Clojurians Log v2

Side note: I like how the term "enshittification" is becoming a more widely adopted term.

Sometimes application forms have these fields for an additional message where I put 3 genuine bullet points of why I am the perfect candidate. In most cases that works well. Also, I am expecting a thorough check of my CV, ie. not just a 4 second glimpse. If one actually reads it one can get everything out of it that is needed to check if I am a good fit, including my motivation. That said, I am aware that many CVs are not built like this. But why expect a second document (cover letter) that is then likely even worse quality (in terms of how much time was put in) than the CV? I assume the request is based on the assumption and/or the respective person's experience that applicants are less bad at writing a cover letter than a CV. What I am also aware of is that markets turned and if recruiters are increasingly asking for it I might need to start writing them again. Until then, I am happy to filter out the organisations that are not 100% interested in my CV.

They don't want to read. If they can reject a person without looking through a CV based on their attitude then it saves time when 120 developers apply. So the problem is that it stopped working as efficiently after everybody started to use text generators to generate the happy text. From what I understand the CV won't be looked at until later because it's only a secondary tie-breaker resource.

Basically we arrived at a prisoner's dilemma: We had one cheating party and it expected that the other one would be the non-cheating one. But as both parties started to cheat (candidate has started to keep up) then they both suffer.

Even (or especially?) at places that receive tens of thousands of applications per year I made the experience that the CV is looked at as the first and only resource. So it's interesting to see for me which places do it differently. I am coming from a background and country where there are lots of traditional (non-tech) companies that like to go the conventional way, ie. with cover letter and lots of references appended to the CV. I kind of stopped doing that and sorted that into my impression of companies becoming more global and modern, ie. just a 1-2 page CV with nothing more. Requiring more feels backward to me but for traditional companies I would still do it 😄

the thing is that in a cover letter everyone can lie to their teeth very easily, while they can't really on a CV, without being found out at least

so I'm still not sure why would you ever base your decision to interview someone on that

> while they can't really on a CV I'm not sure about this 😆

There was a linkedin profile who took my CV section and sections from a couple of other people and combined their experiences to show that he's a super-senior developer 😄 Clojure + Java + PHP (with all laravels and multiple others) + .Net... that's quite a lot 😄 He was my colleague in two-three jobs xD I didn't know 😄 Especially since a couple of them were smalls shops of 3-5 people 😄 I guess I'm very unattentive in the office and also rude to not even see an employee.

I think there's also the issue that, as the Internet becomes more and more AI-generated, humans are going to start sounding like AI because that's the content they are reading and interacting with. I'm not sure if we're there yet, but I think that's coming.

cover letters are so deeply weird. people are applying to so many jobs and can't possibly be instantly and deeply enthusiastic about each job they apply for, and yet they're required to feign that in a cover letter. each job is expecting a level of investment per application that the job doesn't spend on each applicant's application. those hiring don't need to feign excitement about a candidate, but candidates need to appear to be excited regardless. for ND folks it's an extra burden because you have to come off NT in the cover letter due to bias and stigma, even if not intentional by the person doing the hiring. I get why those doing the hiring want it, they want a summary of the person and their skills and how they'd fit, they want a pitch, they want a good story, but on the human level it's bizarre

which is all to say: it's extremely weird as a whole and also very understandable why someone would want to automate it

> those hiring don't need to feign excitement about a candidate, but candidates need to appear to be excited regardless. That depends on the market I'd say. As soon as a candidate shows excitement and it goes to the next step, the company needs to show excitement, too, else the candidate goes with another company (if there's competition). If competition is tough, companies even need to do the first step of reaching out to the candidates. Remember all those Linkedin messages and full inboxes of not really-interesting sounding applications from companies?

they don't need to feign excitement

Linkedin can create templates for recruiters for that, have yet to see Linkedin creating that for applicants 😄

they get to pick who they talk to and presumably those are people they would actually want to talk to about it

Either side can pick or say no and define their own requirements. Only if both sides are open for the further steps, further steps happen.

