How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story | Hacker News Reader

How we used to get jobs: A newspaper classifieds story

ironicsans.ghost.io

167 pointsspeckx137 comments

You'd mail your resume in (it was a 'hack' back then to hand-deliver it), then get a call in a couple days or weeks. Then someone who was home during the day (if you already had a job) would answer the phone and take the message from the HR person (or they'd leave one on your answering machine), you'd then have an appointment to go in or return a call to set one up...

A friend is searching for a job right now and was surprised to encounter an online job posting requesting mailed in resumes.

Next we need a service that will tailor resumes to job descriptions using LLM's (already easily available) while also having an integrated "mail this resume" function.

First class postage on printer paper will be the default, but you can pay more for cardstock, pink paper, and a scent to give it a little something extra.

Of course, there will also be a service targeted for the companies that receives the mailed in resumes, scans and OCR them and maybe even send the results to an LLM to make further filters and classifications.

And here's the neat thing: If both services are provided by the same company, they can even save the costs of actually sending the physical paper to themselves!

No need for a service, agents with a resume can retool it to match it a target just fine already (talk to a hiring manager to see how much this is already going on) and there are already physical printing + delivery services the agent can pay to complete the application for you.

I had an old coworker who told me he got into software development in the sixties by walking into an IBM office and asking for a job. He had no education beyond high school and no experience with computers. They just had him take an aptitude test and then he worked on mainframes for decades.

Working on mainframes and with computers was considered secretarial work by almost everyone around that time. The role of computers in work, and the status of working with computers, has changed in incredible ways.

You still had to do a coding test -- but it was pointing to the bug in the C++ linked-list implementation on a single sheet of line printer paper.

Because nobody was going to carry a Sun workstation down to the meeting room just for your interview.

I remember a Java job interview like that. "Tell us what you would do to improve this code" with a couple pages of code printed out :-D

I still do that because 75% of the work I oversee involves reading other peoples' code and spotting problems with it.

I took a paper coding test in 2004 when I was job hunting. It was pretty hilarious to me, really, since it was so incredibly easy (multiple choice data-structures type questions) for anybody who had any skills at all.

They finally offered me a job 3 months later after I already had started working somewhere else.

Three months! Do you know if that was their standard process or the original candidate fell through?

Wasn't the only company I heard from after that long a time. I assume their hiring process was just very broken and slow.

Even Google in 2015 took their sweet time getting back to me after my interviews. At one point the recruiter told me that my offer letter took a week going thru interoffice mail waiting for a signature, and then it took 2 more weeks before they actually sent me the offer.

Or coding on a white board. God I hated it.

The core of the idea is great. Sketch out an idea with someone else.

Interviewing with average interviewers ruined it.

My first full time programmer job I got in early 2003. I had only 1 year left in University and a friend of mine was working in this "hotel reservation website" company owned by some gringos (this was in La Paz, BCS back in the day).

My friend told me he will talk with the boss there and see if they wanted to have me. They were a "Microsoft" shop, mainly doing Visual Basic. This was early .NET days. Because I was a student with all time in my hands, I taught myself C#.

Anyways, they invited me to the small office, I arrived, my friend introduced me to the "boss" (a guy who had got out of University maybe 4 years before) and he gave me a programming challenge. Basically to implement a CRUD in C# for some random domain that I have forgotten. This was in a PC that they lent me (Laptops were not common in Mexico in those days)

It took me about an hour to finish it and handle it in. They then thanked me and told me they will be in touch later.

Apparently, they had scheduled around 4 or 5 hours for the problem and I blazed through it (humble bragging I know hehe). After a couple of days, I asked my friend about the job, and he told me to call to the boss, as it will show interest. I called later that week, apparently exactly at the moment they were having a meeting about me and the position. They basically told my friend I will be his "protege", so he would be my boss.

In hindsight it was a nice place. We were like 8 people max in the team (including devs and designers, doing Flash, and the accountant lady that also sold us Burritos for breakfast). Golden years now that I think of it (the office was just by the broadwalk, so we would go out to the beach).

But yeah, the interview process was completely personal and down to earth. Not the crazy stuff that you see nowadays. It marked me, as every time I have to hire people I try to replicate the feeling I had at that time. I was hell nervous, but excited to show what I knew.

Sorry for the long Abe Simpson story-rant, it's cool to remember.

Unpopular take: This was significantly better for employers and employees.

It worked as both an effort and presentation filter which both reduced the overload of candidates, allowing for more attention, higher variation of skills that didnt often show like traditional resume bonafides and mad companies more likely to invest more in employees as it was a pain to go do again.

