The best way to stand out (for me) is a real application not written with AI. Everyone uses AI now and it all sounds the same. Express your honest enthusiasm for joining the company/mission in the cover letter (maybe 20% of applicants submit a cover letter, and a smaller fraction of that was written by real people, and smaller fraction of that gives authentic enthusiastic vibes). Use your real voice in your writing. I give the AI applicants a chance if their resume makes sense, but it's a minefield.

I just can’t muster honest enthusiasm for all the companies/missions to which I must apply to get even a call from their internal recruiter. I have enthusiasm for creating viable, efficient, maintainable software. I can adapt those skills to the mission du jour. But apparently, that’s not sufficient - if it were, my 30yrs of experience would get me hired.

If, by chance, a company or mission are reprehensible to me, I just won’t apply. If I’ve applied, I’m certainly willing to apply my skills to your project.

We are coders, if we like the project/technology and the team is fun, of course we will be happy to do our job well.

On the other hand, what does the mission matter if you are unqualified and can't solve the problems at hand.

Yes, a good mission is always a plus, but most capable coders code because the problem/implementation is interesting. They won't magically code better if the code is intended to be used for some Earth-saving purpose.

And this is the problem, if I am hiring for a startup or in my case green field initiatives, I don’t need just “coders”. I need people who understand the business and can give prescriptive insights and deal with the ambiguity that comes with any green field initiative. If you are just a coder, how do you plan to stand out from the literally 1000s of applications that every company gets?

In my experience, companies tend to avoid people that know or pretend to know too much about the company/vision. I'm not sure why that is, but likely because they want someone for a specific role, not a generalist. They want someone who will be happy doing their job, not have their focus spread across disciplines. In the (really incipient) start-up environment it's good to have generalists, but such jobs are kind of rare.

Plus, when it comes to mission, people can just say what the company wants to hear, a lot easier to fake interest than the coding and communication skills.

There are tens of thousands of “outstanding coders” and even if you are one of the best, how do you communicate that through a resume to stand out from the crowd? Honestly, most companies don’t need great coders.

Historically I haven’t cared about the mission of the company except when I was working for a company that sent nurses to the homes of special needs kids and when I was consulting for state and local government during COVID.

But, what triggered me is the thought “I just care about coding and not the actual business value of what I’m doing

> not the actual business value of what I’m doing Assuming that you are not willingly going to work for a company that does harm (i.e. gambling, borderline scams, etc.), most businesses should actually provide some sort of value to some people (otherwise they wouldn't have revenue).

Yes, working for a medical company who tries to cure cancer is a meaningful mission, but so is for a company creating entertainment (games/movies), educational content or even for companies that simply aid other companies in achieving their goals, or slightly improving people's lives.

I think the least meaningful type of work is actually the one that has a meaningful but unachievable mission. Like "web3 decentralization". Yes, the idea sounds nice, but if it's impossible or impractical to reach the goal, it doesn't really do any good either, or can even turn it into a harmful process.

Meaning doesn't only come from the business goals themselves, but also from the people you work with. You can still find meaning in helping those around you.

I am not disagreeing with you, but I was raised and spent my life being a coder. If my sole goal in life was to help people (instead of enjoying the coding/creation process), I would have become a medic or something with a clear purpose.

AI messages are always 500 words of rehashing the JD, so your goal is to not look like that.

RE: "the enthusiasm" part, you obviously decide who you hire as a hiring manager, but you might be overlooking a LOT of qualified candidates if you're looking for "enthusiasm" on the resume...

From an incentives POV, the job application space does not properly incentivize saving the mental energy and time of either recruiters or applicants.

Automation and reduced friction has made the situation a kind of arm's race and mess.

This is a real issue - I once got approached by a recruiter for a company, it was a good fit, I think I would've walked the interview and been a great hire - I'd heard of them before. The founder had acted like a dick head to one of my friends, I just immediately turned it down. There is a cost to very publicly treating people poorly. People don't seem to understand that these things that big companies might get away with due to scale, smaller companies cannot. People talk.

