclass

Is he a nice guy? - try to be nice

Is he not a nice guy? - dont be too nice

etc...

>to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do).

You ask your friends/past colleagues if the company they currently work for has any openings. If you've worked hard, solved problems and are good to work with, it's a good way to get further employment.

be creative in any kind of technical assessment

some people think SWE is about "logic". it is, in part, but the "engineering" in software is much more of an art than it is in other branches, like construction

the current sota AI is great at logic and terrible in creativity and actual engineering. if the technical assessment is not designed for you to show your creative engineering side, do it yourself, do more than you were asked, think about what would be relevant to that company in terms of engineering creativity and offer that

that's the best way I know of showing you're a real engineer, not an LLM operator, it's worked well for me in the job search process

good luck!

It seems like the best strategy is automation for both job-seekers and employers and upshot is awful for everyone. So, the sum individually optimum behaviors might not be optimal for a group. Well, back to the drawing board, humanity.

> The only other way I've seen suggested to signal that I'm a real person with real experience is to know someone in the company who can vouch for me (which I almost never do).

The last company where I worked, employee referrals were the preferred mode of hiring. The referring employee would also benefit, on successful completion of the new hire’s first year.

You might want to revisit this aspect.

My advice is to contact recruitment agencies.

HN hates recruiters, especially the cold calling kind on LinkedIn, but it has worked great for me. Every other job of mine has been through a recruitment agency and they have been responsible for the highest pay increases and they have been better to talk to about available budget for the role than the employer

Recs on specific agencies?

Just wanna say keep at it! You’re getting interviews and sometimes it just takes time for the stars to align into an offer.

> I really am interested in the specific job I'm applying for.

Are you doing anything that shows and differentiates your interest isn’t the same as all the automated “interest”?

Ex: understand deeply some parts of the industry the company is in and how it can be improved w/tech? Or is it just “rust is cool”?

I've personally found that even when I do my best to exude interest in the industry/company through custom question responses or the cover letter that auto-rejection is still the most common end result.

I'm still amazed that the applicant tracking systems don't provide employers with stats like "time spent on application" or "time spent on website researching". At least this would be a signal towards higher interest.

Heck, I'd love a "fave 5" system for employers. Something to flag extreme interest in working for their company. Companies would probably love to have a list of high-intent people to recruit, regardless of their current employment status.

wouldn't poeple just flag everything as their fav 5 and put high numbers of hours not actually spent on the application? unless the system can track all a candidates applications, this seems moot, and if it did track all that yuk no thank you, i don't need more tracking in my life to solve a problem we created artificially. Plus it is probably easy to game for anyone with a minimum of programming skills...

The thought process was tracking all candidates (not having a user-submitted number). That tracking is already happening for most marketing analytics. I'm surprised I haven't seen it show up on the job application side.

As for the fave 5 idea - I don't see an easy way to game this if it's tied to a single user account. You would only be seen as prioritizing the company to the employer if you're actively prioritizing them. Most people are applying to way more than 5 companies simultaneously and don't know where their application stands for the company. It would be too risky to try and rotate it continuously.

The idea that the problem is primarily (or even substantially) the fault of employees is laughable. HMs put up all the hoops, and keep immeasurably more power in the process from start to finish.

Networking to make contact that can help you get past the HR filter is the new skill set that is essential not job application automation.

Meet people and form connections.

agreed, last application i sent, i had an informational with the hiring manager. They told me to email them my resume in addition to the official submission process so they can tell HR to find and flag my application for interview.

I didn't get the job, or even an interview despite that and the hiring manager never bothered to tell me why. (one of their direct reports told me its because i was vastly overqualified)

I feel stuck in a limbo where my title doesn't reflect the seniority i operate at so i'm not getting interview for senior roles based on automated filters i guess, but jobs i do get interviews for, I was told no because because i was overqualified for the role more than once.

This includes being overqualified for the FTE equivalent of my current job as a contractor in the same company and org. But there's no roles opening at the seniority level they'd hire me at and I can't just rage quit on a 6 figure salary just because I should be making double even as a junior as an FTE by now. So they won't hire me for the work I already do but have no problem keeping me on for half the pay as a contractor. But at least I have a job?

It highly depends on what kind of job you want. What kind of company do you want to work for?

Is going to the company in person an option?

Because adding shit to the pool doesn’t help. The jobs aren’t there, and crapping in an empty pool doesn’t help any more than pissing in a full pool.

Run LeetCode problems until you can crush the technicals

A lot of companies are reevaluating the technical interviews because they're too easy to cheat at now unless they're on site on your hardware (or on a physical whiteboard).

If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job?

Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

>If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job?

My job isn't writing resumes and cover letters.

> Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

lmao this is exactly the issue. There are hiring managers in here saying they're trying to filter out people using LLMs in applications and you're telling me to use LLMs.

> Also, not using LLMs might be a red flag. I wouldn't want a dev that is not open to this technology...

