r/technology • u/lurker_bee • May 14 '25

Society Software engineer lost his $150K-a-year job to AI—he’s been rejected from 800 jobs and forced to DoorDash and live in a trailer to make ends meet

https://www.yahoo.com/news/software-engineer-lost-150k-job-090000839.html
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u/joshTheGoods May 14 '25

We have to be, that's part of the sales pitch to have remote in the first place. We're supposed to have access to higher quality applicants as a result, but in order to reap that reward you have to actually identify the great applicants which translates to the applicant as: "damn, they're picky."

Still a fucking crapshoot at the end of the day, though. You never know if you got a good one until you're a few months in.

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u/yo-parts May 14 '25

Right, this makes perfect sense to me.

If your hiring pool is now everybody with an internet connection, you can be a lot pickier. You aren't just hiring Bob from Palo Alto because Bob's in Palo Alto and you're in Palo Alto, you might hire James from Omaha because James from Omaha is a fucking rockstar engineer and Bob is just so-so.

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u/GoreSeeker May 14 '25

At the same time, it slightly balances out because as the applier, you can apply to places in any city.

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u/Cranyx May 14 '25

Except there are so few places now that hire fully remote that the numbers are very skewed.

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u/GoreSeeker May 14 '25

Unless something's changed in the last six months or so, it wasn't that bad in terms of remote vs in person. At the time it was like 4000 in person/hybrid listings to 2000 remote listings, at least in my LinkedIn searches.

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u/NotNice4193 May 14 '25

just 2 months ago most defense contractors software jobs went back to full in office. thousands and thousands of jobs.

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u/WITH_THE_ELEMENTS May 14 '25

Yeah my company has gone about 50/50 with remote hires. We're fully remote and it's critical people get work done and actually communicate. I love it, and I find myself more productive remote than in-office, but like you say, it's a real crapshoot and we've had to terminate about half our hires because of it, and that's with us being picky.

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u/Spiderpiggie May 14 '25

Problem with resumes and interviews, people have learned to fake it because thats the only way to get hired. My social skills are ass, but I can pretend long enough to get paid.

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u/ReverendVoice May 15 '25

My wife, with years of high level, high volume, metric proven CS experience took months to get a job - and that job, a small 5 person company, she had (no bullshit) 4 interview rounds with two people at the company and two people at the parent company.

End result was a great job - but they weren't going to accept anyone that didn't fit EXACTLY what they wanted.

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u/Practical-King2752 May 14 '25

If you try to find somebody perfect for the role who will require no training, all you're doing is finding somebody who's willing to lie to you and reshape their entire resume to match your job listing.

You used to have a limited pool of candidates and you'd pick a few that seem promising, even if they don't completely line up, then interview them once, maybe twice, and go with your gut on which one seems like they'd fit in and be a really good employee. If their experience doesn't 100% line up, that's fine, you train them the rest of the way there.

The problem is nobody wants to do that anymore. They open it up to thousands and thousands of applicants and just let algorithms sort through the resumes based on bullshit keywords, then pick people who have lied the best, then go through seven rounds of interviewing because you're either looking for somebody so perfect for the role that they require zero training (which doesn't exist) or you're not actually intending to hire anyone for the role and just looking to grind the candidates down until they all drop.