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An AI bot-war destroyed the online job market
- bloopernova 2y agos/An AI bot-war/Greed, selfishness, and laziness/g
- arandomhuman 2y agoAutomated job posting is apparently an “AI bot war” who’d have thought! sure it’s annoying but so is click bait.
- supriyo-biswas 2y agoUnfortunately, most of the stuff from this publication[1] is just clickbait and culture war stuff; I wonder why the domain is even allowed here. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=salon.com https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=salon.com
- michaelt 2y agoI mean, presumably it's a "bot war" because there are multiple competing parties, all using automation: * Direct recruiters using automated tools to post job ads, filter resumes and respond to applicants. * Third-party recruiters using automated tools to scrape job boards for openings and create duplicates * New entrant job boards scraping popular job boards, to create simulated activity. * Identity thieves, automatically duplicating legitimate ads to gather PII * Applicants using LLMs to fill out application forms and write cover letters.
- arandomhuman 2y agoThat is fair I didn’t really consider that view point.
- ramon156 2y agoTo be fair, we could definitely rule out unqualified people using AI, but currently these tools are driven by pure greed
- rexpop 2y agoSure, we can attribute all unfortunate outcomes to Aristotilian vices, but as engineers we have learned that these traits are constant, and may be ameliorated through systems, processes, and policies. Attributing misfortune to vice is nihilism.
- simonw 2y agoI think the two most significant trends described by this article are "ghost jobs" - job listing that companies leave up even though they don't actually have a role to fill - and aggregators and scrapers which gather copies of job listings from elsewhere in order to populate a job board with a bunch of duplicate, potentially stale or filled positions. Combined, these help explain why people complain of applying for 60 jobs and only hearing back from two of them - most of the listings aren't actually valid leads. From the article: > Half the managers in question said that one emphatically ambiguous reason they would keep such job listings open indefinitely was because “The company was always open to new people.” That was actually one of the better answers on a list of very bad ones. A tie, at 43%, went to the next most-common responses, “To give the impression that the company is growing” and “To keep current employees motivated.” Perhaps the most infuriating replies came in at 39% and 33%, respectively: “The job was filled” (but the post was left online anyway to keep gathering résumés), and “No reason in particular.” > That’s right, all you go-getters out there: When you scream your 87th cover letter into the ghost-job void, there’s a one in three chance that your time was wasted for “no reason in particular.”
- luigi23 2y agoBut I don’t think this is something groundbreaking isn’t it? Similar to dating apps, when the pool is enormous It’s very cheap to keep the options open. With the automation and growing value of the personal data, everyone should keep that in mind when applying for a job. Also, I suspect there is a reason but the responders are too lazy or are too ashamed to provide it. My wild guess would be, as cited as before: this position has been allocated but it almost cost nothing to keep it open to farm data and to keep perception that the business is growing.
- janalsncm 2y agoI really don’t like unemployment as a metric. If the US economy was a product and I was the product owner for it, it would be the last indicator to check. Underemployment is a much bigger issue since a barista with a PhD counts as employment, but from the user perspective (people living in the economy) there’s not much difference between full time minimum wage work in a HCOL area and not working.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoFull time minimum wage work is probably netting you close to 40k in high cost of living areas these days. It’s not nothing.
- zamfi 2y agoWhen “low-income” starts at 100k, though, 40k might feel very close to nothing.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago40k affords your $1600/mo rent at least. Having housing covered is not nothing.
- BobbyJo 2y agoRent in HCOL areas is more than 1600 a month. I live in a college town, hardly HCOL, and 1600 a month will get you a small apartment here. Looking online, median rent in the US for all housing types is over 2k.
- kjkjadksj 2y agoWell chances are people making 40k aren't renting a unit that leaves them with only a thousand a month leftover. They are probably living in that small apartment or with roomates or a significant other, the latter case halves the rent wherever you live for a 1br for example.
