Low-Effort Job Applicants vs. a 'Hard' Job Market
Description
A meme presented as a screenshot with white text on a black background. It contrasts two statements. The first, labeled 'job seekers:', says, 'it's so hard to get a remote job these days'. The second, labeled 'job applicants:', shows a screenshot of an email application for an 'iOS Developer at Photo AI' position found on 'Remote OK'. The body of the email is a generic template where the applicant has failed to insert their own information, leaving in placeholder text such as '[Write your previous experience here]' and '[Write why you would be great for this job]'. This meme satirizes the disconnect between the perception of a difficult job market and the actual quality of many applications submitted. It's a relatable frustration for hiring managers, recruiters, and senior engineers involved in the hiring process, who often have to filter through numerous low-effort, generic submissions to find serious candidates, especially for competitive remote positions
Comments
23Comment deleted
Some candidates treat job applications like a UDP packet: they fire it off and pray it gets there, with no confirmation or stateful content included
Saying “remote hiring is broken” while sending a cover letter that still says “[Write experience here]” is the talent-pipeline version of shipping to prod with `throw new NotImplementedException()` and blaming the load balancer for the outage
The irony of developers who can architect distributed systems with five-nines uptime but can't be bothered to replace placeholder text in their job applications - it's like deploying to production with console.log('[TODO: implement actual logic here]') still in the code
This is the software engineering equivalent of pushing to production with console.log('TODO: implement actual logic here') still in the code. Job seekers complain about ATS filters and ghosting, yet here's someone who literally shipped an application with unfilled template variables - like deploying a Docker container where the environment variables are still set to 'REPLACE_ME'. The irony is that this developer probably has strong opinions about code review standards and technical debt, but couldn't be bothered to fill in their own experience section. It's the classic case of 'works on my machine' energy applied to career advancement: the template rendered perfectly in their draft folder, so they assumed it was production-ready
Leaving "[Write your previous experience here]" in a job email is the hiring equivalent of pushing TODOs to main and asking for prod access - great for load testing the recruiter’s spam filter
Remote hiring feels brutal when your cover letter ships to prod with TODOs - ATS parses “[write your previous experience here]” as null and returns 204 No Content
This app's as uninitialized as a Swift optional: nil experience, guaranteed crash on review
Checks out Comment deleted
🤡 Comment deleted
The exact 07:00 timestamp too.. At least we know the script they put in cron is performant Comment deleted
After 500 applications and 30 rejections upon interviews, you don't really give a shit, maybe that's even mine Comment deleted
I can remember one special application, I spent half of the day to answer all questions and fill all fields and after all I got rejected by template answer. Comment deleted
I once applied to Dolby as a trainee even though I had 3 years of professional experience and they actually had an interview with me, where they said I'm a very strong candidate and they do like my profile, after 2 weeks I got a template rejection and same happened in Ericsson when I applied for middle, since then I wonder what's wrong with this world Comment deleted
That’s just 2 attempts which makes the situation statically not important just due to amount of options what might have happened and why such kind of decision has been made against your profile Sadly the only options here is to keep up what you’re doing, stay motivated and apply for other positions which are looking good for you Comment deleted
I mean eventually I did find a job after 3 months and around 300 rejections and 10 interviews but I'm not the only one struggling, maybe that's only happening in Poland but all my friends and colleagues from university either had to look for 3 months too or are still looking for over half a year Comment deleted
Need more points in "luck") Comment deleted
So yeah, dear HR managers. You got my CV, why the hell do I have to write all the shit twice? Ask me anything you want to know on short call, not via text pls. Comment deleted
Also there is a story about some dev girl, who fucked up whole HR industry with fake CV (google “Mia khalifa programming language”, “Voldemort DB” if you don’t know the story, it’s really funny) And it shows us that good CV and even cover letter doesn’t guarantee that you’re hiring cool specialist. Comment deleted
And it shows us that good CV and even cover letter doesn’t guarantee that you’re hiring cool specialist. Of course yes! And 2 hours interviews doesn’t guarantee it. And 2-3-4 rounds of interview 1.5h each doesn’t And a month of work doesn’t guarantee it And at any moment any of us can get mad l/crazy/etc and will become fireable There’s no final truth in our life but that’s fine for business to work towards risk reduction 🤷♂️ Comment deleted
This shit is just soo much true Everyone should make it mandatory to have a call with video on when hiring any kind of freelancer on upwork or whatever Comment deleted
We had a bunch of similar stories with guys claiming to be from Scandinavian countries for some reason No idea what’s the point for them to do so Comment deleted
Remote OK Comment deleted
Plot twist. It is a multiple personality disorder. 5 personalities in a single body. Comment deleted