The person you're replying to is a senior, not junior candidate.

For junior devs who are still learning, LLMs are a great force multiplier that help them understand code faster and integrate new things.

For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might save a couple hours per week, on a good week. I would consider extremely heavy LLM use a much larger red flag for a senior level position, than not using them at all.

Github copilot still sucks for writing complex code (algorithms or database queries, e.g.). Or trying to do unpopular things (like custom electronics using particular micros and driver chips).

For unit tests, it's a godsend. Particularly if you write one unit test, and then it can write another in the style you wrote.

LLMs can’t write unit tests. They can’t even tell what you intend. If your code is already correct, you don’t need the unit test, if it’s not, the LLM can’t write the unit test. If you thing an LLM can write tests for you, you can be replaced by an LLM.

I don't think the concept here is blindly taking the output of the LLM and calling it a day. One can test, the test.

I've had about 33% luck with unit tests coming out perfect. Usually the issues are small problems that are easily fixed though.

> If your code is already correct, you don’t need the unit test.

I don't know where you work where code is written once and is never changed again, but enjoy it while it lasts...

Worse is when a protocol or shared state condition is modified.

E.g. suddenly some fresh out of college know-it-all sent crap into your function that you weren't expecting. Then he went to management to blame you for writing such shitty code.

Thing is you wrote unit tests around that code and the shitty know-it-all deleted them rather than changing them when he modified the code

This is why management needs to understand code.

What? Is that a real example? Are you seriously working with people who delete your tests, misuse your code then complain about you to management?

Is your workplace filled with high school students? I’ve never seen anything so petty and immature in my professional career. I hope management told them to grow up.

> Is your workplace filled with high school students? I’ve never seen anything so petty and immature in my professional career.

I think the description I remember on glass door was that it was "high school all over again".

Recently on HN there was a thread debating the utility of having required code reviews for PRs.

I'm firmly on team "require a coworker to say okay before merging", and this is exactly why.

> if your code is already correct, you don’t need the unit test

This is a hot take. I'm 100% not onboard with.

Correct. Unit tests are not only for the current version of the code, but also to prevent regressions in future versions of the same code.

IMO, the main use case for LLMs in unit tests is through a code completion model like Copilot where you use it to save on some typing.

Of course, there are overzealous managers and their brown-nosing underlings who will say that the LLM can do everything from writing the code itself and the unit tests, end-to-end, but that is usually because they see more value in toeing the line and follow the narratives being pushed from the C-level.

I've been in the industry for something like 15 years. I've been using LLMs to help me create the stuff I always wanted but never had time to make myself. This is how LLMs can be used by seniors to great effect - not just to cut time off tasks.

Same here (not in the industry though). I recently got a personal project done with the help of LLM's that I otherwise wouldnt have had the time or energy to research properly if it wasnt for the time savings.

I’ve done so many tiny hobby projects lately that scratch 10+ year itches, where I’ve said so many times “I wish there was an application for this, but I’m too lazy to sit down and learn some Python library and actually do it.” Little utilities that might have taken me a day to bring up a bunch of boilerplate, study a few docs, write the code switching back and forth from the docs, and then debugging. Today that utility takes me 30 minutes tops to write just using Copilot and it’s done.

I kind of feel like it is the inverse in many ways.

As an experienced engineer, I know how to describe what I want which is 90% of getting the right implementation.

Secondly, because I know what I want and how it should work, I tend to know it when I see it. Often it only takes a nudge to get to a solution similar to what I already would have done. Usually it is just a quick comment like: "Do it in a functional style." or "This needs to have double check locking around {something}."

When I am working in the edge of my knowledge I can also lean on the model, but I know when I need to validate approaches that I am not sure satisfy my constraints.

A junior engineer doesn't know what they need most of the time and they usually don't understand which are the important constraints to communicate to the model.

I use an LLM to generate probably 50-60% of my code? Certainly it isn't ALWAYS strictly faster, but sometimes it is way way faster. On of the other things that is an advantage is it requires less detailed thinking at the inception phase which allows my do fire off something to build a class, make a change when I am in a context where I can't devote 100% of my attention to it and then review all the code later, still saving a bunch of time.

I'm not making numbers up here; the controlled studies that have been done agree with me.

See here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566

Worse/less experienced developers see a much greater increase in output, and better and more experienced developers see much less improvement. AI are great at generating junior level work en masse, but their output generally is not up to quality and functionality standards at a more senior level. This is both what I've personally observed and what my peers have said as well.

Out of curiosity, which LLM code tool do you use?

interesting paper and lots of really well done bits. As a senior dev that uses LLM extensively: This paper was using copilot in 2023 mostly. I used it and chatgpt in that timeframe, and took chatgpts output 90% of the time; copilot was rarely good beyond very basic boilerplate for me, in that time period. Which might explain why it helped jr devs so much in the study.

