Dang are we back to the years of the "Thanks Obama" I guess we truly live at the end of history and have no option but to rehash the classics, don't we ?
Sorry for the political comment but every time I see Tesla financials I think “this company should’ve failed in 2014 but-for those subsidies and ill-conceived carbon credits.”
And the only reason most domestic airlines, car manufacturers, and some of the largest financial institutions still exist is because of multiple bailouts. It's not like Tesla is unique in being helped by the government.
Indeed. If the government makes a habit of bailing out all the failures, eventually the system will be dominated by failures because they never get cleaned out.
Still doesn't imply that bailing out failures was a good idea though.
ACA was not intended to address costs. It was a compromise to expand access without threatening the insurance industry. A more comprehensive reform had just failed.
Let's think a lot more widely here: how many things in your life suddently got explosively more expensive over a decade. How many of those do you think would have not surged if it wasn't for [insert single thing here]?
It's the same logic people use to suppress minimum wage. But prices keep going up. Almost like that's not as big a factor as we thought.
I would like to assume that I am a good candidate I usually get calls back from even LinkedIn posts or even indeed, but after well applying to more than two hundred offerings on the who is hiring posts in this place, and only having had been called twice. I can assure you that the ones here usually are not hiring and at best just want a rooster of possible replacements for their current employees.
Most notable offender is mixrank, I know more than twenty people that have applied to no avail, even people with more than 22 years of experience and very fancy titles.
Not a YC startup, but jobs I've posted recently had over a thousand applicants in the first few weeks. I post multiple places, including HN. There's a huge culling process to find the 20-30 most applicable candidates, then to narrow down from there to the 1-2 that fit best.
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.
> Express your honest enthusiasm for joining the company/mission in the cover letter…
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.
I'm in a mission driven organization so I pay more attention to that than other companies might. Regardless, a little authenticity and enthusiasm can go a long way. The bar is low.
That's a given. Many tech jobs still pay well enough to have a luxurious life. Some jobs pay more because they have to. The biggest nightmare for me would be seeing 7 years go by and accomplishing nothing.
When we do our job, we very rarely interact directly with the "mission".
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.
> When we do our job, we very rarely interact directly with the "mission".
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?
You can still stand out by being an outstanding coder and good person/communicator.
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.
> You can still stand out by being an outstanding coder and good person/communicator.
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
Yeah, that's true, it's very hard to stand out or know how good someone actually is through a short CV.
> 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.
Agreed on the "no AI messaging". And keep it incredibly short. Like 140 characters short. The messages that stand out look a lot more like tweets than they do cover letters.
AI messages are always 500 words of rehashing the JD, so your goal is to not look like that.
Just an FYI: every single career/job search coach I've worked with or read advises either to use a generic cover letter (basically referring the reader to the resume) or to skip it entirely.
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...
Some companies are just very selective, i.e: they're hiring the right people not the best candidate. Most of us get jobs because companies need to fill a role and we're the best candidate of a bad bunch... most of us (whether we have 22 years and a fancy title or not) would not get a job at a company that hires carefully because we're probably not a good fit for their very niche view of what a good hire is.
I agree and there's nothing that disincentivizes companies from "over-soliciting applications". Having 100000 applicants vs 100 has no downside other than:
1) you need to literally post your application URL more places.
2) you might not get through skimming or auto-screening / OCR-ing all the resumes/apps.
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.
It makes total sense for a startup to be highly selective. But being overly selective at the CV/application stage is dumb. If they really do have some really highly specialized requirement that should be on the advert. If they don't then being having a high rejection rate at the CV screen stage is going to be easy - it's easy to reject people, but you're overwhelmingly likely to screen out the few candidates that are actually a good fit. So sure, expect a low success rate but a low reply rate is an indicator the company isn't serious about hiring.
If you're getting so many applications that you have to apply such a harsh screen that you're likely losing most of your good candidates via false negatives then you shouldn't be soliciting more applicants to apply. This is what this thread is about - if you're saying these guys are getting so many applications they have to start just brutally cutting CVs almost arbitrarily then they definitely shouldn't be posting on HN about their vacancies. Not least because they're poisoning the well.
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...
