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PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   29762 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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From college to dating to jobs, no one in history has been rejected more than Gen Z

This is an interesting article about the trend of mass-applications that has become increasingly normalized across many areas of life. If you've applied for a job in the past decade or so, you'll know that the signal:noise ratio is very bad, and as such you're kind of expected to mass-apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs. Each job will get bombarded with something like 1000 applicants in the first few days, and while many of those applicants will be junk, there will probably be at least a few dozen high-quality candidates that you're competing with. This has led to companies becoming extremely picky. In my specific area of tech, its led to an expectation that you need to do dozens of hours of "leetcode", which are little toy problems that are ostensibly used to make sure you actually know how to program, but which actually do a terrible job at this because real programmers will usually be somewhat bad at these, while people who grind leetcode but know little else can do quite well. There's also a further expectation that you might be asked to do other ridiculous feats like have 8+ rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, and you might be ghosted at any point in this process, even after you've interviewed with real people. Heck, you might even be ghosted after you've received and accepted a formal job offer, then if you show up to work the company will just lie and say they have no idea who you are. While there's theoretically some recourse by suing for promissory estoppel, it's almost never worth the effort so it rarely happens. The accepted answer is "that's just part of the game now, swallow your pride and move on".

Dating, and to some extent college applications are also like this. Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face. While I think a little bit of rejection can be good to build resilience, I doubt humans are psychologically well-equipped to handle the barrage of rejection that's become commonplace. Getting rejected hurts even if it's just a small annoyance from not receiving a response. It makes you feel like you're being treated like garbage a little bit, which would almost certainly prompt some amount of nihilism after a while. It might also lead to some amount of risk aversion. I myself simply refuse to deal with online dating at all, which has dramatically limited my romantic options. But if dying alone is the price required to remove this nonsense from at least one aspect of my life, that's a deal I'd gladly take.

I graduated with a Masters in 2020.

I’m now 41 and still work retail.

I have 22 years of retail management experience.

The amount of no’s I’ve received is in the thousands.

I don’t even believe entry level positions exist - I’ve never seen one. No idea why I got a Masters.

My idea was that ‘ hey my experience and this degree will mean I’ll be making 6 figures in a few years. LOL

Applying for jobs is bad, but not that bad. When I was applying for my first real jobs in 2017-2018, I had about a 10% conversion rate to first-round interviews. Even if you have 1/10th of the level I had, you should still get several interviews per thousand applications, and that's pretty conservative. If you're not even managing that, there's a good chance there's something fundamentally wrong with the way you apply.

There’s clearly something off about me that prohibits me from finding a new career in some way … and possibly with the way I apply of course.

I’m just at a loss and stuck in retail for now.

It’s not literal Hell - I can probably be a store manager if a Dillards in 5 years and that’s six figures … but I just feel the need for more.

I wouldn't blame you for wanting more, as I've never heard retail to be a particularly wonderful sector to work in. There's probably a lot of that vague existential dread that you're "missing out" in some way when you've worked a job you don't want to for decades.

I don't know what sector you're applying to, but I'd be open to further conversation if you want tips applying to places, or for a second person to look over the resume you're sending. For the record, I work tech in a smallish DC financial lobbying firm.

No pressure to take me up on it or anything.

Some mad black Deleuzianism, arriving from 1993:

With the emergence of a market-driven integrated technoscience of control and communications comes the diffusion of electronically synthesized reality interfaces across the entire efferant and afferant surface of the Body. Having libidinally saturated the actually-existing channels of consumption, capital is overflowing into cybersex — sex with/through computers - in its relentless passage to the traumatic disorganization of the biological order. Eros dissolves definitively into its function as a subprogram of runaway Thanatos at the point that it unreservedly invests technical interfacing with digitally synthesized excitations. The mask capital exhibited to seduce eros was a pretension to ultimately resolve matters in relation to stimulation or unpleasure, but this has now fallen away, since cybersexuated capital cynically displays its program to replicate a tradable modulation of unpleasure, and thus its unsurpassable addiction to traumatic excitation.

