I had an old coworker who told me got into software development in the sixties by walking into an IBM office and asking for a job. He had no education beyond high school and no experience with computers. They just had him take an aptitude test and then he worked on mainframes for decades.
You'd mail your resume in (it was a 'hack' back then to hand-deliver it), then get a call in a couple days or weeks. Then someone who was home during the day (if you already had a job) would answer the phone and take the message from the HR person (or they'd leave one on your answering machine), you'd then have an appointment to go in or return a call to set one up...
Unpopular take: This was significantly better for employers and employees.
It worked as both an effort and presentation filter which both reduced the overload of candidates, allowing for more attention, higher variation of skills that didnt often show like traditional resume bonafides and mad companies more likely to invest more in employees as it was a pain to go do again.
For employees it was great too. Much like the world pre-dating apps the business world wasnt all looking for the equivalent of trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes. As well as the points mentioned above.
Second unpopular take: This was better for all involved, but it constrained the job market to geographical boundaries. People did not apply to jobs in other states/countries/continents because they did not see the job postings for other states/countries/continents.
More so than now, but one could still find work elsewhere. At least in the US, you would visit a local library and read newspapers to see job listings in other cities. Or, you could rely on "headhunters" who would work to collect available candidates for many companies; they would advertise their services as regional or national agencies. The market looked different but for someone who wanted to find a job somewhere else, there were ways to do it.
That's interesting because it's way more complicated than that. Boston had the 128 loop and Digital. TI in dallas. Simi valley. I think it's more like the end of defense spending in the late 80s early 90s winnowed down the several "SV"s into only one.
I know, and the reason Digital and TI and Compaq weren't able to make as deep ecosystems as Xerox PARC or Fairchild did was because of the non-compete aspect back when companies were much more litigious than today.
IMO, the non-compete aspect is way overstated. People moved between the Roye 128 computer companies all the time and even moved to California. If it was a slower pace than today, it probably had more to do with people not shifting jobs as often than litigation related to non-competes.
I took a paper coding test in 2004 when I was job hunting. It was pretty hilarious to me, really, since it was so incredibly easy (multiple choice data-structures type questions) for anybody who had any skills at all.
They finally offered me a job 3 months later after I already had started working somewhere else.
I responded to an ad in the newspaper for a C programming job way back in mid-1980s. The team that posted the ad was not impressed with my resume, but they sent it on to a different team within the same company. That team hired me and I stayed at that company for 14 years.
Unlike the author, I kept the ad in a box for 35 years, at which point I scanned it and threw out the hard copy.
Edit: Also, the resume I mailed to them was printed by a print shop.
Those jobs aren't meant for you... they post in the classifieds with the hopes nobody responds. All to game the labor market test allowing their visa worker to get a green card.
Mine is from Poland, early 90s, and even more analog. I worked at a Polish-Italian company. Our accountant used an ERP program, DOS, written in Clipper. There was no internet, so the vendor's consultant had to come to the office in person. The consultant was a young woman. She became my girlfriend and she pulled me into ERP.
The girlfriend left. The ERP stayed for over 30 years ;)
My job interview at this event went like: my name is first last name. I am a professional and I want to work for you. And they responded: we can tell you are a professional and we want you to work for us.
It’s way harder now-a-days!
As someone who lived in NYC for a while circa 1999 the process at the time as I recall it was using a newspaper classified ad to find a broker to find an apartment.
The vast majority of actual apartment listings were all gatekept within the broker system making hiring a broker (with an insane fee) effectively mandatory for actually finding a place to live in a reasonable timeframe.
We were told the quality of paper mattered and that the envelope should have the same high-end watermark that the resume sheet had. Inkjet printed resumes were discouraged because the quality back then was low and the resolution made anti-aliasing on the type come out weird. Laser printed only, please.
Laser printers were expensive AF for poor guys just out of college looking for a job.
My BJ200 ca. 1993 had awesome print quality, comparable to a Laserjet II, if you used slightly glossy paper (so the ink wouldn’t bleed) and you waited a bit for the ink to dry on each sheet.
Another tidbit, based upon finding out which company the phone number belonged to: you could go to the library and access business directories. Think the yellow pages, only they were geared towards businesses rather than towards consumers. Print versions were broken down by industry, but electronic ones (on CD-ROM) were searchable. It was also a tool for looking for unadvertised jobs, since those directories seemed to be geared towards making cold calls (albeit, for people doing sales).
