9 ms·

Disclaimer: This is purely anecdotal, and not backed by any data. I'm in my mid-twenties and just recently started interviewing people for the team I work on.

Disclaimer: This is purely anecdotal, and not backed by any data. I'm in my mid-twenties and just recently started interviewing people for the team I work on. It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at, or finding someone to give a second set of eyes on a cover letter or resume, most people really drop the ball. If job prospects are grim, you'd at least hope people would put in more effort.

hitekker 11y ago
I think fear of unemployment as a motivator (or perhaps most kinds of fears) only works in brief, dramatic, and largely unhelpful spurts. So when I look at people who are doing a shoddy job of caring about the particulars of their (potential) job, I always think "is this something that they want to do or at they they are forced to do stave off unemployment?" To respond more effectively: grim prospects only increase the pool of applicants, and decreases their average desire to do the job you ask for.
- jonathanjaeger 11y ago
  "To respond more effectively: grim prospects only increase the pool of applicants, and decreases their average desire to do the job you ask for." I think that's spot on.
blakeshall 11y ago
I'd be curious if you are seeing the results of 'shotgun' style job searching. Sending your resume anywhere and everywhere with the hopes of getting a callback. I imagine that would make it difficult to research every possibility.
- Domenic_S 11y ago
  at the interview stage?
- jonathanjaeger 11y ago
  I believe this is definitely true, but I'm speaking of the first initial interview as well. It's not quite as bad as the top of the funnel, much higher quality, but still not the level of effort I was hoping for.
- chucky_z 11y ago
  I was going to mention this exact same thing. The last time I had to go job hunting I submitted my resume to 40-50 companies each week or so, and unless I heard anything back ever, I did zero research outside of seeing if what they were looking for matched what I wanted to apply for.
  - itsybitsycoder 11y ago
    How long did it take you to find a job using this method? Were you applying to software jobs?
    - chucky_z 11y ago
      Actually, one of my friends on Facebook saw that I was job hunting and offered me an interview. :/ I've gotten all of my best (and last few) jobs through connections, fortunately for me, and maybe unfortunately for me giving advice on how to get a job. I'm specifically in the sysadmin/dba (and a little devops-y) side of things, and less in programming.
    - tracker1 11y ago
      I didn't quite follow the same approach recently... Was my first time looking for a job in several years. I sent out maybe 50 resumes and got callbacks on about half of them. I mainly applied locally. Also, updating my linked in profile got a lot more cold contacts than sending out resumes did. I was pretty selective as far as finding a job, the interview process reduced the responses to about a third. In the end there were about 3-4 I was interested in, and one of them bumped up the offer to where it was about 20% more than the closest competing offer, so I decided to go with it. However, I've got about 18-19 years of experience in my field (full stack software development, focusing on web applications), and stronger throughout the stack than most. Many of the positions were labelled "Senior" but the pay, and desired experience, didn't align with that statement in my opinion. It really just depends. Having a strong resume will go a long way... having a summary statement with your desired position, goals and skills along with technology you are familiar with followed with work/project history reinforcing that experience will go a long way in terms of getting in the door.
newobj 11y ago
I'm 40, and have seen shitty resumes/interview efforts my entire life. It seems to have no relationship to economic conditions. Most people just don't seem to ... try very hard? Wish I had something more insightful to say after almost 20 years of observation.
- tsunamifury 11y ago
  My opinion on the matter is that every employer has unique expectations that they pretend are industry standard and obvious. I'll relate this to your statement by saying, they don't know how to try because interviews as a process are like crossing a field of landmines. Too much academic work or management responsibility, they call you overqualified. To little: they say you aren't trying. Enthusiastic for a low end job: we shouldn't hire them because their expectations are too high. To low of energy: they aren't the right fit. This goes on and on and on as hirers act like their individual set of criteria bias are obvious -- likely because the interviewer themselves has limited experience. Most people do best when they are told what to do in blind situations. Help them out with a few tips on what to expect and I'm guess you'll find much better applicant quality.
  - morgante 11y ago
    Sure, there are certainly some land mines, but then there's also pure sloppiness. A double digit percentage of the resumes I see have spelling and grammatical errors in them. How hard is it to spend a few minutes checking over a document that is pretty key to your career?
    - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
      Good engineers can be bad at English. I've seen C-suite briefings and strategy docs with obvious errors in them. Unless you're working in publishing, I'd pay less attention to trivial errors than to evidence of an ability to get useful things done.
