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From college to dating to jobs, no one in history has been rejected more than Gen Z
This is an interesting article about the trend of mass-applications that has become increasingly normalized across many areas of life. If you've applied for a job in the past decade or so, you'll know that the signal:noise ratio is very bad, and as such you're kind of expected to mass-apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs. Each job will get bombarded with something like 1000 applicants in the first few days, and while many of those applicants will be junk, there will probably be at least a few dozen high-quality candidates that you're competing with. This has led to companies becoming extremely picky. In my specific area of tech, its led to an expectation that you need to do dozens of hours of "leetcode", which are little toy problems that are ostensibly used to make sure you actually know how to program, but which actually do a terrible job at this because real programmers will usually be somewhat bad at these, while people who grind leetcode but know little else can do quite well. There's also a further expectation that you might be asked to do other ridiculous feats like have 8+ rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, and you might be ghosted at any point in this process, even after you've interviewed with real people. Heck, you might even be ghosted after you've received and accepted a formal job offer, then if you show up to work the company will just lie and say they have no idea who you are. While there's theoretically some recourse by suing for promissory estoppel, it's almost never worth the effort so it rarely happens. The accepted answer is "that's just part of the game now, swallow your pride and move on".
Dating, and to some extent college applications are also like this. Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face. While I think a little bit of rejection can be good to build resilience, I doubt humans are psychologically well-equipped to handle the barrage of rejection that's become commonplace. Getting rejected hurts even if it's just a small annoyance from not receiving a response. It makes you feel like you're being treated like garbage a little bit, which would almost certainly prompt some amount of nihilism after a while. It might also lead to some amount of risk aversion. I myself simply refuse to deal with online dating at all, which has dramatically limited my romantic options. But if dying alone is the price required to remove this nonsense from at least one aspect of my life, that's a deal I'd gladly take.
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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