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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.

If the listing is generic like "senior software engineer" and all of the requirements are generic like being able to program or do teamwork, it's probably a generic listing.

Applying anyway is a safe bet, but I wouldn't invest as much energy into tailoring your resume if it's a 6 month old posting from a 50 person company with a website that looks like it's from 2009. That company probably forgot to take the listing down.

> maybe you should say outright you're looking for 10 people

This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.

The target can also change constantly. At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.

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> At a large enough company you continuously lose people for natural reasons, like retirement, moving for a spouse, moving to be closer to family. Past a tipping point you're just always hiring.

As an analogy it's kinda like hard drives: when one of my hard drives dies, it's An Event which I need to deal with specifically; I need to order a replacement for that specific drive. At Google's server farms, hard drives dying is just a statistic, you continuously buy hard drives just because you know existing drives are gonna die at some semi-predictable rate.

Or a more morbid analogy: military casualties in a war.

It's not really an analogy, it's just facts of life. In a large enough company or over a long enough time period at a job or in your career, realistically people actually will eventually die and cause vacancies. I've had two coworkers die, one because of illness, the other because of an auto accident. I stopped using the "bus factor of one" phrase as a result even and use "redundancy or succession planning" since it's not outside the realm of possibility that someone might get hit by a vehicle.

Sure, but in one many more people leave the workforce by being killed and maimed than in the other.

"Lottery factor" works, though it's more of a mouthful

That, and nobody knows what you're talking about.

Just the first time

More morbidly, military casualties in what the military insists isn't war.

Even in peacetime, training accidents kill an expected number of military personnel each year.

I'm not talking about training accidents.

No this is not common sense. No company in LATAM has 10000 people. Large companies just aren't a thing here. Most companies here are the 50 people companies you mention so the normal thing is to hire occasionally. And LATAM never had an industrial revolution so software positions are just rare unless the company is larger than the local average. If you do find one, it's not a pure one or is service oriented, not to build a product. What I mean is, building a technological product is rare let alone as a product company in LATAM and most technical positions are service or outsourcing oriented. If you find a technical product role like being a mobile developer, it's often not at a company that offers a technological product but a service in another industry like a bank

I googled and literally the first result was LATAM Airlines who have 44,000 employees.

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

Airlines and state owned companies seem to be the exception

ok, that statement seems a bit different than your previous one of "No company in LATAM has 10000 people."

Except for the companies who have 10000 people, no companies in LATAM have 10000 people.

Love the logic, have an upvote.

So América Móvil doesn't have nearly 200k? There are plenty of LATAM companies with more than 10k people.

This was an intentional fallacy for comedic effect, specifically "No True Scotsman"

I think we can all agree No True LATAM company would have 10,000 employees.

I think he means "software companies".

Large companies exist, but pure software companies or with heavy side of it?

Petrobras?

You don't think MercadoLibre has job postings open all the time just to replace the people who are leaving? They're around 120 000 people, is each of those people hand-picked for a particular position and not just hired because they know they need to replace some percentage of workers who'll leave?

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

While the 9th largest is 7,777 people reported... all the others are at least 40,000 people and the largest two are over 100,000.

Itaú Unibanco https://www.itau.com.br/download-file/v2/d/42787847-4cf6-446... shows 80,657 employees in Brazil in Q2 of 2026.

And for tech jobs... https://carreiras.itau.com.br/busca-de-vagas/software/35299/...

Is it a big list? No. Is it a bank? Yep... but then Capital One is a large employer of tech in the US. Estimates put Walmart (certainly not a "tech" company) at having 20,000 technical roles.

Discriminating between technology product and technology role at a "regular" industry or service seems a bit biased. I (software developer) haven't worked at a tech company for the past two decades (and frankly, while wages are lower than the tech company jobs my job stability is much higher).

Lol

Bimbo

Femsa

Grupo Salinas

There's plenty more: https://es.tradingeconomics.com/bimboa:mm:employees

> you can assume that they're always hiring.

You can, but you’re probably wrong and are wasting your time and effort going through lord knows how many hoops to submit a simple CV.