For employees it was great too. Much like the world pre-dating apps the business world wasnt all looking for the equivalent of trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes. As well as the points mentioned above.

Second unpopular take: This was better for all involved, but it constrained the job market to geographical boundaries. People did not apply to jobs in other states/countries/continents because they did not see the job postings for other states/countries/continents.

Third unpopular take: this geographical restriction was a good thing.

Fourth unpopular take: without it Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist.

SV exists thanks to CA's lack of non-competes and the Stanford and UC Berkeley innovation ecosystem.

Otherwise, Boston, NYC, DMV, Seattle, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and others all could have become the next Silicon Valley.

That's interesting because it's way more complicated than that. Boston had the 128 loop and Digital. TI in dallas. Simi valley. I think it's more like the end of defense spending in the late 80s early 90s winnowed down the several "SV"s into only one.

I know, and the reason Digital and TI and Compaq weren't able to make as deep ecosystems as Xerox PARC or Fairchild did was because of the non-compete aspect back when companies were much more litigious than today.

IMO, the non-compete aspect is way overstated. People moved between the Route 128 computer companies all the time and even moved to California. If it was a slower pace than today, it probably had more to do with people not shifting jobs as often than litigation related to non-competes.

> and the Stanford and UC Berkeley innovation ecosystem

which is geographic...

and let's also not forget the vast, heavy investments from the Navy and government during WW2. the SV wasn't just a couple of fancy colleges, San Fran is a major city that got a ton of investment.

the DMV arguably is the east coast SV

What does DMV stand for in this context?

DC, Maryland, and Virginia, a term only used in the DC area because those not in DC proper take offense at being lumped in with it or something I guess.

That seems like a really niche term. Parent really should've specified what it meant instead of assuming everyone in the world would automatically know what it meant.

On that note, thanks for explaining it to me.

More so than now, but one could still find work elsewhere. At least in the US, you would visit a local library and read newspapers to see job listings in other cities. Or, you could rely on "headhunters" who would work to collect available candidates for many companies; they would advertise their services as regional or national agencies. The market looked different but for someone who wanted to find a job somewhere else, there were ways to do it.

Interestingly, and maybe surprisingly, moving long-distance is less common than it was in the past. The total number of movers has decreased [1] while the percentage of those moves that are inter-state has stayed constant [2]. Another analysis from 2018 [3] looked specifically at people who move for jobs and found a huge drop since the 1980s.

In the really old days you would move somewhere (often because you heard that some industry was booming there) and then look for work. Today you can't do that without a lot of savings.

[1] https://www2.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/d...

[2] https://www2.census.gov/library/visualizations/time-series/d...

[3] https://www.challengergray.com/blog/historical-analysis-fewe...

I wonder how it relates with housing. Today you couldn't move without a job at your destination, because buying a house is expensive and renting requires a stable job.

jobs back then also offered relocation bonuses or covered moving fees and similar

my old man used to work for Big Oil back in the day, both in the US and internationally, and in basically all cases it wasn't even really a discussion -- "here's the cash to cover the move, how soon can you be here?"

for international, esp. in places like Kenya or Australia, they had apartments or condos for short term workers that they'd put you in until you found something more permanent. after my folks had me + my siblings, they even had listings of nannies and maids pre-sourced so you could find reliable help once you landed.

I think that is one reason why it was better.

thus people were treated better and got work faster instead of fighting against thousands of people who mass spooge resumes with email now.

For context: my programming career started in Russia (while I didn't live there... it was a very unique situation at the time to have a remote job!), then for some twenty odd years in Israel (on-site), then another five in the Netherlands (work visa).

I have an extremely negative impression from jobs that grant visas. Here are some points to consider:

* Work visa is an extremely valuable asset to the worker. They will do a lot of bad things before they even consider endangering their status in the country they reside. This leads to a pathologically abusive workspace because no criticism ever goes up the administrative chain of command. This severely impacts product quality, creates a toxic working environment.

* There's no good selection process for the applicants. On the other hand, applicants have a huge incentive to stick with whatever potential employer might employ them. This results in the overall poor quality of the workforce hired in such a way, it's also a workforce that's difficult to replace or to improve.

In other words, after working in Israel as a programmer for some twenty years (Israel doesn't issue work visas to programmers) I've seen both good quality products and programmers as well as bad. When I came to the Netherlands I was in shock because of how poor was the quality of both the product and the workforce. At first, it didn't make sense to me: how on Earth if these people can pay more and have a bigger candidate pool do they end up with such bad outcomes? My bullet points above are the conclusions I came to while trying to understand the problem. Perhaps they are wrong, but the observation, definitely, isn't: the quality is so bad I want to cry.

