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Kalislav Smirnov
Kalislav Smirnov

Posted on AI-assisted

The job market is brutal. Your complaint thread won't fix it.

#career #discuss #writing #devops

Four of this week's front-page posts are about the job search. One calls the market disgusting. I'm in the same market, applying for DevOps and platform roles, so this isn't shouted from the shore.

The market really is bad

  • 22% fewer software development postings on Indeed in the US than in February 2020 (index at 78 on 2 October, FRED).
  • 61% of job seekers ghosted after an interview; 18 to 22% of jobs on Greenhouse's own platform classified as ghost jobs in any quarter (Greenhouse, 2024).
  • 37% of job seekers say they apply to more jobs than ever and hear back less; 73% of HR professionals say under half of applications meet the listed criteria (LinkedIn, January 2025).
  • 22% of candidates use bots to apply automatically (Greenhouse, 2025); Greenhouse's own explanation for the ghosting is employers drowning in AI applications.
  • One dev.to author sent 59 applications in 14 days. 51 got no answer.

Nobody who has seen these numbers gets to say "try harder". The market is unfair, and good engineers got laid off for reasons unrelated to their work.

The post doesn't help you either

I pulled this week's dev.to posts under career and jobsearch and kept the 43 with "job", "interview", "market", "rejected" or "ghost" in the title.

This week on dev.to Posts Zero reactions 10+ reactions
Job-search posts 43 31 2
devops, kubernetes, sre, terraform posts 292 180 23

So yes, most of everything gets ignored, mine included. The difference is what happens after. An ignored Terraform post still answers someone's search in six months and still sits under your name when a recruiter looks. An ignored rant does neither. And the two job-search posts that did break ten reactions weren't rants. (The "disgusting" post is tagged jobmarket, so it isn't in the table; it had 23 reactions the morning after. Fair enough. That's still sympathy from people who can't hire you.)

And look who's in the thread. Other job seekers. The hiring manager isn't, and if she wanders in she learns that you're frustrated, which she assumed.

What a stranger sees

Picture a recruiter with your name in a search box and four minutes before the next call. She finds three posts about ghosting and nothing you built. Next tab.

Same recruiter, same four minutes, and the first result is a README that explains one decision. She reads it. Maybe she writes. That's the gap between "unread" and "read", the only gap a post of yours can close.

It doesn't have to be impressive

It has to be specific. My home lab is one mini-PC running Proxmox, which is nothing. The README line I'd point a reader at says that changing a container's network interface through the Terraform provider restarts the container even though the plan shows an in-place update. One sentence, and it says more about how I work than a cover letter.

An incident write-up with a timeline. A comment that politely corrects someone's YAML. A write-up from March still gets found in October; a rant from March is gone by Tuesday.

One more Greenhouse number: 28% of candidates admit to using AI to generate fake work samples. A repo with a commit history and a README that explains why beats a polished sample because it's hard to fake.

Where this stops working

No time: skip the homelab. One write-up of a problem from your last job, names filed off, thirty minutes. Less than the forms nobody reads.

Burned out: rest, and ignore everyone telling you to build in public, me included. This is for people who still have the energy for a thousand-word complaint.

Visa, location, a role that doesn't exist in your city: proof of work gets you read. It doesn't get you past a wall the hiring side can't move either.

The ask

Keep writing. Change the ratio. For every post about the search, two about the work: the bug, the migration, the thing that broke on Friday. If the market is still like this in a year, you'll have a year of visible work instead of a year of visible frustration. Only one of those is something a hiring manager can act on.

Tell me I'm wrong in the comments. Or better: drop the one write-up you'd want a recruiter to find first. I'll read every one.

Sources

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