In the same way an applicant needs income and is of course hugely interested in a purposeful place to work, the company needs skilled labour to stay afloat.

it's in no way a level playing field w/r/t power, the employer holds more of it (as evidenced by people having to apply to many, many jobs before landing one)

I agree it's not level. From my perspective, in which direction it goes depends on the time and geographical region we're in. Among other factors.

E.g. 2 years ago was very different from today. Not only because of AI.

I would go a step further and say from my perspective (as a Software Developer) I don’t see correlation for people about showing excitement, good talk etc. for real work later. The same for how company describe itself. Everything is about satisfying needs of people on both sides to make them believe they do good decisions in optimal way (time and emotions). Both sides have believes and each HR / Developer will have different. Many people, many rules.

Actually I can even say I was observing situations when people were doing not the best work in job, but they were so good about talking. This made them in power to fire other people, not provide good value to projects etc. But nobody outside of dev team understood this, because how? They put a lot of effort in good presentation of themselves for everyone. There is no way for managers to judge this, because it needs deep tech knowledge. On the other hand I was working with guy who was from Ukraine and represented different approach. He was doing very good job, but didn’t pay as many attention to “fake” talks. I definitely choose him to work in team instead of all this excited guys. Definitely. But people who not code with this people can’t really know who is good or not and value in team. Here unfortunately often good self presentation is better, than good coding. At least it work for some long time.

PS I am trying to say it is hard for HR to get right conclusion who was good choice or bad. I think so.

A team of average coders who get along well (whatever that means) might also outperform a really good coder. Being "good" on the job has many dimensions, marketing yourself is definitely one of them, at least for many jobs.

I would say marketing yourself to get a job, but later it will be nice to write good code 🙂 But correlation between this 2 is not certain :)

I thought of marketing in a broader sense, such as communicating your approaches, ideas, challenges, solutions, opinions, documentation, etc. for collaborative work. As software development often is team-heavy and interdisciplinary work.

I agree. Just saying it is not as simple as that and point of view if person is good depend on who you are. From the point of view of someone who feel responsible for the project you want to have people who commit good code and you can sleep wheel, not stress. You see they don’t put complex code, performance issue, don’t have stupid ideas which they force, because are excited about something, don’t have ego problems with feedback about code and learn from this. You can’t fix someone ego problems with coding whatever you will do. From the point of view of manager (depends on title, so wider topic) you don’t want to have fires, troubles, team conflicts etc. This lead to way different experience and satisfaction from people with who you work. Manager can be satisfied, but developers not and opposite.

Catching up on all the posts from overnight my time and... wow, I thought I was cynical about the hiring process after forty plus years in this industry... One of the things I'm not hearing from a lot of folks here is just how important communication is in a team environment. Can you clearly communicate your ideas? Can you clearly communicate the pros and cons of an approach? Can you think through several possible solutions and communicate the tradeoffs inherent in each of them? Those are important skills in a developer. It's "easy" to help a developer improve their core tech skills (which is why I have never done technical challenges/quizzes in interviews): communication and critical thinking are the more important skills I want to see in a cover letter, a CV/resume, and in an interview. And a cover letter is a hill I'm prepared to die on as a long-time hiring manager. A personalized cover letter says the candidate has invested a bit of time finding out about the company and has considered how they and the company would fit together (and bonus points if they identify potential misalignments in the cover letter). If you're applying to "hundreds" of jobs, you can't provide a personalized cover letter that is tailored to each of those jobs -- so you either omit it or send a very generic one. I don't want to compete with "hundreds" of other companies: I want candidates that have thought about why they want this job and why we would want them. If you want things to improve, you gotta break the chain here...

So you prefer a generic cover letter to a possibly ai generated one? Assuming that someone knows enough about the job from the outside without ever having talked to anyone is frankly absurd. For the faang and other bigger companies I would understand, but how am I going to know if I would actually like to work somewhere from a potentially misleading job post?

