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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.
Look, commenting about jobs- I freely acknowledge that tech jobs might just be uniquely ridiculous. But for most normal jobs you apply and then call the company and check up on it, and then if the interview doesn’t raise any red flags and you have the basic qualifications they’re looking for, you’re hired. The zoomers seem to have forgotten that second step. As with most things, they should listen to their elders born before jet fuel melted steel beams and they’d do fine.
Experienced Tech Bro checking in.
Leet code grinding and blind resume application have been losing propositions for years. This isn't new info. The career / job strategy median is:
The keen eyed among you will detect something here; a tech career is now much like any other professional career; you have to network and you have to develop some sort of specific edge, usually born of genuine interest and passion in a niche area. The era of "Yes, I can sling code pretty good" is over. That was 2005 - 2015, give or take a two years in either direction.
I simply don't believe the Gen-Z has it worse story. I can remember when I was in High School and everyone wanted a job at the local hardware store because it paid really well and wasn't that difficult if you had some level of real interest in, well, hardware stores. This being commonly known, kids from all over the county would stop by to drop off their resumes everyday. How many do you think were called back and interviewed?
Luckily for me, the owner's son happened to be in my grade and we were in the same Geometry class.
I had a really good summer working at the hardware store.
Yes, that's the tech BRO track. If you're in tech and not a bro, you won't be pivoting to a tech-adjacent role, you won't be schmoozing with people to get a job, and it will be VERY unlikely to do the startup thing because you probably won't know the right people (some do, by accident). But it's always been easy for the bro types.
Me: "Here's my experience in the field"
You: "I'm not you, so this doesn't help me"
.... I don't know what I can do for you? I'm trying to relate my experience and perspective. I'm not trying to craft a career strategy for randos on the internet.
I've got plenty of experience in the field. Advice like yours is evergreen. It's not wrong. But it only works for a certain type of person (who are somewhat rare among tech people, though less so than they used to be). Consider it the other way -- if the best way to get ahead as a sales bro involved writing code, and most sales bros couldn't write a line of code to save their life, would advice to follow that best way be useful, in general?
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