And I'm not saying this as a partisan, on either side.
Fleeing is the coward's way out. Stay and fight for what you believe in.
You don't get to come back and dictate that the rest of us placate to your beliefs and feelings after you fled and didn't invest any sweat equity to fix the problem.
Your spray and pray technique is flooding HR departments with AI generated applications. This blocks out people who are actually qualified for the role as they get drowned out by the "shameless" who apply for anything that "vaguely fits".
This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken.
"This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken."
You have this backwards. The only reason they have so many applicants in the first place is that the sector unemployment rate is so high and companies play games with evergreen postings.
Except it's not. A lot of people just got used to quit job on Monday, have several offers by Friday (with a big salary boost) which was never the norm for professional employment.
Go check the stats. Sector unemployment is about 6%. Full employment rate is considered 4%. There are numerous layoffs over the past two years. It's taking people a year or more and hundreds of applications to find new jobs. The IT job market has actually shrunk this year.
Again, check the stats. 6% is higher than full employment rate, higher than the overall rate, and is above the median unemployment rate for the past 100 years. It would be even higher except the participation rate is falling.
> It would be even higher except the participation rate is falling.
Prime age (25-54) labor force participation rate is steady and high (steady around the highest peak since the one at the height of the late-90s dotcom boom—which itself was the global maximum since the stat was tracked—for the last couple years.) Overall LFPR (16+) is dropping, but that's just the elderly population share growing.
A lot of people are looking for reasons why landing tech jobs isn't the turkey shoot that it was for the past 15 years or so. I'm unconvinced how much AI is the answer. I do think a lot of tech companies probably overhired during COVID for a variety of reasons. From what I see, professional hiring seems pretty normal even if certainly not overheated and you can argue about how it compares to the general economy by a percentage point or two.
There's no good approach here. If you can't rely on hiring through the network, you need to apply. And then either you get hired or someone else. It's all broken, but we can't expect every single person to collectively choose the "cooperate" option in this massive game if prisoner's dilemma.
This. OP is playing by the rules. The rules are silly and dysfunctional, but at least in the short term, that's the winning strategy. I'd probably do the same in his case (or at least a combination of sending maybe 5 well-made resumes or cover letters, to the companies that are the most promising, + 95 "spray and pray" ones for random fishing).
You got it. If you KNOW the company is ACTUALLY hiring and is serious about filling the role, and it's a good fit; take the extra time. But spray and pray helps counter ghost jobs which are impossible to detect until hindsight.
It's not a question of who to blame exactly. The poster's practice illustrates why sending resumes in response to job postings can't work anymore. From the point of view of the new hiring company or new job applicant, it doesn't matter who created the situation. What matters is what we do about it next. You can spray and pray but you certainly shouldn't expect it to "work".
For the poster: was their method a good use of their time? is the job "found" a good fit really? will they last in this position?
For the hiring company: was their method a good use of their time? is this person in any way a great fit? will they last in this position?
The poster complains that few companies sent him a rejection note! Why in the world would they? The poster was protective of their time, and should rightly expect the hiring companies to do the same.
Yes, the job i found is a perfect fit for me and my skillset. I did not fake my way into something.
and my point is: if you genuinely apply to a position and you never even hear back from them, not even to reject you, it doesn't make sense to only apply to a handful. again, emphasis genuine application; answered all their questions and the role is a fit for my resume. That's why you have to spray and pray.
Were your applications that good of a fit? You sent 450 applications for one hiring. Very roughly speaking this means you expect the employer to carefully consider 450 applications for their one job opening (assuming roughly speaking, that everyone does the same). "Carefully" is clearly not gonna happen. You sprayed and prayed but the employer is hiring one person for that one position (not quite true) and can't just spray and pray themselves.
You may have indeed found 450 real and fictitious openings that would be a great match for you. Yes, not impossible. Still the practice puts the employers themselves in a position where these resumes and answers cannot possibly be read. Not carefully, not at all. Again no blame one way or the other. I'm just arguing that we cannot expect the employer to carefully consider all these applications. There is no point in being shocked / surprised / whatever by this. The sprayed and prayed applications will not be read carefully. The employer will find whichever shortcut to sift through the pile and will carefully consider only a handful of all these applicants. Or hopefully, will see the light and consider other kinds of applications - such as network leads (but there are other options.)
My argument is about what we do next. My answer is that it cannot be job postings and answers to job postings. That ship has sailed. (And nonetheless, congrats on your new job.)
> You sent 450 applications for one hiring. Very roughly speaking this means you expect the employer to carefully consider 450 applications for their one job opening
I think you misunderstand. I did not apply to the same job 450 times. These were 450 different companies/positions that aligned with my resume.