No, I don't want a generic one or an AI-generated one. That's my point.

If anything I would praise the AI users in this case, they wrote what hiring managers want without wasting too much time

Yeah but it's not going to happen, and discriminating based on that is just wrong, but well it's your choice

The AI-generated language is horrible tho'... and I want to know how they communicate not whether they can use ChatGPT.

It does happen. I get applications with good cover letters that show the candidate has thought about our job -- and isn't just blasting out applications to any company they think might hire them.

The same language would have been perfectly fine if you didn't even know there were AI generated ones? If they didn't all look like that now I mean? Is it the language the problem or just the fact that they all look the same?

I also get a lot of applications with no cover letter where the resume doesn't match the job reqs in any way, shape, or form -- clearly candidates playing the numbers game who don't care about this specific job.

Any two individuals are going to communicate differently so "The same language would have been perfectly fine" is never a problem with personalized cover letter written by humans. Never has been in the 30 years I've been a hiring manager.

If you filter by CV fit and then give the candidates a short call you might be able to get what you want – at least until AI phone calls have taken over

If the CV doesn't fit at all, the candidate won't get a second look. If two CVs fit equally well, and one comes with a personalized, human-written cover letter and the other doesn't, I'm going to prefer the candidate that took the extra time to show some communication skills and care.

Sounds very reasonable

You might miss out an actually more motivated person who communicated better but didn't put in the time to show it in the application. And if that's your criteria, that's fine. Other companies do it differently.

It's a choice, but without some evidence I find it very hard to believe that there is any correlation between the cover letter and the quality of the candidate

When my father was applied to be the head of the DPW his resume was

My name is John McCue, I've been a well driller for XY years.

plus or minus a single sentence. 12 pt font on white paper

I find that infinitely more respectable than AI generated schlock - so thats an easy filter for "culture fit"

Yeah often the best Devs are the ones who put the least effort, since first they are very busy and second they don't need to

Can you think through several possible solutions and communicate the tradeoffs inherent in each of them? Those are important skills in a developer. It’s “easy” to help a developer improve their core tech skills (which is why I have never done technical challenges/quizzes in interviews): communication and critical thinking are the more important skills I want to see in a cover letter,

My contribution to this interesting discussion: the first time I saw a job listing asking for a cover letter I had to google it to know what it even meant. No jobs where I lived ever asked for one (and as of today, I still am not sure if I'm writing a good cover letter or not - probably not). I though, supposedly, that the first part of the CV should be the "cover letter" - like, "I'm a software developer specialized in <X> and <Y> that..." or something like that

As of today... things are weird. With so many companies using AI to scrap CVs or ghosting candidates, and with no real way to discern which one is which, it's hard to actually invest time in any kind of "customization" when applying for a job. Speaking about my recent experience, I had like 3 to 5 companies I was really interested in entering. One basically ghosted me, but luckily I was able to talk over Slack, got 2 phases of interview, and then... they ghosted me again... And the other 4 basically got me an e-mail saying "Thanks for applying!" and then ghosted me.

I understand that things are weird for people that are looking for talents and need to somehow separate people "machine-gunning" CVs everywhere (free translation from a Portuguese term 🤣), but it's also frustrating to craft a personalized CV/Cover Letter/Re-type everything that's on CV on the trash platform to apply for a job just to be met with silence...

The ghosting from companies you invested time in is soul-crushing. A person has to be extremely lucky or have infinite amounts of sanity to find every job attractive and spend the time to write these two sentences for each application.

The problem is how to refresh this sanity after a couple of ignoring rounds. I think I'm not good at this.

The ghosting from companies you invested time in is soul-crushing.

Company HR persons like to ask "what were you doing the last year?". I once replied like this: "I didn't have a job and I was applying all the time. It's basically like having a job but you're not paid because you do the unpaid day-long or week-long assignments, meetings and so on. You can't really focus too much on anything else.". This was for a company that's already "way more basic" and the application was way more "work smarter not harder" than my regular applications (I really thought that I was looking motivated and I had at least pretty-alright qualifications). And they still nitpick people.

