One little tip I learned the hard way: an applicant tracking system (ATS) can claim to have imported your fine-looking Word or PDF resume, but that does not mean that it has correctly parsed it and populated the key fields (eg skills) that it shows to the hiring manager.
The problem seems to be that ATSes struggle with the "modern" style of resume, much beloved of Word template authors, where you might have a left column with your contact details, github, and maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side with your positioning statement and job history.
I went from zero callbacks to 80% after I junked Word and rewrote my resume in a much more old fashioned, linear format. I used Overleaf (LaTeX) like it was 1999 and exported to PDF.
I have seen one behavior with ATS that was actually tracked down and might hit fellow HN readers. A recruiter I worked with at a company asked me why I didn’t have any experience with artificial intelligence. I said it was all over my resume - I’ve been in the field for more than a decade. He said that it didn’t show up until that ATS.
It turned out the ATS didn’t properly parse ligatures like “ffi”, “fi”, etc. It rendered them as a blank space, so “artificial” became “arti cial”. I turned over ligature rendering in my resume and started to get more callbacks.
Upon further inspection, I discovered that a lot of LLMs also have problems with ligatures and just ignore them when fed a pdf.
So, maybe those annoying job apps where you upload a resume and still have to fill everything in an HTML form aren’t the worst thing.
Latex and git has been advantageous to authoring a resume for me. It separates the layout design ant content.
“Oh no it’s 2 pages with only education on p2.”
Quickly comment out a bullet and print off a fresh 1 page pdf. I don’t use dumb words or phrases now to fit layout, at least far fewer. And git makes me less worried about deleting when it isn’t working.
One pattern i use, that i think makes things simpler, is to have a layout/contact template with definitions, then different context specific main latex files inputting from a sub directory of section blocks: experience, skills, education, etc.
I’d thought I was slick with word table layouts for sections, until a counselor told me the table structures persist in the supposedly flat pdf.
I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.
> I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.
There may be edge cases where some obscure software can't parse a weird resume format, but in general if you put anything remotely resembling a common resume format (Company name, dates worked there, optional description and/or bullet points) it will be parsed properly.
I'm in a big Slack where people ask and give career help. Several hiring managers have offered to test people's resumes on their company's ATS over the years. Nobody has ever found a combination that actually failed the ATS except when it was an obvious problem (like someone who made their resume in Illustrator) or an obvious user error (exporting a resume as an image).
I wouldn't say it's a "myth". My experience is a lot more like the OP's than what you describe.
A few job sites, like WorkDay, have mangled my PDF resume every time I upload it. Like the OP, I've had to massage the layout and formatting to make it more compatible.
I've been applying to jobs for the last three months and many companies use systems that automatically parse your resume and then let you manually correct the parsed data. It's nearly always a mess, and I use a very straightforward linear resume template.
It's possible that there is some selection bias here, where mediocre parsing systems give you the option to manually correct everything because they know they are mediocre. I remain skeptical.
When applying for jobs via LinkedIn it’s very important to use a PDF. A huge number of people submit Word documents, however, LinkedIn doesn’t render them in the browser. Given that most roles get hundreds of applications, unless someone’s previous roles really catch my eye, I am probably not going to download anything.
And please do not pay anyone for "ATS compatible resume templates" or other ATS related services.
I don't think people realize how many of the ATS myths have been promulgated by people trying to sell services to job seekers. The ATS myth resonates with people for some reason, so desperate job seekers will often pay (unnecessarily) for various "ATS friendly" templates or ATS reviews.
Can you elaborate on the exact layout syntax these ML idiot savant agents want to read? Lack of an industry wide standard data interface makes this terrible.
I can only speak for what worked for me. A shorthand heuristic might be that if the resume can be read in linear fashion by a screenreader without any weirdness or non sequiturs, it's probably pretty good (another argument in favor of paying attention to accessibility!)
In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8 throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones like enumitem and fancyhdr.
Word/Google Docs -> PDF conversion is perfectly fine, and every system will understand it. Just don't try to get fancy with layouts and stick to headings, subheadings and bullets. People reading the resume will appreciate this as well.
There is an industry standard - HR-XML[0] (disclaimer: I was on the committee for a little while). But I would be surprised if any of the job boards let you import it directly.
Frankly, plain text rendered to PDF is probably going to be the most easily parsed by their systems. If they let you add attachments separate from your resume, then stick your "beautified" resume there.
I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of them also parsing better in the ATS system ):
+1 here. I have two resumes. One looks nice/modern and its what I send recruiters/managers once I have an interview scheduled. One is an ugly, to me, plain looking word doc that application tracking systems can gronk.
I've used LaTeX, online resume generators and Google Docs templates, but they were unfruitful. I've applied to 350 jobs and only got one screening recruiter call (then was ghosted). Despite having 2+ YoE and published research as well as having worked as a contractor for FAANG (I even made one loads of money in stock after they applied my recommendations)!
If you've applied 350 times with that kind of success, then it might time to revise your approach, your CV or both.
I've never found good leads with cold approaches. Even when getting contacted and receiving an offer, it was always low salaries on that method. What worked best was going to related events, talking to people hosting the booths, talk to presenters of topics where I'm an expert and this way get warm introductions.
Yeah, I just have a text file and convert it to HTML for people that want to view it on the web. Has never been a problem. I'm not a graphic designer and if that's a skill you want, you got the wrong girl.
I have done two different types of resumes; long and sort. When I was learning about resumes in high school and college, they said to just list your jobs and maybe some key skills. I have been told this is useless to recruiters. So I rewrote things to have a couple paragraphs about major projects at this jobs. I have been told this is too long and nobody has time to read it. So now I have both and you can pick the one you want.