I don't if it was exactly better, it was less "liquid."

Given the reduced competition, you couldn't find primo jobs unless you moved to a hub (which is why most people are in NYC/SF/LA), but when you found a job it was more stable.

The older I get the more I think the internet is a massive net negative due to effects like this.

Another example is used car sales. Before the internet it was local and required work to find cars for sale. Now thanks to the internet we have "hustlers" who scour FB marketplace and craigslist and buy up all the deals to flip for profit.

Someone who flips cars serves the seller by closing the deal faster

No because they only buy the best deals that would have sold fast anyway

This happens with niche markets e.g. CRT TVs.

Because CRTs are no longer made they are becoming rare but at the same time the market for them is small so what ends up happening is that opportunists take advantage of this and hoard them to create artificial scarcity.

You could argue they are doing a service by saving them from ending up as e-waste but this isn't always the case. Sometimes sellers are just raising the floor price for their own benefit.

It works in weird ways.

Physical space e.g. hikes,lookouts etc get absolutely ruined now and sometimes even closed due to the low barrier of entry required to discover them and the type of people this attracts but the flip side is something uniquely good like a coffee shop can be a success from open day.

I think the blog era was the best. If you were into something and applied some effort researching you could have many amazing experiences without having to rely on the luck of befriending knowledgeable people. However in today's world if you find something good it's only a matter of time that someone else discovers it uses social media to ruin it.

> Another example is used car sales. Before the internet it was local and required work to find cars for sale.

Certainly in the UK there were plenty of established options pre 'internet' to make finding cars easier.

Physical weekly magazines like Autotrader existed prior to the internet which had a small photo of the car a brief description and key details and asking price. People also used magazines like Parkers Guide to estimate the valuation of their/prospective cars based on mileage/condition etc.(Kelly blue book I think is equivalent in the US?...based on sitcom knowledge)

There were local used car garages too of course, but many of those also had their cars listed for sale in autotrader listed as 'trade' sale rather than 'private'. Or they'd be in the local newspaper on a set day of the week (where I was - Wednesday had a special 10+ page pull out of 'house listings', can't remember what day cars were but same happened)>

I know people travelled very long distance to buy cars using autotrader because my dad made an amount of side-money in the 1980s and 1990s from it. typically he'd buy a used (often damaged, 'no MOT') car, repair it, run it for a few months, sell it for a profit and repeating the process. He went all over the country to buy cars and he sold his cars privately to people from all over.

Also larger used car retailers and approved-used car garages have long since moved stock around their locations to support sales and used to have similar in-house magazines/brochures that showed all their available stock.

You lament the 'hustlers' scouring FB but arguably that's a much less problem than the risks pre-internet whereby local car garages could rip off local consumers because those customers quite probably only a limited field of reference to understand the value / worth of a car and so could easily be sold something for way more than it's true worth due to lack of comparable data. One of the biggest benefits of the online world is you can quickly see what is a 'normal' price for an item and so it's a little harder for people to be completely ripped off (though of course it still happens, savviness as a consumer takes a bit of work/time and a willingness to shop-around/do research).

Except now the modern car flippers have so much data on prices thanks to the internet that they know exactly what cars to buy and how much profit they could make. So it becomes much easier to do, making it more prevalent, and causing prices to rise.

Do you think it's the internet that introduces the net negatives, or is it just that there are less obstacles and makes bad behaviour surface more easily?

There shouldn't really be a problem with online job postings, but when people on either sides either try to game the system or don't actually want to deal with their job (e.g. HR departsment that can't and won't manually process applications).

Same for you example with the cars. Seems perfectly reasonable to put your used car online and for someone 400km to be interested if it's the right car at the right price. It's only when the hustlers insert themselves problems arise, but that's due to frankly shitty behaviour. The internet just makes it simpler to be a bad or annoying person.

I responded to an ad in the newspaper for a C programming job way back in mid-1980s. The team that posted the ad was not impressed with my resume, but they sent it on to a different team within the same company. That team hired me and I stayed at that company for 14 years.

Unlike the author, I kept the ad in a box for 35 years, at which point I scanned it and threw out the hard copy.

Edit: Also, the resume I mailed to them was printed by a print shop.

The newspaper does still have job listings e.g. for Amazon, NVIDIA, DoorDash, Tesla, Chewy. I haven’t been having much luck applying to them though...