I worked on a project in 1990/1991 (pre-WWW) that involved making the phone book electronically accessible. For development my client purchased CD-ROMs containing the White Pages from the entire NYC tri-state area (NY, NJ, and CT), making it trivial for me to search by name and/or number. Once the web had been around for a few years, reverse-lookup became commonplace.
And then it disappeared once "Find out who called you only $50 or subscribe for $35 or we'll add you to our bad public records site" became a business model.
In 2000 you could go to the library and look up the number in the Polk directory. There was one for each borough. There was an alphabetical section, a section by street address, and a section by phone number. You can still go down to the library and use them, for example if you want to know what was at 867 Madison Ave in 1926, or who had the phone number PENnsylvania 5000.
> Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less
This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information.
If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet.
I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info.
EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.
> You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard.
I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact.
On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.
It's less true today but the networking is also swizzled together with a huge pile of other resumes. The genuine high quality network opportunities still tend to rise to the top--how I got a gew jobs over the past 20+ years--but the noise is definitely greater, especially if you don't have that network.
Probably cuts out as much entry-level hires as AI does.
When you are comparing online job boards to employment centres and classifieds, they are more accessible and available. Employment centres always involved making a dedicated trip. Newspapers cost money and may involve a dedicated trip to fetch one. Not to mention that plenty of businesses simply didn't advertise jobs in print, particularly entry level jobs. Part of that may have been expectations: people would actually walk into businesses to drop off applications or see if openings are available. Again, it took a lot more effort to find those jobs.
Fun tidbit, I remember visiting Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) in the early 2010's. Boom times for them. It was a bit like walking into a different era with respect to job seeking since many business (again, entry level jobs) were advertising with help wanted signs in their windows.
There was a "Job Spotter" app in the late 2010s where you would take pictures of help wanted signs and get paid small amounts, a weird bridge between online job boards and physical signs. I made $50 in five months, then the pandemic killed it. During our lunch hour, my coworkers and I would race to each storefront to see who could get their submission first.
> Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy.
This is called Social Capital. It is very much a class thing. Many older people recommended joining fraternal organizations (like frats or freemasons) to get these social connections.
Social capital (networks) help a lot for intros, but even without social connections there is a big difference between someone with access to the right information and someone who doesn't even know where to look for it.
A lot of people I know didn't have the right connections, but they were in the right place at the right time to pick up the information they needed for how to find the right jobs, how to prepare for interviews, and so on.
My university didn't do much job prep. They saw themselves as focused on the academic side, with getting a job as an exercise left to the reader. Many of my friends at other universities, especially the less difficult ones, were given a lot more info about how to prep for interviews and do job market related things.
Finance and journalism are full of these people. A fair few in startupland as well.
It's possible to get to a certain level without those connections, but it's very hard to get the top jobs. And you'll never be an insider.
Conversely quite a few people in those top jobs are there because of social game playing and status signalling, not because of talent or raw intellect.
I had a friend who started a number of businesses in the UK, including some dating apps before they became very popular. She said that at her public school the teachers would say things like "As the future leaders of the UK you should..."
I once went through a recruiter to secure an interview for an engineering position. He insisted that I "suit up" so I did despite knowing it was out of touch with reality. I showed up to a non air conditioned building where the head of engineering was wearing ragged cutoff shorts. Last time I ever bothered with a recruiter.
I find that disgusting, actually: Western societies pretend to be meritocratic, when actually it’s really just nepotism and elitism.
I’m not shedding a single tear for those used to leading a privileged life thanks to their family or money, but have to actually compete with the rest of us now.
It is a little of both. An interview is to short to know of someone is good. So if someone you trust vouches that is more useful than anything an interview can say. Maybe you could find someone better but odds are you find someone worse.
More that the person giving the reference is putting their reputation in the reference.
The reason is that now there are fewer different kinds of jobs (many roles like manufacturing have moved offshore) and also fewer jobs in terms of numbers and more regulations which prevent competition and shrink the number of competing company (again leading to fewer roles).
It wasn't nepotism before, it was efficiency. I didn't have any connections and I got better opportunities back then than I do now and the people were overall better at their jobs. Nepotism is much stronger now and jobs are increasingly theatrical/bureaucratic and have little to do value creation.