Were submissions as simple as “here’s my CV, contact me if you like what you see”, then this wouldn’t be a problem. But when you have to sign up to the millionth HR service with the same 50 “please input the info that’s already on the resume you’re submitting” steps over and over again just to never hear back from the company or get rejected 6 months later, “submit away” is not an acceptable answer.

> This wouldn't help because you have no way of knowing if they've already hired 9 people or 1 person.

Yes, it would. Even if only 1 of the 10 spots is available, it still is a valid listing. Not knowing if the listing is valid at all is way worse.

Asking for “common sense” only works if the situation you are in makes sense to begin with. Job listings are a cesspit of bad behaviour, dark patterns, disrespectful processes and incongruous offers.

What we need is some sort of regulation on how job listings are posted and how candidates can and should apply.

While we’re at it, it should be utterly ILLEGAL and absolutely liable to have a job listing up with no salary range or a salary range that’s too wide to give a sense of what compensation looks like—lying about it should trigger serious legal consequences as well.

It’s about time candidates were treated with some dignity.

This kind of attitude is why some people cant find jobs. Meanwhile the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.

What kind of attitude? Wanting employers to respect my goddamned time? Wanting to know how much employers are willing to pay for my services?

Yeah. I want a job listing to actively tell me how much I stand to gain in exchange for my time and skills. How absolutely entitled of me. Imagine that? A potential employee wanting to know upfront how much their time is worth in the eyes of a potential employer? Nonsense! You get what you get and you don’t get upset.

If that’s your line of reasoning then I can only assume you’re exactly the type of employer that indulges in such practices.

Good luck on your job hunt.

Very kind of you good stranger. I’m not job hunting at the moment but I appreciate the support!

The UK is currently passing laws to make every job listing include salary:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/ckg7gg2zdexo

That’s a good start.

It would be nice if they passed a law to also make every job listing represent an actual job opening at the actual company (or their representative). There are too many postings that are all about "collecting people", forming candidate algorithms, tracking applicants, and mining. It is really grotesque.

This is not helpful and untrue, if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void. New accounts for the N+ glassdoor/indeed/bamboo/handshake/yougettheidea clones. Poorly pulling information from an uploaded resume, requiring manually editing or adding the info _every_ time. If your dilligent/dumb you writing a cover letter for each one (no AI the signal is too bad), then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection. There is a good reason people are complaining, it's asinine to put this on jpb seekers.

> if you've tried to apply for jobs within the laat ~6+ years you will know it's screaming into the void

I have applied for, and got, 3 jobs in the last 8 years. So yeah I think I am allowed an opinion on it without people telling me Im wrong.

Two things can be true. I’ve applied to a few jobs in the last few years and got a few of them as well. Does not mean that the hoops I had to jump through were any less demeaning, disrespectful or downright stupid.

If OP is a hiring manager, they're on the other side of the job market right now. It can be true that managers have no problems getting jobs and the rest of us do.

It is even weirder in my case. I am not applying for any jobs, recruiters reach out to me. After exchanging plesantries with HR ladies at video calls they ask me what are my salary expectations. I explain them there are two options. For full time employment I expect them to give me their best offer for me to consider. For consulting I expect them to give me exact goals so I can give them exact quote. I mostly never hear back from them, in rare cases they say their technical colleagues reviewed my resume and decided I am not appropriate candidate. I suspect most of them are just mining data about salary expectations.

Nobody is allowed to do anything without someone telling them they're wrong.

Three jobs in 8 years? Seems like a red flag, we want to hire someone who will stick around.[1]

1. (Actual feedback I got in an interview two weeks ago, for a position no sane person would want to stay in for longer than two years.)

Fair enough, dont hire me. There are thousands of jobs out there.

Greenhouse saves your info and auto fills it. Companied that use Ashby are pretty much upload your resume. Only workday sucks or other random small ones that show up.

Workday is the only one of these I’ve heard of or encountered in the US.

Probably because workday sucks so much that you notice it.

>then you submit it and wait an arbitrary amount of time for the rejection

You get rejections? When I was jobhunting, half of the companies I applied to never replied to me.