It's an honest answer. I'd respect that.

I think that if a company ends up even slightly nitpicking you then you already lost. Because the next thing they'll do is a meeting and they'll talk about things they found unattractive. And if another candidate got lucky and avoided the pain questions then he wins. Or nobody gets hired at all because the company needs to not fire HR and give them work. "Yes, he didn't have a girlfriend for all his life -- he must be so bad to girls. I guess I'll pass too."

I should stop with this thread. It's not as bad because I found ways to compensate the sanity. And I think that the job market has been better recently. We'll see what I'll talk about in a week or two 😂 And for Clojure jobs... I don't think it's possible currently. There is one company that opened a vacancy in UK but I'm not in UK. So my location plays a big role.

@vemv "25 applications? I'd have genuinely expected something in the hundreds" -- I spoke to HR today about a new batch of applications that popped up on the Jira board for me to look at, and they said they're still filtering through the 700 applications they've received so far... so I'm only seeing the best tip of this particular iceberg... ...and I think I'm going to curl up in a ball in the corner and cry, because finding just 1-in-25 applications to be worth a screening call was already depressing enough 😞

because finding just 1-in-25 applications to be worth a screening call was already depressing enough

they said they're still filtering through the 700 applications they've received so far

I have a friend who is/was looking for a summer internship slash coop. I feel for them

for folks without enough experience to stand out you can imagine how many jobs they'd have to apply to and how impractical writing custom cover letters for each would seem

hence all the loquacious AI cover letters you've seen

> And it's not only about HR. Think about the candidates... ☠️ Part of the problem is that the platforms allow candidates to send applications to dozens (hundreds?) of companies with just the click of a single button. The main one we're dealing with right is http://bestjobs.eu which... well, at least the formatting is nice and clear and readable... and they do have enough flexibility for candidates to provide introductory paragraphs... but we're also seeing resumes with just dates, companies, and job titles with no details at all about what the person did which... I mean, how can any candidate think that's acceptable?

just spam at that point

(and maybe those awful AI-generated cover letters are coming from the platform, as an option applicants check before they click the "Apply to a thousand jobs!" button?)

oof

AI arms race

to where? the bottom?

yes and no, the arms race will be to make these cover letter more and more believable while also people try to use AI to detect them. in theory they'll keep trying to outdo one another, so a race to the top. but depending on the ceiling on the believability of the AI generated cover letters this can lead to this source of information becoming entirely untrustworthy which is definitely a race to the bottom

both sides should change position from HR -> software developer and software developer -> HR for a few jobs. Then everyone will understand second side way better 🙂

unless AI will replace both sides heh

it is 1000% a race towards entropy

meanwhile AI starts consuming the AI generated content out there and it becomes a civilization-wide game of fancy-markov-chain telephone, making the landscape of information more and more homogeneous and useless and deceptive, self-inflicted misinformation warfare

see: current google search results where so much is steaming garbage

Wasn’t always like that? 😉

some day it will feel like that's the case but I remember when the worst you had to deal with were sites that ripped off the content from others instead of generating nonsense on the fly

So, we have an AI that writes letters and other that tries to detect them? Next we'll have AIs that write CVs, then others that detect AI-written CVs. We could also make an AI that tries to detect, based on rejection range and other stuff, if a company is using AI to grade candidates; then we might want to make an AI to review PRs and see if the code in that PR was generated via AI. I mean... it all makes sense now, Entropy is basically energy that wants to become equally spread, and this does sound like a waste of energy and effort 🤣

I was doing e-commerce for 10 years and I remember content everywhere as SEO rubbish 🙂

yeah, I meant it in exactly the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_(information_theory) sense

Do people on FB, YT and other places do better posts or content? 😉 AI is learning from us heh

that's a great way to think about it @afoltzm, thanks for sharing that

uneven quality is exactly the thing that makes it easier to pick out high quality information