Ah yes, the h1b box checker ads.

To be fair that h1b requirement is stupid.

Chewy! Yay

According too the linked article, you should try faxing your resume to them. Have you tried that?

Those jobs aren't meant for you... they post in the classifieds with the hopes nobody responds. All to game the labor market test allowing their visa worker to get a green card.

Yes this is a common PERM loophole that companies exploit for cheap labor -- they can't get applicants to respond, so they have to look outside the US

Mine is from Poland, early 90s, and even more analog. I worked at a Polish-Italian company. Our accountant used an ERP program, DOS, written in Clipper. There was no internet, so the vendor's consultant had to come to the office in person. The consultant was a young woman. She became my girlfriend and she pulled me into ERP. The girlfriend left. The ERP stayed for over 30 years ;)

Idk if it's true but it seems like life was simpler before the Internet took off.

Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less

Used to flip both ways...

I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role.

In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.

Simplicity and convenience are often inversely correlated.

Life was for sure simpler in times gone by, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Definitely different.

I'm sure future posters will look back on these years with fondness for this or that as well.

I don’t think most people under 40 can wrap their head around what it was like to need to be home or at work for someone to reach you, which required a phone call. And you couldn’t make a phone call unless you were at home or work, or stopped at a pay phone. And what if you called someone that wasn’t home? Or were on the can and couldn’t pick up in a few rings? Sure you could leave a message but they probably had no way to get back in touch with you. You just had to wait and hope they called again. No text. No email. No Caller ID for most people pre-internet. No GPS for most people, and even if they could give you GPS coordinates, wear are you going to with them? Hope you got a really big fucking globe.

Yeah, but none of that really mattered, did it? The expectation everywhere was you couldn’t really reach people that easily so you didn’t and you didn’t miss it. Also going to places involved mapping out your path on a map ahead of time and then struggling a little bit in complicated places where you would ask local people for directions. There was no GPS. We didn’t know what we were missing. It didn’t feel like a real problem at all.

As a teenager that hated being at specific places at specific times, it was often an annoying problem for me. The second I realized I could get a cheap pager, I did so without hesitation.

You know, it's very strange; during a normal week I may go "out and about" a lot during the day, even though I'm not employed, and I just go do errands or shopping. And I'm out in public carrying my phone. Now I may be 100% available to answer phone calls, whether I'm sitting on the bus, walking down the sidewalk, sitting in a clinic waiting room or a restaurant.

But I am definitely not 100% available to talk to you. Especially if you're a billing department, medical office, or some business that wants me to both authenticate my PII and then talk about some personal, financial/medical matter. That is not a conversation for public space. That is a conversation I must have in the privacy of my home (and with access to my computer for files!)

So that is why we used to have phone booths. I don't own a car, which is essentially a large, privately-owned, mobile phone booth. Sadly, because pay-phones went away, privacy booths naturally died with them. Dr. Who understood. But Pacific Bell didn't!

So just because you can reach me, and I can reach you, doesn't for a minute mean that it's an opportune time to talk.

Someone I used to work with left to start a business selling “phone booths“ for private mobile phone conversations in public. I believe they’re called Private Talking Spaces. Not sure if he’s still doing it. I thought it was a good idea but obviously there’s no financial incentive like there was with a phone booth, so they had to be purchased and installed by whoever owned the space.

> Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less

This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information.

If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet.

I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info.

EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.

> You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard.

I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact.

On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.

It's less true today but the networking is also swizzled together with a huge pile of other resumes. The genuine high quality network opportunities still tend to rise to the top--how I got a gew jobs over the past 20+ years--but the noise is definitely greater, especially if you don't have that network.

Probably cuts out as much entry-level hires as AI does.

> Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs

This implies that more people know where to find the job listings and they've become more accessible and available.

When you are comparing online job boards to employment centres and classifieds, they are more accessible and available. Employment centres always involved making a dedicated trip. Newspapers cost money and may involve a dedicated trip to fetch one. Not to mention that plenty of businesses simply didn't advertise jobs in print, particularly entry level jobs. Part of that may have been expectations: people would actually walk into businesses to drop off applications or see if openings are available. Again, it took a lot more effort to find those jobs.

Fun tidbit, I remember visiting Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) in the early 2010's. Boom times for them. It was a bit like walking into a different era with respect to job seeking since many business (again, entry level jobs) were advertising with help wanted signs in their windows.

There was a "Job Spotter" app in the late 2010s where you would take pictures of help wanted signs and get paid small amounts, a weird bridge between online job boards and physical signs. I made $50 in five months, then the pandemic killed it. During our lunch hour, my coworkers and I would race to each storefront to see who could get their submission first.

https://theamericangenius.com/app-pays-snapping-pics-help-wa...