It's possible that people's lifestyle in the west was propped up by the exploitation of foreign labour, that much is possible, but note that the people who did the exploitation back then are the same doing it now (or their heirs). The difference is that now the money is increasingly circulating just between each other, bypassing normal people. Soon it will bypass all humans; the entire economy will be between machine owners. Social mobility is mostly about social connections and politics nowadays. In the west, it has never been less meritocratic.
I don’t think most people under 40 can wrap their head around what it was like to need to be home or at work for someone to reach you, which required a phone call. And you couldn’t make a phone call unless you were at home or work, or stopped at a pay phone. And what if you called someone that wasn’t home? Or were on the can and couldn’t pick up in a few rings? Sure you could leave a message but they probably had no way to get back in touch with you. You just had to wait and hope they called again. No text. No email. No Caller ID for most people pre-internet. No GPS for most people, and even if they could give you GPS coordinates, wear are you going to with them? Hope you got a really big fucking globe.
Back in the day, the 4x5 (medium format film) experience requirement would have filtered out a lot of candidates. It was arty, weird and required expensive gear (Hasselblad or equivalent) and even more expensive film (around $1/exposure).
These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.
Your phone in your pocket is not sniffing medium format film resolution. It also lacks the latitude of really any negative film stock. Color wise slide film is still supreme to this day.
The realistic digital equivalent resolution of 4x5 film is around 40-50 megapixels, which iPhones have supported out of the box for a couple of years now.
Of course there's a lot more to taking good pictures than the raw sensor, but what I'm saying is that the barrier to entry is way lower than it was in the article's day.
It may be acceptable for phone screens and images on the web. However, if one was to print the image as an 8x10 (or larger and view it from 12 (the length of the diagonal) inches away, the ability to resolve details in the image will not be present in the phone image.
Granted, few people are printing things out at 8x10 or 16x20 for framing anymore and comparing them to traditional photographic images... but it is there. (I have some 30x40" prints that I've done (though I typically didn't have the funds or wall space for many - 8x10s and 16x20s where my most common) and purchased a number of 20x60" prints over the years).
I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role.
In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.
I encountered one corporation where you walked up to security, told them you were there to look for work, and they directed you to an office that contained posting of currently available positions. As far as I know, they didn't advertise job openings anywhere else. If you weren't willing to drop by their offices, they weren't interested in considering you.
Of course, talking to anyone about a job within the building was an entirely different matter.
This is why your grandparents (or parents if you're a greybeard) still recommend going down to corporate offices and trying to hand your resume to a person/recruiter there. Nowadays it is all online resume screening. It is frustrating listening to people who haven't had to job-hunt for several decades.
I'm dreading the day I need/want to look for another job!
That said, there may be contexts where their advice would help. It's likely useless in all organizations that have a human resources department, since they will be dictating policy and may even be doing the initial screening. But smaller businesses? Quite often their handling of applications isn't all that different from my grandparent's day. Replacing that emailed resume with a hand delivered one may be enough to get their attention.
I also wonder how applicable modern approaches would be in towns and smaller cities. Something tells me they would rather only deal with local candidates and not have a bunch of people who apply from out of their area.
Years ago I had an important job interview. Unfortunately, 2 days prior I broke a bone in my right hand during a bicycle wreck. I didn't wanna show up to the interview with a cast on my hand/arm ("this guy is reckless."), so I cut it off. I interviewed with about 10 dudes that day, and they all wanted to give me a "strong handshake". It hurt like hell, but I had to maintain composure. I got the job. And I've been here for almost 25 years. :)
Classified ads for jobs were still a thing up until around Y2K. MonsterBoard (what it used to be called) was one of the first online job platforms and then Dice came along. I used to have good luck finding contract gigs through dice.
Very self-satisfied, and deservedly so. Like when you use that one piece of scrap wood in the garage you've been saving for this one occasion, or something from that drawer of metric-threaded bolts that just saves the project you're working on. It was all worth it, see? This is why we do it. No different with the author's digital preservation and online tool use. Pleasant read.
imo the job process is totally broken its an AI arms race. You have people doing mass ai apply with slop CVs and then recruitment just doing the inverse with AI ATS. Working on something I think could help solve the issue just need to find recruiters to talk to see if it's any good.
If someone's feeling especially playful, they might ask if it's a metric or imperial buttload. An imperial buttload would be loosely based on the idealized/claimed size of some prominent arse in the past, while a metric buttload implies the existence of a platinum-iridium reference derriere.