I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be. (I'm kind of just waiting for the founders from my last startup to start something new... they didn't survive the reorg either, which was a "sort by salary descending and only keep the last 3". The joys of having your software startup bought by an indecisive large company that doesn't do software ;)
> I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be.
Not sure about the 'should', but I think it is. Over the years I had the pleasure to work with quite a few good people, but there were also some buffoons (not counting those in marketing). I can only imagine, that the resume of the latter will look more appealing.
> much beloved of Word template authors, where you might have a left column with your contact details, github, and maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side with your positioning statement and job history
The design always struck me as a clumsy attempt to take up space.
For me, a similar approach is actually the exact opposite. It's always a struggle to fit a good summary of your professional life on a single page and being able to put some short stuff in multiple columns can help you save space. For example I usually have certifications, trainings, etc in two columns since they're often fairly short entries.
Coming back here to really thank you for this. I converted my resume into LaTex today then to pdf. Began uploading it to a few listings and where I would previously have to go back in and correct things this is no longer happening. Much thanks.
It would be useless to test against a system that companies weren't using. I wouldn't count on anything open source in the HR space, to be honest.
I remember seeing a list of companies you could "apply" to with your resume that would then show the ATS-parsed version back to you. Every single person who used it got a reasonable result back, which is usually enough to put an end to all of the ATS myths out there.
The biggest pain / fear related to layoffs for me isn't the immediate actual loss of income...
It was that I have to go job hunting and how demoralizing and toil heavy that process is. Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least, but naw it's too much of a pain.
>Recruiters. Don’t discount or blow them off.
That's all they do for me ... I suspect there's a subset of people who are very attractive to recruiters and they actually do things for those people and I am not in that group. The advice surrounding recruiters is always so disconnected from my experience that it seems strange.
The leetcode grind is my biggest dread. I can do it and I do well, but I'll be damned if it isn't a lot of mindless rote memorization that immediately leaves my brain the second I land the job, never to be used again (even in my job) until the next time I apply around.
Honestly I just stopped interviewing at leetcode places and those that expect you to "prepare" for their interview, especially those that are dumb no-name SaaS companies.
It's less about me being stubborn as it is those places are hiring based on the wrong skills, and those end up not being good places to work.
> Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least
When I grew up, my father worked in commercial banking in the 1980s and 1990s. There were so many bankruptcies / mergers / financial crises, that he got (painfully) used to being laid off. Watching him go through this had a large impact on my view of my relationship with most employers (hostile, wary, defensive). He once said to me, "At my level (middle manager), as soon as I start my new job, I start looking for my next job." He was exaggerating, but the point stayed with me.
I definitely agree with you: Looking for a job (or "keeping your doors & windows open to new opportunities") while having a job is much, much easier -- mentally. In my industry, most connections with head hunters are made through LinkedIn. You can set a special flag in your profile that says "I'm looking for work", but this is only visible to professional head hunters (they pay a lot of money for an account with these special privileges). It works very well. Normally, the calls start with: "Them: Are you looking at the moment? Me: No, but I am open to new and exciting opportunities. Them: Oh, great. I have something for you." Do that enough, and eventually something very good lands on your doorstep.
> At my level (middle manager), as soon as I start my new job, I start looking for my next job." He was exaggerating, but the point stayed with me.
That’s no exaggeration at all. I’m not always looking for a job. But everything I do I do with one eye toward how will this look when I get ready to interview? Am I working on tech that is demand? Am I working at the correct “scope, impact, and ambiguity” or am I just being a “ticket taker”?
You're saying that the "vast majority" of recruiters receive your CV (from wherever) and instead of contacting you on the email address on your CV they will Google around for your personal email address? I don't believe you. Why would anyone do that extra step when they already have your email address?
Might depend on the niche you're in, or your location. My experience with recruiters (on the hiring side) mirrored what I heard from friends who got hired through recruiters: they're basically match-makers.
If you're not a well-known name, you can have your job-postings but you won't get any applications. Either you spend time on advertising and try to convince people that you're really real and actually really want to hire, or you just get yourself someone who introduces you to people who might be a good fit. That's a recruiter.
Out of the 10 jobs I have had since 1996, 6 came from external recruiters. I met five of them in person over lunch or in their office when I was looking for local jobs in Atlanta until 2022.
The one I didn’t meet in person was a specialized recruiter for my niche.
Two came from me reaching out to them and two were from internal recruiters
> I really wish companies would start giving honest feedback even if it’s hard for the candidates to heard at first. It would be a much better way for candidates to improve themselves and we’re all adults here and can take the feedback.
I’ve said it before, and I say it again. This isn’t true. When companies try to be helpful and give you well meaning feedback, you find out that their reasons for rejecting you are absolutely banal, and you’d have been better off not hearing anything.
When I first become a hiring manager I thought I'd be the exception and provide everyone with detailed and honest feedback.
I didn't last very long. Candidates would see the feedback as an invitation to prove me wrong or argue with my assessment. I got a few very angry e-mails from people who took their rejection very personally and made it clear that I was their enemy. One person (who was actually very unqualified) even went on a mini rampage across the internet, trying to "name and shame" my company and even my personally for the rejection. There were even threats of a discrimination lawsuit.
So I stopped. It's back to something like "We've decided to proceed with other candidates"
I once interviewed for a job where they admitted I was the only person in the pipeline. I was then rejected with a canned "This was a highly competitive process and we've decided to proceed with other candidates" email. Did not feel great.
