punkbit

Sometimes I wonder if the recruitment process has become a way for HR and HM to appear busy rather than actually hire people? I hear the same stories, over and over again, experienced myself. For example, the team is too busy, everyone's in the offsite, X gone on holiday, its our fault the team needs to realign, the role is suddenly frozen, etc. Candidates could be enjoying their time instead of wasting their lives like that. I know it seems that this case is fine because the rejection was immediate, but if you write in the forms manually you can easily waste 1 hour per application. Should be ilegal!

It'll work out, keep going!

Great! But "We do not currently have any open jobs. Please check back later."

Location: London (UK)

Remote: Yes (Remote/Hybrid depending on location)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Primarily Typescript, React, Bash, GitHub Actions

Résumé/CV: https://punkbit.com/docs/cv-punkbit-helder-oliveira.20260713...

Email: info (at) punkbit (dot) com

I'm a Product Engineer and a creative based in London. I’ve built full-stack applications across web, mobile, blockchain and embedded platforms. My client-side work includes React, Electron, Roku’s Scenegraph, and native iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI, always with a strong focus on UX and design-first thinking. On the service-side, I’ve worked with traditional service hosting, containers, and serverless, including (but not limited to) AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Workers, CloudFormation, SAM CLI, nodejs, bunjs, MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, grpc, Redis, Docker, nginx, and a few legacy tools best left unnamed (yes, including CodeIgniter and ftp).

I’ve also developed developer tools like CLIs and SDKs, primarily Typescript/JavaScript land, and have written code in systems languages such as Rust and Zig.

I care about great UX, developer experience, documentation, rapid iteration and automating workflows with CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Bash scripts, etc).

Also familiar with modern development practices by leveraging coding agents, such as opencode, claude and open-weight models as I care about cost. To iterate quickly, I rely on an inference provider such as Fireworks.

Want to know more? https://punkbit.com

I have similar experiences! The most recent was during a private beta in a discord channel. Past, includes Hacker News and even Youtube comments.

The most challenging experience, was to locate a friend from school in the 90s. He didn't have any social media or online presence. I put some effort and found out a book he has published, one of his childhood dreams. The book was released by a small publisher...

Thinking that I've got at least 18 years of professional experience, and I've had my own website for years (maybe a different domain a decade back), with my work, experience and email address publicly available. With a few keystrokes, I can still find genuine conversations I had with people 15 years ago and if I want message them.

Of course that not everyone keeps the same email address, and plenty of companies disappear. But if you're genuinely interested in finding someone, it's surprisingly easy to find them.

Sometimes I wonder if my life would be different if I'd had a LinkedIn account. Maybe someone would have reached out 15, 10 or even 5 years ago, especially when some of my skills were in demand! Not everyone has access to the same opportunities, so maybe I shoot myself on the foot. But I remember the times I had a lot of recruiters contacting, sometimes offering free lunch, dinner or beer. Felt special! Maybe that's why I didn't want to have a Linkedin account. I was happy focusing, working, had my humble salary just enough to pay the bills. Or, I didn't know I could get paid much more...

But isn't it strange how we pretend to care about people, while so much of what we actually care about is visibility, connections, status and what someone can offer us? We've become worse at remembering people for who they are, what they're good at, or the conversations we once had with them. Preferring to look for exaggerated achievements, job titles, ghost jobs in fake companies, navigating a horrible looking website. Sort of a 1999 amazon.

Everyone complains, but few people are willing to leave it, because they know what happens when you disappear...

We're just replaceable profiles in the noise, and very few people will put in the effort to look beyond all the BS!

That’s what most people don’t seem to understand, this is wasting peoples life’s. It’s insanity.

I agree, it should be ilegal!

Interviews nowadays are one way. It’s almost like hiring managers want to appear busy at their work places and the rest of us are there to entertain them. A sort of humiliation ritual. For example, now they like to ask “Tell me about exceptional work you’ve done, that nobody else could do it?”.

They've highlighted one of the reasons why some or many Linkedin profiles are fantasy

This is such a good point!

I think that OpenRouter's goal is to have the user pick the model, so there's manual configuration for the user control and cost benefit. Maybe you meant OpenCode Zen? But let's be honest, "AI" is definitely incredible, not "hilarious", or "so bad".

Modern witch hunt, and we shouldn’t deny it! Keep downvoting as much as you want.

RIP

I was about to post this too! Bridge Kids is one of my favourite indie shows.

YouTube’s team is completely useless.

