A lot of it is spam and people who clearly are using AI to fill in our form. One applicant didn’t even bother to remove “ChatGPT:” from the answer.
Of the remaining applicants I do feel that even those with years of experience at big companies are kind of hothouse flowers. They are skilled at using complex and costly frameworks, but they are often missing what I used to think of as the basics.
A lot of those frameworks are themselves ZIRPs! I kind of think the current generation has been cheated a bit. If I were starting out today I don’t know how I would have learned anything.
We had a candidate who detailed some of their achievements at their previous employer, things like “I got this third party service to feed their logs into that third party service”. And they are not wrong, this was a titanic effort and they had to navigate complex change procedures to get it done. But… this isn’t what I’m hiring for.
Candidates are also under a lot of pressure. I read an application the other day which was clearly human-written, but they gave two or three word answers to essay questions. The answers were actually correct, just not with the kind of detail we wanted. But I imagine that we were one of ten applications the guy filled out that day. In this environment I don’t know how much time I can legitimately expect a candidate to spend on us.