Comment by wormer
4 years ago
As someone who's in college and looking/lookedfor internships to do over the summer, postal is literally not an option anymore. Companies will not offer a mailing address to their hiring team at all, and if you send something via mail they will simply not look at it. Also, post-pandemic, most interviews are done via Zoom, so how are you going to do that then? Even if you're in the same area as the company you're applying in, they just will not let you into the building.
This sounds really bad! Where are you from?
New York City, and I don't think it's bad. The effort it takes for me to apply to jobs, and conversely, to approve/reject applicants (according to other people that I've talked to) is easier than having to sort through a ton of junk mail.
People on Hacker News like to propose "just use low-tech!" or "just self host!" often and I don't get how that's a solution. I _could_ spend hours of my day printing out and mailing my resume to companies (if they allowed me to) and waiting days-weeks for my response _after_ they made their decision (during which time I still have to pay bills and have no job) or I could apply with one button on Linkedin and get my response back instantly. It just saves so much time.
Others will say that that's a small price to pay to retain my freedom, which might be true. But what's not true is the other qualities of life that internet and big data affords me. If I don't have instagram or snapchat I literally lose all spontaneous contact with my friends and family. Sure, I _could_ mail them a letter, but with the delay in communication a lot of the intimacy is lost, and we would truthfully just talk a lot less. This, along with a lot of other problems (how do I contact my professor for help after class? go to their house?). Combined with the fact that I would have to be _extremely_ thorough and make sure that my data is scrubbed from all of Facebook/Google/Twitter/Whatever and it's subcompanies, it's just not a real solution. It's actually really annoying that so many are content with infeasible individual solutions instead of advocating for things like pushing against the EARN IT act or the like. I shouldn't have to have a computer science or cyber security degree to be private online - it should be done for me by the government. I don't know what the fuck is in that vaccine (or any medicine I take for that matter) but I can trust that it does me good because of regulations.