> I'm just arguing that we cannot expect the employer to carefully consider all these applications. There is no point in being shocked / surprised / whatever by this. The sprayed and prayed applications will not be read carefully. The employer will find whichever shortcut to sift through the pile and will carefully consider only a handful of all these applicants.
Which is exactly why one needs to apply to many jobs. Almost every job on linkedin has had over 100 applicants after it's been up for a few hours. If you just apply to a handful, there's little chance you'll find success.
I didn't mention it before, but a CFO friend of mine is the one who told me to spray & pray because it's what she had to do and encouraged me to do the same. She was initially against doing it herself, but she changed her mind. And she is a C-suite and is someone with a large network.
> You sent 450 applications for one hiring. Very roughly speaking this means you expect the employer to carefully consider 450 applications for their one job opening
No misunderstanding. Since lots of people operate like you did - more or less - that's the more or less result.
> Almost every job on linkedin has had over 100 applicants after it's been up for a few hours.
Well yeah. If your job search is going to be answering postings on anything - if you START with the linkedin posting as a given - then you will be competing with hundreds of garbage applications. Yes of course. Which means the employer won't read these all carefully (not possible). And the interview process for these will be aimed at filtering the garbage. And you won't like it. Etc etc.
And no argument that sometimes it works. Of course. It's a common way to go about a job search and on average people do get hired in the end, after a lot of nonsense. Everyone also complains a lot about a broken and inefficient hiring process. The inefficient hiring process is co-evolved with this approach.
People also mention approaching the right people and being fast-tracked through the hiring process. That is also a thing.
Even if you're only applying to one opening per company per day, from a recruiter's perspective your application is likely to be equivalent in value to most of the 1,500 other applications they have still to weed out. Your advice boils down to "stop applying to tech jobs."
my application was not "AI generated" nor was it for unrelated roles. Everything I applied to was in alignment with my resume. I would much rather be able to apply to a handful of jobs and for that to be enough. But I don't control the market, i can only participate in it.
This is a huge problem in Pennsylvania also, but most of the municipalities have abdicated significant maintenance responsibilities to HOAs. They refuse to take over roads, retention ponds, and common land areas requiring the HOA to cover maintenance. Snow removal from "public" roads and landscaping of "common areas" is a significant cost for HOAs. If the municipalitiies are forced to take these dutues over it's going to be a huge hit to their budgets. I'd think this would be a hard sell to most politicians in PA.
It is well known that all the suburbs in the US are just an economic time-bomb waiting to happen due to the maintenance cost of the public amenities (especially when water/sewage/electricity infra).
Seems fair that the people who actually live in them are the ones paying for the costs instead of spreading it over to all residents of the city. Maybe we will see some suburbs converted to more dense housing once the public infrastructure needs to be replaced.
Not here in Southern York County, PA. I would not buy any house in an HOA and all houses i have bought (sold) were not in an HOA in the various towns here.
I have completed three SANS courses and hold two GIAC certifications. Yes, they are unreasonably expensive. But you know that going in.
But I have no idea what this guy is talking about otherwise. He repeatedly claims "content misalignment" and "exam misrepresentation". The courses I have completed were wholly aligned with real-world application. And as far as the exams...they are open books and open notes. And you get practice exams that provide a pretty nice roadmap of the actual test.
There is a move to rename the crime to "financial grooming" because the term "pig butchering" is an intentional form of victim shaming. Anyone who is still using the term pig butchering should be immediately discredited.
It's a literal translation of the original Chinese term. This scam has been popular in Asia for years. One can use a euphemisms but it doesn't really help the victims. Also the term "grooming" has a negative connotation itself since some Western media outlets started using it to downplay child gang rape. See the British "grooming gangs".
People have to use words understood by others to communicate. this is the first time i've ever seen this term and agree it's better but don't think it's fair to discredit people using the current term
Financial grooming is a better name anyway. Maybe not the best, but I assumed a pig butchering scam had something to do with pigs or butchery, like maybe selling other meats as pork or pork as other meats, or selling products sourced from pigs as vegan.
Financial grooming has money right in the name. And there's other victim grooming patterns, so I wouldn't think 'financial grooming scam' is something to do with recombing a president's hair.
Seems to me that the name is an extremely vivid explanation of what's happening, and might therefore prevent it happening, by sticking in people's minds. Better to prevent it happening at all than name it to make people feel better about themselves.
Honestly that makes sense, the main reason the public doesn’t hear about these things is because victims don’t want to speak on this. They just got swindled, can you really blame them?
In almost every scam there is an element of "grey legal area", where the victim thinks that they are doing something slightly illegal or completely illegal and that's why it is going to pay out so well for them. That is to make sure victims don't tell police or really anybody. "Hey I was putting all my money into this criminal scheme, but instead I got scammed, can you help me?"
