I don't understand — I use AI to write email particularly _because_ I care about the recipient, and am confident the resulting email will more eloquently and accurately express my feelings. I'll also often edit it afterwards to ensure it's in my voice.
Regardless, I don't think it's fair to presume that my boss doesn't case because an LLM generated the email.
^ This was written 100% by hand. Let's have Claude proofread it and make any suggestions:
I'd argue the opposite — I reach for AI because I care about the recipient. It helps me express my thoughts more precisely and eloquently than I might off the cuff, and I'll often edit the result to make sure it sounds like me.
As someone who's been a hiring manager for around 7 years, I agree with you, but note that the people who screen resumés before they even _get to you_ very well may be looking for those references.
For my own resumé, I include the stack used at each job which I feel strikes a fair balance.
That's what I always did too. Then I removed it because I wanted to focus more on the kind of problems I solve rather than the languages I've worked in, and recruiters complained, so I put it back in.
If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.
But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.
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I don't summarily reject AI-written resumés to be clear, as honestly, it's basically a necessity at this point to be competitive with others; it'd be putting yourself at a severe disadvantage on pure principles in a way that has no real positive net effect on society. Even if you disagree with AI resumé screeners, you're only hurting yourself — especially at a time that has the largest impact on your compensation (i.e. negotiating salary at job start is one of the most valuable ways to spend your time since it will pay you back every paycheck).
Though I _do_ tend to question resumés that look like they were written almost entirely by an LLM without the candidate providing significant context and refinement.
> If it's something like "Refactored the apartment list service improving P99 Latency from 2s to 180ms", it definitely boosts the resumé in my mind. A good engineer would be measuring their impact and likely have numbers like that off the top of their head.
> But if it's like "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%," with the same fidelity on each bullet, I'm very skeptical.
Do you mind explaining why? The former doesn't indicate caring about business impact whatsoever (is this service in the critical path of any online process? Who knows!) while the latter does.
> "Increased revenue by $18.7M by reducing time-to-first-interaction latency from 2.3s to 117ms, increasing conversion by 47% and LTV by 28%,"
The first is that they're playing fast and loose with their numbers. Latency has before/after, conversion and LTV have percentages; revenue is just a single number. Did that double revenue? Or is that half a percent, and is it lost in the statistical noise?
The other is that there's nothing there to convince me that the technical work was was the full cause, instead of, say a new marketing promotion that launched at the same time, or another team redesigning the landing page flow, or another team re-doing all the product photography, or any other concurrent work.
Maybe all those questions have good answers, but I would at least want some nod in there to how they validated it. I find people who focus on "business impact" but don't know how to do the math to have confidence in it dangerous, because it's so easy to cherry-pick numbers that will make execs happy at a glance and prioritize for those things instead of actual long-term system or product or customer-facing improvements.
I'm not binning the resume for it, and maybe it helps get past the people who see it before I do, but I'm gonna dig in on it. And I'm usually disappointed by the answers.
I wish it was at least normalized to submit two resumes - one for AI and one for humans. Threading the needle to please both audiences is such a crap-shoot.
This sounds correct. When I implemented push notifications for an iPhone application, I remainder needing to obtain a store a separate token for each device a user has, and subscribing to a feed of revoked delivery tokens. Seemed like an interesting design intended to facilitate E2E encryption for push notifications.
Depending on where you live it may not really be relatable to you, but living in NYC -- there are people that will intentionally jay walk on a green light and even _stare you down_ knowing that you will stop and let them pass.
People jay walk when there's no traffic all the time, that's totally fine. This is a totally different act of passive aggression.
> Depending on where you live it may not really be relatable to you, but living in NYC -- there are people that will intentionally jay walk on a green light and even _stare you down_ knowing that you will stop and let them pass.
This is the speed walking equivalent of picking up pennies in front of a steam roller. Saves a min here and then until you pay for it big time.
Maybe the sycophantic behavior of AI models comes from rich people having them build to behave the same as their personal yes-men. A person accustomed to never hearing "no" won't like a machine that tells them off.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately… For years this has been said, and for most of us isn’t something we’ve been able to experience until recently. Yet, now we can see how chatbots have made sane folks lose their minds, by simply being too agreeable. I think it’s a grim look at what it’s like to be hyper wealthy. The odds that they’ve completely disassociated from reality, IMHO, have increased exponentially after seeing the effects on “normal” people. The only difference is us plebs, don’t have the resources to then bring our distorted view of reality to life.
When I look at Google, I see a company that is fully funded by ads, but provides me a number of highly useful services that haven't really degraded over 20 years. Yes, the number of search results that are ads grew over the years, but by and large, Google search and Gmail are tools that serve rather benevolently. And if you're about to disagree with this ask yourself if you're using Gmail, and why?
Then I look at Meta or X, and I see a cesspool of content that's driven families apart and created massive societal divides.
It makes me think that Ads aren't the root of the problem, though maybe a "necessary but not sufficient" component.
Google is almost cartoonishly evil these days. I think that's pretty much an established fact at this point.
I'm not using Gmail, and I don't understand why anyone would voluntarily. It was the worst email client I'd ever used, until I had to use Outlook at my new job.
The only Google products I use are YouTube, because that's where the content is. And Android, because IOS is garbage and Apple is only marginally less evil than Google.
I’ve recently begun using my personal domain as my primary email address, with it forwarding to gmail so I can “get out” easily if I ever had a reason. That said, I’ve found Gmail’s service great, their spam filtering highly effective, (although I haven’t surveyed the competition lately so it’s possible their huge advantage no longer exists) and their features pretty user-friendly (eg the one-click unsubscribe as well as a page to view all your subs in one place). I have never felt like they _abused_ the immense amount of data they have about me nor used it for “evil” purposes; only to profit on relevant ads that are at least clearly marked and unobtrusive. I don’t like that they have so much data on me, but I’ve felt like they’ve been transparent about it, so it’s been on me for making a decision eyes wide open. As opposed to Meta and the shady shit they’ve been caught doing...
That said, I’m open-minded and obviously thinking about this given moving to my own domain.
What’s the evil behavior you’ve experienced? I’m down to move off if I’m oblivious to something…
Yeah the question is what is the optimal feedback loop between producers and consumers and what are the appropriate communivation channels that respect human rights that we can all agree on