Somewhat related, i have a good idea what i can and cannot ask chatgpt for, ie when it will and wont help. That is partially usage related and partially dev experience related. I usually ask it to not generate full examples, only minimal snippets which helps quite a bit.

Another factor not brought into consideration here may be that there are two uses of "senior dev" in this conversation so far; one of them refers to a person who has been asked to work on something they're very familiar with (the same tech stack, a similar problem they've encountered etc.) whereas the other one has been asked to work on something unfamiliar.

For the second use case, I can easily see how effectively prompting a model can boost productivity. A few months ago, I had to work on implementing a Docker registry client and I had no idea where to begin, but prompting a model and then reviewing its code, and asking for corrections (such as missing pagination or parameters) allowed me to get said task done in an hour.

Yes, when you have the general principles of programming, but not experience with a particular technology, ChatGPT is a force multiplier.

So I often use Github Copilot at work usually with o1-preview as the LLM. This often isn't "autocomplete" which generally uses a lower end model, I almost exclusively use the inline chat. That being said.. I do also use the auto-complete a lot when editing. I might create a comment on what I want to do and have it auto-complete, that is usually pretty accurate, and also works well with me since I liked Code Complete comment then implement method.

For example I needed to create a starting point for 4 langchain tools that would use different prompts. They are initially similar but, I'll be deverging them. I would do something like copy the file of one. select all then use the inline chat to ask o1 to rename the file, rip out some stuff and make sure the naming was internally consistent. Then I might attach additional output schema file and the maybe something else I want it to integrate with and tell it to go to town. About 90% of the work is done right.. then I just have to touch up. (This specific use case is not typical, but it is an example where it saved me time, I have them scafolded out and functional while listening to a keynote and in-between meetings.. then in the laster day I validated it. There were a handful of misses that I needed to clean up.)

As someone learning programming with an llm, its 50-50 as to whether it saves or costs me extra time.

This is mostly because if i don't know that i'm asking for the wrong thing, the llm won't correct me and provide code that answers the wrong question and make things up to do that if needed.

Sure i learn by debugging the llm's nonsensical code too, and it solves my "don't want to watch a 2h tutorial because if i just watch the 10minutes that explain what i want to learn, i don't understand any of the context". But it's not much faster with the llm since I need to google things anyway to check if it is gaslighting me.

It does help understanding errors i'm unfamiliar with and the most value i found is pasting in my own code and asking it to explain what the code should do, so i find errors in my logic when it compiles but doesn't have the desired effect. And it will mention concepts i'm lacking to look them up (it won't explain em clearly but at least it's flagging them to me) in a way youtubers earely do.

Still haven't made up my mind if it is a net positive as it often ends up getting on my nerves to wait 10min for a fluff intro before it gets to the answer. Better than a 20min fluff video intro on youtube maybe?

> For senior devs, LLMs are a maybe-optional tool that might save a couple hours per week, on a good week.

I'm an industrial engineer who writes software and admittedly not a "senior dev", I guess, but LLMs help me save much more than just a few hours of week when crapping out a bunch of Qt/Python code that would cause my eyes to glaze over if I had to plod through it.

The flag you want to see from a senior is reasoned examples of how they use it effectively. Ask for stories about successes and failures. By now, everyone has some.

You've got this completely backwards. A Jr with an LLM is a recipe for disaster. They don't know the tech, and have no clue what the LLM is spitting back. They copy code into the abyss.

Meanwhile, a sr with an LLM is a straight up superpower!

Here's a recent study showing junior devs seeing far higher gains from LLMs than seniors: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4945566

It is the opposite. Juniors can only solve toy tasks with chatgpt.

Someone with experience can first think through the problem. Maybe use chatgpt for some resarch and fresh up your memory first.

Then you can break up the problem and let chatgpt implement the stuff instead typing everything. Since you are smart and experience you know what chunks of code it can write (basically nothing new. only stuff you could copy pasta before if you had somehow access to all code in the internet yourself).

TLDR: It is way faster to use it. Especially for experienced programmers. Everything else is just ignorant.

What is consensus at the end, I have heard people say that is good for seniors but for juniors is detrimental.

>If you can't stand out from an LLM then why can't it do your job?

I downvoted your post because this is a complete nonsequitur.

If you reply to a comment I believe it cancels your downvote.

For the ranking order. The post itself will still get greyed out, or flagged after enough downvotes.

That is so mean. I actually cried for 5 minutes.

What company have you hired developers for?

LLMs just lie way too much.

Like completely fabricate what they need for a plausible answer from thin air.

As of now they do more harm than good.

Like completely fabricate what they need for a plausible answer from thin air.

Reminds me of a guy I used to work with. He just made stuff up all the time. Turns out, the answers never actually mattered, people were just bored at their desk and wanted to give the appearance of doing work. I think he's in management at Apple now.

> I think he's in management at Apple now.

Clearly management material.

We all know that.

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