      - strickjb9 11y ago
fecak 11y ago
Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago when there was the time taken to type resumes, print them up/copy, put into envelope or hand deliver, the amount of time invested likely made people more concerned with their product. Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications.
- edgyswingset 11y ago
  As a recent college grad who went to a community college and then a run-of-the-mill state school, my experience and general impression from my peers was that unless you shotgun as many job applications as possible, you're probably not going to hear back from anyone. My own hypothesis is that most companies are so obsessed with a potential "false positive" hire that they're perfectly okay with not investing in a new graduate. Thus, we have to send out 10+ job applications per week, otherwise we end up as yet another one of the millions of unemployed, college-educated young adults. It's not totally awful (I found a great job as a result of my career fair), but unless a company is specifically recruiting from your university it's pretty much a given that you won't be offered an interview, let alone a job.
  - ghaff 11y ago
    There's certainly a tradeoff between shotgunning and carefully crafting an individualized approach. I'm not sure it's really all that different from what it's always been though. Way back in the day when I was graduating from engineering school, I sent out a lot of minimally customized cover letters with a standard resume to many companies in what seemed like possibly interesting industries. In fact, I got a number of interviews from those shotgunned resumes and ended up working at one of the companies. It was a pretty good job and one that I'd have never stumbled onto with a more tailored approach. OTOH, my most recent three jobs--including my current one--were all basically through people that I knew.
zyxley 11y ago
> It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job. That would be because when you're applying to a huge number of jobs per week and get no response for almost all of them, it gets really hard to actually care about any of them.
- spdustin 11y ago
  He was referring to interviewees; ostensibly the interviewee has "heard back" from the potential employer, thereby landing an interview. It is at this point, IMHO, the interviewee should at least pretend to give a shit about the place that has risen above the silence that candidate had heard to date, and opted to spend the time to interview them.
- Domenic_S 11y ago
  GP said he was interviewing people. Surely you can care when you go into an interview?
Retra 11y ago
One of the problems with the this process is that the information that would drive behavior-driven feedback is not usually correlated with the behaviors you use to interact with the environment. You apply for a bunch of jobs, maybe you'll hear nothing back, or when you do, it feels random and disjointed. I have a nice job, but I can't tell you that it's a result of hard work more than it is luck. I can tell you that all the people I have worked with have praised me for being highly valuable to them, but the people who didn't hire me... what impressions can I make of them? That they don't know what they're doing? Or that I don't know what I'm doing? Neither of these is a morale booster.
- caskance 11y ago
  Or you could accept what most people learn in their first month of dating experience - that just because you're not right for each other doesn't mean there's something wrong with either of you.
  - Retra 11y ago
    If "just get over it" were a solution, don't you think it would have worked by now? I don't think being flippant about people's lives is all that productive.
    - caskance 11y ago
      No, of course not. Just as with the dating metaphor, there are a lot of people who will never be mature enough to accept that. But that's something they have to deal with themselves. I'm not their therapist. I can't "be productive" and help them fix their self-esteem issues.
      - deleted 11y ago
        [deleted]
    - bduerst 11y ago
      They're just saying that some skills typically come about with experience, and I don't think they're attacking you or unemployed people. You talk about information being limited to job applicants, but interviewing is a two way street. Interviewers are human and also trying to sift through the information you deliver, and they tend to lean towards false negatives in order to avoid false positives. Sometimes there is a gap and it really does come down to luck (or your experience in communicating during an interview).
ForHackernews 11y ago
The cover letter and resume are going to be read by a keyword-scanning algorithm, not a human being, anyway. In my experience, the main way anyone gets a job is through personal connections. The cover letter and resume are like some weird archaic relic of a bygone era. As a formality, you have to submit them to some online system, but only after you've already interviewed and been offered the job. They're like paper thank-you notes for wedding gifts: The forms must be obeyed.
jcslzr 11y ago
its because when unemployed it is hard to deal with things, it seems like stress makes you dumb or inactive
- cryoshon 11y ago
  This is a factor as well. I remember reading an article on the Guardian a few months back about how unemployment is a significant mental health hazard, very frequently resulting in chronic anxiety/depression. It's easy to get stuck in a new rut when you're still stuck in the old rut.
chc 11y ago
