-Job seekers find it harder than ever to get a job -Companies find it harder than ever to find the people they need

These two things shouldn't be true at the same time, at at least eventually balance out, but it only seems to be getting worse.

If job-seekers were using bots to spam their resume to every job opening, whether they fit it or not, if they were creating resumes that didn't actually fit their talents (lying), and if companies were advertising openings that didn't actually exist, then the true job seekers and the true job openings can't find each other in the sea of lies and spam.

And, from what I can gather, that has been increasingly true for a decade. I don't know whether AI has made it worse in the last few years.

I think fake job openings, lying on your resume, and applying everywhere have been a thing as long as jobs have. AI may have supercharged this.

But I don't think the structural issue is that companies advertise nonexistent jobs. Even companies I know are hiring (I know because they're paying in-house recruiters) have a tough time filling those roles.

Neither do I think that lying on resumes is cause of the problem. Even if resume spam is a massive problem, you'd expect that adaptations either in applicant behavior or in talent sourcing would emerge that would remedy this.

If job marketplaces actually cared about the end user experiences of those seeking/offering jobs, we'd see much more effort towards blunting the impact of things such as AI spam and ghost job postings. They have no real impetus to do so, however, because they are making money hand over fist off the volume of people desperately interacting with their services.

In short, the main interface to the job market has been enshittified.

Those are much worse now, and most people aren't the level of standout talent that gets inbound jobs, nor scour careers pages for hours.

If a heritage shoe company doubles prices, moves production overseas while producing worse quality, and then markets explicitly to a fringe political group, it's hard to un-ruin it. Brand images are sticky and production facilities don't re-emerge in your home country out of thin air.

But if a software company were to genuinely own up to their mistakes and say "We went wrong in this specific way and we're going to fix it by sunsetting [hated feature], reverting pricing to the old policy, and prioritize fixing application speed and stability", then you can salvage some trust.

Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.

At least, more room than if not.

I'm not referring to evil lockin, simply... a very nice degree of customization, and no way to port that to a similar service.

Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).

Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.

Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.

I've seen this pattern a bunch:

1. Person builds trust on X/LinkedIn or via an insightful blog/newsletter (substitute your channel of choice here) for a few years because they have unique opinions, interesting stories from personal experience, are entertaining/charismatic, or share data/insights nobody else has.

2. They realize "AI can do this now" and use AI trained on past content to generate the content.

3. They post the content

4. People initially keep engaging because their AI-generated content inherits some of the trust they built up

5. People realize their posts are AI slop and feel tricked or simply no longer enjoy the posts.

6. Engagement falls off a cliff because the assumption has changed from "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's got a good chance to be interesting" to "If I see this person/company in a feed, it's guaranteed to be AI slop.

There's a temporary "Have your cake and eat it too" phase where you get the results without doing the work. But once that ends, you have to build the brand all over again because it's been tarnished.

(Fyi my take isn't that everything needs to be hand-written and no AI can ever be used in writing. Just that this cycle keeps repeating because people don't do the work anymore. You can use AI and still be doing the work of generating genuinely good writing)

I agree completely, but this is part of a larger pattern in society lately around short-term thinking. It seems like everyone is trying to cash ASAP and fewer people are investing or building long-term.

Between crumbling social institutions, climate change, governmental chaos, and increasing economic inequality, I think people just don't believe in the future as much as they used to. If you stop believing in the future, then making choices with short-term positives but long-term negatives becomes rational. You won't be around when the chickens come home to roost. Or, at least, you believe you'll have much bigger problems to worry about then anyway. Better to get yours now while you can.

When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.

Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.

I’m talking about a one-time cashing in of trust one already has built up, not saying whatever the algorithm demands to go viral.

These people already have the thing others are expecting from content creation!

I think this is different from the short-term phenomenon you describe where people want to get rich quick via crypto/prediction markets/wallstreetbets/etc.

It’s much more like you already have enough to retire on, but cash it all out because your cousin’s tattoo artist’s stepson recently got a bachelor’s in finance and they won’t charge any management fees.

But yes, a lot of the tech industry these days resembles people looking at a rainforest and thinking how much value could be derived from clear-cutting it. Massive one-time extraction of value, long term destruction of an ecosystem, resulting in harms distributed all over the world in ways that aren't obviously linked.

- Eschew the "For You", Read tweets only from people you have chosen to follow.

- Only follow people who have a bona fide livelihood outside social media, avoid anyone for whom income is largely driven by "engagement".

It’s an environment designed for the exact opposite of your best intentions.

... You don't actually advise them to post on LinkedIn, do you? You know all the engagement on LinkedIn is fake, right?

These days it's all just that, or else people flinging AI slop past each other.

I have never seen a single piece of content on LinkedIn that I felt was genuine, or that wasn't obvious engagement bait.

It doesn't matter how much you enjoy your tasks or how good your comp is (unless it's enough to retire early) if you dread your colleagues and/or work environment.

I've declined customers or offers.

I think it's important for two reasons:

-For career growth and learning new skills (which eventually translate to more money), it's important to be in an environment where you want to crack tricky problems and exchange ideas with colleagues. Not to talk about the fact that good working relationships pay dividends later on for networking and such.

-We spend so much of our limited time on Earth working that we should enjoy it as much as possible, which, at least for me, is a function of liking who I work with and how I work.

iA Writer is very well one very solid and proven solution for certain use cases. In fact, I would argue that, independent of what app you use, plaintext plus markup (with the right set of templates) is, methodically, economically and logically, a much more efficient solution than Word. And I'd even argue that it is more efficient in most government, school, NGO and corporate cases.

You may find that delusional. I'm certainly not delusional about the real challenge here. It is not what app you use, but the network of format and formatting expectations, and to make people change habits. After 15 years of trying to convince people to focus on content rather than form, we know very well just how incredibly hard it is to convince people and make them stay in what they enjoy more against everybody else.

I was responding specifically to a commenter who pretended as though the article was super promotional, which it isn't. I agree your proposition is the right way to transitioning away from MS Office.

Was just saying you're actually NOT proposing to get administrations on iA Writer as their default writing tool, as a prev. commenter was insinuating.

Lots of important business logic and data live there

I myself have built an app to help me do 2 hours of deep work on a personal (non-job) project. It's extremely opinionated to help ME specifically (can't add more than 3 active projects, minimal interface etc.)

But I wonder how many people will truly do this kind of thing. I feel like this will be done by people who previously maintained spreadsheets or copious notes for their projects, which has always been a minority.

But that is a tiny fraction of people. We can also theoretically make any dish at home from scratch (and be opinionated about ingredients), but people still go to restaurants for things they could whip up in 20 minutes.

I think the same will be true for software.

I feel like this is a device with massive productivity potential (having a ton of massive screens anywhere I want), but none of them happened.

The price tag was of course insane, but I also feel like the use cases, apps, integrations etc just didn’t materialize.

I can think of NFT infrastructure here:

Various product categories were created with market leaders that owned them.

But the NFT hype didn’t hold and we effectively realized the use cases didn’t manifest beyond ZIRP-driven speculation and a small collector-artist scene.

So that can negate the whole category or crown a different winner when a technology changes.

Imagine if we used NFTs to verify if an AI or human made a piece of media.

Suddenly “marketplace” becomes a much less interesting category than scalable, fast APIs to create NFTs

I'm wondering if AI coding companies almost NEED to be this capital heavy to pay for the massive LLM costs.

Of course you could also just spend your money wisely and not do another funding round, but then how are people supposed to know how much you are worth? And how are investors supposed to know they made a great investment?