It’s been a mess for awhile due to economies of scale benefiting the hiring side to manipulate and abuse the market. The fact it’s become more affordable for job seekers to do a bit of the same is just ironic.
Bonus: jobs would have to be classified according to a single government standard, so it should be possible to search for a good job match by at least limiting the field and (allowed) location(s).
You as a hiring company can pay to have a 2nd website, but posting it to the gov't portal is a requirement. The information, such as conditions, salary (range), experience, location etc, are all in standardized format. If you're found to be lying, it's a federal crime (because of fraud and interstate commerce for example).
Applicants also must have gov't issued ID (such as social security), so you cannot be fake.
With LLMs, this same exact scenario is playing out in other realms. Look at writing and publishing. Sure you’re on top of the world before everyone else catches up, but when they do, there’s now just a boilerplate of exponentially expanding bullshit and counter-bullshit that everyone has to circumvent to do anything.
The second tier of search results tends to be dominated by imitators that don't really add anything of value (SEO spam, blog posts that tell you how to write a for loop in Ruby despite knowing full well that the reader already had no problem finding that information, etc.)
Then finally at the bottom are the little guys who try their best, but haven't learned yet that it's a waste of time to try to self-publish any content because there's too much actual spam masquerading as content, and Google can't tell the difference.
The search results effectively became a list of content approved by a single publisher (even if automated) rather than a melting pot of freely-expressed ideas.
I sincerely hope that we can prevent the similar nullification of the software developer's career accomplishments as carrying any weight, but I am starting to have doubts. If it even goes as far as the erosion of incentives to accomplish things, then we may actually end up needing that AI to do the work for us, as there will be few people left who give a shit.
As an aside, I shudder thinking about what a heavily ‘SEO’d’ LLM experience would be like.
They seem much better at producing bullshit that’s difficult to filter through, than performing actually useful work.
Coca-Cola and Toys R Us have found them useful for making terrible commercials cheaper than making terrible commercials by hand and way cheaper than making good commercials that actually improve their brand image. Seems weird they’d do that for immensely expensive holiday television spots rather than throwaway 5 second YouTube spots or something but hey — I’m clearly not a corporate genius.
