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PaperclipPerfector  27d ago (text post)   29869 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 17, 2025

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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.

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