I once went through a recruiter to secure an interview for an engineering position. He insisted that I "suit up" so I did despite knowing it was out of touch with reality. I showed up to a non air conditioned building where the head of engineering was wearing ragged cutoff shorts. Last time I ever bothered with a recruiter.

Showing up egregiously overdressed for a tech interview was a rite of passage before jobs search advice was easy to find on the internet.

I showed up to a job interview wearing the exact same shirt and tie as the CEO who interviewed me. I got the job.

was this intentional somehow, or just coincidence?

It was coincidence.

> Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy.

This is called Social Capital. It is very much a class thing. Many older people recommended joining fraternal organizations (like frats or freemasons) to get these social connections.

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

Lauren Rivera wrote a number of publications about this and how it impacts hiring at upper class firms, and who gets into nightclubs.

https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tbzjN7QAAAAJ&hl=en

Social capital (networks) help a lot for intros, but even without social connections there is a big difference between someone with access to the right information and someone who doesn't even know where to look for it.

A lot of people I know didn't have the right connections, but they were in the right place at the right time to pick up the information they needed for how to find the right jobs, how to prepare for interviews, and so on.

My university didn't do much job prep. They saw themselves as focused on the academic side, with getting a job as an exercise left to the reader. Many of my friends at other universities, especially the less difficult ones, were given a lot more info about how to prep for interviews and do job market related things.

Finance and journalism are full of these people. A fair few in startupland as well.

It's possible to get to a certain level without those connections, but it's very hard to get the top jobs. And you'll never be an insider.

Conversely quite a few people in those top jobs are there because of social game playing and status signalling, not because of talent or raw intellect.

I had a friend who started a number of businesses in the UK, including some dating apps before they became very popular. She said that at her public school the teachers would say things like "As the future leaders of the UK you should..."

I find that disgusting, actually: Western societies pretend to be meritocratic, when actually it’s really just nepotism and elitism.

I’m not shedding a single tear for those used to leading a privileged life thanks to their family or money, but have to actually compete with the rest of us now.

This is not the reason though.

The reason is that now there are fewer different kinds of jobs (many roles like manufacturing have moved offshore) and also fewer jobs in terms of numbers and more regulations which prevent competition and shrink the number of competing company (again leading to fewer roles).

It wasn't nepotism before, it was efficiency. I didn't have any connections and I got better opportunities back then than I do now and the people were overall better at their jobs. Nepotism is much stronger now and jobs are increasingly theatrical/bureaucratic and have little to do value creation.

It's possible that people's lifestyle in the west was propped up by the exploitation of foreign labour, that much is possible, but note that the people who did the exploitation back then are the same doing it now (or their heirs). The difference is that now the money is increasingly circulating just between each other, bypassing normal people. Soon it will bypass all humans; the entire economy will be between machine owners. Social mobility is mostly about social connections and politics nowadays. In the west, it has never been less meritocratic.

It is a little of both. An interview is to short to know of someone is good. So if someone you trust vouches that is more useful than anything an interview can say. Maybe you could find someone better but odds are you find someone worse.

More that the person giving the reference is putting their reputation in the reference.

Back in the day, the 4x5 (medium format film) experience requirement would have filtered out a lot of candidates. It was arty, weird and required expensive gear (Hasselblad or equivalent) and even more expensive film (around $1/exposure).

These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.

Your phone in your pocket is not sniffing medium format film resolution. It also lacks the latitude of really any negative film stock. Color wise slide film is still supreme to this day.

The realistic digital equivalent resolution of 4x5 film is around 40-50 megapixels, which iPhones have supported out of the box for a couple of years now.

Of course there's a lot more to taking good pictures than the raw sensor, but what I'm saying is that the barrier to entry is way lower than it was in the article's day.

I'm sorry but 48mp on a sensor the size of the end of a pencil is just not the same as even full frame, let alone 4x5.

What does that have to do with how much detail the sensor cells are able to resolve?

The circle of confusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion ) imposes optical limitations on the image.

It may be acceptable for phone screens and images on the web. However, if one was to print the image as an 8x10 (or larger and view it from 12 (the length of the diagonal) inches away, the ability to resolve details in the image will not be present in the phone image.

Granted, few people are printing things out at 8x10 or 16x20 for framing anymore and comparing them to traditional photographic images... but it is there. (I have some 30x40" prints that I've done (though I typically didn't have the funds or wall space for many - 8x10s and 16x20s where my most common) and purchased a number of 20x60" prints over the years).