Technocapital colonizes every aspect of human life, deterritoralizing all that is holy.

Gen Z enters a world where their humanity has been abstracted and previous social bonds and customs have been relentlessly mined for capital. The job market (like dating apps) operates within a libidinal economy: it is driven by desire, competition, and consumption of possibility. Just as cybersex is a market-saturated extreme of libidinal capitalism, the contemporary job hunt is saturated by hypercompetitive dynamics and the promise of a better two-sided match. Capital and desire become identified: the ideal job or partner is constantly promised but never realized, which makes the Molochian altar ever more appealing.

Strange. A few hours ago I was checking this thread in the phone and I swear there was a short and witty response wondering just how unique the historic experience of Gen Z is. By now it disappeared.

If it was mine, I deleted it because on second read I didn't feel like it added a whole lot to the conversation and was essentially navel-gazing. Here it was, just in case:

Need a quick vibe check on this. I don't know if I was reverse Born in Le Wrong Generation, but I feel like the world has always been like this. Or, rather, this is the only world I have ever known. But I'm saying this as someone who came of age in the late 2000s, and am what would be probably considered an oldhead by most youth.

Was I ahead of the awfulness curve? Or does intergenerational understanding really take decades to percolate upward?

It's funny, as I make this post I got an e-mail response from a job application telling me in automated corpospeak that, yes, my resume is being reviewed by an AI bot and yes, I will be ghosted if she doesn't like it.

I applied to this job not because I really need it, but because I am essentially a perfect fit that checks 14/15 boxes on their Preferred Qualifications wish list. Funny to think their unicorn candidate might not even get a screening call because they are too lazy to review resumes.

Or maybe it isn't that. Maybe they won't reach me because they are flooded with resumes that look just like mine, not because there are so many people like me out there, but because so many are using their own AI bot to generate the perfect resume for every job in a 100 mile radius and aren't particularly concerned if they're full of lies.

What a horrifying tragedy of the commons. While it's always been horrible, I'll agree that things have clearly gotten worse. Somethings gotta give. Regulation, or something. In the meantime, maybe this is a good indicator that it's time to abandon any remaining vestige of K-selected application strategy, no matter how promising the outlook.

Somethings gotta give. Regulation, or something.

Why do you say this? I mean, I wish it would, but why do you think someone is coming to save us?

I suppose that things could get worse than I could (or would want to) imagine before they get better, but at some point things get so pathological that they outright stop working. There are a lot of very powerful parties that have a strong interest in things actually working (both employers and employees alike) and I don't see a whole lot of strong beneficiaries of dysfunction that could resist such motion. It's just that the two major parties who have an interest in the system working well have a typically adversarial relationship, and the problem hasn't yet gotten big enough for them to set aside their differences.

But eventually it will.

It's really only dysfunctional for employees, who have to spend the effort applying to dozens or hundreds of jobs filled with broken interfaces and astrology quizzes. For employers everything's working fairly well, or at least it's not materially worse than it's ever been. It costs next to nothing for them to filter out more candidates, especially if the process is partially automated.

No, it's broken from both sides. Employees are presented with job listings that are mostly junk, either pure junk (no real job behind them) or inappropriate jobs without enough information to determine that. Employers get resumes which are crap or pure lies. Both sides employ filters, but the amount of junk is so high, the amount of information easily available so low, and the filter-makers so incompetent that the filters have low selectivity and sensitivity.

The basic problem is just that the market is too big.

I really don't see why employers would see that as a big problem. Filtering out junk is not expensive or hard. ATS exists, and this is one of the tasks HR uses to justify its existence. Big companies like being able to grab talent from all over the world.

Filtering out junk is not expensive or hard.

Of course it is.

ATS exists, and this is one of the tasks HR uses to justify its existence.

Yes, but it doesn't work very well. You've got a job. You post it somewhere. You get 10,000 applicants. 10 of them are good, the rest are bad. You need to cut that somehow using very cheap filters. Say you get your cheap filters to cut you to 100 applicants... but unfortunately while they've filtered out over 98% of the junk, they've also filtered out all the good applicants.