In my experience, most people who are having trouble finding a job put in a lot of effort for their first several tries, then lose hope and start just robotically resume-spamming. Probably some people are just lazy, but I'm guessing in a lot of cases you're catching people on the tail end of that.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
SixSigma 11y ago
How suitable a process do you feel interviewing has turned out to be ? Because years of HR research has suggested that interviews are a very poor method for determining candidate suitability for a job. [1] [1] http://imgur.com/5G0E3dj http://imgur.com/5G0E3dj
morgante 11y ago
Keep in mind that as a purely statistical matter the majority of job applications and interviews come from unqualified candidates. The good people are quickly hired, so the bad/lazy/inattentive people end up dominating the numbers. In my last job search, I "applied" (usually emailed a friend) to 10 or so companies, had final interviews with 4, and chose one within a week or two. Contrast that with some of my friends who try to do at least 10 applications a day (yet, predictably, still don't have a job). If you were merely to look at the average quality of applications, it would be way lower than the average quality of applicants.
mhurron 11y ago
> secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at What's the point? No seriously, other than stroking the ego of the interviewer with a 'please sir, I am just dying to work here because you're so awesome and I'm not worthy.' Especially at entry level, one job is pretty much the same as the other. I am not applying because working here is the most important thing to me, I am applying because there was an opening I might be qualified for and I was looking for a job. I don't care how much you think I should think that your place is the best place ever to work and I should prostrate myself to get it, it's just a damn job and I am only looking for a paycheck so I don't starve and I can do things I want to do with my life.
- fluidcruft 11y ago
  That's a pretty ridiculous attitude. Just hire yourself -- clearly your opinion is the only opinion that matters and moving money from someone else's pocket into your own is ultimately all about about your feels. Where's the hustle?
  - hollaur 11y ago
    Where's the passion? Love and work don't have to be two separate entities.
- ju-st 11y ago
  > I am not applying because working here is the most important thing to me, I am applying because there was an opening I might be qualified for and I was looking for a job. Yep, I'm actually too scared to state the real reasons why I'm applying. I think HR will filter out my appplication when I write "your opening sounded somewhat interesting and I want to know more about the tasks I have to do when I work here". Instead I just drop some additional keywords and bullshit into the obligatory "Why do you want to work here?" field. This approached worked so far.
  - marcosdumay 11y ago
    I sometimes wonder whether HR people that do that are so smart that they realize bullshiting is an important ability that must be selected for, or so stupid that they actually fall for the answers they get.
SilasX 11y ago
The problem with this explanation is that, for every such person, you can probably find another one that does all of that stuff correctly but still never hears back. That's exactly what we see with the Fizzbuzz phenomenon, with every interviewer complaining that no applicant can do it, but everyone tripping over each other (including hobbyists and beginners) to say how easy it is, so "where's my job?" I saw it too with professors and employers who blog, complaining that applicants and students can barely put together a sentence. Where meets the twain?
- VLM 11y ago
  "every interviewer complaining that no applicant can do it" I've noticed a correlation between that and insanely low pay or horrific working conditions, or a crazy disconnect between demands and the requirements. "I don't understand why none of the applicants can explain the details of why one BGP route is preferred over the other" -- says the guy trying to hire a CCIE for $50K at a dying utility company. "Well, sure we pivot every month and require 80 hour super high pressure work weeks and the runway ends in six months but aren't all companies, everywhere, on a perpetual death march?" -- says the guy who doesn't get any fizzbuzz-able applicants "I can't find any applicants with PHD level programming skills and encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms who have written a widely used LISP and/or hold a Fields math medal and/or a Nobel" -- says the guy complaining about getting no serious applicants when trying to hire for an entry level CRUD shoveler, upon being told everyone's unemployed so he should aim high.
  - ryandrake 11y ago
    Or, in other words, companies tend to get the applicant pool that their job descriptions/work conditions deserve.
- hackerboos 11y ago
  I've never had a interview which was only FizzBuzz. The problems given are usually much more difficult than that. But I've also done interviews with no coding at all. Point being, nobody is going to hire on FizzBuzz alone, in fact I would hatch a guess that most companies don't use it as a problem anymore given its prevalence.
hollaur 11y ago
I'm 25, and I approve all applications that get sent to every job on Inbound.org, and you wouldn't believe the stuff people submit. I actually had one of our devs build in an "email applicant" button so I could quickly email the worst ones and give them some tips.

