Comment by jmyeet
10 hours ago
This sort of thing needs to be illegal. We saw a similar thing wtih RealPage. So many corporate landlords use it that it essentially becomes anticompetitive price-fixing.
I've heard a claim that an issue with these ATS AI Systems is that your CV gets scored and that score is cached for some period from 3 to 12 months. So any application with a completely different company with your name will just yield the exact same score. If true, it means that if you score badly for whatever reason, you're going to get auto-rejected by every company that uses that system before ever being seen by a human.
This seems to fit anecdotal data where people have applied for hundresd of jobs and never gotten anything other than an automated rejection. But obviously that's not proof or confirmation. But if it is, it's almost like being a voncicted felon. It greatly limits your ability to find a job and that's a huge problem.
I don't know what the solution is but I hope these companies get sued for states for issueslike this where actual discrimination occurs.
Recruitment and hiring has been a mess for decades, though, especially in tech.
It's like all the leetcode bullshit. We know that is not a valid measurement for actual performance in a dev job, but that doesn't stop managers from using it.
What they need is a number, a rating, on how much of a fit each candidate is, through some process that can be described as objective and fair. The algorithms provide that.
If we make this illegal, they'll just come up with some other bullshit.
In an ideal world, companies would assess each and every candidate individually and on their merits. But no-one has time or patience for that, so we have these bullshit systems.
From what I seen, the leetcode is self reproducing dysfunction. There is whole subculture that believes being good at leetcode like tests and puzzles makes you inherently superior in all aspects, because you are smart. After all, they were good at leetcode like tests and are superior and smart. It is people who grew up in that subculture becoming managers recreating the culture they grew up in.
That is why the "not a valid measurement for actual performance in a dev job" thing does not matter. Too many people are emotionally invested in this being important measure. Their and their friends self worth is attached to it.
Is it... illegal... to put white characters on your name field? Just thinking out loud here, but what if we fed the AI (and ONLY the AI) a different name for every role. By adding two invisible characters on the space between your name? Would it then make a new index?
Consider characters that look the same but have different unicode?