Two times I posted in the "Who wants to be hired?" HN thread in the past few years, I had a job within the month. Both times, I did not even have any resume or CV at all. But this year, I've been posting there for over 6 months and nothing. Not sure if attitude is such a big factor -- the job market kinda does what it does. You do make a mistake by not putting yourself out there though, because then there's basically no chance that an opportunity will come your way. One comment in an HN thread could be your ticket, or you could be applying to thousands of listings for months and getting nothing but the occasional rejection (though of course, never nearly as many as you made applications).

>the ones who just emailed their cv and didnt overthink it are happily working.

Tell that to the last 3 years of new grads.

"Just email your cv" is literally impossible at many employers today. the app process is absolutely far more onerous for the applicant than it was a generation ago. For a bit of silver lining, I have noticed the "auto-populate from my resume" feature actually works reasonably well on some sites, which was not the case just a couple years ago when I was last looking.

Also, in some orgs you physically cannot send the cv.

I can't send or recieve documents as email attachments anymore to external stakeholders, everything must be via sharepoint link.

That, plus a decade of compulsory anti phishing training means no half competent HR person should be blind opening an attachment that says 'CV'.

I don't know a single person who's got a job by just emailing their CV. In fact, it reads as asinine as the idea that you can get a job by just showing up in person with a good handshake.

Taking time off your existing role to do multiple interviews for something that turns out to pay 10-15% less than you are currently on is insulting.

how are you getting to multiple interviews without having a concrete-ish idea of what the pay will be?

literally the first thing I talk about with recruiters during an initial phone screen.

yeah okay there may be a ~5-10k, maybe even a little more, bit of wiggle-room but if I can't make a reasonable guess where I'll land why would I even consider interview #2 when I already have an existing role?

It is required to post a salary range in some states. Sometimes they are quite wide, but realistically in the posting I see the posters seem to be taking the rule in good faith.

Signing up for another page is a bit annoying (especially for places that are all using the same platform, like Workday—I understand these are probably self-hosted or kept disconnected on purpose, but still it could be nice if there was a separate global space for applicants, then we could just be imported in).

To some extent it would be nice if it was harder to apply. Like I used to be happy to see a cover letter required, as that’d filter out some of the competition. Now people can just AI generate their cover letters I guess, so I mostly avoid postings that require them unless I’m really excited. (I think LLMs mostly review the applicants these days as well, and I’m pretty sure LLMs prefer LLM-speak, so it’s a losing proposition).

Often you pay to have that posting. For a smaller company they def know that posting is still up. Likely they are just getting poor applications (or need to improve their posting because the right people are not seeing it)

In the age of LLMs every one is "tailoring" their resume to every posting.

This depends a ton on if we're talking about a company's own website's job listings or if it's on some dedicated job listing site.

Company's own website job listings are likely actually in an applicant tracking system (ATS) like Greenhouse or Ashby because they need to manage the pipeline, not just list the job.

I found the "AI tailoring" on par with the rest of AI - it's completely untrustworthy. It makes shit up on my resume because it's in the job description when I have no experience in it. We've always had this technology, it's called lying. It may be great to get your foot in the door, but once you have to justify it you're gonna have a hard time.

They don't pay for it continuously. They post it once as a LinkedIn post or a recruiter does it either in LinkedIn or elsewhere. They either don't pay for it or pay for it once if a recruiter does it

My common sense is that it varies per market. In an employer's market this bad you either need to be highly specialized or you need to get your submissions in early. First 24 hours matters a lot more than your actual skillset when job postings are regularly receiving 1000+ applicants. You know the hiring managers are going to stop after they find a few dozen qualified applicants.

But in a good market, sure. You can throw your hat into a random general application and you still might get a call back. Old postings are worth a shot. Any connection with an internal recruiter at least guarantees you start the process.

> If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring.

Perhaps true in the most literal sense, but you cannot assume that it's true in the practical sense.

Lots of companies have laid off significant numbers of people, particularly in certain roles. There will always be some turnover that requires hiring at a large company but this does not mean that you should assume there are always open positions for your role.