AI-generated information homogenous in quality that drowns the ecosystem in irrelevant hallucinations makes it harder to discern which information is higher quality

but quality rank is made by the same people.

the better they get at making it believable, without addressing correctness, the worse the outcome. your search results become inundated with believable but wrong information that cannot be corrected on the sites it's found on (who would correct it, the AI?) much less in the model that generated it

So far I was trying AI in economy and coding this was very frustrating experience. I didn’t do generated content, but I guess it is not as cool as they describe it.

right, it is, the point is it's a system of perverse incentives that reinforce themselves with huge harms to the commons

I think I just wanted to say we complain on AI, but people don’t do better job about content. Sure there are some people, there also some good AI which do good things. It became too abstractive discussion 🙂

low quality content from a human author contains different information than low quality AI content

it's not too abstract from where I'm sitting but I'm fine with moving on

in fact I can bet cover letters mentioned in thread are not AI generated, but made manually by people based on other content

not sure what you're basing your bet on but I'd bet on Sean being able to detect AI loquaciousness just from knowing him from around the community

bold claim considering you haven’t actually seen them

perhaps

but my point is even if people write them manually, will it be better? It needs something outstanding.

I don't particularly care about better as much as real

real is not enough, real is people want a job

this will not pass

inconsistent quality is a feature not a bug

ok we made too big offtopic, I am going to read something :)

thank you for conversation

> both sides should change position from HR -> software developer and software developer -> HR for a few jobs. Then everyone will understand second side way better @kwladyka Well, I'm on the side of HR in this thread, as a long-time hiring manager... but some of y'all are arguing purely from the software developer (job applicant's) p.o.v. which is why I'm trying to get you to understand better 🙂 I've been on both sides over the decades.

and this is good approach 🙂

PS my point wasn’t only label for job. Mainly experience being fired not a long time ago or hiring bad / good people. How frustrating it is from both sides, challenges, why it leads to this behaviours.

more that, than job label

building empathy is good

I did not expect this post to kick off quite such a long thread -- but I think it's been very interesting to hear different people's thoughts. A couple of you have expressed similar thoughts about the hiring process several times before, so I wasn't surprised by your presence (and opinions) here 😉 but I do think it's important to hear "the other side", i.e., other than from the applicants, from time to time...

(and I will say that the hiring process for Clojure roles is much, much more pleasant than for JS roles, when you're on the other side from the applicants!)

Why not ask for cover letter after you selected their CV for screening? This way the candidate would know that they may actually get a chance. And then you will be giving them more time than one minute which they could use to spend with chatgpt but they might actually write it themselves. The task is simply too easy to use chatgpt on. For instance like this: "We know that chatgpt can generate beautiful text and there are people who submit these. But we want your specific motivation for getting into this job. Short and to the point." If I'd get an email that would ask for this then I'd surely write it. If I'd know that the company actually uses them and it's not a spam.

Cover letters are supposed to be submitted with the resume. Employers are not supposed to ask for them later on.

I’ve been wondering if we’re reaching a point where we’re easily detecting AI generated content and starting to associate it with low quality. Kind-of seems like it.

Easy -- if you get what you asked for then it's AI-generated. What a terrible world we live in...

I mean, you can scare those ~20 straight by pointing out that you noticed their cover letter was written by AI

it seems small, but if we have a culture of immediate and public negative reaction to AI generated crap the problem can get better

between AI screening out real job applicants and AI-enabled fake applications, it really seems like the fraction of noise (relative to signal) in the application process is rapidly approaching 1

something simple like Thank you for your interest in applying. We strongly suspect that your cover letter was written with generative AI and thus will not be considering your candidacy. Software Development is a collaborative process and frequently requires developers to have open, honest, and clear communication. Misrepresenting the work of an AI chatbot as your own does not reflect well on your capability or willingness to do so. We strongly suggest that you never do so again in the future. All the best, Sean Corfield

Try this one because this generic one suits every occasion:

We have reviewed your application and you have a very valuable set of 
skills. Unfortunately, they don't quite line up with our immediate hiring needs 
and we will be moving forward with other candidates at this time.