Big companies like being able to grab talent from all over the world.

Grabbing talent from all over the world exposes them to junk from all over the world.

As someone who has gotten a first-hand glimpse into certain hiring pipelines, I'm not at all convinced this is the case. Resume stuffing and spamming seems to be a serious issue, one that has even managed to waste some of my non-HR time, and while I didn't get to see what it was like before, it's difficult to imagine that GPT et al hasn't made it worse. I think hiring agents are turning to AI bots for a reason.

I can buy that things have gotten worse faster for job seekers, but I think that ultimately only delays the inevitable. Like any market, while the buyer and seller have a large adversarial component to their relationship, it's ultimate a cooperative exercise because they both want the deal to close. If one party is so disadvantaged that they begin to drop out, both parties lose.

But sure, that doesn't mean that whatever new equilibrium asserts itself has to be a good one. Perhaps the endgame really is AI agents screeching at each other, producing a barely functional market with a large, profiteering new middle man. Maybe that reality is already here, and I'm an old man who needs to get with the times.

I've considered feeding Claude an omnibus resume with all reasonably delineated units of experience on it, and asking to to pare that down for individual listings. But I'm honestly afraid that might be too honest for today's meta, and I'm nowhere near desperate enough for new employment for change that radical.

But I'm saying this as someone who came of age in the late 2000s, and am what would be probably considered an oldhead by most youth.

I'd say the situation has essentially been like this since 2008, yes. Maybe the period between 2015-2019 was slightly better.

My memory of this is that the general feeling was that, yeah, things are really bad right now because of the financial crisis, but things will recover and go back to normal. Then they never did.

Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face.

Worse, "ghosting" has become ubiquitous in dating and employment, so doors aren't even being slammed. They just disappear without feedback.

Worse, they often don't even disappear. Sometimes that job keeps getting re-posted every week for another year.

You ring the doorbell and absolutely nothing happens. Nobody answers. The door just continues floating there.

The reason(s) for this is even worse.

If you can document that you posted a public job notice, you can demonstrate to the Feds that you are "equal opportunity" employer - even when you wanted the job to go to a specific friend-of-an-employee already. Seriously, this is how it works.

Part of it is also used by large public corporations to send noise to hedge funds. Hedge funds will scrape job postings as a rough proxy for expected hiring (and, therefore, demand) for certain companies. A bunch of ghost jobs can confuse the HF algorithm.

This isn't new.

Look, commenting about jobs- I freely acknowledge that tech jobs might just be uniquely ridiculous. But for most normal jobs you apply and then call the company and check up on it, and then if the interview doesn’t raise any red flags and you have the basic qualifications they’re looking for, you’re hired. The zoomers seem to have forgotten that second step. As with most things, they should listen to their elders born before jet fuel melted steel beams and they’d do fine.

n=1 Within the last 5 years my wife walked into a firm that she thought looked interesting, no "We're hiring" sign, zero experience in the industry, just with a portfolio showing she was artistic, and got a job.

Experienced Tech Bro checking in.

Leet code grinding and blind resume application have been losing propositions for years. This isn't new info. The career / job strategy median is:

  • Recruit hard out of undergrad. The good news is you're cheap and a degree from a "good" program will probably get you an offer. Your whole job is to learn how XYZ corp does their development / product roadmapping etc.
  • 2 - 4 years in, you lateral. You DO NOT do this with blind resume flinging. You use your network of friends (you've been making those, haven't you) to figure out who is hiring and which one of your friends has the relative clout to get your resume in front of a decision maker.
  • (Option B after undergrad) Do the startup thing. Whole other world, but it's an option, at least.
  • (Option C) Pivot to a tech adjacent role; solutions architect, tech sales / sales engineering, technical PM. The good news here is that networking is built into your job. If you're good at your job, you're good at networking and the inertia supports itself for a while. This isn't a guarantee to wealth, but you'll never be jobless.
  • If you want to stay hard on the engineering track, you job hop as much as you want to build a big salary / options. Really, however, you need to start creating some sort of public portfolio. This used to mean just having a good GitHub profiler with some pet projects. No longer. You need to be involved in some sort of ongoing and pretty large scale open source project etc. The idea is that you're creating true "subject matter expertise" in some niche.
  • Now you're getting headhunted for that expertise. Well funded startups, big time roles at FFANGs etc.