I had an old coworker who told me got into software development in the sixties by walking into an IBM office and asking for a job. He had no education beyond high school and no experience with computers. They just had him take an aptitude test and then he worked on mainframes for decades.
You'd mail your resume in (it was a 'hack' back then to hand-deliver it), then get a call in a couple days or weeks. Then someone who was home during the day (if you already had a job) would answer the phone and take the message from the HR person (or they'd leave one on your answering machine), you'd then have an appointment to go in or return a call to set one up...
Unpopular take: This was significantly better for employers and employees.
It worked as both an effort and presentation filter which both reduced the overload of candidates, allowing for more attention, higher variation of skills that didnt often show like traditional resume bonafides and mad companies more likely to invest more in employees as it was a pain to go do again.
For employees it was great too. Much like the world pre-dating apps the business world wasnt all looking for the equivalent of trust fund, 6'5", blue eyes. As well as the points mentioned above.
Second unpopular take: This was better for all involved, but it constrained the job market to geographical boundaries. People did not apply to jobs in other states/countries/continents because they did not see the job postings for other states/countries/continents.
More so than now, but one could still find work elsewhere. At least in the US, you would visit a local library and read newspapers to see job listings in other cities. Or, you could rely on "headhunters" who would work to collect available candidates for many companies; they would advertise their services as regional or national agencies. The market looked different but for someone who wanted to find a job somewhere else, there were ways to do it.
Third unpopular take: this geographical restriction was a good thing.
Fourth unpopular take: without it Silicon Valley wouldn’t exist.
SV exists thanks to CA's lack of non-competes and the Stanford and UC Berkeley innovation ecosystem.
Otherwise, Boston, NYC, DMV, Seattle, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Chicago, and others all could have become the next Silicon Valley.
That's interesting because it's way more complicated than that. Boston had the 128 loop and Digital. TI in dallas. Simi valley. I think it's more like the end of defense spending in the late 80s early 90s winnowed down the several "SV"s into only one.
I know, and the reason Digital and TI and Compaq weren't able to make as deep ecosystems as Xerox PARC or Fairchild did was because of the non-compete aspect back when companies were much more litigious than today.
IMO, the non-compete aspect is way overstated. People moved between the Roye 128 computer companies all the time and even moved to California. If it was a slower pace than today, it probably had more to do with people not shifting jobs as often than litigation related to non-competes.
I remember back when the Thrifty Nickle was how you could find all kinds of things up to and including your next vehicle.
You still had to do a coding test -- but it was pointing to the bug in the C++ linked-list implementation on a single sheet of line printer paper.
Because nobody was going to carry a Sun workstation down to the meeting room just for your interview.
I remember a Java job interview like that. "Tell us what you would do to improve this code" with a couple pages of code printed out :-D
I still do that because 75% of the work I oversee involves reading other peoples' code and spotting problems with it.
I took a paper coding test in 2004 when I was job hunting. It was pretty hilarious to me, really, since it was so incredibly easy (multiple choice data-structures type questions) for anybody who had any skills at all.
They finally offered me a job 3 months later after I already had started working somewhere else.
I responded to an ad in the newspaper for a C programming job way back in mid-1980s. The team that posted the ad was not impressed with my resume, but they sent it on to a different team within the same company. That team hired me and I stayed at that company for 14 years.
Unlike the author, I kept the ad in a box for 35 years, at which point I scanned it and threw out the hard copy.
Edit: Also, the resume I mailed to them was printed by a print shop.
The newspaper does still have job listings e.g. for Amazon, NVIDIA, DoorDash, Tesla, Chewy. I haven’t been having much luck applying to them though...
Those jobs aren't meant for you... they post in the classifieds with the hopes nobody responds. All to game the labor market test allowing their visa worker to get a green card.
Ah yes, the h1b box checker ads.
According too the linked article, you should try faxing your resume to them. Have you tried that?
Chewy! Yay
How tech company HR departments game the system for PERM jobs: A newspaper classifieds story
Mine is from Poland, early 90s, and even more analog. I worked at a Polish-Italian company. Our accountant used an ERP program, DOS, written in Clipper. There was no internet, so the vendor's consultant had to come to the office in person. The consultant was a young woman. She became my girlfriend and she pulled me into ERP. The girlfriend left. The ERP stayed for over 30 years ;)
Or attending a local job fair with a stack of printed resumes.