That is why we have the old saying: "You can't fool an honest man"
> In almost every scam there is an element of "grey legal area", where the victim thinks that they are doing something slightly illegal or completely illegal
That isn't true of pig-butchering scams, or in general.
> That is why we have the old saying: "You can't fool an honest man"
The saying is "You can't cheat an honest man". And it's also bullshit. Don't trust old sayings; you can quote me on that.
How are you so sure, and why are you so angry as to rage against old sayings? The pig butcher scammers might very well tell their victims that the supposed crypto investments are not allowed in China, to make them seem more lucrative.
The most effective way is to get a 'finance' app approved on the Apple/Google store (which is easy), then you send your victims there after grooming them for multiple weeks, then show above average returns, but not exceptional ones, so they keep depositing their savings, then when they try to withdraw, you make a message like 'you have to pay 40% taxes on your total earnings, please deposit that much before you can withdraw'.
That's why I think 'pig butchering', despite the negative connotation, is accurate. Yes, grooming is part of the scam, but it isn't the majority of it.
No, you're the one who made a claim unsupported by TFA, that victims usually believe they're acting illegally.
The scammers might very well tell everyone carlosjobim put them up to it. You can't just assume something is happening because it technically could happen.
I was talking about why victims are many times reluctant to talk to the police or others when they've been scammed. My comment was not in response to the article, but to another comment.
Frankly you seem to be looking for some kind of argument where there is none.
If not most, then very many of the victims when it comes to scams for large amounts of money. There's good reason for this, if the victim wants to keep their dealings secret then there's less risk that somebody finds out and tells them they're being scammed.
"Financial grooming" is the term in common use in the UK.
I've never heard of 'pig butchering' which sounds rather victim blaming and certainly would not be used as a *descriptive* term by UK banks, government or media.
I'm also in the UK and I'm not seeing the victim blaming part of it. I don't think it's a great term, given that I had no idea what it meant until I read the article. Then again, I would have assumed "financial grooming" was a service offered by a concierge banker to lower my direct debits. Out of the two phrases, I do feel that saying "my uncle is being butchered" will get law enforcement to act more quickly than saying that he's being "groomed".
I'm obviously missing some context or nuance here, since you're the second person to identify the connotation. Is it the "pig" part?
This place is ridiculous. How do I get downvoted for trying to help the victim from being stigmatized? The term is horrible, and there is no legitimate reason to use it.
> There is a move to rename the crime to "financial grooming" because the term "pig butchering" is an intentional form of victim shaming. Anyone who is still using the term pig butchering should be immediately discredited.
Your first sentence was fine, although I disagree that the term is intentional victim shaming.
But you came into a forum where people know term A, and went on full blast with "anyone who is still using (well known) term A instead of term B (that many people didn't even know exists) should be immediately discredited."
That's needlessly aggressive and doesn't really help get your message across.
You're right that this place is ridiculous. However, as I mentioned in a cousin comment, I don't see the stigma and you haven't done a good job of explaining it.
Is it because the word "pig" implies that the victim hasn't kept Kosher and that the scam is god's punishment for that? Is there a general consensus that people who are "butchered" deserve to be murdered? This stigma was obvious and immediate for you, but I'm not picking it up. I don't wish to perpetuate the stigma, but you haven't shared what it is.
As far as I know the "pig" part is about fattening (increasing trust and and thus the payout) them up before butchering (scam exit). Really doesn't seem like victim shaming. If anything it makes me feel worse for the victim because its a long con involving trust and feelings.
As I've been told long enough "be strict in what you give, be liberal in what you accept". We're all welcome to apply (arbitrary) strict rules to what we say, but we ought to live with the fact not every does (or, anyway, have the same set of rules to start with)
Long time adjunct instructor here - it's pretty easy to tell when a student is writing above their level or not within their tone and style. A lot of times, I can tell the work is not the students; maybe not AI-created, but definitely created by someone else.
I'd like to see the actual paper. Turning a student in for plagiarism is a serious action and not taken lightly. I think the instructor had other clues besides machine alerts.
"Turning a student in for plagiarism is a serious action and not taken lightly."
In this case the instructor did not turn the student in for plagiarism. The student went to the board of academic integrity herself in an attempt to undo the instructors decision to fail her.
"Notably, male rats exhibited pronounced autism-like behaviors, characterized by a marked reduction in social interaction and repetitive patterns of behavior. Furthermore, there was a substantial decrease in neuronal counts in critical brain regions, indicating potential neurodegeneration or altered neurodevelopment. Male rats also demonstrated impaired motor performance, evidenced by reduced coordination and agility."
And I'm not saying this as a partisan, on either side.
Fleeing is the coward's way out. Stay and fight for what you believe in.
You don't get to come back and dictate that the rest of us placate to your beliefs and feelings after you fled and didn't invest any sweat equity to fix the problem.