Three really good points. Specially the third one. Not sure why HN readers are downvoting you…

The swe/product position returns “The job you requested was not found”

Location: London (UK)

Remote: Yes (Remote/Hybrid depending on location)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Primarily Typescript, React, Bash, GitHub Actions

Résumé/CV: https://punkbit.com/docs/cv-punkbit-helder-oliveira.20260713...

Email: info (at) punkbit (dot) com

I'm a Product Engineer and a creative based in London. I’ve built full-stack applications across web, mobile, blockchain and embedded platforms. My client-side work includes React, Electron, Roku’s Scenegraph, and native iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI, always with a strong focus on UX and design-first thinking. On the service-side, I’ve worked with traditional service hosting, containers, and serverless, including (but not limited to) AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Workers, CloudFormation, SAM CLI, nodejs, bunjs, MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, grpc, Redis, Docker, nginx, and a few legacy tools best left unnamed (yes, including CodeIgniter and ftp).

I’ve also developed developer tools like CLIs and SDKs, primarily Typescript/JavaScript land, and have written code in systems languages such as Rust and Zig.

I care about great UX, developer experience, documentation, rapid iteration and automating workflows with CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Bash scripts, etc).

Also familiar with modern development practices by leveraging coding agents, such as pi, opencode, claude and LLM, including kimi over fireworks inference.

Want to know more? https://punkbit.com

paywall article

I enjoyed reading this article and learned a lot from it.

Lately I’ve been writing on paper again, sharpening pencils and slowing down. It helps me stay closer to my own thoughts and to a more human pace.

A pencil is just a tool too, but a very unique one. It disappears if we abuse it, leaving only the traces of our existence.

That’s true! Naysayers keep mentioning it’s due to over hiring during Covid. I’d say it’s AI investment related and AI replacing a lot of software needs. Plus, people seem to use just a couple applications or platforms nowadays.

C’mon! So, when HR manages to get real candidates, why do we have to go through 8 stage of interviews that take months? It’s humiliating.

Imagine spending 6 to 8 hours a day looking for opportunities and nothing for 1, 2 years. What are people supposed to do?

Yes, got contract work and got a couple offers too. In the past, hired developers from the list, as a hiring manager in a previous company. Overall, it’s quite hard to predict but better than nothing!

Location: London (UK)

Remote: Yes (Remote/Hybrid depending on location)

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Primarily Typescript, React, Bash, GitHub Actions

Résumé/CV: https://punkbit.com/docs/cv-punkbit-helder-oliveira.20260417...

Email: info (at) punkbit (dot) com

I'm a Product Engineer and a creative based in London. I’ve built full-stack applications across web, mobile, blockchain and embedded platforms. My client-side work includes React, Electron, Roku’s Scenegraph, and native iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI, always with a strong focus on UX and design-first thinking. On the service-side, I’ve worked with traditional service hosting, containers, and serverless, including (but not limited to) AWS, GCP, Cloudflare, Workers, CloudFormation, SAM CLI, nodejs, bunjs, MySQL, Postgres, NoSQL, grpc, Redis, Docker, nginx, and a few legacy tools best left unnamed (yes, including CodeIgniter and ftp).

I’ve also developed developer tools like CLIs and SDKs, primarily Typescript/JavaScript land, and have written code in systems languages such as Rust and Zig.

I care about clean code, great UX, developer experience, documentation, rapid iteration and automating workflows with CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Bash scripts, etc).

Also familiar with modern development practices by leveraging coding agents, such as pi, opencode, claude and LLM, including kimi over fireworks inference.

Want to know more? https://punkbit.com

Would they be the same person? I'd risk sounding ignorant and say they wouldn't. They could be fed the same food and knowledge, but what shapes them is every random factor encountered in the real world. How would they react when reading or hearing about all the hate they are guilty of without ever participating in it? It's not their lived experience.

Are you suggesting using AI/Agents to apply for roles?

This is actually impressive. If it can output each frame as layers, even more.

Sadly, some people believe that Generative AI output is the same; I find it very hard to watch and extremely cringe. I did see some good examples, but still not the same type of quality. For untrained eyes, all look the same, but I'm definitely not that type of person and very supportive of proper craftsmanship. You can see this same thing happening in software engineering and product design.

Finally someone else notices it!

Job candidates keep facing a lot of hurdles, including scams, Trojan horses like the one presented here, ghosting, wasting candidates' time, nepotism, etc. As a candidate you can easily spend more than 8 hours a day looking for opportunities, switching stacks, studying, doing take-home projects, etc, for absolutely nothing. Life is precious and shouldn't be burned like that!