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> "Oh no, efficiency will be down and the execs' stock options might not be worth quite as much."

Translation: employees have to work with someone who is not pulling their weight (always unpleasant) and their own stock based compensation might not be worth quite as much (hurting the income of individual programmers) and the manager has to deal with the hassle of a termination process. So forgive me for having exactly zero sympathy with candidates trying to use AI slop to game the system.

Both sides of the process have real skin in the game, but the difference is that employers (and not employees) typically control the structure of the hiring process. So insofar as the hiring process becomes degenerate, that's something companies can do something about, but not something candidates can do much about (except in this case fail to follow their own obvious incentives).

I'm not exactly cheering for LLM-driven spam here, but the way applications work has incentivized candidates to be maximally spammy for a very long time.

Again:

The other side of this is that the candidate who the hiring managers ignore for not fitting their hopelessly-unrealistic criteria (and not having the good sense to have a family member or golfing buddy in the C-suite) is risking homelessness. This is not a hypothetical situation; even just here on HN I've seen many people post about dealing with that kind of problem for months or years at a time, let alone other sites.

This is not equivalent to having to work with people who aren't pulling their weight and having slightly lower stock-based compensation—which is, in nearly all cases, either on top of significant regular salary, or being given in such quantities, and to someone with so much existing wealth, that it basically doesn't matter.

Working with someone who's not pulling their weight and induces negative progress on a team is just demoralizing, no matter how much money you have or make. Working with a 1x or 10x engineer? How about working with a -10x engineer?

It's better than being unhoused, sure, but managers, faced with the challenges of firing someone, along with a demoralized team, aren't going to go "y'know what? it sucks being unhoused, lemme hire more bad employees" and loosen up hiring recs. We can discuss at length how terrible it is to be unhoused, but it's not going to change that basic fact.

And what about the other option? Not firing them?

What about trying to work with them to make them a better employee?

Sure, there are some who genuinely just want to take as much as they can and give as little as they can get away with, but they are, without a doubt, a tiny, tiny minority of people. By and large, people want to be able to contribute and do good work.

The problem is, the current system doesn't allow this. It says if you're not hitting the ground running day 1, you're a liability. It says no one will ever be trained on anything, so even if you know Java, PHP, and Kotlin, if you aren't also a several-year veteran of AWS, Kubernetes, and Agile, you have no chance. It says the one thing that matters is Line Go Up, always, and if we ever suspect you might not be contributing as much to Line Go Up as you could be—even if you're not actively making it go down—then you are a problem and need to be forcibly corrected or removed.

So instead of investing in a system where employees feel valued, and know that if they need to shift from one specialty to another, or come in without 100% of the skills expected of the position, they can take a little while and be trained to do what's needed, we treat people like things, and then justify it by saying they'll make everyone else's pay lower if they're allowed to stay.

>> "Oh no, efficiency will be down and the execs' stock options might not be worth quite as much."

> Translation: employees have to work with someone who is not pulling their weight (always unpleasant) and their own stock based compensation might not be worth quite as much (hurting the income of individual programmers) and the manager has to deal with the hassle of a termination process. So forgive me for having exactly zero sympathy with candidates trying to use AI slop to game the system.

Congratulations, you just got fooled by a cognitive trap! Your prize is getting to be mislead and getting to help mislead others!

Large organizations and other powerful interests are very good at playing games to direct blame away from themselves and direct harm towards sympathetic parties. It's one of the techniques they use to maintain their power and create space to do harmful things that advantage themselves.

In this case, you're getting fooled by having one layer of indirection. In this case, (A) the company sets the policies that cause the harm you're sympathetic to (e.g. putting employees under pressure they feel every bit of dead weight, neglecting things like reasonable training and on-boarding periods so people are "dead weight" if they aren't a perfect fit on day one) in addition to (B) the other policies they set (e.g. an unreasonable demand for a perfect fit) that make job searches a demoralizing slog. That way, you're mislead into blaming the people the company harms with (B) for the hard the company does with (A).

It's true that both sides of the arms race make things worse. But the thing is, at risk of sounding like a child: companies started it.

We've all heard the complaints, "why does this job make me submit my resume, and then fill out a form with all the same information on my resume??" and "why is this job listed as entry level when it requires 3 years of experience??", and "this job posting isn't even maintained, it only exists so someone can say they did due diligence before they hired their friend" -- these are all very valid complaints. And also a few of my complaints: why is every job posting super long, require a large amount of highly specific technologies that can easily be learned on-the-job, and also paradoxically really vague about the /actual/ checkboxes that they'll be using to screen out your resume? And what is the point of cover letters; what am I supposed to say on the cover letter that wouldn't be covered on my resume?

Companies have been doing this BS for many years. I don't blame people at all for adopting strategies which let them spam applications. I haven't even heard one coherent argument, from the hiring managers who claim to despise it, why spamming applications is supposed to be bad in the first place.

> So forgive me for having exactly zero sympathy for the companies that perpetuate this ugly arms race.

But companies have all the power so they should be able to make all the rules, and so we should all be sympathetic with them as they deal with the legitimate hardship of things not being perfectly in their favor.

Those excess humans just need to grow up and die already. /s