I can't really agree. I mean you scroll 1 paragraph down and it says he worked a Google Deepmind, that's really all I'd need to see. I think the market is just super hard for new grads. I've heard from people that had to apply to hundreds of companies and do 20+ interviews to get something.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.
It's frustrating for the participants, but typically for these "internship programs for disadvantaged students", future employers will not treat it as equivalent to a regular internship.
That includes the company that runs the internship. In my large tech company experience, usually the entire "internship for disadvantaged students" program led to zero job offers.
Honestly, it might be a good idea to avoid those programs entirely. You often don't get to work on "real problems" while you're there. The program exists for PR much more than to give you useful experience.
That said, I don't have experience with this specific program, so this might not fit the archetype.
That's what it says on paper but that's not reality. If you are asian you are suddenly not disadvantaged even if you are an immigrant. It is just legal racism.
The fact that employers even get to play games like this tells you a lot about our current situation ironically.
"Disadvantaged" is not something that is defined purely by race (atleast in the UK) The key factors that are considered in your university application are all pretty much pure contextual factors IE; income, poor academic performance family history of higher education etc..
If you are of Asian descent in the UK the biggest factors to determine if your going to get into a program like this is not your skin color. Its an evaluation of you and your family's history and providing ascent to people less fortunate.
You say that you can't really agree [about the resume being poorly formatted from having too much text?], but then you agree that there's too much text (if all you need to see is the 1 item of "Google", then you're saying there's firmly too much text, like 95% of the resume is useless).
Also consider that the resume has too much text in a pre-LLM world (e.g. this submitter doesn't structure documents for consumption very well, but I'll still read it). Post-LLMs, using an essay-format would make me suspect that the submitter didn't even write it (taking the time to read it is a big gamble).
Not to detract from the article's palpable despair. I genuinely can't say for certain that "well if they made their resume less verbose they'd definitely get hired", because I suspect there's a good chance they still might not. But it probably wouldn't hurt.
I'm not sure if this is a good approach or not.. but I've started just exploding my resume out, then feeding it to an LLM to create a job-specific version a few times... I'll edit the job-specific version a bit, which does cut things down.
I don't know it's helped or hurt, as I've only gotten a response from about 1:50 that I sent out before or since I made the shift and I know the job market sucks.
I still need to flush out some of the prior jobs in terms of older history, projects and accomplishments. I've done a lot of contract work in 6-12 month segments in the past three decades... It's kind of wild to look back on the shear variety, scale, scope and size of some of the things I've done and worked on.
At this point, I'm not sure if it's luck, ageism or just the number of short stints in my past... but It's a weird feeling in recent job market that I haven't felt in decades. 5 years ago, it felt like I was being overwhelmed when I wasn't even looking... today it's a mess.
Last time I was job hunting I did something similar: Write out everything I've done, even "silly" things like Haskell knowledge from uni, then comment out everything not relevant to a job until my resume fits on 2 pages. My Latex Template made this much quicker than it sounds, maybe ~10 minutes per application (and 10+ hours to create the CV itself...).
Two issues I see that haven't been mentioned yet:
1. A lot of companies, especially startups, are fake job advertising. They want to look like they are growing, and they might hire a golden goose, but many job ads I saw just stay up for months or even years.
2. A lot of companies, especially large ones, are using AI to pre-screen CVs. So you now have to get through AI, then HR, then a technical manager, each with their own sets of requirements. I've played around with some of the HR AIs, they tend to be quite... superficial. To give one example from the CV above:
> Ran small A/B tests and collected human-in-the-loop safety ratings to calibrate thresholds and escalation rules.
Is a perfectly good sentence, but according to AI should be:
> Optimized escalation rules and safety thresholds by conducting A/B test collecting human-in-the-loop safety ratings, reducing false-positive escalations by 15%.
Put your achievement first? Good. Strike out verbs like 'small'? Fair, it is a sales situation. Make up numbers entirely to provide a 'quantifiable result'? Complete crap. But it seems to be what every HR bot really wants to see, so now you have to sprinkle it in and hope it gets you past the bot, and doesn't make the technical manager think you're a complete charlatan.
It's that second one that I'm trying to actually work around by using AI to generate the trimmed down version. I just haven't taken the time to pull open some of the really old versions of my resume to flush out the history and to expand on older projects yet.