hitekker 11y ago

I think fear of unemployment as a motivator (or perhaps most kinds of fears) only works in brief, dramatic, and largely unhelpful spurts. So when I look at people who are doing a shoddy job of caring about the particulars of their (potential) job, I always think "is this something that they want to do or at they they are forced to do stave off unemployment?" To respond more effectively: grim prospects only increase the pool of applicants, and decreases their average desire to do the job you ask for.

jonathanjaeger 11y ago
"To respond more effectively: grim prospects only increase the pool of applicants, and decreases their average desire to do the job you ask for." I think that's spot on.

blakeshall 11y ago

I'd be curious if you are seeing the results of 'shotgun' style job searching. Sending your resume anywhere and everywhere with the hopes of getting a callback. I imagine that would make it difficult to research every possibility.

Domenic_S 11y ago
at the interview stage?
jonathanjaeger 11y ago
I believe this is definitely true, but I'm speaking of the first initial interview as well. It's not quite as bad as the top of the funnel, much higher quality, but still not the level of effort I was hoping for.
chucky_z 11y ago
I was going to mention this exact same thing. The last time I had to go job hunting I submitted my resume to 40-50 companies each week or so, and unless I heard anything back ever, I did zero research outside of seeing if what they were looking for matched what I wanted to apply for.
- itsybitsycoder 11y ago
  How long did it take you to find a job using this method? Were you applying to software jobs?
  - chucky_z 11y ago
    Actually, one of my friends on Facebook saw that I was job hunting and offered me an interview. :/ I've gotten all of my best (and last few) jobs through connections, fortunately for me, and maybe unfortunately for me giving advice on how to get a job. I'm specifically in the sysadmin/dba (and a little devops-y) side of things, and less in programming.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    I didn't quite follow the same approach recently... Was my first time looking for a job in several years. I sent out maybe 50 resumes and got callbacks on about half of them. I mainly applied locally. Also, updating my linked in profile got a lot more cold contacts than sending out resumes did. I was pretty selective as far as finding a job, the interview process reduced the responses to about a third. In the end there were about 3-4 I was interested in, and one of them bumped up the offer to where it was about 20% more than the closest competing offer, so I decided to go with it. However, I've got about 18-19 years of experience in my field (full stack software development, focusing on web applications), and stronger throughout the stack than most. Many of the positions were labelled "Senior" but the pay, and desired experience, didn't align with that statement in my opinion. It really just depends. Having a strong resume will go a long way... having a summary statement with your desired position, goals and skills along with technology you are familiar with followed with work/project history reinforcing that experience will go a long way in terms of getting in the door.

newobj 11y ago

I'm 40, and have seen shitty resumes/interview efforts my entire life. It seems to have no relationship to economic conditions. Most people just don't seem to ... try very hard? Wish I had something more insightful to say after almost 20 years of observation.

tsunamifury 11y ago
My opinion on the matter is that every employer has unique expectations that they pretend are industry standard and obvious. I'll relate this to your statement by saying, they don't know how to try because interviews as a process are like crossing a field of landmines. Too much academic work or management responsibility, they call you overqualified. To little: they say you aren't trying. Enthusiastic for a low end job: we shouldn't hire them because their expectations are too high. To low of energy: they aren't the right fit. This goes on and on and on as hirers act like their individual set of criteria bias are obvious -- likely because the interviewer themselves has limited experience. Most people do best when they are told what to do in blind situations. Help them out with a few tips on what to expect and I'm guess you'll find much better applicant quality.
- morgante 11y ago
  Sure, there are certainly some land mines, but then there's also pure sloppiness. A double digit percentage of the resumes I see have spelling and grammatical errors in them. How hard is it to spend a few minutes checking over a document that is pretty key to your career?
  - TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
    Good engineers can be bad at English. I've seen C-suite briefings and strategy docs with obvious errors in them. Unless you're working in publishing, I'd pay less attention to trivial errors than to evidence of an ability to get useful things done.
    - strickjb9 11y ago

fecak 11y ago

Recruiter and resume-writer-on-the-side here, and it's become so easy to apply for jobs that most people put zero effort into anything but pressing send and shotgunning a resume to hundreds of companies. If there was even a small cost (time or money) to applying, you can be sure that resumes and cover letters would be much more common and of higher quality. I'm not suggesting that we charge applicants, but years ago when there was the time taken to type resumes, print them up/copy, put into envelope or hand deliver, the amount of time invested likely made people more concerned with their product. Job seekers are much better served spending an hour sending 10 focused applications than spending that same hour to send 100 sanitized applications.