- 2y ago
- nomdep 2y agoAs always, journalists blaming tech for everything bad, this time unemployment. Higher interest rates makes money more scarse, section 174 makes hiring programmers too expensive, high inflation makes everyone poorer… but sure, it must be the evil AI!
- marcosdumay 2y agoThere's 1 paragraph talking about unemployment rates... In a 2 to 3 pages long article. It doesn't blame unemployment into AI at all.
- nomdep 2y agoThe whole article premise is "Job hunting is difficult because of AI". The title itself is "An AI bot-war destroyed the online job market". ¨Difficult job hunting" means "unable to find work" means "unemployment"
- meroes 2y agoOkay…and nothing worse than techies thinking they necessarily have requisite knowledge outside of tech.
- formerly_proven 2y agofwiw here in europe I don't think you - or anyone - is going to find a job online any more, and even through networking it's very unlikely to find a job, since there are virtually no (real) openings any more. Basically nobody is hiring, and those who are, aren't paying anything worthwhile.
- ZoomerCretin 2y ago> and those who are, aren't paying anything worthwhile. That is the entire goal of interest rate tightening. To impoverish the masses until much lower wages are finally considered "worthwhile." Look at the incredibly strong and quick knee-jerk reaction in 2021 to enhanced unemployment schemes as soon as the vaccines went out. Employers wanted to hire at the same low rates of pay, but couldn't find enough workers of sufficient quality, so all levels of government treated this as a policy emergency: they cut unemployment, they cut food stamps and many social programs, they lowered the legal age at which you can work at all, work dangerous jobs, and work overnights, and the Federal Reserve illegally defied its mandate to maintain full-employment first, and then a *3%* inflation target when it jacked rates up very quickly.
- ericd 2y agoIt’s largely to slow lending and credit creation. They’ve got a difficult balancing act to perform, especially since cheap money is a lot more politically popular than the alternative, partly because many people focus on the part where the higher rates makes their debt more expensive, or that it causes lowered employment, like you seem to be. And maintaining low rates also does things like raise asset prices, as people borrow more to pump up their leverage and returns, people spend more, companies make more, and they hire more, people make more, etc, and people generally feel a lot better about that than austerity/saving/laying low. Unfortunately, it also leads to a lot of malinvestment, where people work on a lot of ultimately useless stuff, and that tends to make countries long-term poorer than being more prudent.
- lifestyleguru 2y ago> Basically nobody is hiring, and those who are, aren't paying anything worthwhile. Your mistake is that you expect the job to pay for housing, and that the housing is available in the surroundings of the job. There needs to be some brutal EU-wide legislation preventing hoarding of real state and making it a miserable investment. Overall I agree, nobody is hiring right now.
- curtisblaine 2y agoGhost jobs, at least in Europe, are a way for recruiters to get your data and send you real jobs, normally much less glamorous. Ghost apartments to let* too, for scummy estate agents instead of recruiters. *Which are real places that have been already let months ago but whose status was never updated to keep them in search results.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago> But here’s the thing: While those criticisms may well be accurate for a certain number of anecdotal examples, anybody who searches for more such examples will never, ever run out. They can’t all have jumbled résumés. They can’t all need interview coaching. Yes they can! It's stunning to see this level of media illiteracy from a reporter. In a country of 300 million people, there's all kinds of misleading or outright fictitious trends that you'll never run out of examples for. And then the article goes on to cite a "time-to-hire" statistic from a private report written by some guy and his self-named consulting company. I'm a lot less confident this trend is even real than I was when I started reading.
- DenisM 2y agoSo if the job marketplaces are flooded, where does one find a job anymore? It seems like one should spend maybe 20% of their work time just maintaining professional connections to make sure they can find a job when they inevitably need one.
- ghaff 2y agoYes, networks can be important. Since the one I got after an on-campus interview in grad school, every job I've had has been directly through people I knew. I don't know how to quantify the time spent. It was mostly organic through people I had worked with in some capacity.