The keen eyed among you will detect something here; a tech career is now much like any other professional career; you have to network and you have to develop some sort of specific edge, usually born of genuine interest and passion in a niche area. The era of "Yes, I can sling code pretty good" is over. That was 2005 - 2015, give or take a two years in either direction.

I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story. I can remember when I was in High School and everyone wanted a job at the local hardware store because it paid really well and wasn't that difficult if you had some level of real interest in, well, hardware stores. This being commonly known, kids from all over the county would stop by to drop off their resumes everyday. How many do you think were called back and interviewed?

Luckily for me, the owner's son happened to be in my grade and we were in the same Geometry class.

I had a really good summer working at the hardware store.

Don't have much commentary on the rest of the bullets at the moment, but I'd like to reemphasize the first bullet point for any young person, whether out of undergrad, masters, MBA, or PhD, and regardless of industry beyond tech.

There's a zero'th bullet point, potentially negative n'th bullet point. If you're an undergrad, you already should be grinding for (summer) internships. Within tech or tech-adjacent, this could mean leetcode-maxing.

All the better if you can secure an internship between your junior and senior year, or sophomore and junior year, at a prestigious firm. Jobs are like women: It's much easier to get another one when you already have, or demonstratively have had, an attractive one or more.

I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story. I can remember when I was in High School and everyone wanted a job at the local hardware store because it paid really well and wasn't that difficult if you had some level of real interest in, well, hardware stores

And now there are no kids working at the local hardware store, because the local hardware store ran out of business and got outcompeted by a big box that employs illegal immigrants for below-minimum wage. If you don't think the current generation has it worse I simply do not believe you have an accurate understanding of the world as it currently exists. I'm not Gen Z and while I could tell that I had fewer opportunities and conditions were worse compared to my parents, the employment market they're graduating into is fucking dire. Every single public-facing job I interact with that was previously done by a highschool kid is now done by an Indian adult.

I think the problem is just elite (or aspirant-upper-middle-class) overproduction. Gen Z'ers could actually have a material life better than their past equivalents by working a menial or unskilled job, the problem is that such a high proportion of the youth would find that insultingly low-status. That's not to assign blame, the decline of towns and cultural messaging has produced this state of affairs, but it's also worth noting that the internet makes discontent more visible and self-sustaining.

I'd expect big box stores to be much less likely to employ illegal immigrants. Home Depot has an HR department and a legal department. Bob's Hardware has neither.

I see plenty of zoomers working cash registers in my area. Fully one third of people in my county are Asian or Indian.

I'd expect big box stores to be much less likely to employ illegal immigrants.

I freely admit to ignorance on this front - I'd heard multiple stories about the employment of illegal immigrants by larger companies, especially in hardware and convenience stores. I was under the impression that a HR department would actively encourage the employment of illegals given the policies of the Biden/Obama/Bush regimes, but if I'm wrong I'll accept that.

I see plenty of zoomers working cash registers in my area.

I don't - but this is just an anecdote, and I don't think this sort of thing would be evenly distributed. There's a decent chance that my area is just low in children and high in Indians, but I just can't accept that the vast increase in the number of Indians working low-paid jobs hasn't had an impact on the hiring market for the young people who used to work those positions.

I haven't heard about any overabundance of Indian illegal immigrants-- I'd wager they're legal (at least, relatively speaking) working on student visas or brought over as dependents/relatives of indians that went from h1bs to green cards.

Big businesses pay for illegal immigrants, but my understanding is that it's indirect-- they'll hire a contractor that uses illegal labor rather than hiring them directly.

  • a tech career is now much like any other professional career; you have to network and you have to develop some sort of specific edge, usually born of genuine interest and passion in a niche area. The era of "Yes, I can sling code pretty good" is over. That was 2005 - 2015, give or take a two years in either direction.