My job interview at this event went like: my name is first last name. I am a professional and I want to work for you. And they responded: we can tell you are a professional and we want you to work for us. It’s way harder now-a-days!
I did that when I was younger. Also, the advice was to print your resumes on heavy bond paper so that you looked upper class.
Not only jobs, but NYC apartments - although in the Voice not the Times.
As someone who lived in NYC for a while circa 1999 the process at the time as I recall it was using a newspaper classified ad to find a broker to find an apartment.
The vast majority of actual apartment listings were all gatekept within the broker system making hiring a broker (with an insane fee) effectively mandatory for actually finding a place to live in a reasonable timeframe.
What about the obituary?
Brokers still gatekeep the best inventory in NYC for the most part.
Every craigslist apartment I ever found was sketchy as hell.
Every Craigslist apartment listing I've ever seen turned out to be through a broker as well.
They have/had broker/no-broker categories and I never had the budget for broker.
The broker ones are kinda big scammers though, from what I remember.
We were told the quality of paper mattered and that the envelope should have the same high-end watermark that the resume sheet had. Inkjet printed resumes were discouraged because the quality back then was low and the resolution made anti-aliasing on the type come out weird. Laser printed only, please.
Laser printers were expensive AF for poor guys just out of college looking for a job.
My BJ200 ca. 1993 had awesome print quality, comparable to a Laserjet II, if you used slightly glossy paper (so the ink wouldn’t bleed) and you waited a bit for the ink to dry on each sheet.
Indeed, I remember being told to go to kinkos and have it printed there since I didn't have a laser printer
Another tidbit, based upon finding out which company the phone number belonged to: you could go to the library and access business directories. Think the yellow pages, only they were geared towards businesses rather than towards consumers. Print versions were broken down by industry, but electronic ones (on CD-ROM) were searchable. It was also a tool for looking for unadvertised jobs, since those directories seemed to be geared towards making cold calls (albeit, for people doing sales).
I worked on a project in 1990/1991 (pre-WWW) that involved making the phone book electronically accessible. For development my client purchased CD-ROMs containing the White Pages from the entire NYC tri-state area (NY, NJ, and CT), making it trivial for me to search by name and/or number. Once the web had been around for a few years, reverse-lookup became commonplace.
And then it disappeared once "Find out who called you only $50 or subscribe for $35 or we'll add you to our bad public records site" became a business model.
In 2000 you could go to the library and look up the number in the Polk directory. There was one for each borough. There was an alphabetical section, a section by street address, and a section by phone number. You can still go down to the library and use them, for example if you want to know what was at 867 Madison Ave in 1926, or who had the phone number PENnsylvania 5000.
Idk if it's true but it seems like life was simpler before the Internet took off.
Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less
> Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less
This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information.
If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet.
I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info.
EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.
> You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard.
I'm not sure that is any less true today. If you were looking for a job, people used to go to a job centre or look at the classifieds. Since everyone did it, those were also the jobs with the most competition. Swap job centre and classifieds for online job boards, and you have the situation today. Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs. On the other hand, that is balanced out by people applying for more jobs. It's hard to claim that applying for more jobs involves more work, though there is certainly a negative psychological impact.
On the other hand, knowing where to look (then or now) cuts out a lot of the competition. Having a social network feeding you that information cuts out even more competition.
It's less true today but the networking is also swizzled together with a huge pile of other resumes. The genuine high quality network opportunities still tend to rise to the top--how I got a gew jobs over the past 20+ years--but the noise is definitely greater, especially if you don't have that network.
Probably cuts out as much entry-level hires as AI does.
> Yes, you have more people applying for the same jobs
This implies that more people know where to find the job listings and they've become more accessible and available.
When you are comparing online job boards to employment centres and classifieds, they are more accessible and available. Employment centres always involved making a dedicated trip. Newspapers cost money and may involve a dedicated trip to fetch one. Not to mention that plenty of businesses simply didn't advertise jobs in print, particularly entry level jobs. Part of that may have been expectations: people would actually walk into businesses to drop off applications or see if openings are available. Again, it took a lot more effort to find those jobs.
Fun tidbit, I remember visiting Edmonton (Alberta, Canada) in the early 2010's. Boom times for them. It was a bit like walking into a different era with respect to job seeking since many business (again, entry level jobs) were advertising with help wanted signs in their windows.