Firstly, there are the monthly "Who is hiring" posts. There, basically anyone can post their company and their positions. They don't need to be YC companies.

And secondly, there are the promoted "Company ABC hiring a Software Engineer (YC '23)" (or similar). There, commenting is not allowed, and the listing will stay on HN for a set amount of time.

I believe the question in this post talks about the latter.

But it's certainly interesting to see in this thread, that basically both of these groups of companies don't reach out to candidates...

A few big problems:

1. AI Spam. I categorized the inbound we got the other day from a job post. Out of 172 daily applicants, we got 22 that looked reasonably like a person, and 150 that were primarily AI generated messages. Which are pretty easy to spot because they're 500 words of tech jargon and rehashing the job description.

2. Purely automated applications. There are a lot of "Apply to 1000 jobs with AI" startups out there that just spam job boards [1][2][3].

3. Qualifications. There is a shocking number of engineers applying to work at an AI company who have never made a single API request to OpenAI. After three years of hearing about AI every day if you've never tested a single inference API then why are you applying to an AI startup.

The signal to noise ratio is so bad that it's better to just do outbound. At this point the job listing is mostly there so we can share it with candidates that we reach out to.

[1]https://lazyapply.com/

[2]https://aiapply.co/

[3]https://www.reddit.com/r/GetEmployed/comments/1eo8uyp/i_used...

This is what it takes to get through the filters/recruiter search. In majority of the organizations the first line of defense is the recruiter who has a limited knowledge of the job responsibilities, technologies involved, etc. They employ various search techniques in their ATS (lately enhanced by the various LLM tools) and whatever resumes come up in the keyword search will end up in the pile presented to the hiring manager. This is especially true now when volume of resumes is in hundreds, you can't just go through all of them manually. So the only way to get through the first stage is to create resumes to fit the LLM/keyword search...

EDIT: I've been seeing more and more of these disclaimers when I submit an application: "We use Machine Learning for an initial comparison of resumes against the education, experience, and skills requirements of the job description." Check here to out out of this analysis.

So candidates tweak resumes to match the requirements (likely) with the same LLM that will be checking the resume match to the same requirements. Why is this surprising?

Is that not the ideal answer? Those that get to move forward are the one's that just happen to write a message that hits a non-descriptive sweet spot? A fucking Magic 8 Ball

I've personally applied to several jobs offering less than $80k TC (government, nonprofits, startups) and heard nothing back. That's a small sample size because I'm currently employed and only looking at particularly interesting positions, but I'm also only applying to good fits, writing an individualized resume/cover letter, etc.

Anyways, I agree with GP that there seems to have been a breakdown of the old post job -> cold submit resume pipeline. You have to have some kind of an in these days.

When I looked for my Plan B jobs - just regular old C# enterprise dev jobs looking for AWS experience paying less - crickets.

It’s seems harder to get interviews for jobs you are overqualified for than ones you are slightly under qualified for.

If you want a founding engineer for on-site only full-time work in the Bay Area at 50-80K and a fraction of a percent of equity, you deserve every volley of AI shitspam resume dumping that awaits your inbox.

And I think it was only two or three months ago that I saw a hiring post offering exactly that.

You take all of the risk of early stage startup employment and as soon as the company gets long term traction you get shown the door.

I've seen this mostly in NY startups but have heard it's a wide trend.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/omniai/jobs

This doesn’t come close to what a mid level enterprise CRUD developer could make in Atlanta.

[1] https://www.levels.fyi/t/software-engineer/locations/atlanta...

That being said, I would hope that position is remote for $175K. I would have jumped on it when I was a pure software developer working in Atlanta. But working locally in SF for that amount?

According to salary.com, that’s the median for the highest level of IC in Atlanta.

https://www.salary.com/tools/salary-calculator/software-engi...

Your colleagues' network of high quality instant hires is only interested in switching to $400k/y opportunities.

This coin has many sides but it isn't complicated.

Thats really working with someone elses AI, no?

FWIW I have used it quite a bit, but its not really the same thing as developing AI

(nevermind my usual rant that we shouldn't call any of this AI, but I digress)

Nowadays, making requests to the API of a LLM provider is what makes an engineer a good fit for working at an AI company? Really?