  • I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story

I'd say there's a contradiction here.

Yes, that's the tech BRO track. If you're in tech and not a bro, you won't be pivoting to a tech-adjacent role, you won't be schmoozing with people to get a job, and it will be VERY unlikely to do the startup thing because you probably won't know the right people (some do, by accident). But it's always been easy for the bro types.

Me: "Here's my experience in the field"

You: "I'm not you, so this doesn't help me"

.... I don't know what I can do for you? I'm trying to relate my experience and perspective. I'm not trying to craft a career strategy for randos on the internet.

I've got plenty of experience in the field. Advice like yours is evergreen. It's not wrong. But it only works for a certain type of person (who are somewhat rare among tech people, though less so than they used to be). Consider it the other way -- if the best way to get ahead as a sales bro involved writing code, and most sales bros couldn't write a line of code to save their life, would advice to follow that best way be useful, in general?

Education is more like this than not -- I've gotten about a third of the jobs that I've applied for. They do make people enter all their credentials into an online application with no chance to autofill, and ask for written letters of recommendation, often from one's current principal, before even scheduling interviews, though. It's also accepted to substitute teach in a school district someone wants to work in until they offer a permanent job.

It doesn't help to call and "check up," though. I suspect it might annoy the people involved, and make them less likely to hire, actually.

Well yeah, big institutions(like what teachers generally work for) do not have a way to get your resume directly in front of a hiring manager. But I’ve gotten trade jobs for billion dollar companies by calling to check up and holding through boss’s secretaries to get a ‘oh, we’re looking for someone who knows x, y, z, since you already know x and y come in for an interview and we’ll discuss training you for z- I’ll talk to hr about fishing your resume out of the bottom of the pile’.

Education loves its bureaucracy so I’m not surprised there’s no way to short circuit. My friends that work as CPA’s and lawyers know this trick, though.

Yeah there are a bunch of jobs where hiring works the "normal" way. I work at an IP litigation firm. If someone emails me their resume I look at it to see if they meet the qualifications we're looking for. If they do I circulate it to the other partners and recommend an interview. Then we have an interview and if we like the person we hire them.

But for most normal jobs you apply and then call the company and check up on it, and then if the interview doesn’t raise any red flags and you have the basic qualifications they’re looking for, you’re hired.

I’m not sure what type of jobs you’re referring to here, but I can confidently say that this is not how the hiring process works at all at my job, which is an extremely standard-issue white-collar/pink-collar corporate call center position. We have a whole HR/recruiting edifice to receive, sort, and filter out applications, and our company also does background checks. If an applicant called our HR department to “check in” at any point during this process, it would not make any difference in expediting any stage of the process. If the applicant got any response at all from our recruiting team, it would almost certainly be a generic “your application is still under review, please wait to hear back from our team with an update” email. Maybe you and I have very different ideas about what constitutes a “normal job”.

Yeah, I work at a generic-ish large-ish company, and there is literally zero way - including being an internal applicant and stopping by the hiring manager's desk! - to get your resume moved in front of them quicker or to jump the line.

This is true, but it’s also true that calling your recruiters to check up on status often does make a difference, and usually expedites the entire process. As anyone who has ever worked in any large company, pinging people regularly to update their status and nudge them towards doing or accelerating the work they owe you, is in fact a significant part of your work, and does make a difference. Recruiters/HR is no different, and pushing them does work.

I was about to say. While I'd love for what he's saying to be true, this has not been my experience for over a good decade - both in the realm of job searching as well as helping my boss sift through resumes and interview applicants.

Even a decade ago, job search was a depressing affair of constant spamming of resumes and applications to employment agencies that always acted as a third party for the actual company trying to fill the position.

From what I've seen, "normal" jobs like big-company retail are even worse. They take thousands of candidates for tens of jobs, make them take various personality tests intended to tell if you have the proper attitude (the typical format has various questions where you answer from Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree... and the correct answer is ALWAYS Strongly Agree or Strongly Disagree), then ghost all the losers.