It is better to ask your internal recruiter / HR department to inform the candidate of your feedback (if you work for a big enough company). It is also good practice to always have a panel, not just the hiring manager, doing interviews.
So the candidate gets feedback along the lines of: "Thank you for participating in our interview process. Unfortunately, our panel decided you weren't the best fit for position X at this time, because ...reasons.... Under company policy, we won't accept further applications from you for one year from today, but we would encourage you to apply for a role with us in the future".
There is a chance they will reply back to HR arguing, but it is their job to be polite but firm that the decision is already made, and that they can apply again in one year (and not pass anything back to the hiring manager).
The key is to think long term and about the company as a whole - the candidate who gets helpful feedback and is treated fairly is more likely to apply again in the future (after the mandatory cooling off period), when they might have more skills and experience working somewhere else. There is a finite qualified labour pool no matter where you are based, and having the good will even of rejected candidates is a competitive advantage. The message should be "not now", rather than "not ever" (although of course, if they do go on some kind of rampage, they could turn the not now into not ever - that's a bridge burning move). If a tiny percentage go on a rampage, but the company protects the individuals from it, and has lots of counteracting positive sentiment from prospective and actual staff, then it's still a net positive.
This happened to me when I had to reject a doctor from my research study due to his site manager being unprofessional and his site being an audit risk. I sent a brief professional two-sentence vague rejection note thanking him for his time and wishing the best in his future research and he responded with an absolutely unhinged 17-paragraph rant, threatening lawsuits, calling my vendor CRO a crazy cat lady, saying she was too old to find happiness in life, ranting about San Francisco liberals (his clinic was in NYC), threatening to sue me, threatening to sue my vendor, threatening to turn us all into the FDA for fraud and wasting his time, and on, and on. It was completely shocking to read and really opened my eyes to how viciously and crazily people can lash out when they feel rejected. I was really glad I kept my rejection brief I can't imagine what he would have latched onto and ranted about if I'd given any specifics about why we didn't select his site. The weirdest part is he came to us very highly recommended from another doc!
Here's another issue, the interviewer is sometimes wrong. Or, there was a miscommunication. At least twice in my career I missed an offer because the interviewer didn't think I had experience in something, but turns out I had decades of it. But, I don't brag. Heard thru the grapevine, "oh they said you didn't have database experience," hears me using databases since the late 80s. WTF?
So I could imagine debating a point while being in the right.
And even in the case where the candidate is right to push back on the feedback, the process has usually moved on with another candidate already, so it's just awkward for everyone.
Another issue is that positions which are advertised are often already filled by some acquaintance, but we need to go thru the motions of posting the job, sifting thru resumes, interview questions, leetcodes, etc. and interview theatre before we go and hire the acquaintance.
Sometimes, HR doesnt know and the interview panel may not know.
But especially after a take home assignment, feedback should be given 100% and face to face. It's almost embarrassing to spend X hours/days of your (spare) time only to be rejected with an email and usually some random reasons, without having the chance to explain why you built this toy project that way, how much time you spent and what would you do with more time or in production or even showcase some live coding on top of what you did.
But everything has become really inhumane, no-one cares. That's why AI is dominating and ruining the field.
True that. I just got some "honest feedback" that I didn't agree with at all. I'm all for criticizing myself, but this feedback totally missed the mark. I didn't have deep enough experience with "object oriented programming". What does that even mean? I've been creating and using objects every day since 2007. I literally... don't know what to do with that feedback. It's like the carpenter interview, "Have you ever built brown houses? Our client is very interested in brown houses."
> didn't have deep enough experience with "object oriented programming". What does that even mean?
This could mean two things. "You aren't knowledgeable about OOP" or "you couldn't show us that you are knowledgeable in OOP". If it isn't the former, maybe it's the latter? Maybe the real+underlying feedback is that you couldn't convey your breadth of knowledge in your interview?
With regards to what they're saying, the first thing to do is reverse the perspective. The applicant is hearing a yes or no, so if it's a no they want to know what they did wrong to improve themselves.
From the interviewer's perspective - we get someone who is average, then another person who is average, then someone who has trouble with basic questions, then we get this person who may be as average as the first two, then we get someone who answers every question correctly, and has a deep knowledge of the domain if you drill down, then you get an average person again.
There's nothing really wrong with the person, they did as well as four other people. It's just that someone else came in who was a standard deviation above the majority of the people in the bell in the normally distributed Gaussian curve.
Got rejected after a take home, and the feedback from the recruiter was 1. a reviewer thought I used a library incorrectly (they actually misunderstood how the library worked) and 2. I didn’t implement something that the instructions had explicitly said not to implement.
I didn’t argue with 1 because I figured it was pointless and it sounded like the recruiter was having a rough day. I politely pointed out 2 as a courtesy and he said “huh, the other guy yelled at me about that”.
Although honestly, I left the process thinking “lol” instead of “I’m a dumbass” like I might have absent the feedback.
I have a spreadsheet of my job hunts since 2008 across 8 times I was looking for a job. I was working at my first two jobs between 1996-2008
I’ve been rejected three times once I started the interview process. I have also always gotten interviews from companies where external or internal recruiters reached out to me and I submitted my resume.
All three times I’ve gotten rejected was post mid 2023.
It was clear from one within 10 minutes that I wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m not sure why I didn’t get hired for the second one after going through the rounds even though I have my suspicions.
The third I got ghosted after the HR screen where the representative from the target company’s investor interviewed me.
> More than 150,000 layoffs were reported in 2024 and a whopping 264,000 in 2023.