The whole process just seems to suck all around. As much as I never liked filtering through a stack of hundreds of resumes as a senior member in a time hiring, being on this side of the wall is even less fun.
I don't see the point of applying for "hundreds of jobs." I think use the time to network with real people and forget about Indeed or whatever because those jobs are mostly fake anyways.
> I think use the time to network with real people
It kinda doesn't work these days. One of the points of DEI was to eliminate the nepotism hiring (and it's kinda good if the hiring wasn't so broken), so these days referrals don't mean shit unless you're referred by someone high-ranked enough.
I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
I was auto rejected from a publicly traded company through internal referral because I applied to a remote position. My friend told me the recruiter told her that position wasn’t available to SF residents, only engineers in LCOL areas.
My experience is completely the opposite, every quick hire is a referral, jobs constantly ask for and bonus for referrals. The higher up the position the more it matters that you have a warm introduction.
Agree. The big public traded companies might be different but if a business owner thinks you can solve their problem and that will gain them more money than you ask for it is very easy to get hired
Just saying "referrals are worthless" or "referrals are useful" doesn't mean much without specifying the type of referral. Obviously if you're talking directly to a hiring manager who's willing to bypass HR, it's much likelier you'll end up with a job than if you're talking to someone who sees an open position on another team and says he'll flag your resume on their ATS if you apply.
> I've literally seen people being autorejected after being referred by team-leads these days.
Yes. But not always. Getting an internal referral helps somewhere between not at all and a lot. And it is pretty random, nothing to do with you. Just a matter of timing and attention span and where other candidates are in the queue.
However, it never hurts. So overall, don't expect networking and referrals will get you the job, but do expect it to help every now and then. So it is worth spending some time on that.
I haven't found this to be the case as much. Posted a job, got 100 applications, at least 10 had referrals. 10 is manageable for me to sift through but not the win the applicant thought. More than that, I found a colleague had a whole google form process to farm out referrals.
Bonuses. Usually there is no penalty for failed referrals, so the more people they refer, the more likely someone gets hired and sticks around long enough for the bonus.
That's not a scope expansion, a first-order relationship within your family is barely even networking at all. Giving preferential treatment to friends and relatives is an entirely different world from what's being suggested above.
As one of those new grads, I'm frankly not seeing where I could expand my scope to. Most random tech workers, outside the people I know through a past job, wouldn't want to know me, a random person. Everyone always suggests networking and going to events in the vaguest possible ways, but I'm not seeing any results in terms of establishing actual, real, interesting connections through the watered-down LinkedIn version of interaction. I would have to either build something so profoundly interesting that they would come to me first, or get to know someone in the field via some different means (like an unrelated hobby). It feels like there's very little that can actually be done productively. If you already happened to know someone somehow, you have a shot at the golden ticket, otherwise it's pretty bleak.
I think you need to find one of those people collectors. I know one of them, and I could ask him to introduce me to somebody with <insert skill/interest> and he'll know somebody within a hundred miles.
I've made six figure revenue over the course of the past 5 years from introductions to new clients through a "people collector". Definitely a great person to have in your network!
I wonder how hard it is to become such a person. Just start telling people you're looking to be one, and I imagine they'll give you their business card in case you manage to become one and they need you in the future.
I think it's a personality trait. He actually enjoys talking to dozens of people every day. He's friends with pretty much all the professors at the local uni because he turned up to random events as a student, and somehow he met a director level person at my company at the dry cleaners and they have regular catch-ups. he keeps a notebook of small facts about everybody in his network. COVID lockdowns were devastating for him.
In contrast, my Dunbar number is about 5. I need a few days to calm down from meeting new people. I can't imagine putting in the effort that he does in collecting people. COVID lockdown was a welcome break for me.
I hope I eventually manage to stumble into one of these. I honestly didn't know they had matchmakers for the corporate world. Since most of my connections are within my age group, most people I know are in a similar situation to me and also have most of their network feed back inward to other similar people. Finding someone like this seems pretty unlikely.
he's a lot younger than me, and he was doing it as soon as he started uni. I think it's a personality trait, although of course he spent time on improving the skill.
Totally agree that this guy could write books though.
On some level I always wonder if it'll be better for society if the next generation of bright young minds gets rejected from these tracked paths to big tech or finance and instead are forced to do creative new things. Of course I feel for them too, and losing one's identity at a useful cog in the labor market is a fate that is going to come for all of us soon.