I applied to one recently that had a long list of adjectives, like basically any adjective you could use to describe a person. There were hundreds, maybe a thousand, and you had to mark all the ones that describe you. From "industrious" and "punctual" to "gregarious" and "sanguine", it was ridiculous.

I'd be curious about the job. It almost functions as a test of some combination of IQ plus perseverance: if you mark all the good words, you get maximum points. You can do this faster if you're smarter, but can make up for it with enough perseverance. Not altogether unlike work itself.

Though, if I really wanted the job and had this as a step, I'd probably just write a script for it.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting too, I wavered on what they might be looking for. I thought maybe marking all the positive words would be a strike against me, so I only picked like a five or six kinda similar ones, like "industrious" and stuff. I didn't get the job, but I don't know why or what would have been better.

Going by the people I've known who want to work retail between getting a college degree and a serious job, Starbucks and Trader Joes are both fine with the trade off of higher turn over, but smarter, more interesting employees, and will give an immediate interview. Other companies don't necessarily respond at all. I suppose these are simply different business strategies?

I'm asking because I'd love to be in an industry that's more normal than tech: what are normal jobs that have that hiring routine, in your experience? Are we talking like working in a construction site, being a teacher, being a librarian, working as an accountant, all of the above?

  • CPA, Lawyer, etc for a medium sized firm rather than a big one

  • Outside sales of any description

  • Blue collar work that isn’t for a giant institution

  • Functionally all trades jobs

  • IT for small to medium sized non-tech companies

  • Secretarial or other pink collar work for non-giant companies

Being a teacher, librarian, nurse etc would probably be an exception(because government/giant institution). Finance and tech definitely are(because high compensation and hiring cycles that don’t correspond to the needs of the business).

Most law firms hire in the way hydroacetylene describes.

You know, for all the many downsides to a career in medicine, I'm profoundly grateful that I haven't had to scrabble, beg and apply scattershot to job offers as if I was hunting a goose that laid golden eggs with a shotgun.

I'm probably just lucky. The job market for fresh grads, even those with an MBBS, is tight in both India and the UK. Arguably worse for the latter, due to both a massive increase in med school enrollment without a concomitant increase in higher training positions, as well as an influx of international doctors who find even the grim conditions there an upgrade. That same glut hasn't struck the higher levels of job roles, because it's far harder and more time consuming to manufacture a consultant or specialist.

In India, I think I was batting over 90% acceptance rates for all the jobs I applied for. The one place that didn't take me reached out a few months later asking if I was still looking (I wasn't). Maybe it was a CV that had proper grammar and the perfect degree of self-aggrandizement to inflate limited (at the time) work experience. Maybe it was the fact that I come across as friendly, earnest and even painfully polite and respectful. It might just have been dumb luck.

In the UK, I took one glance at the ballache that was applying to jobs when all you've got on your CV was a pass on the PLABs and a GMC number, and opted to not really bother. This was made far easier by the fact that psych training only considered scores in competitive exams, instead of (((holistic factors))).

Come to think of it, even applying for med school in India never required you to scrape and beg. You sat the exam, and you either beat out the millions of hopeful aspirants, or you tightened your belt and hoped for better luck next year.

That's what matters, IMO. If you have a robust grading system that winnows the chaff straight from the get go, employers can be far more complacent about the quality of potential employees. It all boils down to supply and demand. If there's an oversupply of candidates, or even the impression of too much choice (to a first approximation, the number of single men equals that of single women), then you get the party with the power imbalance in their favor playing hard to get.

The only other plausible solution to this is some kind of costly signal, such as educational qualifications, or having a girlfriend (while seemingly perverse before you actually think about it, taken men elicit far more interest from the opposite sex).

Of course, the old saws like Leetcode are facing rapid annihilation from people using AI to jump hurdles for them. The only real solution, for SWEs, would be to look at real projects, or have in-person and monitored interviews.

Its a point I've made before.

Power law distributions rule EVERYTHING around you if you're younger and haven't had decades of time to cement your status and build a pile of wealth. And yes, this has almost always been true, but now its simply a known fact of life for the Zoomers. Its the air they breathe, the water they swim in. Every activity they could possibly participate in is subject to a panopticon of algorithms that will rank their performance and often publish it for easy observation, and they are surrounded by peers who are competing as hard as possible to not be left behind.

Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.

And this means they're pretty much attuned to the Molochian incentives over their entire lives, and this thus sets their expectations for how the rest of their lives will turn out (spoiler: not great unless they get rich enough to just opt out of the race).

Yes, Algorithms have always been there, but now its more legible than ever. Or, ironically, less legible since most places keep their algos as black boxes. Its not like you can just ask "Why didn't you hire me?" "Oh, I don't like your tattoos/lack of experience/general attitude." Its always a nonspecific dismissal that even they can't explain.

So they're told to suck it up and try harder, keep going until they get a yes, etc. etc., but they're missing the 'feedback' part that might help them zero in on why they're failing and getting rejected. And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

One hopeful use case for AI if it does not end all our problems at once (we're all dead, or its utopia) is it should be extremely good at helping match people with positions that work best for them given their preferences and the other party's needs. An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which, AND given constructive feedback as to why certain applicants aren't suitable or what they can do to improve. Same for dating, in theory, although the thought of AI mediated dating/mating disgusts me on a visceral level. Hmm.

Algorithms have ruled everything the Gen Zers have done since they were young, from Video Games to Dating to School to Jobs.

Once again, I find myself quoting:

“The target of the Jihad was a machine-attitude as much as the machines," Leto said. "Humans had set those machines to usurp our sense of beauty, our necessary selfdom out of which we make living judgments. Naturally, the machines were destroyed.”

And this:

And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

reminds me of the gritty cyberpunk dystopia Tyler Cowen forecasts our civilization becoming in Average is Over.

And I think the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

I think @KulakRevolt had a good essay related to this. I can't find it right now, but he argued that in the past, most men were pretty happy to see increased military spending because it meant jobs. Relatively good jobs that an average man could get, no experience or credentials necessary. Nowadays we tend to think there's a tradeoff between "guns or butter" where increased military spending means less money available for all the nice stuff. But the more common pattern is the opposite- war opens up opportunities, while longtime peace creates a glut of men with no clear role in society. If some of them die in a war, that just creates even more demand for young men.

If some of them die in a war, that just creates even more demand for young men.

Kind of like the idea that the Black Plague was a good thing for the peasantry (that survived)?

Yeah. It's the same Malthusian logic- the population grows faster than the amount of available wealth. And even if the population is shrinking, the wealth is also getting concentrated into fewer and fewer hands unless the government steps in.

the hard truth is just that everyone is TRYING to capture the top 20% performers across the board, so anyone not in the top 20% performance bracket for any given category is going to be left out, and very confused as to what their real options are.

It's a actually not that bad. I can't find the original article (which I read at least ten years ago), but it's easily shown that if every company hires the ""top 20%"" of their applicant pool then much more than the top 20% of the actual labor force in that sector is employed.

Of course, but it doesn't leave those getting rejected with much insight into what they could do better.

While true, I don't think there was ever a time when an employer would tell you how you could be a better candidate. If nothing else it's probably covered in spooky liabilities, at least if you are a lawyer.

You can't even ask, is the thing.

Because the people doing the hiring probably don't even know, or would rather not explain "the computer told us no."

An effective 'job hunt' AI could check all available jobs against all available applicants and sort out which are best suited to which,

Same for dating, in theory

The problem - a little more so in the case of dating, but not much - is that people/employers don't know what they want. Some might think they do, but they don't.

In the end, it's all vibes. "They know it then they see it", and they especially know what they don't want when they see it.

The AI won't help with that, at least not until it has a good training set of people who vibed in the past.

I suspect that training an AI that can do this is far simpler than you'd assume on the face of it.

And it doesn't have to be THAT good to beat the current system as described.

I'd be a tad more worried about how people might try to aggressively 'jailbreak' the thing to improve their chances.

My assumption is that an AI would be extremely good at this - if it had the training data. Far better than a person could be without meeting the candidate.