I switched careers in my 30s to get into tech. It was big, difficult pivot. At the moment, I do not regret it and really like what I do.
But the job market is shockingly bad. I do not have an optimistic outlook, so I am looking to pivot again, likely a small business. All the extra cash I have after expenses, I put towards various side hustles. One big upside to being a SWE is that I can make whatever app I want and put it on the internet publicly.
The job market is bad because a lot of people joined tech when there was a lot of open roles (and a lot of SV money). The money has returned to its pre-bubble level, so there's fewer jobs. But the same number of people looking for work as during the bubble when they switched careers. Most of those new workers lack deep skills, so the existing jobs are going unfilled. Most of the listings I see now are for senior and above.
Another problem is management attitudes towards hiring. They are switching their capricious attention and investment towards AI [1] and off shore to save costs [2, 3].
The combination of all this is making for an ugly combo of negativity. Tech used to be a lot more fun, even before the SV ZIRP hysteria.
Been programming since I was 14, pursued a career in another field so that I could program for fun. I have considered pivoting my career to software development many times. Seeing people far more qualified than me have nightmarish job hunting experiences always makes me think twice. When people with 10+ years of experience can't find a job, there's no reason to believe self-taught programmers without degrees ever will.
Starting a business seems like the only real answer. Struggling only makes sense when it's for your own company.
You and the other million of devs think the same, that's why the indie dev market is exploding and twitter is full of influencers posting their app revenue..
This is so true, and I'm in fact going through this right now. One of my semi-technical friends followed an online tutorial and created a stock tracker web app, almost entirely using ChatGPT. It is a pretty good achievement (in the context of someone who isn't a programmer and started from scratch), and I'm encouraging him to keep going down this path and developing his skills. He is however convinced that he can launch this app and make millions, and is even considering quitting his job to do it full time. There is zero chance it is going to get any kind of traction, and I keep telling him that, but he is too enamored by all the "influencers" on LinkedIn/X telling him that he is basically a 10x engineer now.
Yup, I've been calling this out as the other side of the coin of LLMs for a while now. If dev skill is no longer a barrier to entry and you can spin up an application using chatGPT over the weekend, then so can literally EVERYBODY else on the face of the planet.
You think it was hard competing against 10 other similar apps? Try 1000 or 10,000 competitors.
Yes because it’s harder to land a stable job, it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
> it’s much more realistic to start a business that is going to convince enough people to pay you enough to support yourself.
I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.
> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)
> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.
> And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
In the US you do.
1. Sales = learn to knock on a 100 doors to get one sale.
2. Marketing = learn to communicate your value prop to specific companeis and hiring managers.
3. Delviery = learn to deliver products/projects end to end with all the management that goes in between.
If you know all 3 you'll never be in a position where you don't have income.
It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now ... don't just do a 8 hour job and go home and watch tv.
Keep trying to sell your services to others ... at least 2-3 hours after work to other companies/startups/other industries. Its a big world - smeone needs your services - your survival depends on finding those people nad packaging your skilsl so that they buy.
Yes is just that easy. You don’t actually have to have anything to sell. If that’s all it takes, why do only 1 in 10 startups succeed and that isn’t even counting all of the people who are struggling in obscurity.
> It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now
That 4 years number sounds like an ass pull. What’s your source? Everyone is different and some of those skills come naturally to some people, so I sincerely doubt that number is even close to universal.
Honestly, your whole suggestion seems straight out of one of those generic self-help scams that ignore the realities of life and always blame the user: “You gotta do the thing. If you’re not successful it’s because you didn’t want it enough, not because we’re dispelling the same dated advice to everyone”.
Note I don’t think that’s what you’re doing, you’re not selling anything. I’m just saying I question the helpfulness and quality of the advice.
This will not work if the status quo actually changes to a degree that a significant portion of developers have to do this. It'd very quickly saturate the people willing to give you a chance.
This was a good advice 10-2 yrs ago, but going forward? We'll have to see, but my gut says this will become just as likely to succeed as becoming a successful influencer... By which I mean that a few will occasionally make it/succeed, but it'll only be such a low fraction of the people trying for it that it rounds to 0.0%. and the ones succeeding will generally have been able to leverage an opportunity that most trying the same never had.
(Not to discourage people from trying - without an attempt you won't even have the chance to grasp such an opportunity. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of an observer)
> If you code, you should be building a business on the side.
This is incredibly far from being the universal claim you say it is. 99% of software developers work for someone else, not at their own business, and most are perfectly happy.
By all means, building a business is great for many reasons, sometimes including financial reasons, and you should do it if you want to. But not wanting to is not an "excuse" and you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.
I think OP is saying that it's more of an insurance policy than something to make you happy. If you asked any software dev 5 years ago what their career security looked like, I'm sure most would tell you that they feel extremely confident. A lot has changed in 5 years. Being good at one thing and expecting that to support you for the rest of your life is a risky strategy in the fast-changing world we live in. Tech people felt immune from that, but the facade is starting to crack.
100%. people wanna blame companies for laying people off, doing leetcode, having ATS systems that don't parse resumes correctly.
if people realized - aimed at software engineers - that the same company you're applying for - someone went through the pain of creating the initial product, marketing it, selling it. I'm sure you can do the same - maybe not at the same level but at 80%.
unlike in zero-sum games - real life you can have multiple winners - 80% will get you there.
I do wonder about that. If you had it in you to start a business then I doubt you would have been sitting around waiting for the next downturn to do it.
15 years of experience. Laid off twice last year. 10+ years at 2nd last role, 3 months at last.