Submitting to a large company for roles that are in secular decline within that company is mostly a waste of time.

It's also not uncommon for natural turnover to be used as an organic way to downsize, with a role for a person who just left remaining unfilled.

> Some common sense goes a long way. If the job listing is from a company with 10,000 people, you can assume that they're always hiring. Submit away.

Common sense would dictate that a company with 10,000 people has a need for a diverse set of roles, and it would be completely stupid to recycle the same template pretending the role was always the same. In fact, repeating a stale advert suggests the company does in fact not have positions opened and either forgot to pull an old advert or some recruiter is trawling for applications to pretend to be productive.

I don’t think common sense suggests that at all. It’s like saying that the US armed forces requires soldiers with many specialized skillsets (which is true) so clearly it should recruit to every individual role and post separately.

A large company may have a handful of actually-very-special-role positions open for every hundred generic "our tech stack is this and isn’t going to change" developer roles.

Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.

The armed forces have a service commitment of several years (if I read this correctly, US Army is 8 years). People will sometimes change jobs within months.

They have the time to train someone into a role and typically don't have to worry about going to work for a competitor after they get out of AIT or A school.

People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.

One of the biggest changes since then is that there are companies that a different scale of revenue per employee ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%28google%2C+meta%29+re... ) and pay accordingly.

While there's nothing wrong with those companies paying such, it drastically changes the incentives for the regular employee. Going to work in Big Tech can be like winning the lottery (in the dot com boom, I had about 6 million on paper... that I didn't sell before the crash).

That there is drastically different industries with correspondingly different levels of compensation has incentivized the person who can change jobs to move from a $60k job to a $120k job to a $250k job to do so.

In the 90s I was making $50k/year ($50k '95 -> $109k '26 https://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm ).

The companies where people used to work a decade or two or three are still there and in many cases, largely unchanged.

This is so out of touch

There are companies out there where managers, mechanical engineers, marketing, and all the other non-technology roles work at for a decade or two. It's the software developers and IT people who switch jobs after two years working there.

What's the difference between those job types? It's that software development and IT have a multimodal salary with much greater discrepancy between the companies that fall into the distribution around the lowest mode and the highest mode.

https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/trimodal

If you switch from working at a local area company to Big Tech, you significantly increase your salary. For other careers, going from the local job to the national big company will likely give a much smaller boost.

Here are the stats for tenure: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/tenure.pdf

Table 6 (last page) shows the median tenure by job classification. Computer and mathematical occupations are the ones that were going down between 2014 and 2020. The others were holding fairly constant.

Table 2 shows 21% of people 35 and older have 10 years or more of tenure at their employer. At 45 years old, it's 45%.

I still hold that software development is the outlier for shorter tenure and the largest factor driving that is that you can quit your job and get a new one that pays twice as much.

Do you have an alternate explanation for this data or published data that contradicts this?

What an incredible contribution to the discussion!

> People used to spend their entire careers at a single company. Something changed, and it wasn't worker attitude.

The US-style neoliberal attitude towards decimating the workforce at a drop of a hat for PR purposes does have a chilling effect on any employee's trust.

But don't fool yourself: one of the most important tools anyone has to improve their life and wellbeing is the ability to switch jobs. It can create career opportunities you would otherwise not have, and even unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints.

> unblock career progression by sidestepping your current job's corporate constraints

no shit I work with multiple people that dipped out of their old gig, did 2 years somewhere else, and came back at a much more senior level to their old job because HR limits how often you can get promoted or increases inside a bracket.

jumping matters, as does the potential threat of jumping.

> Perhaps the armed forces are doing something right, and the tech industry is not.

This shows some ignorance on the history of work relations. The bad old days of industrial guilds and company towns are not renowned for quality of life and independence. Your life was tied to the company, and all you could aspire to do in your life would be to toil in the same low paying job while mixing up your corporate structure with your life's social structure. If god forbid you lost your job, you and your family would lose your whole life.

Tell me how this is doing things right.

For those in the US to understand, see how your access to healthcare is tied to your employer, and the impact this have on your life of you are forced out of your job. Now extrapolate this to every single aspect of your life.

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