@invertisment_clojuria No, because that obscures the issue

it lets them think that maybe they just need to practice React more or add some more bullet points to their resume

It doesn't obscure it. It's a real email from a Clojure company 😄 They may need to practice React. Why not. It makes them busier and destroys their lives.

its not AI skills, and they are not valuable

making AI skills - economically viable

using AI skills - borderline useless, disastrous to our profession

I find it almost hard to believe someone would let a generative AI write a letter for them. If anything it shows a lack of AI skills.

Here's the parallel I draw in my head:

Why lack of AI skills? They managed to prompt it just fine. I think you meant Machine Learning skills. And also a lack of writing skills or lack of confidence because by using GPT for writing they accept that they're worse than the median GPT result. AND this may mean that they won't improve.

Lack of skills judging what generative AI is good at.

Prior to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9g (or at least the time period around it) the royal we was generally accepting of blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs. Maybe NFTs were the line, but there was always an echo of "yes those uses of the technology don't make sense, but surely one day we'll find a nail for this hammer." It was socially acceptable to be a "Web3" developer and make "DeFi" apps. Tons of developers https://github.com/Alec1017 became "blockchain developers." The only people who should have known better let socially destructive projects be accepted. Relatively recently its changed. Whenever someone has a new crypto scam idea its a lot more common to tell them, by whatever words, to f* off. This social rejection feels like its finally slowed the growth of that nonsense. Social rejection - that there will be concrete consequences for engaging in AI enshittification - is one of the best mechanisms we have to deal with it.

I think that cover letters are totally pointless, maybe it's not a bad thing if they are scrapped thanks to the LLMs

how many people are actually sincere in what they write in a cover letter, even if not helped by a generative AI? Probably 0, you still have to write what you think the recruitment person on the other side wants to read, so what's the point?

the CV should be more than enough, if you are interested in the experience just contact the person and you'll find out what he actually thinks

As a hiring manager, cover letters are very important 🙂

I haven't written one in ages and still got job offers

they are maybe important to you, I would not generalise

A lot of hiring managers I've dealt with in the 30 years I've been a hiring manager are a pretty good sample size 😛

so before LLMS existed people just used templates to write them, which is essentially the same thing

A lot depends on the application process. If you're applying for jobs where the hiring manager knows you, for example, a cover letter is not so important.

I don't get how you would expect to understand how someone really feels about a certain company before he even spoke to anyone at that company, just by a few paragraphs either auto-generated or from a template

it wasn't requested at all in the last few jobs I applied for, not even optionally

AI is probably more useful than blockchain - Google's gotten pretty bad and it can be a kinda effective google - but it doubles down on almost every factor that leads to the generally bad software development landscape we have • People with bad teachers or bad curriculums now go to ChatGPT and get worse habits than even the StackOverflow brain (I'm struggling to find the article i read years ago whose thesis was like "rehire your engineers, because we noticed that many plateaued once they were trying to do something they couldn't easily google) • Corporations treating skilled labor as replaceable/outsourcible • Prioritizing "time to market" over every other metric, including correctness and good design. "AI will help me write quicker" • An unquestioned priority to make everything "easy" • Abusing the contributions of unpaid volunteers for profit (its a plagiarism machine!)

"Will AI replace engineers" is a vapid question you'd expect Shareholders to ask other Shareholders. Its not a conceit we should entertain. Not that an AI cover letter implies any of these opinions - but it does show a disrespect. To whom...maybe themselves and their confidence in their writing, the application process and the intelligence of the person reading it, the craft of writing as a whole...etc. Its kinda the writing equivalent of being mean to a waitress at Applebees. Its probably not the only way you are shitty

Again, before AI people just used templates, I don't see such a big difference between the two

You don't really use a template blindly and verbatim. For instance some wording may be imprecise or irrelevant. Or you could take 2-3 templates and join them. With generators you already have a pre-made full-context text that you can just copy-paste directly. So editing is actually harder because now you don't even need to do it and you become lazy as the default result good enough. And you don't even need to get a second prompt either because the first result is already pretty good.