You know, I think I’ve had enough of “have taken up farming”/woodworking Silicon Valley nostalgics at this point (I’m talking about them/in general, not you).

Modern computing is toxic. The Internet is shit. And all because it was designed that way. Computing doesn’t have to be shit. I would know. Plenty of let’s say local computing solutions are just fine. They are so okay and fine that I hardly think about them. They just save me time and work.

Like the AI Cretins say, the cat’s out of the bag, time cannot be unwound. But computing is not fundamentally alienating, life-draining, or doomed to be infiltrated by spooks from the worst regime in the world. That’s just what SC programmers who are hobby woodworkers and use fliphones think.

Very self-satisfied, and deservedly so. Like when you use that one piece of scrap wood in the garage you've been saving for this one occasion, or something from that drawer of metric-threaded bolts that just saves the project you're working on. It was all worth it, see? This is why we do it. No different with the author's digital preservation and online tool use. Pleasant read.

In 1981, my first job in Silicon Valley was obtained by answering a blind (no company name) ad in the Mercury News. It was a kooky company that built burn-in ovens for semiconductors (mostly 2164 memory chips back then).

I had a lot of fun there. The purchasing manager was a Scottish guy and he had an after hours drinking club in a small conference room with a wet bar. I was only 24 years old and working crazy hours. I'd get a few beers around 7 pm and then go back to work writing 8080 assembly language code for a few more hours.

I also ended up smoking weed with the CEO and CFO a couple of times. The CFO was not a young guy. I'm not sure how old he was, but he had all white hair. The CEO gave me a mason jar full of his homegrown weed as a gift when I finished the project.

That company and even the building is long gone. It's now a Google parking garage.

How tech company HR departments game the system for PERM jobs: A newspaper classifieds story

After my burgeoning career cratered and jobs weren't pouring in because my résumé was impressing naïve, desperate managers during the cusp of the dot-com boom, I found myself in a homeless shelter with a newspaper and a phone.

And yeah, shelters are harsh. A lot of them turn us all out on the streets during the day, because shelters are exclusively for sleeping and hygiene. So you trudge around town during the day to find food, work, and a purpose in life.

So they would have an "employment resource room" with stacks of newspapers and little phone carrels for us to call anyone. And yours truly here had not the slightest clue or inkling how to actually conduct a job search. I didn't know how to design or write a CV, I didn't know how to approach employers, and of course, by the late 1990s, classified help-wanted ads were a really, really shitty way for an "IT Professional" to find anything.

But I could do nothing but try. Eventually, I found some scammy call-centers who would hire anyone. And I worked as a scammy caller in a fly-by-night call-center. I worked day labor. And landing these jobs didn't teach or train me in the slightest how to seek jobs, how to market myself, or how to interview.

I still don't really know how. ATS and gatekeepers and my lousy, holey work history? It's a lost cause in today's market. I've learned a lot of tips and tricks since then, but in the end, it's about making yourself a good product, offering value to a company, and finding the right fit before you go insane and just apply for SSDI.

while the personal touch has pretty much disappeared from the hiring process at tech companies, it can still be found. About 5 years ago my daughter applied to a tech company as she was graduating from college (they had a booth at the job fair at her school). within a few days she heard back and they offered to fly her out to their campus (halfway across the country) for an interview. the "interview" consisted of various managers talking to her as they walked around the campus (it's an exceptionally nice campus) -- never sat down in an office, no stupid leetcode, etc. She flew back to college that evening and had an offer in her inbox by the time she arrived. She's worked at the company ever since.

My last job was vaguely classifieds-related: the company posted a local press release into the newspaper bragging about how they'd come to the area to serve a couple local clients and I ended up snooping their careers page to find out that they had an open spot (and the dude that spun the site up was leaving) -- right place, right time?

As a teen though (even in the late 2000s): I walked into various places asking for applications and somehow was one of the only teens to go all the way down to the Duty Free to ask if they were hiring (because it's past a tollbooth and inside a big fenced in Customs point of no return). The manager asked if I'd seen his ad in the paper and I hadn't, I said I just figured it was retail that might be hiring. Nailed it.

Or attending a local job fair with a stack of printed resumes.

I did that when I was younger. Also, the advice was to print your resumes on heavy bond paper so that you looked upper class.

My job interview at this event went like: my name is first last name. I am a professional and I want to work for you. And they responded: we can tell you are a professional and we want you to work for us. It’s way harder now-a-days!