Like the article mentions, it's an employers market.
The thing I struggle is the question to why you want to work at a place. Either I'm short and to the point, or it ends up written like I used to when working for one of the Big Three.
And coincidentally, that is exactly the kind of stuff that ChatGPT generates.
Related. But people should also keep in mind that layoffs throughout the industry are extensive. So don't make the mistake of only keeping good connections with your team and managers. Try, to the extent that it's possible, to keep good connections across whatever enterprise you work in. We could easily enter an era, especially in tech, where all of your team and managers are unemployed at the same time you are. Or they otherwise may not have the ability to help you. You should always have a plan for using connections in the event you find yourself in that situation. A prudent pillar of that contingency would be to expand your network as far as you can. Even the facilities guy or the guy in marketing may prove useful one day. No connection is too low or too high.
Tough times. I feel like this is caused by massive capital misallocation over decades. The vast majority of tech companies should not exist, if not for the financial environment propping them up. Now with interest rates going up, there is less cheap money and companies are forced to lay people off and/or shut down themselves.
Reality is that there are too many software developers chasing a small number of value-creating opportunities in a sea of useless or highly inefficient tech companies.
In the meantime, there aren't enough people to produce food, build houses, collect garbage, etc... So costs of essentials keeps going up. It's hard for software devs to transition to physical jobs so it's going to be a tough one.
> I feel like this is caused by massive capital misallocation over decades
Absolutely a large misallocation. And this is not just about the number of engineers. It is also about number of managers, 2 pizza teams, entire management chains merely doing promotion/PIP management, entire sets of VPs and execs with no market experience or engineering experience. Even a large number of PE investors and angel investors who just landed on money but actually don't have any skills beyond betting far and wide.
Highly paid roles have been paying people who are just doing administrative work. This is misallocation. And all of a sudden, this misallocation has come to bare.
I think this gets to the heart of the current situation. The hard truth is that a lot of office workers are actually unskilled labor hidden behind the right kind of social conditioning and "professionalism".
Yeah, it feels like the system created all these jobs because it could afford to support all that deadweight, but most of those people were not creating value; they were not contributing to the company's success so much as merely mooching off of it.
Also, the centralization of media put this effect into hyperdrive. Successful, high exposure companies were drowning in money and so they could just throw 100 engineers at each tiny problem and it wouldn't materially affect their bottom line. They also didn't care much whether an employee was doing their job efficiently, so long as they met basic objectives... Which wasn't hard to do when you have so many people in the team and each person is responsible for a tiny piece.
Many people could be counter-productive in the long run, they were productive enough to meet their short-term OKRs and so they were left alone but their rushed work set the project up for long term pain... Often it's impossible to trace back issues to specific individuals... In software development, it's trivial to introduce massive technical debt while meeting or even blowing past short-term objectives. Someone who is literally killing the project might appear to be a top performer... They may be promoted before any problems become apparent... Kind of like a bad civil engineer who builds an amazing looking bridge and is celebrated for years until the bridge suddenly collapses because the foundations turned out to be poorly designed. By that point they've already been promoted several times, maybe already retired and they can claim that the collapse was caused by incorrect construction practices or bad maintenance work performed later. However, in software, it's much worse because you can't just point to a single incorrect formula or calculation. Failure is usually the result of many bad decisions.
You say that, but everyone I know is working themselves to death. Companies just don’t want to hire. And why should they, if people will keep up the pace?
Same. I guess those who weren't laid off have to work harder to make up for the reduced work capacity and to give credibility to their managers' narrative that efficiency has improved by x%. This doesn't mean that all the work they do adds any value to the economy. A lot of bullshit jobs are VERY demanding.
A game of whac-a-mole can keep people REALLY busy too. You can measure that they're hitting more moles per minute and call that 'increased productivity', but whether or not hitting moles with a hammer is useful is a separate question.
Also, there are questions of short term gains vs long term gains. It's relatively easy to trade away long term gains to obtain short term gains. The incentive structure of our system is predicated on it.
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The problem seems to be that ATSes struggle with the "modern" style of resume, much beloved of Word template authors, where you might have a left column with your contact details, github, and maybe some skills and then a borderless table on the right side with your positioning statement and job history.
I went from zero callbacks to 80% after I junked Word and rewrote my resume in a much more old fashioned, linear format. I used Overleaf (LaTeX) like it was 1999 and exported to PDF.
It turned out the ATS didn’t properly parse ligatures like “ffi”, “fi”, etc. It rendered them as a blank space, so “artificial” became “arti cial”. I turned over ligature rendering in my resume and started to get more callbacks.
Upon further inspection, I discovered that a lot of LLMs also have problems with ligatures and just ignore them when fed a pdf.
So, maybe those annoying job apps where you upload a resume and still have to fill everything in an HTML form aren’t the worst thing.
“Oh no it’s 2 pages with only education on p2.”
Quickly comment out a bullet and print off a fresh 1 page pdf. I don’t use dumb words or phrases now to fit layout, at least far fewer. And git makes me less worried about deleting when it isn’t working.
One pattern i use, that i think makes things simpler, is to have a layout/contact template with definitions, then different context specific main latex files inputting from a sub directory of section blocks: experience, skills, education, etc.
I’d thought I was slick with word table layouts for sections, until a counselor told me the table structures persist in the supposedly flat pdf.
I wish there were an standard optional JSON attachment with a ridiculous small kb size limit to upload along with a human readable resume to help out the user data AST parser.
Here's an example of a simple resumé [0].