Devil's advocate; why would I have made an API request if my employer has never used that service? Maybe that lack of interest on their part is why I'm trying to leave and get a job in a field that's of interest to me.

I hear these complaints all the time from companies. To me if you’re leaving your jobs up at aggregators like LinkedIn, you have no right to complain (not singling you out btw, just a general thought)

Yet, I am unqualified to join an AI startup because I’ve never made an API request to OpenAI

I know PhDs in data science and language technology who are not startup material because they’re too uncomfortable outside of MatLab/Jupyter/R.

My advice: never do a cold application. Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro.

1) internal hires (obviously not as possible at a start-up)

2) referrals

3) direct engagement from a recruiter

4) talent pools curated by online services like LinkedIn or Indeed

5) forum pools, like those here in HN

6) applications from the Careers page

Almost all my jobs have come from referrals or directly from recruiters. I've gotten calls back from four-and-beyond, but have never made it through the process, despite being overqualified in those cases. On the flipside, I've been underqualified for jobs I got via referral. The power of having someone inside can't be overstated.

> Find ways to hustle to get a warm intro.

OP's process is actually that of a spring chicken by not realizing this reality.

I still don't understand why people, especially "experienced hires," expect more from passive applications.

You could list perks of employment as a four-hour commute (one-way), a liberal bring-rabid-dog-to-work policy (mandatory; if you don't have a dog with rabies, one will be provided), and a salary that can best be described as "rounding error", and you'd still get 100 applicants.

Also the success rate is not zero. I've hired great people from cold applications, it's just very rare.

Me: “Okay submit your resume to our job board and someone will get back to you”.

Doing a “warm introduction” isn’t enough.

I expect YC to do due diligence if one of their companies receives several reports that they heard no replies (it's not that many companies). If it's found to be more than hearsay, they lose HN ad privelleges.

---

I wouldn't do a startup but I certainly could see myself creating a bunch of fake developer profiles of varying skill levels and sending them to companies en masse. If they don't reply to anything even though they have had a job opening, they get placed on the (public) name & shame list.

Would also be interesting to automatically keep track of which job openings a company has and how long they've been open for.

He went through and found that almost all the applications he was able to go through were absolute nonsense.

He then screened some people before a technical interview with the rest of the team and found over half of them either had no clue how to really write any code or were completely lying about any experience they've had.

We then had five interviews set up for the following week. None of them were a fit. We have a pretty straight forward set of real world examples for our programming questions and no one got them. Keep in mind, all the other engineers on the team had gone through these questions without issue in the past, and we're not particularly amazing engineers. The "trickiest" of them is essentially performing an in memory group by given to arrays of data that have relations to each other. These were all full open internet as well.

We decided to pause hiring for the next quarter. I think the main issue was the absolute flood of applicants that had no ability to fill the role, and filtering through that with limited man-hours while features still need to be shipped is really difficult.

Years ago, when I'd be part of engineering hiring efforts, we had a recruiter who would handle screenings, so I don't know if it's always been like this and we need to get better at screening, or if it's notably worse now.

The typical good candidate becomes a good candidate through years of experience. The years of a good candidate's experience has exposed them to many people, many people who would love to work with the good candidate again. And so when the good candidate is looking for a new opportunity, or even when they're not looking, there's a bunch of people waiting in the wings, longing for the opportunity to hire them. A good candidate is probably not going to end up trawling job listings. A bad candidate probably is.

Public job listings aren't all bad as they can bring in candidates that you might not have otherwise encountered... and these can be very influential and beneficial hires, but in general, public job listings are for the people who couldn't find a job otherwise. You're looking for a diamond in the rough.

Your company is doing the right thing by pausing the search, it is a very bad use of time. Find people through the founder's and employee's personal networks. A vouched-for candidate in the hand is worth 1,000 applications in the bush. If personal networks aren't an option, the alternative is to do what candidates hate: keep your applications open without the goal to fill a specific role by a specific date but rather to wait for the right candidate to come along.