- rgavuliak 2y agoThe article seems to have one of the most stupidest takes of all. > In other words, were they using early forms of what could now be considered management AI to automatically re-submit ghost listings Surely you don't need an AI to automate a job resubmission, but somehow the author needed to grab attention by mentioning AI. No one asked the hiring managers if they were doing this. Workable is mentioned, but then this gem arises: > what’s called “job post scraping,” Yeah, AI writing job postings allright. We finally get to the AI part: > Armed with AI-driven interactive voice emulators, domain name spoofing, Python-powered web crawlers, the ability to post a fake job while posing as a real company, and some basic 3rd-grade distraction skills, scammers are winning in ways that would’ve seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. Ok fine, but automated voice chatbots are not seamless yet. The article is connecting random things and claiming it's AI
- tymscar 2y agoBack in January I wrote a blogpost about this exact issue and people treated it as ramblings. I discussed it with over 30 people in the meantime each saying theres no way ghost jobs are a thing, theres no way it’s that bad, or that they have a job so surely this is exaggerated. It’s not, it really is that bad, and more than a dozen of them since lost their job and messaged me saying that the blogpost is much more real than they could’ve ever imagined. https://blog.tymscar.com/posts/jobhunting/ https://blog.tymscar.com/posts/jobhunting/
- lazide 2y agoThe US right now is caught between two entirely delusional mental models, with massive amounts of manipulation being used by both. The everything is terrible and we’re being attacked/losing model, and the everything is great and we’re winning model. The incumbent group benefits from the ‘everything is great’ model because incumbents generally always lose when the economy is in the crapper. And because this has turned into an existential fight between these two delusional world views, anyone trying to notice the actual reality gets attacked/gaslit/etc. Notably, also the opposite world view - if allowed to win - will definitely eat everything it touches and destroy damn near everything. It’s imperative we get our heads out of our asses and actually deal with the real world here before we get drug off the cliff.
- toomuchtodo 2y agoMight have to get drug off the cliff to get anything fixed.
- lazide 2y agoSomething will happen, for sure. But history shows it’s rarely things getting fixed cleanly.
- mycentstoo 2y agoI don't think I've personally ever been as disillusioned with technology more than with the recent rapid adoption of AI. I think AI is massively negative on the environment via increased energy consumption to train large LLMs, on creative endeavors via the auto-generated art, etc. on labor via automation of jobs through AI agents, or the degradation of the job market, on public communication via the proliferation of fake videos/news, on personal relationships via AI significant others, on child development through easier cheating, etc, etc. I get that there's a certain inevitability about technology. I also feel - and this could be a terrible analogy - that might have been what it was like to develop nuclear weapons. Better to develop and harness the technology for yourself if your competition is doing so too. That's the world and the market that we've constructed and it's rational to take advantage where you can. I certainly don't pretend to stand on any moral high ground about what I would do if given the opportunity to cash out from AI skills if I had them. But it all makes me very sad. I think I'll go read a book.
- smarm52 2y agoThe only thing I've found evidence to work to get actual responses is LazyApply.
- GreatLdisisp88 2y agoJob market isnt that rosy as government stats show. Just go to any foodbanks and see for yourself the queue. Remember no one audit government numbers. All the numbers are essentially "trust me bros".
- mtVessel 2y agoMy partner has been volunteering at a food pantry here in the US northeast since mid-2020. The numbers have remained fairly constant, aside from regular seasonality.
- rldjbpin 2y agohaving been through this stuff recently, i find that "speculative application" is a wasted opportunity for all this "AI" bs. if both sides are going to blindly spam with llm, why not only send one application and let the likes of workday match the profile with internal personnel requirements? being without a job during my search and getting little to no replies to hundreds of applications, often tens in the same company, drained the life out of me and i wish this to nobody. it seems like this will have a similar fate as filing for taxes in the states. the job platforms benefit from the on-paper engagement this situation produces.