Giving out free samples too me, works too.

This was an inevitability, and not just because of the tightening job market. The real gasoline dumped on the tire-fire of employment (especially tech employment) in the United States is AI. It used to be that, when I posed a job opening, I got maybe 100 applications over the course of a few weeks from people who moderately embellished their resumes. And that's because the conventional wisdom was to spend the time to put together a really class-A application to the jobs that were the best fit for you.

But AI has changed the math.

Now the hours-long process of fine-tuning your resume to fit a job description and crafting a nice cover letter to go with it are the work of a click or two. Candidates have every reason in the world to apply to as many jobs as they can. It's a classic prisoners dilemma; sure, everyone else is worse off if the HR departments are flooded but if everyone else does it and you don't, you're never going to land a job.

And so the firehose opens and the job ad that used to get me 100 resumes over the course of a month gets me 1,000 resumes over the course of an hour.

And, just for funsies, most of them are wildly unqualified. AI is happy to lie on your resume for you and getting it not to do that is hard. So now not only do I have a ton of resumes to go through, I have a crisis of trust on my hands. Who, out of all of these applicants, are telling the truth and who's basically echoing the job-ad back to me?

In that situation, it makes a ton of sense to lean back on trust relationships. Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc have reputations to uphold. I can count on them to police their candidates. My local university wants to maintain a good relationship with area businesses; if their graduates are BSing me in their resumes I can meet the head of their career center for coffee and get them to deal with it.

There is no solution here. The employment market is a feedback loop. The bigger the applicant:job ratio grows the harder it is for employers to adequately consider and respond to applications, turning the application process into something more akin to a lottery ticket than a proper application. The more converting an application to a job feels like random chance the more incentivized applicants are to prioritize quantity over quality, driving the ratio ever higher.

Nothing short of a sudden and profound cratering of the unemployment rate is going to slow this arms race. This isn't the end state of the market; it's going to get worse before it gets better.

In Finland in the early 90s we also had to read complete novels. You could pick from among options or propose your own to the teacher. The tests were not questions but you had to instead write a 2-3 page summary of the book including a short review, and then briefly present it to the class. Since most pupils read separate books, I think the concept was different from the US concept where I assume there were then discussions about the books in class?

I remember reading Catch-22 and Crime and Punishment this way. Crime and Punishment was a chore but I rather enjoyed Catch-22.

I don't bother with romance novels (they're usually about abusers being rewarded for being abusers, and not really my cup of tea even when they aren't), but AI is not great at translation, is terrible at metaphor, and is horrific at writing.

If they're going to use AI for auto-translation, then I think the best thing they can do is pay for the first 30 sessions of therapy needed afterwards.

Over-reliance on an unreliable source is stupid.

Britain has plenty of brilliant minds and is more than capable of building services equal, or superior, to those in the US. It honestly isn't hard - I've worked in the US tech sector and their minds are nowhere near up to scratch. Those that are are overworked, underpaid, and essentially beholden to their employer because the US is a "good ol' boy's club" where executives abuse power and authority on a regular basis. This is not a good way to run a reliable, competent, business.

Hell, give me the seed money and I'll set up an damn cloud provider that can beat the carp out of those in the US. I've been in this business longer than most of the techies working on the US cloud infrastructure but I'm also not blinded by the naive assumptions and political intrigues that have defined the sector thus far.

Wasnt DECs True64 unix or something?

We passed Idiocracy some time back. We're now in a region where satirists and humourists are simply no longer able to function without sounding saner.

True, but to be fair, the scientists, engineers, and scholars are largely fleeing the country, the tech industry is in a massive slump (agriculture is the only sector growing jobs according to the last reliable official figures), and there's a political need to create the impression that the country isn't in a bad way.

But... shouldn't they? I graduated from college in 2002. Today I run software development teams that build cloud hosted machine learning models pretty much none of which was a thing in 2002. Even if we want to imagine that college is essentially a trade school but with ivy and columns, the fact remains that your average college graduate's degree far outlives the value of most of what they're taught unless they're majoring in history.

We certainly want people to exit college with the skills they need to either enter the workforce or grad school, but those skills could be aquired for a whole heck of a lot less time and money than a four-year-degree. The college degree is about critical thinking skills; managing complexity; proving a capability for self education and improvement; etc. Or it should be, anyway.

HP-UX was never any good though, it was always the worst of the UNIXs