I do have a few friends that may be interesting within the next quarter though, so I’m crossing my fingers.

If you're up for a chat my email is on my page here https://www.zachocean.com/contact/

My latest job search made me want to create a startup that addresses this, by vetting both posters and users. The largest hurdle is that adding money to the scenario opens a whole new can of worms for scammers.

Candidates generate a lot of crap, companies filter out a lot of crap and more.

Turns out, maybe those recruiters that we love to hate on, do actually serve a valuable function.

Was this not the sole premise of LinkedIn? Then they were acquired by the M$ and investors demanded ROI, and it turned out being honest (ie, demanding users to be honest in job postings and job applications) is not a profitable business model.

I think there's some active memes in the startup community about not hiring people from finance specifically.

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42857294

I hear bullshit excuses like this often. “Not enough experience with $[unusual product]” (‘enough’ experience is acquired in about a week); “Not a cultural fit” (oh the many things this could mask - not old enough, too old, wrong gender, wrong cultural group - all of which would be illegal to admit); “we … uh … well, we moved on to other candidates” - at least you didn’t ghost me, but this one feels like cover for the previous one (though that one is cover for legal issues…)

I’ve aced technical screenings, made it to the final interview, all sounds positive, then I get some bullshit response. In one interview, there were three dev leads on the call and one unrelated manager who ran the call (and completely ran over the other three), was clueless about the technology he was asking about, and when I disagreed about something (the other three suddenly went from yes-men to silent), this guy decided I wasn’t worthy of hiring.

How can anyone possibly solve the social issues around hiring? I have a (non-starter) idea: some amount of accountability to the people they turn down late in the process.

It’s almost impossible to stand out and rise above the noise these days if you are just randomly submitting your application to a job board.

When I mentioned this before, someone asked me should they reach out to the company directly. That doesn’t help either unless you have a special set of skills or experience that would make you stand out.

Neither “I am a full stack developer” or “I worked for a FAANG” set you apart.

More often you just want a way for extremely strong tactical inbound candidates to find you. Even if you're not desperate to fill the role, you want strong candidates to find you, reach out, and then work with them to find a role to fit the candidate.

Ask HN: Who is pretending to be hiring? <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714672>

Why? They don't have the money nor will they risk it on people who they do not know.

The best way to get "hired" by them is to fiercely compete against them to the point where they wave the white flag and buy you out.

As a data point, yes, some companies do hire here. Maybe not all. But I had a great experience through YC.

I think in general, the hiring market is a mess (on both sides) and HN suffers from similar issues.

Quality hack.

This being said, I've been self employed for several years, so this may have changed since ~ 2021, but I don't think it's likely.

Also, the landscape has changed, and some job posting may have been made during more optimistic moments, and they may just be stale, rather than fake.

I have referred many people to "WorkAtAStartup" in recent years who have had quite a bit of success. While it's unfortunate that you are not having the best of luck, definitely be optimistic and continue to try! There are many great companies that recruit through the YC boards, and I recommend using WorkAtAStartup to have the best chances of response, even more so than their direct job listings.

I also participated in the hiring side for the previous startup I worked at - SoftIron - and we did actually hire someone we found through a post I made here on the monthly Hiring thread. He was a good candidate, but eventually everyone got laid off anyway. I actually felt bad about that - I think we were only around a year after hiring him.

On that note, since I was participating in the hiring, I will say that we had a shocking amount of low effort and AI-written responses to the posting.

Also put an entry up on the monthly hiring thread a few years ago. Even though we explicitly stated US-Based and authorized to work in the US, we did not get a single application from US-Based people. All Indian, Eastern European, and South American.

Last I checked, that radio category is account-wide, so if you do “frontend”, that’s all your account can do. This makes it difficult to apply to multiple kinds of roles through the interface and it makes it harder for founders to find people who can wear multiple hats. Most of them could probably use a versatile person at their stage.

That already exists, and had for some two decades now - it's called LinkedIn.

It works the way it works. Whatever the reasons (which are most certainly related to running a two-sided marketplace and trying to squeeze both ends of it), any such project will end up in a similar spot.