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You know, for all the many downsides to a career in medicine, I'm profoundly grateful that I haven't had to scrabble, beg and apply scattershot to job offers as if I was hunting a goose that laid golden eggs with a shotgun.
I'm probably just lucky. The job market for fresh grads, even those with an MBBS, is tight in both India and the UK. Arguably worse for the latter, due to both a massive increase in med school enrollment without a concomitant increase in higher training positions, as well as an influx of international doctors who find even the grim conditions there an upgrade. That same glut hasn't struck the higher levels of job roles, because it's far harder and more time consuming to manufacture a consultant or specialist.
In India, I think I was batting over 90% acceptance rates for all the jobs I applied for. The one place that didn't take me reached out a few months later asking if I was still looking (I wasn't). Maybe it was a CV that had proper grammar and the perfect degree of self-aggrandizement to inflate limited (at the time) work experience. Maybe it was the fact that I come across as friendly, earnest and even painfully polite and respectful. It might just have been dumb luck.
In the UK, I took one glance at the ballache that was applying to jobs when all you've got on your CV was a pass on the PLABs and a GMC number, and opted to not really bother. This was made far easier by the fact that psych training only considered scores in competitive exams, instead of (((holistic factors))).
Come to think of it, even applying for med school in India never required you to scrape and beg. You sat the exam, and you either beat out the millions of hopeful aspirants, or you tightened your belt and hoped for better luck next year.
That's what matters, IMO. If you have a robust grading system that winnows the chaff straight from the get go, employers can be far more complacent about the quality of potential employees. It all boils down to supply and demand. If there's an oversupply of candidates, or even the impression of too much choice (to a first approximation, the number of single men equals that of single women), then you get the party with the power imbalance in their favor playing hard to get.
The only other plausible solution to this is some kind of costly signal, such as educational qualifications, or having a girlfriend (while seemingly perverse before you actually think about it, taken men elicit far more interest from the opposite sex).
Of course, the old saws like Leetcode are facing rapid annihilation from people using AI to jump hurdles for them. The only real solution, for SWEs, would be to look at real projects, or have in-person and monitored interviews.
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