You can see in the "Quick Start" section how the resumé template is used, which is very similar to how you described yours.
[0]: https://typst.app/universe/package/basic-resume
AFAIK one can embed arbitrary RDF into PDFs, and then one wouldn't need an extra field https://pdfa.org/wp-content/until2016_uploads/2011/08/pdfa_m...
There may be edge cases where some obscure software can't parse a weird resume format, but in general if you put anything remotely resembling a common resume format (Company name, dates worked there, optional description and/or bullet points) it will be parsed properly.
I'm in a big Slack where people ask and give career help. Several hiring managers have offered to test people's resumes on their company's ATS over the years. Nobody has ever found a combination that actually failed the ATS except when it was an obvious problem (like someone who made their resume in Illustrator) or an obvious user error (exporting a resume as an image).
A few job sites, like WorkDay, have mangled my PDF resume every time I upload it. Like the OP, I've had to massage the layout and formatting to make it more compatible.
It's possible that there is some selection bias here, where mediocre parsing systems give you the option to manually correct everything because they know they are mediocre. I remain skeptical.
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Especially for remote positions, there are hundreds of people applying for every open req and it’s hard to stand out
https://www.reddit.com/r/EngineeringResumes/wiki/index/#wiki...
(In short, they might not be as important as you think they are)
I don't think people realize how many of the ATS myths have been promulgated by people trying to sell services to job seekers. The ATS myth resonates with people for some reason, so desperate job seekers will often pay (unnecessarily) for various "ATS friendly" templates or ATS reviews.
That's it. That's all you need to do.
In my case, I had a simple layout with sections clearly delineated and very simple formatting (bulleted lists). Dates were spelled out eg September 2024 rather than 9/24. UTF-8 throughout. No difficult latex packages, just classic ones like enumitem and fancyhdr.
Frankly, plain text rendered to PDF is probably going to be the most easily parsed by their systems. If they let you add attachments separate from your resume, then stick your "beautified" resume there.
[0] For the curious: https://www.hropenstandards.org/
I've spoken with two technical recruiters who say they prefer reading templates instead of hand-crafted Resumes on top of them also parsing better in the ATS system ):
Please see the job history array.
https://xkcd.com/927/
I've never found good leads with cold approaches. Even when getting contacted and receiving an offer, it was always low salaries on that method. What worked best was going to related events, talking to people hosting the booths, talk to presenters of topics where I'm an expert and this way get warm introductions.
I have done two different types of resumes; long and sort. When I was learning about resumes in high school and college, they said to just list your jobs and maybe some key skills. I have been told this is useless to recruiters. So I rewrote things to have a couple paragraphs about major projects at this jobs. I have been told this is too long and nobody has time to read it. So now I have both and you can pick the one you want.
I got laid off recently so this is fresh in my mind, but I got a job through my network instead which did not involve a resume or interviews. That's really how it should be. (I'm kind of just waiting for the founders from my last startup to start something new... they didn't survive the reorg either, which was a "sort by salary descending and only keep the last 3". The joys of having your software startup bought by an indecisive large company that doesn't do software ;)
Not sure about the 'should', but I think it is. Over the years I had the pleasure to work with quite a few good people, but there were also some buffoons (not counting those in marketing). I can only imagine, that the resume of the latter will look more appealing.
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The design always struck me as a clumsy attempt to take up space.
they offer the option to parse your cv and see what "comes out on the other side"
I am not sure whether the idea of the parser is to be a starting point to then use the editor, or a test.
I remember seeing a list of companies you could "apply" to with your resume that would then show the ATS-parsed version back to you. Every single person who used it got a reasonable result back, which is usually enough to put an end to all of the ATS myths out there.
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It was that I have to go job hunting and how demoralizing and toil heavy that process is. Heck I'd likely go job hunting just out of curiosity, the idea of exploring other options should be interesting at the least, but naw it's too much of a pain.
>Recruiters. Don’t discount or blow them off.
That's all they do for me ... I suspect there's a subset of people who are very attractive to recruiters and they actually do things for those people and I am not in that group. The advice surrounding recruiters is always so disconnected from my experience that it seems strange.
It's less about me being stubborn as it is those places are hiring based on the wrong skills, and those end up not being good places to work.
I definitely agree with you: Looking for a job (or "keeping your doors & windows open to new opportunities") while having a job is much, much easier -- mentally. In my industry, most connections with head hunters are made through LinkedIn. You can set a special flag in your profile that says "I'm looking for work", but this is only visible to professional head hunters (they pay a lot of money for an account with these special privileges). It works very well. Normally, the calls start with: "Them: Are you looking at the moment? Me: No, but I am open to new and exciting opportunities. Them: Oh, great. I have something for you." Do that enough, and eventually something very good lands on your doorstep.
That’s no exaggeration at all. I’m not always looking for a job. But everything I do I do with one eye toward how will this look when I get ready to interview? Am I working on tech that is demand? Am I working at the correct “scope, impact, and ambiguity” or am I just being a “ticket taker”?
1) They use the correct email address, the one I used on my resume and to apply for jobs, and didn't dig out my personal one somewhere.
2) They don't say something stupid that reveals they didn't even look at my resume. ("I see you have C# experience", uh no I don't)
3) They include anything at all that's supposed to interest me, even if it actually doesn't.
The vast majority fail at step 1. I've only ever had one email from a recruiter that passed all these criteria.
If you're not a well-known name, you can have your job-postings but you won't get any applications. Either you spend time on advertising and try to convince people that you're really real and actually really want to hire, or you just get yourself someone who introduces you to people who might be a good fit. That's a recruiter.