There was a "Job Spotter" app in the late 2010s where you would take pictures of help wanted signs and get paid small amounts, a weird bridge between online job boards and physical signs. I made $50 in five months, then the pandemic killed it. During our lunch hour, my coworkers and I would race to each storefront to see who could get their submission first.
https://theamericangenius.com/app-pays-snapping-pics-help-wa...
> Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy.
This is called Social Capital. It is very much a class thing. Many older people recommended joining fraternal organizations (like frats or freemasons) to get these social connections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_capital
Lauren Rivera wrote a number of publications about this and how it impacts hiring at upper class firms, and who gets into nightclubs.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=tbzjN7QAAAAJ&hl=en
Social capital (networks) help a lot for intros, but even without social connections there is a big difference between someone with access to the right information and someone who doesn't even know where to look for it.
A lot of people I know didn't have the right connections, but they were in the right place at the right time to pick up the information they needed for how to find the right jobs, how to prepare for interviews, and so on.
My university didn't do much job prep. They saw themselves as focused on the academic side, with getting a job as an exercise left to the reader. Many of my friends at other universities, especially the less difficult ones, were given a lot more info about how to prep for interviews and do job market related things.
Finance and journalism are full of these people. A fair few in startupland as well.
It's possible to get to a certain level without those connections, but it's very hard to get the top jobs. And you'll never be an insider.
Conversely quite a few people in those top jobs are there because of social game playing and status signalling, not because of talent or raw intellect.
I had a friend who started a number of businesses in the UK, including some dating apps before they became very popular. She said that at her public school the teachers would say things like "As the future leaders of the UK you should..."
I once went through a recruiter to secure an interview for an engineering position. He insisted that I "suit up" so I did despite knowing it was out of touch with reality. I showed up to a non air conditioned building where the head of engineering was wearing ragged cutoff shorts. Last time I ever bothered with a recruiter.
Showing up egregiously overdressed for a tech interview was a rite of passage before jobs search advice was easy to find on the internet.
I showed up to a job interview wearing the exact same shirt and tie as the CEO who interviewed me. I got the job.
I find that disgusting, actually: Western societies pretend to be meritocratic, when actually it’s really just nepotism and elitism.
I’m not shedding a single tear for those used to leading a privileged life thanks to their family or money, but have to actually compete with the rest of us now.
It is a little of both. An interview is to short to know of someone is good. So if someone you trust vouches that is more useful than anything an interview can say. Maybe you could find someone better but odds are you find someone worse.
More that the person giving the reference is putting their reputation in the reference.
This is not the reason though.
The reason is that now there are fewer different kinds of jobs (many roles like manufacturing have moved offshore) and also fewer jobs in terms of numbers and more regulations which prevent competition and shrink the number of competing company (again leading to fewer roles).
It wasn't nepotism before, it was efficiency. I didn't have any connections and I got better opportunities back then than I do now and the people were overall better at their jobs. Nepotism is much stronger now and jobs are increasingly theatrical/bureaucratic and have little to do value creation.
It's possible that people's lifestyle in the west was propped up by the exploitation of foreign labour, that much is possible, but note that the people who did the exploitation back then are the same doing it now (or their heirs). The difference is that now the money is increasingly circulating just between each other, bypassing normal people. Soon it will bypass all humans; the entire economy will be between machine owners. Social mobility is mostly about social connections and politics nowadays. In the west, it has never been less meritocratic.
Simplicity and convenience are often inversely correlated.
Life was for sure simpler in times gone by, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Definitely different.
I'm sure future posters will look back on these years with fondness for this or that as well.
I don’t think most people under 40 can wrap their head around what it was like to need to be home or at work for someone to reach you, which required a phone call. And you couldn’t make a phone call unless you were at home or work, or stopped at a pay phone. And what if you called someone that wasn’t home? Or were on the can and couldn’t pick up in a few rings? Sure you could leave a message but they probably had no way to get back in touch with you. You just had to wait and hope they called again. No text. No email. No Caller ID for most people pre-internet. No GPS for most people, and even if they could give you GPS coordinates, wear are you going to with them? Hope you got a really big fucking globe.
Back in the day, the 4x5 (medium format film) experience requirement would have filtered out a lot of candidates. It was arty, weird and required expensive gear (Hasselblad or equivalent) and even more expensive film (around $1/exposure).
