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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.
Strange. A few hours ago I was checking this thread in the phone and I swear there was a short and witty response wondering just how unique the historic experience of Gen Z is. By now it disappeared.
If it was mine, I deleted it because on second read I didn't feel like it added a whole lot to the conversation and was essentially navel-gazing. Here it was, just in case:
It's funny, as I make this post I got an e-mail response from a job application telling me in automated corpospeak that, yes, my resume is being reviewed by an AI bot and yes, I will be ghosted if she doesn't like it.
I applied to this job not because I really need it, but because I am essentially a perfect fit that checks 14/15 boxes on their Preferred Qualifications wish list. Funny to think their unicorn candidate might not even get a screening call because they are too lazy to review resumes.
Or maybe it isn't that. Maybe they won't reach me because they are flooded with resumes that look just like mine, not because there are so many people like me out there, but because so many are using their own AI bot to generate the perfect resume for every job in a 100 mile radius and aren't particularly concerned if they're full of lies.
What a horrifying tragedy of the commons. While it's always been horrible, I'll agree that things have clearly gotten worse. Somethings gotta give. Regulation, or something. In the meantime, maybe this is a good indicator that it's time to abandon any remaining vestige of K-selected application strategy, no matter how promising the outlook.
I'd say the situation has essentially been like this since 2008, yes. Maybe the period between 2015-2019 was slightly better.
My memory of this is that the general feeling was that, yeah, things are really bad right now because of the financial crisis, but things will recover and go back to normal. Then they never did.
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