The one I didn’t meet in person was a specialized recruiter for my niche.
Two came from me reaching out to them and two were from internal recruiters
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I’ve said it before, and I say it again. This isn’t true. When companies try to be helpful and give you well meaning feedback, you find out that their reasons for rejecting you are absolutely banal, and you’d have been better off not hearing anything.
I didn't last very long. Candidates would see the feedback as an invitation to prove me wrong or argue with my assessment. I got a few very angry e-mails from people who took their rejection very personally and made it clear that I was their enemy. One person (who was actually very unqualified) even went on a mini rampage across the internet, trying to "name and shame" my company and even my personally for the rejection. There were even threats of a discrimination lawsuit.
So I stopped. It's back to something like "We've decided to proceed with other candidates"
So the candidate gets feedback along the lines of: "Thank you for participating in our interview process. Unfortunately, our panel decided you weren't the best fit for position X at this time, because ...reasons.... Under company policy, we won't accept further applications from you for one year from today, but we would encourage you to apply for a role with us in the future".
There is a chance they will reply back to HR arguing, but it is their job to be polite but firm that the decision is already made, and that they can apply again in one year (and not pass anything back to the hiring manager).
The key is to think long term and about the company as a whole - the candidate who gets helpful feedback and is treated fairly is more likely to apply again in the future (after the mandatory cooling off period), when they might have more skills and experience working somewhere else. There is a finite qualified labour pool no matter where you are based, and having the good will even of rejected candidates is a competitive advantage. The message should be "not now", rather than "not ever" (although of course, if they do go on some kind of rampage, they could turn the not now into not ever - that's a bridge burning move). If a tiny percentage go on a rampage, but the company protects the individuals from it, and has lots of counteracting positive sentiment from prospective and actual staff, then it's still a net positive.
So I could imagine debating a point while being in the right.
yeah - I don't know why OP makes that sorta assumption. I'd expect angry replies with no benefits to the time wasted on my part.
Sometimes, HR doesnt know and the interview panel may not know.
If it's banal, I'd like to know. Otherwise you're still left wondering whether it's anything that hinders you in the longrun.
But especially after a take home assignment, feedback should be given 100% and face to face. It's almost embarrassing to spend X hours/days of your (spare) time only to be rejected with an email and usually some random reasons, without having the chance to explain why you built this toy project that way, how much time you spent and what would you do with more time or in production or even showcase some live coding on top of what you did.
But everything has become really inhumane, no-one cares. That's why AI is dominating and ruining the field.
This could mean two things. "You aren't knowledgeable about OOP" or "you couldn't show us that you are knowledgeable in OOP". If it isn't the former, maybe it's the latter? Maybe the real+underlying feedback is that you couldn't convey your breadth of knowledge in your interview?
From the interviewer's perspective - we get someone who is average, then another person who is average, then someone who has trouble with basic questions, then we get this person who may be as average as the first two, then we get someone who answers every question correctly, and has a deep knowledge of the domain if you drill down, then you get an average person again.
There's nothing really wrong with the person, they did as well as four other people. It's just that someone else came in who was a standard deviation above the majority of the people in the bell in the normally distributed Gaussian curve.
I didn’t argue with 1 because I figured it was pointless and it sounded like the recruiter was having a rough day. I politely pointed out 2 as a courtesy and he said “huh, the other guy yelled at me about that”.
Although honestly, I left the process thinking “lol” instead of “I’m a dumbass” like I might have absent the feedback.
If this was SASR recruitment that'd be the pysch portion of the test, reject a candidate for a reason that makes no sense and watch their reaction ...
The assessment never stops, everything's a meta test, and they push until you quit the recruitment merry go round.
In the relatively normal world of software engineering .. that's a recruiter landed with a poor testing pachage and procedures.
They were looking for a network engineer who could program a little and you're a programmer who knows a little about networks or something like that.
I’ve been rejected three times once I started the interview process. I have also always gotten interviews from companies where external or internal recruiters reached out to me and I submitted my resume.
All three times I’ve gotten rejected was post mid 2023.
It was clear from one within 10 minutes that I wasn’t what they were looking for. I’m not sure why I didn’t get hired for the second one after going through the rounds even though I have my suspicions.
The third I got ghosted after the HR screen where the representative from the target company’s investor interviewed me.
I switched careers in my 30s to get into tech. It was big, difficult pivot. At the moment, I do not regret it and really like what I do.
But the job market is shockingly bad. I do not have an optimistic outlook, so I am looking to pivot again, likely a small business. All the extra cash I have after expenses, I put towards various side hustles. One big upside to being a SWE is that I can make whatever app I want and put it on the internet publicly.
Another problem is management attitudes towards hiring. They are switching their capricious attention and investment towards AI [1] and off shore to save costs [2, 3].
The combination of all this is making for an ugly combo of negativity. Tech used to be a lot more fun, even before the SV ZIRP hysteria.
[1] https://www.salesforceben.com/salesforce-will-hire-no-more-s...
[2] https://www.turing.com/blog/top-us-companies-choosing-offsho...
[3] I work at a large bank. Almost all our new roles are exclusively in India and the Philippines.
Starting a business seems like the only real answer. Struggling only makes sense when it's for your own company.
You think it was hard competing against 10 other similar apps? Try 1000 or 10,000 competitors.
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Especially if you are early in your career and its becoming harder to land a stable job.
you need to learn how to market your skills, get clients and deliver.
No more excuses to sit in a job and do nothing. This is going to be critical to survive.