It is kind of disingenuous and dishonest to say that there is no value or meaning on those Americans born in American soil, a nation should prioritize the people that live on it or well at least care for them and make them useful for nation building in the future.
Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective. So yeah there is a meaningful difference and saying native born in this context allows us to steer the conversation towards taking care towards those in the country already, which is something that neolib governments have not done in the last decades.
I say this as a person that was not born in the country he resides in now, but saying "calling yourself "native born" doesn't mean a thing " is a dishonest way to try to dissuade and delete necessary words that work towards more fruitful conversatons about how to improve th esytems in North America.
>Canada has proven that importing punjabis for almost two decades and ignoring the local people is not effective.
Curious, that's what Americans once said about the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the French and the Poles and the Chinese and Jews and Catholics and Muslims and so on and on ad nauseum.
It's just a generational crab mentality born from xenophobia. Every new wave of immigrants decides they're "native" as soon as the next wave shows up. None of them are any more native than the others.
This type of solipsistic kumbaya slop is running face-first into reality, fast. People are different. Groups of people are different. Nations of people can be very different. They differ in meaningful and important and obvious ways. You'll live to see these differences continue to manifest in ways that will doubtless surprise you.
And the Ellis Islanders were at least mostly Christian, white, European. They shared a common cultural, historical, religious, and racial frame with native-born Americans. They could and did meaningfully assimilate. Despite this, that wave of migrants almost broke us. Anarchy, terrorism, riots, organized crime, et cetera. The Johnson-Reed Act was passed in response in 1924 and it slowed immigration to a crawl until the 1960s.
Today we have immigrants who speak utterly alien tongues, with no shared history or civilized tradition, arriving at breakneck pace, and who barely learn English because they can scrape by with apps and translation services, who stay in the cultural bubble of their country of origin, who don't see an American culture worth assimilating to. Especially among so-called high skill immigrants, they pick up a US passport and immediately see me as a worse or lesser "American" than they are. That's nuts. The melting pot, if one ever existed, has broken down. What's happening now is something quite different, and it's not good for me or my fellow Americans.
It seems like you have misread my comment and think I have a particular thing against any group of people.
That is simply not the intention of the comment, if you read correctly you will note that what I meant is that you need to take care of your own people, something that the United States ACCOMPLISHED from the fifties until before Reagan.
I am just not more native than an Indian or Italian person that just like me came a few decades ago. However to pretend there is no difference between me and someone whose family has been here for decades or centuries... that is dishonest.
Why do you call Xenophobia to prioritize giving good jobs to the local population ? It seems like your reading comprehension as well as your definition of Xenophobia is deeply, deeply flawed. We can have immigration that makes sense. Like what Canada used to have...
We should prioritize those that have been for decades in a country and those whose families have paid taxes for multiple generations, there is absolutely nothing xenophobic about that.
I well mm used to like reason a while ago but this is laughable.
The article does not show how or explain why or in which manner she affects consumers.
It says that she has been bad for them but there is no proof of this.
Instead it makes quite a comical attempt at trying to vaguely point at the sky and say she is evil or overreaching, but she is not and anyone whoa actually wants a free market can tell you that. I honestly just cannot understand what happened to Reason I checked some more or their side articles and wow the quality has dropped to a level that would make the NYT blush.
That is an a-historical claim. That standard was THE standard from 1890-1980. The consumer-harm standard was the innovation of Bork under Regan in 1980.
sorry what do you mean by saying "Desirability has changed. For example, the number of sports teams have tripled since 1950." ? I am like not American and I do not get how that is related to housing
Houses near desirable locations (e.g. sports stadiums) are more expensive. There are more of those desirable locations now (more sports teams = more sports stadiums). So the average is driven upwards even with no change to the housing itself.
Is living near a sports stadium really that desirable? I lived a few blocks from the Giants stadium in SF, and I'll never make that mistake again.
Running a 15 minute errand on a game day could take hours. It was impossible to get my car out of the garage or get on/off the highway. The food/trash left on the streets was terrible too, which made walking my dog a PITA instead of a pleasure.
I think the point is that if you live in an American city with a professional sports team, you’re living in an area that offers way more than just a sports team; there are many things of note to do within a 20mi radius.
People who choose to live, say 250mi from the nearest major professional sports team are going to have a ton less job opportunity, things of note to do, but will generally have a lot less to pay because no one else wants to live there.
