Why is it so hard to find a job now? Enter Ghost Jobs

Recently I have found several things:

- there are some positions that exist only to receive new personal data information. There are companies that scrape user data when you apply for a job

- some job positions are kept to make employees more productive

- some job positions are kept open to show investors "we are still hiring", "we have no problems, etc.

- some HR just want to have more and more data, some times it is just useful to have new CVs at hand

- my wife decided recently to apply to companies directly, not through work sites, to get directly to managers, etc.

- in the end my wife found job by word of mouth, someone knew someone, etc. etc.

Talking to a couple of people who found jobs recently, I realized that none of them actually found the job by applying online. All of them are through human relationships. It doesn't have to be someone who knew someone, but even an outsourced recruiting agency staffed by humans in a call center is more useful than applying online. The better recruiting agencies usually have an account manager who has a direct line to the company that's hiring.

Online job seeking is dead.

I got hired by directly applying via a company's website; it was my 11th application and my first that wasn't a moonshot (nvda/valve/etc). It was in late 2023 (very bad market), and I didn't have any connections to the company at all. I also have no online presence. Online applications are not fully dead.

Of course this is just my experience as a senior engineer in embedded, so likely doesn't apply to others. But if you're looking, it's worth your time to apply...

I have a suspicion that your experience is representative of a general attitude in embedded engineering compared to other software disciplines. Embedded engineers usually still keep to proper part numbering, testing before shipping and working with greater platform limitations, all virtuous activities that are harder to find in other fields. I like to think this culture bleeds into other parts of the business such as implementing reasonable hiring processes!

I'd chalk it up to embedded not being a field you can hop into after a 4 month boot camp without prior Computer Engineering education. Of course, there are exceptional people who manage to do that, but they aren't the norm

<Warning - rant ahead>

Contrast that to the overglorified code monkeying that is present-day software development... You got react monkeys hard-coding every single width and height for every button and div in a webapp... And they get paid for it... And then someone like me will have to clean up this shit and explain to the client why the billion features he wants won't be ready in 3 months.....

Then you have AWS monkeys coding everything in lambas and amplify, instead of "if conditions" you got "Step functions" and instead of a function you got a lamda, and instead of async/await you got SQS queues and shit.

</Rant>

As a result, legit Engineers/excellent developers resumes get swallowed up in the raging ocean of noise, and a ton of those noise-resumes aren't distinguishable from legit-resumes due to resume generators being dime a dozen.