Eventually I think companies are going to be much smaller entities than they once were which means your have to really buid your own biz.
Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding.
And you need to make enough to pay for health care.
In a slowed down market, both get difficult, the latter many times more than the first.
I only have to convince one place - Google Ads. Plus bring in the "eyeballs" with my free app, but I have accomplished that more than once.
> Also you have to convince companies to do business with you instead of a well known company.
Just one company in my case (actually several, but 90+% of the money comes from Google)
> Oh and to be competitive you need to have some type of funding. I have to be competitive enough to make a few thousand a month, and with my programming (and database design, and UX, and SRE etc.) skills, I have achieved that.
> And you need to make enough to pay for health care. In the US you do.
1. Sales = learn to knock on a 100 doors to get one sale.
2. Marketing = learn to communicate your value prop to specific companeis and hiring managers.
3. Delviery = learn to deliver products/projects end to end with all the management that goes in between.
If you know all 3 you'll never be in a position where you don't have income. It takes about 4 years to really get a grasp of all 3 so start now ... don't just do a 8 hour job and go home and watch tv.
Keep trying to sell your services to others ... at least 2-3 hours after work to other companies/startups/other industries. Its a big world - smeone needs your services - your survival depends on finding those people nad packaging your skilsl so that they buy.
That 4 years number sounds like an ass pull. What’s your source? Everyone is different and some of those skills come naturally to some people, so I sincerely doubt that number is even close to universal.
Honestly, your whole suggestion seems straight out of one of those generic self-help scams that ignore the realities of life and always blame the user: “You gotta do the thing. If you’re not successful it’s because you didn’t want it enough, not because we’re dispelling the same dated advice to everyone”.
Note I don’t think that’s what you’re doing, you’re not selling anything. I’m just saying I question the helpfulness and quality of the advice.
This was a good advice 10-2 yrs ago, but going forward? We'll have to see, but my gut says this will become just as likely to succeed as becoming a successful influencer... By which I mean that a few will occasionally make it/succeed, but it'll only be such a low fraction of the people trying for it that it rounds to 0.0%. and the ones succeeding will generally have been able to leverage an opportunity that most trying the same never had.
(Not to discourage people from trying - without an attempt you won't even have the chance to grasp such an opportunity. I'm just looking at it from the perspective of an observer)
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This is incredibly far from being the universal claim you say it is. 99% of software developers work for someone else, not at their own business, and most are perfectly happy.
By all means, building a business is great for many reasons, sometimes including financial reasons, and you should do it if you want to. But not wanting to is not an "excuse" and you shouldn't feel pressured to do so.
if people realized - aimed at software engineers - that the same company you're applying for - someone went through the pain of creating the initial product, marketing it, selling it. I'm sure you can do the same - maybe not at the same level but at 80%.
unlike in zero-sum games - real life you can have multiple winners - 80% will get you there.
And then sell it.
Not rocket science but most people are their own biggest wall.
Like the article mentions, it's an employers market.
The thing I struggle is the question to why you want to work at a place. Either I'm short and to the point, or it ends up written like I used to when working for one of the Big Three.
And coincidentally, that is exactly the kind of stuff that ChatGPT generates.
> Keeping good connections with your coworkers and not burning bridges is one of the most important things I think you can do in your career.
Words to live by. I wish more folks internalized this phrase.
This is so true, one of my biggest corporate deals came from a guy I worked with a decade before, he was junior at the time.
Reality is that there are too many software developers chasing a small number of value-creating opportunities in a sea of useless or highly inefficient tech companies.
In the meantime, there aren't enough people to produce food, build houses, collect garbage, etc... So costs of essentials keeps going up. It's hard for software devs to transition to physical jobs so it's going to be a tough one.
Absolutely a large misallocation. And this is not just about the number of engineers. It is also about number of managers, 2 pizza teams, entire management chains merely doing promotion/PIP management, entire sets of VPs and execs with no market experience or engineering experience. Even a large number of PE investors and angel investors who just landed on money but actually don't have any skills beyond betting far and wide.
Highly paid roles have been paying people who are just doing administrative work. This is misallocation. And all of a sudden, this misallocation has come to bare.
Also, the centralization of media put this effect into hyperdrive. Successful, high exposure companies were drowning in money and so they could just throw 100 engineers at each tiny problem and it wouldn't materially affect their bottom line. They also didn't care much whether an employee was doing their job efficiently, so long as they met basic objectives... Which wasn't hard to do when you have so many people in the team and each person is responsible for a tiny piece.
Many people could be counter-productive in the long run, they were productive enough to meet their short-term OKRs and so they were left alone but their rushed work set the project up for long term pain... Often it's impossible to trace back issues to specific individuals... In software development, it's trivial to introduce massive technical debt while meeting or even blowing past short-term objectives. Someone who is literally killing the project might appear to be a top performer... They may be promoted before any problems become apparent... Kind of like a bad civil engineer who builds an amazing looking bridge and is celebrated for years until the bridge suddenly collapses because the foundations turned out to be poorly designed. By that point they've already been promoted several times, maybe already retired and they can claim that the collapse was caused by incorrect construction practices or bad maintenance work performed later. However, in software, it's much worse because you can't just point to a single incorrect formula or calculation. Failure is usually the result of many bad decisions.
A game of whac-a-mole can keep people REALLY busy too. You can measure that they're hitting more moles per minute and call that 'increased productivity', but whether or not hitting moles with a hammer is useful is a separate question.
Also, there are questions of short term gains vs long term gains. It's relatively easy to trade away long term gains to obtain short term gains. The incentive structure of our system is predicated on it.