The long road

I have been trying to start a software development career for 4 years now, starting in 2021. As of yet, I have gotten a total of 4 interviews. To be clear, I know this is, probably, my own fault. My resume is garbage due to the fact it's basically torture for me to talk positively about myself and anything I've done. I do not have a cover letter. I did not go to college. I have zero prior professional experience, meaning my resume is just a portfolio of my personal projects. Add in the fact I'm not in a position at the moment to move and, importantly, don't live in a big city and I'm relagated to remote position which are disappearing rapidly.

Especially in the years of AI applicants, I am a bad option. That all being said, this completely sucks for both sides. I do not know how to fix this. I am here to vent about the constant garbage I see that has me completely burned out on applying for jobs in addition to my dead-end job that I need so I can actually survive.

Note: I mostly have been doing my applying on ZipRecruiter and Dice, so the examples will be from the, but these apply for all online sites I've used.

Some sympathy

Before I go fully on my rantings, I want to give some sympathy for the companies that are making these listings. To get any applicants you need to have your job listing, but doing so means your probably going to get a lot of responses. Add in scraping, it makes the amount of responses nearly impossible to go through; add in AI and you have a recipe for disaster. I've seen stories of small companies getting thousands of responses. It's actually insane.

Just lying

While searching for remote positons, let me show you some of the amazing listings. Both of these were searching for remote Golang position. One picture is of the "searchable" information, and the other is what's actually in the description:

These are just the immediate ones I saw this morning when putting in some applications. A few other things I regularly see:

• The same job listing under multiple different company names (This is due to one company using multiple different hiring agencies).
• Listings that are actually just listings on a different job board. I ran into multiple listings on Dice today that were just a link to a listing on ZipRecruiter.
• "Junior" positions that require multiple years of experience. Most "junior" positions say you need a minimum of 2 years of professional experience, and I regularly see "junior" positions that need 4 or even 6 years of experience.
• Descriptions that are woefully lacking in information or just formatted terribly.
• TERRIBLE off-platform application sites, all of which ask for a different log-in. Special hate goes to Jobdiva that is not only bad, but each company's Jobdiva needs different sign-in info.

All of these show a general lack of care in these listings, and it makes the application process so much more taxing and tedious for the actual humans out here. Weirdly some of these seem to be optimized more towards scraping and AI then for real human applications. I like to hope this is more due to incompetence rather then them wanting AI and scraping.

Terrible Recruiters

I have had one good experience with a recruiter. Every other experience has been bad. Nearly every single one asks for information that's explicitly stated on my Resume AND asked for during application. This isn't too bad when it's done via email, but often it's done with a phone call. If they had set up a time for the phone call beforehand, it wouldn't be too bad, but most of the time they call you out of the blue.

Now, I want to be clear, this is not meant to be racist, but these phone calls would be significantly less annoying if it wasn't for the fact that nearly every single one of them is from someone who is Indian with a heavy accent, making it nearly impossible to understand what they're saying.

SCAMS

Fun fact, a system where you give your personal information to a bunch of random people is a great place for scams. It is now commonplace for scammers to place fake jobs postings and to email those applying to jobs, pretending to be a real company. Thankfully, after one such scam where I genuinely thought I had a job, I discovered a few tell tale signs that an email is from a scammer. Pay close attention to the email's domain, in particular any domain that ends with "-careers" is guaranteed to be a scam.

As I've said before, I have no idea how to resolve this, and it will, in fact, probably get even worse.