Another tidbit, based upon finding out which company the phone number belonged to: you could go to the library and access business directories. Think the yellow pages, only they were geared towards businesses rather than towards consumers. Print versions were broken down by industry, but electronic ones (on CD-ROM) were searchable. It was also a tool for looking for unadvertised jobs, since those directories seemed to be geared towards making cold calls (albeit, for people doing sales).

I worked on a project in 1990/1991 (pre-WWW) that involved making the phone book electronically accessible. For development my client purchased CD-ROMs containing the White Pages from the entire NYC tri-state area (NY, NJ, and CT), making it trivial for me to search by name and/or number. Once the web had been around for a few years, reverse-lookup became commonplace.

And then it disappeared once "Find out who called you only $50 or subscribe for $35 or we'll add you to our bad public records site" became a business model.

In 2000 you could go to the library and look up the number in the Polk directory. There was one for each borough. There was an alphabetical section, a section by street address, and a section by phone number. You can still go down to the library and use them, for example if you want to know what was at 867 Madison Ave in 1926, or who had the phone number PENnsylvania 5000.

Not only jobs, but NYC apartments - although in the Voice not the Times.

As someone who lived in NYC for a while circa 1999 the process at the time as I recall it was using a newspaper classified ad to find a broker to find an apartment.

The vast majority of actual apartment listings were all gatekept within the broker system making hiring a broker (with an insane fee) effectively mandatory for actually finding a place to live in a reasonable timeframe.

What about the obituary?

Brokers still gatekeep the best inventory in NYC for the most part.

Every craigslist apartment I ever found was sketchy as hell.

Every Craigslist apartment listing I've ever seen turned out to be through a broker as well.

They have/had broker/no-broker categories and I never had the budget for broker.

The broker ones are kinda big scammers though, from what I remember.

I had the funniest experience with brokers in mid-1990s Silicon Valley.

I was shacked-up with my girlfriend in an ADU garage in Santa Cruz. She was willing to move out with me and some roommates. So the four of us went apartment-hunting in the South Bay area. We eventually found a house in San Jose. It was a dilapidated old property in a ratty area of downtown, but it was our humble home.

Anyway, we had discovered this great concept of apartment brokers who would do the legwork for us! So we signed up to one. Now everyone had computers, but the Internet was for blogs, porn and cat pictures, so nobody did actual work or business over the Internet! So we would go in-person to this brokers office and they would help us fill out paperwork and stuff.

And I have this one, extraordinarily vivid memory of standing there, sullen nerdy goth me with my perky goth artist girlfriend, and we're at the front counter in a small lobby, blinking slowly at two young lady brokers who are standing at their computer terminals, typing earnestly, and they informed us of some computer outage, but the systems are coming back online and these girlbosses are the ones saving the day.

And they begin typing even more insistently and firmly, and they're just banging on the keyboards like there is no tomorrow and they really, really need the systems back in order, and there was just a palpable sense of urgency and naïvete mixing together in the air of this business, and finally these blonde girlbosses chirp that they found us something! And at that moment we embraced and we could practically hear the theme song to "The Jeffersons" playing in the background.

That is the only time that an apartment-finding broker found a place for me, but I have believed in the service type ever since. I am sure that if we had been better people with money, they could've found a good place to live. It was heady times in SV for sure.

I recommend https://www.jobs.now/ because corporations use this loophole to block jobs and eliminate bargaining power. As of this comment, here are some of the companies that are still exploiting the system,

AT&T Services, Inc. Goldman Sachs Amazon Boston Consulting Group Wal-Mart Crowdstrike JPMorgan Chase & Co. DocuSign

I was hoping for a mention about this HR backdoor, but it wasn't covered.

Only my first job involved newspaper ads (early 90s). My second job pivoting into tech came via USENET, and later jobs from networks or shoulder tapping by recruiters.

Fondly remembering postings for TAL and SNOBOL jobs in the classifieds before the book store near me had books on SQL in the early 90s.

We were told the quality of paper mattered and that the envelope should have the same high-end watermark that the resume sheet had. Inkjet printed resumes were discouraged because the quality back then was low and the resolution made anti-aliasing on the type come out weird. Laser printed only, please.

Laser printers were expensive AF for poor guys just out of college looking for a job.

My BJ200 ca. 1993 had awesome print quality, comparable to a Laserjet II, if you used slightly glossy paper (so the ink wouldn’t bleed) and you waited a bit for the ink to dry on each sheet.