Ah that makes more sense, thank you! I wasn't looking at it as a proxy for surrounding development, but now I can see why that might be a more nuanced metric than just region size/population.
Yeah, it's the sports stadiums and not where the paying jobs are. KISS. People want to be comfortable and secure. To be secure you need wealth. To be wealthy you need a high paying job. To get a high paying job you need to live in an urban center. To live in an urban center you need to compete with millions of other like-minded, capable individuals.
If the market was flooded with options nobody would be talking about housing prices. People don't give a single thought about sports stadiums or if you're near a highway/airport or any of that soft nonsense. People are hard: they want a big house that isn't damaged on a nice plot of land above the flood plane where they don't spend 3 hours a day commuting to their job.
>Yeah, it's the sports stadiums and not where the paying jobs are
Who said that?
>People don't give a single thought about sports stadiums or if you're near a highway/airport or any of that soft nonsense.
You might not, but other people definitely do. It's common for people to have criteria when looking for a house (e.g. not having an airport or train station directly in your backyard, being near a good school, being close to x and y amenities, being on a main bus line, etc.). They don't go to a real estate agent and only say "I want a house". Being close to work is a starting filter. Most people apply more filters.
Stadiums were just an example of what people might consider desirable. I think the broader point hervature was making was that what is considered a desirable location (and the cost of being near those locations) has changed in the last 70 years. That is an effect on housing prices which is not clearly captured in the article's analysis.
That conclusion assumes there are options when there are not. There are millions of people priced out of secure housing. People buy what they can. There's no reason to hunt for patterns in noise.
I don’t think it is causative at all. The statement sounds like an AI hallucination. But this is testable. You do probably see some gentrification in the immediate area but you also have the negative externality of parking…
while cheaper in some contexts and somewhat scalable, renewables are nowhere near being as scalable or effective as nuclear, specially as tensions with China rise
Renewables are vastly more scalable and effective than nuclear.
You mentioned China. Last year, China brought more than 100x more PV on line than they did nuclear (on a rated power basis; levelized basis maybe 30x as much.)
Nuclear power which currently has zero new commercial reactors under construction in the US while backsliding as an energy source due to cost and construction timelines now apparently is "effective" and "scalable".
Renewables can be destroyed by a war, but it will not take ten years to rebuild and connect it again to the grid when the war is over. Is not only cheaper, but allows a gradual recover of the electric supply. With nuclear a recover is much more rigid and rushing it is potentially catastrophic.
ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be ramped up and overused in Germany, Nuclear is safe and effective and until we actually solve the battery problem most of the world should switch to nuclear if we want to survive, Yale has tried to fit the numbers on many occasions but not even them can disagree that nuclear is required
> ok but lol you are still obviously denying and acting blind to the fact that for many many years, that neither we will nor our lungs will get back, coal had to be ramped up and overused in Germany
This simply isn't true. Coal use for electricity has been declining consistently in Germany and especially since the first shutdowns of nuclear plants (cca 2011). And the replacement was not natural gas as in e.g. the US.
Looks like coal usage for electricity production indeed only went up for ~3 years around 2011, probably we can consider that a mere blip within the downward trend.
Wind and solar indeed seem to pick up what nuclear used to bring to the energy mix. Gas usage is only slightly up over 30 years, which doesn’t look like it’s directly substituting nuclear — but surely it could have gone down had nuclear be kept around?
(Personally, I wish politics would have pushed harder against coal and simply ignored nuclear for a couple more decades. But political feasibility is important ofc, and I don’t know how hard of a sell that would have been in 2010.)
I don't know what would've surely happened. It's easy to think well if they did this not that all the positives would remain they'd just be better. I think life is more complicated than that.
In general what I think is people make a pariah out of Germany and its energy choices, but this is mostly based on false data, which tells me enough. The debate is riddled with false data which lead to even worse conclusions. In the end the numbers are positive and that's all what's important for me. There are better candidates for criticism when looked at individually or even globally, what the individual strategies accomplish on a global scale. So when looked at globally, the German energy transition has accomplished a ton. E.g. the 600TW of solar this year never would've happened without it, which more than offsets the 10-15GW of nuclear they switched off, most of which was past its retirement age.