These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.
Your phone in your pocket is not sniffing medium format film resolution. It also lacks the latitude of really any negative film stock. Color wise slide film is still supreme to this day.
The realistic digital equivalent resolution of 4x5 film is around 40-50 megapixels, which iPhones have supported out of the box for a couple of years now.
Of course there's a lot more to taking good pictures than the raw sensor, but what I'm saying is that the barrier to entry is way lower than it was in the article's day.
I'm sorry but 48mp on a sensor the size of the end of a pencil is just not the same as even full frame, let alone 4x5.
What does that have to do with how much detail the sensor cells are able to resolve?
The circle of confusion ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circle_of_confusion ) imposes optical limitations on the image.
It may be acceptable for phone screens and images on the web. However, if one was to print the image as an 8x10 (or larger and view it from 12 (the length of the diagonal) inches away, the ability to resolve details in the image will not be present in the phone image.
Granted, few people are printing things out at 8x10 or 16x20 for framing anymore and comparing them to traditional photographic images... but it is there. (I have some 30x40" prints that I've done (though I typically didn't have the funds or wall space for many - 8x10s and 16x20s where my most common) and purchased a number of 20x60" prints over the years).
Used to flip both ways...
I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role.
In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.
Looking straight into the eyes, strong handshake, exuding confidence?
This but after going inside the building without authorization and saying you will not leave without a job.
I encountered one corporation where you walked up to security, told them you were there to look for work, and they directed you to an office that contained posting of currently available positions. As far as I know, they didn't advertise job openings anywhere else. If you weren't willing to drop by their offices, they weren't interested in considering you.
Of course, talking to anyone about a job within the building was an entirely different matter.
This is why your grandparents (or parents if you're a greybeard) still recommend going down to corporate offices and trying to hand your resume to a person/recruiter there. Nowadays it is all online resume screening. It is frustrating listening to people who haven't had to job-hunt for several decades.
I'm dreading the day I need/want to look for another job!
That said, there may be contexts where their advice would help. It's likely useless in all organizations that have a human resources department, since they will be dictating policy and may even be doing the initial screening. But smaller businesses? Quite often their handling of applications isn't all that different from my grandparent's day. Replacing that emailed resume with a hand delivered one may be enough to get their attention.
I also wonder how applicable modern approaches would be in towns and smaller cities. Something tells me they would rather only deal with local candidates and not have a bunch of people who apply from out of their area.
> This but after going inside the building without authorization
That would make you eminently qualified for a position in AI these days.
> ... strong handshake ...
Years ago I had an important job interview. Unfortunately, 2 days prior I broke a bone in my right hand during a bicycle wreck. I didn't wanna show up to the interview with a cast on my hand/arm ("this guy is reckless."), so I cut it off. I interviewed with about 10 dudes that day, and they all wanted to give me a "strong handshake". It hurt like hell, but I had to maintain composure. I got the job. And I've been here for almost 25 years. :)
You cut off your hand?!
The replacement has a Geiger counter, don't worry.
LOL
Classified ads for jobs were still a thing up until around Y2K. MonsterBoard (what it used to be called) was one of the first online job platforms and then Dice came along. I used to have good luck finding contract gigs through dice.
Very self-satisfied, and deservedly so. Like when you use that one piece of scrap wood in the garage you've been saving for this one occasion, or something from that drawer of metric-threaded bolts that just saves the project you're working on. It was all worth it, see? This is why we do it. No different with the author's digital preservation and online tool use. Pleasant read.
imo the job process is totally broken its an AI arms race. You have people doing mass ai apply with slop CVs and then recruitment just doing the inverse with AI ATS. Working on something I think could help solve the issue just need to find recruiters to talk to see if it's any good.
[delayed]
In case the headline makes no sense, the original title before being mangled by the HN headline censor:
"How We Used to Get Jobs".
Fixed, thanks!
Thanks. What a pity, the mutilated title sounded promising.
>I’ve just gone through a butt load of resumes
Perhaps she said "bulk load of resumes" and you misheard it as the funnier version?
Nope, this is a common expression.
If someone's feeling especially playful, they might ask if it's a metric or imperial buttload. An imperial buttload would be loosely based on the idealized/claimed size of some prominent arse in the past, while a metric buttload implies the existence of a platinum-iridium reference derriere.
Related to the shit ton and metric shit ton.
Boat load?