Looking for a Job Is Tough

At this point, I view the job search process as stochastic rather than deterministic. I model my job search using the binomial distribution. All that you need to know is what how frequently you get interviews and offers to then explore the probabilities involved.

To me at least, that removes a lot of the uncertainty, since I now know that if I apply to X jobs, I will have a Y percent chance of getting at least one offer, etc. Or maybe all of this is just an indictment of current hiring practices that I no longer think in terms of individual positions but in terms of aggregates of them.

> At this point, I view the job search process as stochastic rather than deterministic.

Yes, it is sales. You are doing sales. Leads -> chats -> due dilligence -> offers -> negotiation -> conversions.

This is also how the hiring side looks at it. “How many leads do we need to get a conversion to this role?”. It helps when both sides understand this.

Admissions to selective colleges are the same way. For most students it's rather foolish and wasteful to target any one specific college because luck plays a huge factor (or the actual selection criteria are unknown and unknowable, which from the applicant's perspective is indistinguishable from luck).

People cannot discriminate. They must spray and pray because the algorithm demands it of them. Thus, both sides (employer and employee) lose, because every applicant and every institution becomes flattened, generalized.

It used to be, applying to places took time and effort. So students (and job applicants likewise) would discriminate. This allowed employers and institutions to actually build culture. An institution could be different from another institution in large ways, all cultural, all "soft" -- unpronounceable by the machine.

This enriched us all, because it allowed pockets of brilliance to form. Actual, real, human variation.

Now, every job has 2,000 applicants. Every HR person is trained at a school whose curriculum is undifferentiated from Harvard or Yale, because every school has the incentive to emulate Harvard or Yale. Every HR person's classmates all, similarly, could not afford to care which institution they applied to, because their application process was -- again, spray and pray. And thus, every HR person at every company creates the exact same institution.

This flattening, this algorithmization, is like an invasive species which has choked out all of the variable, beautiful, at times brilliant flora and fauna which existed, protected, in its isolated institutional ecology. All of that cultural diversity has been destroyed so that we could click "easy apply."

What's the result? Every job application looks the same. Every interview looks the same. Every internal culture looks the same. Every job is the same, so much so that you could switch jobs every 2 years and nobody would even notice or care. Every 2 years! How much does a 2 year old know!? Every company apes Google in their interview process because Google is the Kudzu that choked out their local flora and fauna.

We're all poorer for it, this mass extinction event. Like you say, it's happening all over, not just in companies and schools.

AI has made this problem even worse, too.

The solution to the problem is trusted intermediaries that act as something of a filter against bad actors. They're just hard to establish, especially in a world where people want the other side to have their hands tied but not their own.

Upvoted, but my experience is that radically different cultures actually do continue to exist, especially across different industries. But maybe not at the apex of money and prestige.