Indeed, I remember being told to go to kinkos and have it printed there since I didn't have a laser printer

I miss 24hr kinkos

I remember back when the Thrifty Nickle was how you could find all kinds of things up to and including your next vehicle.

I wonder if anyone finds jobs on Craigslist anymore

Classified ads for jobs were still a thing up until around Y2K. MonsterBoard (what it used to be called) was one of the first online job platforms and then Dice came along. I used to have good luck finding contract gigs through dice.

Looking straight into the eyes, strong handshake, exuding confidence?

This but after going inside the building without authorization and saying you will not leave without a job.

I encountered one corporation where you walked up to security, told them you were there to look for work, and they directed you to an office that contained posting of currently available positions. As far as I know, they didn't advertise job openings anywhere else. If you weren't willing to drop by their offices, they weren't interested in considering you.

Of course, talking to anyone about a job within the building was an entirely different matter.

This is why your grandparents (or parents if you're a greybeard) still recommend going down to corporate offices and trying to hand your resume to a person/recruiter there. Nowadays it is all online resume screening. It is frustrating listening to people who haven't had to job-hunt for several decades.

I'm dreading the day I need/want to look for another job!

That said, there may be contexts where their advice would help. It's likely useless in all organizations that have a human resources department, since they will be dictating policy and may even be doing the initial screening. But smaller businesses? Quite often their handling of applications isn't all that different from my grandparent's day. Replacing that emailed resume with a hand delivered one may be enough to get their attention.

I also wonder how applicable modern approaches would be in towns and smaller cities. Something tells me they would rather only deal with local candidates and not have a bunch of people who apply from out of their area.

I'm waiting for a TV show or Youtube series about people over 50 who go looking for jobs using only these kinds of methods.

I remember asking my grandmother what she thought a large number of applicants would be for a job. She said 10. The local grocery store gets 200+. I don't think there's a single vacancy out there which gets a single digit number of applicants any more (they might all be AI, which you can (hopefully) quickly rule out, but still).

When the dot com bubble popped, I was out of work for an extended period. I ended up living with some older friends (about 10 years older than myself and I was about 40 at that time). They gave the "hand out resumes" advice along with thinking that I could get a part time gig at the grocery store (packing groceries). They never understood that most tech recruitment at that time went through recruiters and that all the local grocery stores were unionized and had waiting lists to get rehired. The Mrs had not looked for a job in 20-ish years. I ended up getting one through the bodyshop/agency that the Mr was working at.

That city had 3 basic industries: defense, fast food and religion. The defense contractors all wanted current top secret clearances (I had bad debt at that time) and the religious employers all wanted "testimonies of faith" (think SF-86 but aimed at religious beliefs, and required 10+ years of church attendance with names & numbers of the reverend/priest/etc to vouch for you).

> This but after going inside the building without authorization

That would make you eminently qualified for a position in AI these days.

> ... strong handshake ...

Years ago I had an important job interview. Unfortunately, 2 days prior I broke a bone in my right hand during a bicycle wreck. I didn't wanna show up to the interview with a cast on my hand/arm ("this guy is reckless."), so I cut it off. I interviewed with about 10 dudes that day, and they all wanted to give me a "strong handshake". It hurt like hell, but I had to maintain composure. I got the job. And I've been here for almost 25 years. :)

You cut off your hand?!

The replacement has a Geiger counter, don't worry.

LOL

imo the job process is totally broken its an AI arms race. You have people doing mass ai apply with slop CVs and then recruitment just doing the inverse with AI ATS. Working on something I think could help solve the issue just need to find recruiters to talk to see if it's any good.

Almost worse than indiscriminate applications are the fraudulent ones, where the applicant isn't sharing the own answers in interviews, isn't the one in the interview at all, or sometimes never existed.

In case the headline makes no sense, the original title before being mangled by the HN headline censor:

"How We Used to Get Jobs".

Thanks. What a pity, the mutilated title sounded promising.

Fixed, thanks!

>I’ve just gone through a butt load of resumes

Perhaps she said "bulk load of resumes" and you misheard it as the funnier version?

Boat load?

Nope, this is a common expression.

If someone's feeling especially playful, they might ask if it's a metric or imperial buttload. An imperial buttload would be loosely based on the idealized/claimed size of some prominent arse in the past, while a metric buttload implies the existence of a platinum-iridium reference derriere.

Related to the shit ton and metric shit ton.

Another quantity is "an ass-load, and I wouldn't be surprised if that came first and then butt-load is the toned-down version.

https://xkcd.com/37/

Why, my good poster, there's nothing funny about 48 bushels in my butt (i.e. towed cart).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/buttload

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