edgyswingset 11y ago
As a recent college grad who went to a community college and then a run-of-the-mill state school, my experience and general impression from my peers was that unless you shotgun as many job applications as possible, you're probably not going to hear back from anyone. My own hypothesis is that most companies are so obsessed with a potential "false positive" hire that they're perfectly okay with not investing in a new graduate. Thus, we have to send out 10+ job applications per week, otherwise we end up as yet another one of the millions of unemployed, college-educated young adults. It's not totally awful (I found a great job as a result of my career fair), but unless a company is specifically recruiting from your university it's pretty much a given that you won't be offered an interview, let alone a job.
- ghaff 11y ago
  There's certainly a tradeoff between shotgunning and carefully crafting an individualized approach. I'm not sure it's really all that different from what it's always been though. Way back in the day when I was graduating from engineering school, I sent out a lot of minimally customized cover letters with a standard resume to many companies in what seemed like possibly interesting industries. In fact, I got a number of interviews from those shotgunned resumes and ended up working at one of the companies. It was a pretty good job and one that I'd have never stumbled onto with a more tailored approach. OTOH, my most recent three jobs--including my current one--were all basically through people that I knew.

zyxley 11y ago

> It's amazing how little effort many seemingly qualified people put in to secure an entry-level job. That would be because when you're applying to a huge number of jobs per week and get no response for almost all of them, it gets really hard to actually care about any of them.

spdustin 11y ago
He was referring to interviewees; ostensibly the interviewee has "heard back" from the potential employer, thereby landing an interview. It is at this point, IMHO, the interviewee should at least pretend to give a shit about the place that has risen above the silence that candidate had heard to date, and opted to spend the time to interview them.
Domenic_S 11y ago
GP said he was interviewing people. Surely you can care when you go into an interview?

Retra 11y ago

One of the problems with the this process is that the information that would drive behavior-driven feedback is not usually correlated with the behaviors you use to interact with the environment. You apply for a bunch of jobs, maybe you'll hear nothing back, or when you do, it feels random and disjointed. I have a nice job, but I can't tell you that it's a result of hard work more than it is luck. I can tell you that all the people I have worked with have praised me for being highly valuable to them, but the people who didn't hire me... what impressions can I make of them? That they don't know what they're doing? Or that I don't know what I'm doing? Neither of these is a morale booster.

caskance 11y ago
Or you could accept what most people learn in their first month of dating experience - that just because you're not right for each other doesn't mean there's something wrong with either of you.
- Retra 11y ago
  If "just get over it" were a solution, don't you think it would have worked by now? I don't think being flippant about people's lives is all that productive.
  - caskance 11y ago
    No, of course not. Just as with the dating metaphor, there are a lot of people who will never be mature enough to accept that. But that's something they have to deal with themselves. I'm not their therapist. I can't "be productive" and help them fix their self-esteem issues.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - bduerst 11y ago
    They're just saying that some skills typically come about with experience, and I don't think they're attacking you or unemployed people. You talk about information being limited to job applicants, but interviewing is a two way street. Interviewers are human and also trying to sift through the information you deliver, and they tend to lean towards false negatives in order to avoid false positives. Sometimes there is a gap and it really does come down to luck (or your experience in communicating during an interview).

ForHackernews 11y ago

The cover letter and resume are going to be read by a keyword-scanning algorithm, not a human being, anyway. In my experience, the main way anyone gets a job is through personal connections. The cover letter and resume are like some weird archaic relic of a bygone era. As a formality, you have to submit them to some online system, but only after you've already interviewed and been offered the job. They're like paper thank-you notes for wedding gifts: The forms must be obeyed.

jcslzr 11y ago

its because when unemployed it is hard to deal with things, it seems like stress makes you dumb or inactive

cryoshon 11y ago
This is a factor as well. I remember reading an article on the Guardian a few months back about how unemployment is a significant mental health hazard, very frequently resulting in chronic anxiety/depression. It's easy to get stuck in a new rut when you're still stuck in the old rut.

chc 11y ago

In my experience, most people who are having trouble finding a job put in a lot of effort for their first several tries, then lose hope and start just robotically resume-spamming. Probably some people are just lazy, but I'm guessing in a lot of cases you're catching people on the tail end of that.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

