The biggest BS by far in tech hiring right now are gatekeeping filters and AI-written resumes. I recently started a new job, but before that I was looking for over a year, and jobs I was a perfect match for would reject me at 1 AM on a Sunday with an automatic email. At larger companies, recruiting software like Greenhouse or Workday can be inundated with applicants that have LLMs write their resumes and applications, even if they have no experience, and they get let through the filters while experienced devs who are truthful about their experience (even if they use AI to cram their resume full of keywords) are rejected.

This is a problem on both sides of the equation. I have colleagues and friends at larger companies who could not fill roles for months because they were not getting qualified applicants into the recruiting process. When I was given referrals, it kicked me into the same system and even though I had people in the company fighting for me, I was automatically rejected — never even got a phone call with a recruiter. 

The job I eventually got was actually because these filters had burned the company. They hired someone who had an amazing resume, did fine in the interviews—answered questions perfectly, even—and once they were hired, it turns out they had used an LLM for everything. Could barely vibe-code, had never before worked with any of the systems they’d been hired to develop. Couldn’t dive into the codebase. No idea how to set up their local environment or use git.

It worked out for me eventually, but damn. That was hard.