The problem is the training data. I haven't gone on nearly enough good and bad dates to show the AI what I like and what I don't like. So I can't let the AI choose my wife. Yet I knew I had found her when I first met her.

Given that a large percentage of relationships now occur in large part via text, ignoring privacy concerns it's easy to feed the texts I sent to my wife in the first six months of our relationship and then assign a value to our marriage, and so on across thousands of examples until they can look at your texts with your gf and determine if you should get married.

Don Draper: Arranged marriages, but arranged by a computer instead of parents who love you.

"Our Super Yenta, with a measured IQ of over 9000, has studied over 200,000 successful relationships and over 300,000 unsuccessful relationships, in order to determine what subtle factors in communication can indicate relationship compatibility. Super Yenta has no ulterior motives: she doesn't want to hook you up with her niece, she's a computer without feelings that rates relationships only on objective criteria discerned from training data."

Interesting, that's not my experience at all! I've had good "text game" with many women who turned out to be bad dates, or who turned out to be good dates but absolutely not wife material.

In my experience, there's absolutely no way around meeting and talking/interacting if you want to know if you have potential. The AI would need to watch those meetings, and be trained on data like that.

I'm suggesting that the AI will likely pick up on patterns you and I don't, subtleties that predict relationship outcomes more reliably than the participants themselves.

The average single has zero training examples of what a text conversation looks like in a relationship that leads to marriage. At best, they may be able to conference with a few friends who may have experience of one text conversation they lead to marriage who may be willing to read a few messages and render an opinion. A hypothetical YentaGPT could trivially review months of messaging and compare it to thousands of examples of successful and unsuccessful relationships.

Just as a great baseball coach can judge a player from how they grip the bat, a great relationship coach could judge from a text conversation.

From your data set though the AI wouldn't be looking at how the player grips the bat, but how the player writes about gripping the bat, if he does at all, or how he texts about the game, etc. I believe @pbmonster 's point is that while "text game" may be one data point (and as far as it might get one in the proverbial door, an important one) but it doesn't read body language (gripping the bat), tone of voice, eye contact, scent, speed of talking, whether you shake your knee up and down, how she holds her hair over one shoulder, etc etc. To say nothing of moments when the two of you laugh at the same thing, or other, small but deep indicators that may not be very legible in text interactions.

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Strange. Gen Z has grown up with historically low levels of unemployment, at least in America. Although I think that changed in the last two years, due to rising interest rates. Is this mass application thing due to people already at jobs trying to find better ones to switch to?

There's certainly been low unemployment for the most part, but that's not the issue (though it could exacerbate things if unemployment spiked). It's the fact that the internet has made applying for things (jobs, dating, schools) so much easier, which led to a proliferation of applications. But applications are mostly a zero-sum game, so employers, schools, etc. have responded by ratcheting up expectations.

This could theoretically be solved if the government cracked down on the most abusive practices (like ghosting after a formal job offer) and instituted a well-designed tax to counteract application spam, but that would probably be as unpopular as congestion pricing, so I doubt it would pass in our populist-addled age.

It's the fact that the internet has made applying for things (jobs, dating, schools) so much easier, which led to a proliferation of applications. But applications are mostly a zero-sum game, so employers, schools, etc. have responded by ratcheting up expectations.

Yes, fully agree. While macroeconomic and cultural changes leading to unemployment and underemployment are real, the big factor I see underlying this whole conversation is that online applications make it possible for 15,000 people to apply for a job, which was never possible before. You can't treat 15,000 people respectfully and humanely. And the surplus of choices creates a sense of decision paralysis, dulling any ability to reason through options while diluting any sense of personal responsibility. There's a reason making most decisions starts by creating a shortlist.

That's why online dating is collapsing, too: a surplus of options leads to a sense of paralysis and lack of moral responsibility. Where before someone would be restricted to the local fare, now someone can see everyone around, and reach out with almost no effort. And what is offered with no effort can be rejected with no effort.

As always, technology is introduced as a liberating option but quickly transmutates into a crushing obligation. The market will extract all value, and will trample over any barrier in order to obtain it.

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