No doubt, but in both cases most candidates don't actually believe in what they are writing

It's just an extra useless step to be able to actually get an interview

People are told its a numbers game and then shame them for trying to facilitate applications with AI

Don't forget the employers have been searching CVs for regexes for decades

Exactly, you're supposed to apply for 100 jobs and write a custom cover letter from your heart for all of them 😄

People are told its a numbers game

I imagine an alternative where job application forms could say "if we'll think you're using generators then we'll not process your request". https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/16/gentoo_linux_ai_ban/ i.e. this would put the burden of proof on the person who registered right from the start.

If candidates started rejecting leetcode interviews (and they can't - the power dynamic is the other way around) then employers would stop giving them. Nobody wants to be socially spurned. "Fear of rejection" is one of the most effective social levers

> Just a couple of the cover letters seemed genuine and were probably written by humans On the bright side of things, as you probably have already figured out, I see there a sensible criteria for a first round of filtering. ✂️ 😁

I don't mind spending time on CVs or cover letters, it really irks me when it's clear that time is wasted (meaning, the recruiter doesn't pay attention to it). Sometimes it gets entertaining, when they can't even get your name right (in a past interview round, the same recruiter managed to call me Victor first, and Maria later).

> A resume without a cover letter says you don’t really care about the application. I think this assumption is wrong. This is not how reality work from point of view of a person who is looking a job. Companies don’t respect candidates time. I don’t do cover letters, but I really care about my jobs and applications. Another problem is job offers description usually do not match with real work after get a job. The same about company culture description etc. My experience with hiring people is limited, but from my point of view and my developers friends I would say cover letter doesn’t matter for job engagement.

But like I said I know nothing. Just trying to say to not reject people who don’t send cover letters or put them on worst position.

It's rare we interview someone who has not taken the time to write a cover letter specific to our company/job. As I said above, I know a lot of hiring managers (and HR folks) where that is a rule. Your experiences may not match that but if you don't write a cover letter and you don't hear back from the company, maybe that is one reason why... 🙂

it is always, because I don’t live in US, so they can’t proceed.

maybe it is US vs EU culture difference

hard to say

I have never get feedback to write cover letter.

If I get 150 applications, I am not going to wait until the interview round to ask why they applied to my company and this job. That's a giant waste of my time. Re: "EU culture" -- this was a general rule for most of the UK companies I worked with (as a hiring manager) before I moved to the US. But that was also 25-30 years ago. I've "only" been a hiring manager in the US for 25 years.

UK is more US, than EU about this. I think so.

Well, the UK certainly isn't the EU now 🙂

heh this is different story

let’s just say Europe

UK is in Europe, but it is kind of more similar to US. I can be wrong, but this is my impression.

at least about tech jobs

While we are in the topic do you want to share what you would like to read in cover letters? Maybe give some examples with top cover letters which bring your attention?

I want to see that someone has some idea of why they want to work for my company and why this want this specific job, and what they feel they bring to the table for this job. If they've taken the time to tailor their resume to match the company/job and have a clear introductory paragraph explaining this, then the lack of a cover letter is not a deal breaker -- but most resumes don't include that, or only have some very generic blurb that tells me nothing.

To each (country corporate culture) their own. Interviewing for German companies I was sometimes asked a list of all projects+all detailed tech I worked on, which was more annoying than a cover letter. In Italy I never had to do any coding challenge, more likely to be trapped in a SOLID or design pattern conversation; and there no one ever cared about cover letters. In the UK I don't think is possible to get an hands-on software position without going through a tech challenge. In my interactions with US companies, I perceive them obsessed with people showing off how they're amazing and want to change the world and blah blah blah (good luck introverts) for the rest yes, quite similar to UK.