SixSigma 11y ago

How suitable a process do you feel interviewing has turned out to be ? Because years of HR research has suggested that interviews are a very poor method for determining candidate suitability for a job. [1] [1] http://imgur.com/5G0E3dj http://imgur.com/5G0E3dj

morgante 11y ago

Keep in mind that as a purely statistical matter the majority of job applications and interviews come from unqualified candidates. The good people are quickly hired, so the bad/lazy/inattentive people end up dominating the numbers. In my last job search, I "applied" (usually emailed a friend) to 10 or so companies, had final interviews with 4, and chose one within a week or two. Contrast that with some of my friends who try to do at least 10 applications a day (yet, predictably, still don't have a job). If you were merely to look at the average quality of applications, it would be way lower than the average quality of applicants.

mhurron 11y ago

> secure an entry-level job. Whether it be hustle to learn more about a business, the specifics about the company you might work at What's the point? No seriously, other than stroking the ego of the interviewer with a 'please sir, I am just dying to work here because you're so awesome and I'm not worthy.' Especially at entry level, one job is pretty much the same as the other. I am not applying because working here is the most important thing to me, I am applying because there was an opening I might be qualified for and I was looking for a job. I don't care how much you think I should think that your place is the best place ever to work and I should prostrate myself to get it, it's just a damn job and I am only looking for a paycheck so I don't starve and I can do things I want to do with my life.

fluidcruft 11y ago
That's a pretty ridiculous attitude. Just hire yourself -- clearly your opinion is the only opinion that matters and moving money from someone else's pocket into your own is ultimately all about about your feels. Where's the hustle?
- hollaur 11y ago
  Where's the passion? Love and work don't have to be two separate entities.
ju-st 11y ago
> I am not applying because working here is the most important thing to me, I am applying because there was an opening I might be qualified for and I was looking for a job. Yep, I'm actually too scared to state the real reasons why I'm applying. I think HR will filter out my appplication when I write "your opening sounded somewhat interesting and I want to know more about the tasks I have to do when I work here". Instead I just drop some additional keywords and bullshit into the obligatory "Why do you want to work here?" field. This approached worked so far.
- marcosdumay 11y ago
  I sometimes wonder whether HR people that do that are so smart that they realize bullshiting is an important ability that must be selected for, or so stupid that they actually fall for the answers they get.

SilasX 11y ago

The problem with this explanation is that, for every such person, you can probably find another one that does all of that stuff correctly but still never hears back. That's exactly what we see with the Fizzbuzz phenomenon, with every interviewer complaining that no applicant can do it, but everyone tripping over each other (including hobbyists and beginners) to say how easy it is, so "where's my job?" I saw it too with professors and employers who blog, complaining that applicants and students can barely put together a sentence. Where meets the twain?

VLM 11y ago
"every interviewer complaining that no applicant can do it" I've noticed a correlation between that and insanely low pay or horrific working conditions, or a crazy disconnect between demands and the requirements. "I don't understand why none of the applicants can explain the details of why one BGP route is preferred over the other" -- says the guy trying to hire a CCIE for $50K at a dying utility company. "Well, sure we pivot every month and require 80 hour super high pressure work weeks and the runway ends in six months but aren't all companies, everywhere, on a perpetual death march?" -- says the guy who doesn't get any fizzbuzz-able applicants "I can't find any applicants with PHD level programming skills and encyclopedic knowledge of algorithms who have written a widely used LISP and/or hold a Fields math medal and/or a Nobel" -- says the guy complaining about getting no serious applicants when trying to hire for an entry level CRUD shoveler, upon being told everyone's unemployed so he should aim high.
- ryandrake 11y ago
  Or, in other words, companies tend to get the applicant pool that their job descriptions/work conditions deserve.
hackerboos 11y ago
I've never had a interview which was only FizzBuzz. The problems given are usually much more difficult than that. But I've also done interviews with no coding at all. Point being, nobody is going to hire on FizzBuzz alone, in fact I would hatch a guess that most companies don't use it as a problem anymore given its prevalence.

hollaur 11y ago

I'm 25, and I approve all applications that get sent to every job on Inbound.org, and you wouldn't believe the stuff people submit. I actually had one of our devs build in an "email applicant" button so I could quickly email the worst ones and give them some tips.