chat

I've shot out HUNDREDS of applications in the past 14+ months. I've had maybe a total of 8 or 9 interviews in that time. This is in tech, so I get that shit is changing, but in my defense I've been doing my role for about a decade, and it isn't something that AI has taken over JUST YET.

It's frustrating, soul crushing, and i hate it. Im this close to just applying to stock shelves or fill online orders at the whole foods a block over from my partners.

In the past couple years they've pivoted hard to LLMs, and it really makes you wonder whether they value anything on the human side.

Fortunately I live in an area (somewhere between the Appalachians and the Rockies) where living expenses are reasonably affordable, and minimum-wage jobs are constantly hiring. I don't know what I'd do if I was still stuck on the "affluent career" bandwagon. My vocation is undermining capitalism now, and it turns out networking with radicals is remarkably fulfilling.

What's your degree/experience in?

Yep, don't forget all the chatbots and automatic emails they put you through...

Annoying is putting it lightly. It's the main work task that is openly, proudly hostile to ND people and autistic people in particular

I feel your pain, nothing fills me with dread more than searching for jobs. Makes me feel genuinely sick.

This is what tricked me down the cooking for a living path. Kitchens are pretty much the only places that getting a job isn't a nightmare. Talk to a chef, if you know about food talk a lil shop, if not you're probably aiming for dish anyway but if you show some interest or even just have solid knife skills to help out with prep and if you've got fuck all that's not bad either cause it they're the ones teaching you, you'll be doing it their way. Id rather train someone from dish up that's easy to work with than some arrogant recent culinary school grad. Then usually you get a short trial shift to just make sure you're not entirely incapable of doing the job and that the rest of the staff doesn't think you're a weird creep or whatever and then you're in. The twist is that it's a brutal job that doesn't pay good.

It's soul crushing

Something like 60% of all words posted to LinkedIn come from LLMs. It’s all bullshit and nobody likes it if that makes you feel better

I was unemployed for two years largely because job-hunting was so miserable. I was qualified in my field with experience, but like you say, they make it into the most dehumanizing experience possible.

Death to linkedin, death to resumes, death to cover letters, death to having four successive interviews for a job, and death to corporate HR managers.

As someone who just started a new job after hundreds of applications, I sympathize

Imagine what we could get done as a society if we fired as many people as possible whose jobs are to say "no" when someone wants to work.

Some advice: optimize your CV for the ATS. Nowadays it is very easy for people to mass apply. And if no human sees your CV, you are going to be rejected anyways. The biggest hurdle is going through the automated system.

I know this is probably too much of a change but consider applying for a trade union apprenticeship. IBEW, IUEC, ILWU, carpenters, etc.

I've bee lucky to always land in "you gotta know someone to get it" jobs, but they've all been trade or operating jobs. There's alway room for apprenticeships, but they're not as good as they used to be. Gotta have all the certs and paperwork and also be willing to eat shit and smile.

I’ve been effectively unemployed for 20 months and I just secured a job with the government as the walls are being closed in by Elon and Vivek.

I would have really advised you to seek a government job and get good at applying on USAjobs because you don’t have to play nearly as many stupid games as you do in the private sector. But there’s a real possibility that’s going to change with Trump in charge.

Dems suck but really, Republicans do make everything shittier

I was feeling very much like what you describe after I quit my PMC job - which was quietly being taken over by machine translation and chatbot shit. What I did was pivot to childcare, specifically after school stuff. No idea if there is any real infrastructure for that where you live, but for me it's been pretty rewarding. It's an active, extremely varied job and when I walk in the door it's like my personal issues disappear for a while. Kids kind of put things into perspective or something. It can be hard, disorienting and rough sometimes (kids can be little assholes, and realizing all the fucked up shit in their lives that make them do so can be depressing), but it feels meaningful in a way that no office job I've ever had has done.

Wage is shit though, and I'm massively overqualified (have an MA in a completely unrelated field). It is however pretty cool that my most important qualifications in this job are actually things I like to do in my spare time - music, games, sports etc.

The amount of jobs I've interviewed for, only to be rejected but then offered that exact same job but as unpaid "work experience" confounds me.

"Yes we want you to work here, but we don't want to pay you to work here."

Also is it me, or is there a huge uptick in companies looking for scientists to produce model data that they can train AIs on?

Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

What is your degree in?

(No pressure, I'm a Classics B.A.)

Having a job is worse. Especially a good job.