Yeah, I'm no fan of the "tech challenge" stuff (as I've said several times here -- I think it's wrong-headed and doesn't tell you anything about how well someone can do an actual job 🙂 ).

25 applications? I'd have genuinely expected something in the hundreds

found the article https://pvs-studio.com/en/blog/posts/0952/

Re: hundreds of applications -- we're looking at a specific market so we haven't promoted this role very widely. When we last declared "open season" to hire a junior JS dev, we got 150 applications in just a few days. That was a particularly crushing process, sifting through so many awful resumes to try to find even a handful of people worth interviewing!

Why not scrap the CVs and just accept private messages? Because by writing a message the format is not as strict and you'd directly go into "why" mode as an applicant. By asking for a CV the employer shows that it's somehow important. What you tell here is that CVs aren't the main thing that you want to assess.

I think the best way would be to write this in the ad: <...> If you've read this far the general rule is to expect that the candidate would write a couple sentences of what is their motivation to apply. Specifically from your side. If we'll suspect that it's written by a suggester model then we might not consider you at all. Also include the title of your favourite food so that we'd know that you read until the end.

> Why not scrap the CVs and just accept private messages? Because anyone identifying as a hiring manager would then be bombarded with unsolicited DMs? 🙂 A CV/resume is important. What I'm complaining about here is the general lack of care most applicants take on this. I've reviewed a lot of people's CVs/resumes -- I've reviewed a lot of them here from Slack. Writing a good CV/resume isn't a skill that developers are taught, unfortunately, so a lot of them are pretty bad at it (and over the decades I have seen thousands of awful documents). I do recommend building a network of contacts. A lot of jobs are obtained not through public job applications but through your network (I think it's close to about 1/3 of all jobs are through networking?). This community is an excellent place for that. But networks cut both ways: if you come across poorly here and your resume ends up on someone's desk, the impression you create here will color their feelings about your resume; and if you come across really well here, but have a poor resume, you might still get an interview from someone who knows you. That said, the majority of job applications are "cold": the only thing HR and a hiring manager have to go on is your resume and, hopefully, a cover letter. You have to stand out, you have to get your message across in a handful of carefully worded paragraphs and a couple of page of information. If HR and the hiring manager don't know you, those few pages are all that can tell your story. And I will concede that a lot of companies treat applicants poorly. Every application should get an acknowledgement of receipt and then a follow-up in a reasonable time of either moving forward with the process or a rejection. I think it is awful that so many companies don't bother with either of those...

> I think the best way would be to write this in the ad Perhaps just assume that's implicit in every job ad? 🙂

Maybe

> Also include the title of your favourite food so that we'd know that you read until the end 🤣 Love it...

🤣 Love it...

Reminds me of when I was on the C++ Standards Committee and there was a running joke about getting certain strange words into proposals so that they might end up in the published standard... ...I think studebaker made it into the final document? But there were several unexpected words in the ANSI document in the end... 🙂

What's this "numbers game" business? I work with Clojure because I think "throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will stick" is the kind of strategy that makes ugly, smelly walls.

Why? Is there a regulation on that?

In last days I send let’s say 10 CV, but I made extra few sentences only for 1 job offer. I didn’t do this for others, because of dry corporation description of the job where there is nothing outstanding to say, because there was nothing outstanding to read. 1 offer was different, because it was smaller company and someone put more effort into job description, so naturally I could refer to this and match with this or not. Just my fresh observation while I am in the process of looking a job.

Still, on the end it will not change fact I would do my job “the same” in each of this job.

I love when an off-hand comment stands the test of time: > The AI identifies high-entropy clusters – the precise points where unique insights and "blood" reside – and systematically replaces them with the most probable, generic token sequences. What began as a jagged, precise Romanesque structure of stone is eroded into a polished, Baroque plastic shell: it looks "clean" to the casual eye, but its structural integrity – its "ciccia" – has been ablated to favor a hollow, frictionless aesthetic. https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/semantic_ablation_ai_writing/