I'm sorry I didn't respond to your job application | XCancel

I'm sorry I didn't respond to your job application

Alexander Belanger

@abelanger5<br>13m

57

Back in January of this year, as we were expanding our team, I posted the following on Hacker News’ “Who is Hiring?” thread:

(Not going to post anything easily scrapeable, for reasons you'll soon find out.)

Whenever we’ve looked for new engineers, I always started with a comment on this thread. It usually brings in some emails from interesting and talented people.

In January, this worked really well. We got over 100 qualified applications with personalized messages from the candidates. I tried to respond to each one that wasn’t clearly AI-generated. We eventually brought on 2 of the applicants as full-time team members.

In May, I posted a similar comment. It’s hard to overstate how different these results were just four short months after my initial post.

I’m not sure if HN’s hiring posts are suddenly indexed into some AI job application tool, or if this is just the state of the world now, but in the weeks after I posted, I’d consistently get between 20-30 messages a day. Each of these messages had exactly the same structure:

Now, I’m actually not particularly annoyed about this, so please don’t take this as a rant. I empathize with job applications who are frustrated with AI being used in every step of the application process. AI interviewing, application processing, and candidate selection feels dystopian and disheartening.

Culture is an important value at Hatchet. We’re a small team and a remote company. Ensuring that there is trust across the organization is a critical part of building that culture.

We need our team members to be thoughtful and we need them to be thorough, in their work, their decision-making, and their interpersonal interactions. In the past, I’ve tried to read every candidate application to look for signals of that thoughtfulness and thoroughness. Increasingly, I can’t find those signals. I’ve always put my email address in the HN job postings, but I’m going to stop doing that now (the email spam has been incessant).

That all to say, I’m sorry I didn’t respond to your job application. If I’m being honest, I probably didn’t even look at it.

Something helpful for prospective applicants?

I want to be helpful to the many talented people looking for open roles, many of whom would no doubt excel at a small, engineer-led org like Hatchet.

So, for reference, here are the cover letters from our most recent engineers. While they vary in degrees of professionalism, they’re relevant, contextual and (at least from what I suspected at the time, and verified later) written by a human. If you’re looking for a job on a small, engineering-led team, perhaps these could be useful to you.

Engineer #1:

Hey Alexander! I'm [NAME ] - an engineer at [COMPANY ] who's spent a lot of time painstakingly debugging Celery issues, so I'm super curious about Hatchet and excited about what you all are doing! Would love to chat about me and a bit more about the role, and thanks a bunch!

Engineer #2:

I have experience working on [COMPANY’S ] Python driver, and more recent experience at [OTHER COMPANY ] working on backend services for real time streaming pipelines, a custom DSL written in Go that hooks into the aforementioned pipelines to allow customers to write their own alerting logic, as well as a variety of personal projects related to obfuscated Python code (I love writing transpilers and working with language internals). At [OTHER COMPANY ], the main languages that I have been using are Go and Python (FastAPI, Pydantic), with Postgres and Elasticsearch as the databases, but I am also proficient in Rust (recently wrote a basic vertex rendering pipeline that uses SIMD for all the matrix math). Working on developer tools, especially for such an interesting application sounds perfect for me.

Engineer #3:

I found Hatchet through your HN post and spent some time reading the blog. I particularly enjoyed the piece on durable execution and your take on Go for agents. The problems you're solving are interesting, and I like the "Postgres-native" approach.

I'm a [RELEVANT TITLE ] at [COMPANY ] and [SECONDARY, RELEVANT TITLE ]. Quick background:

[TENURE AT COMPANY ]: Joined as an early Cloud engineer (team Right now, we’re well-staffed, thankfully, but we are growing so fast that our hiring will likely ramp again in the coming months (weeks, even). In-network searches have worked well for us in the past, but I doubt that can reasonably scale. We also don’t plan to hire a talent team or outsource to a talent agency anytime soon.

That all to say, how we’ll approach hiring moving forward is an open question and one I’d be interested in hearing about from other founders. How are you handling the AI-ification of job applications?

And if you’re one of the applicants battling the bots with your own bots: godspeed.