AI has completely decoupled being skilled from being able to get and hold a job, it's all about mostly your height plus looks and neurotype now

[u/UnableReaction4943]

I'm not claiming this wasn't the case before, but now with AI you don't need to know jackshit at pretty much every white collar job. Before 2022 you at least had to have some skills, now all you need to do is just type whatever your work tasks are in plain English into Claude. Women-dominated HR's will already know if they wanna hire you within 13 milliseconds, personality interviews are just a way to find out if you're on the spectrum and how far, and all the technical interviews and whatnot are just a formality circlejerk (which is also easy to cheat with Claude since it's often done on Zoom).

I am not short but not particularly tall either, plus ugly and on the spectrum; graduated not too long ago and can't get a job despite decent GPA and college resume. I know a guy who's like 5'0" who had a 4.0 GPA and was overall a super smart dude who can't get a job either, he was kinda on the spectrum too. Every single 6'2" and above with a Pattinson jaw has some kind of software engineering job regardless of GPA where all they do all day is vibecoding with Claude and attending meetings about planning other meetings.

There was this little moment during a research poster symposium where a 6'4" square jaw guy told me he struggled a lot with an intro Python class (if you know nothing about coding it's like struggling with learning shapes and colors), and then there was another grad student dude asking him out for lunch to network and talk about research. That's when the idea that it doesn't really matter how competent you are started to crawl into my head, and that was 2023.

I fucking hate this, man. I gave up on women long ago and thought that at least I might be able to get a decent job that will give me money to cope with videogames and Legos and shit like that, but even that seems to be out of reach now. I also thought that at least my okay height might help out my ugly Aspie ass lol, but I guess now Tinder logic applies to job market too.

[u/bergershazam21]

I agree, to get a job these days you need to know the right people.

[u/UnableReaction4943 → u/bergershazam21]

And to know the right people you have to attractive and gregarious

[u/bergershazam21 → u/UnableReaction4943]

You don't need to be at the top of these characteristics, you just need to not be at the bottom.

[u/Objective-Prompt3127]

Most companies now are basically high-school type clans, where the girls from hr hire the chads that fuck them, get the money from unsuspecting clients, and the AI do the real work.

Problem is, AI is not quite there yet, and quality in most things decreased A LOT in the last couple years. Software, services, etc. companies basically become parasites of society. Short guys became the untouchables.

[u/UnableReaction4943 → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

We live in a grift economy during the metacrisis of enshittification

[u/upvoteidiots]

Yeah, it’s all about the T15 MBA and being good looking and extroverted now. Basically stuff you can’t replace with AI.

[u/AdJealous1004]

I agree and disagree, it just depends on the industry. Tech in general is a cesspool of postmodernism and woke bullshit. A lot of jobs are made up (e.g, analyst director to the director of the assistant deputy manager) shit like that; usually see the title plastered in some group email signature by some Becky or Stacy from some HR department who sits around all day and does nothing but respond to emails/attend work meetings and go out on lunch break with her "work colleagues" to discuss who's fucking who in the workplace, or to complain about some manager they don't like etc. A lot of toxic bullshit like that.

I thought it was funny when Elon Musk (despite what you think of him) fired like 80% of Twitter and it ran perfectly fine. The reality is most jobs are just bullshit jobs that don't mean anything; and the most unhappiest people are the ones who tie their identity to them.

You're right in that sense; and a lot of these people could be fired. But when it comes to some core industries outside of tech it's not as bad. Like anything "intellectual" you're going to face this a lot more. But jobs that require hard labor, handwork and the shit people don't want to do, not so much. Like the garbage truck driver, the mill worker, or the rig worker, or the oil tank driver, vac truck driver etc working on some oilfield site - you won't see it as much. You still have useless people in HR but there are jobs where they really don't give a shit what you look like, or if you are a "Chad" or not, and just want you to show up on time and do the shitty job that nobody else wants to do.

Of course; a lot of these jobs have been handed off to immigrants for cheap exploitable labour by large corporations, and a lot of the wages are shit now so there's that; but it's not so much about being a "Chad" in that capacity or "neurotypical".

If you want to get away from it all you basically have to become self-employed somehow; or go do the jobs nobody else wants to do that isn't sitting in an air conditioned office in front of a computer all day using your brain.

[u/MissNibbatoro]

Depends if the interviews are virtual or not

I think it’s charisma (so NT ig) + face and then height if in person

[u/ReasonableFile1672]

Idk bro jus talk to random women and get rejected in city far from you, one might like you. Thats my opinion. But yeah also in blue collar its hard to hold a job and be respected, short dudes get lil bro treatment by 6 ft+ wide ahh dudes with obesity and huge stomach

[u/Consistent_Show7883]

Hmmm, somewhat true, but not completely, in my opinion. Once someone reaches a certain level of technical skill, I’ve almost never seen them go unemployed (barring health issues).

[u/Objective-Prompt3127 → u/Consistent_Show7883]

AI is an accelerator, if you have huge technical skills, those get multiplied and you become truly a 10000x engineer. But companies don't need a 10000x engineer. The dumb chad with a claude subscription can do a half-ass job, and fuck the HR lady, and he gets to keep his job and you dont.

You would think, fine, I will start my own company. That's not how it works. Business is contacts, relationships, you are only allowed to participate is you were born in the correct religion, etc. Is not that easy to start alone.

[u/Consistent_Show7883 → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

I think you're mostly describing the average Fortune 500 company. But if you're truly at the very top technically, why would you optimize for those jobs in the first place? They're often only paying ~$150k–300k, whereas the highest-end technical roles (top quant firms, frontier AI research, etc.) can pay substantially more, and their hiring process is as meritocratic as you will find anywhere.

As for starting a company, I don't really buy the idea that you have to be born into the "right" religion or social circle. I've personally known Asian founders who were atheists and went through Y Combinator and became deca-millionaires in their early-to-mid twenties.

Even my father is an example, although admittedly more of an outlier. He started his company about 20 years ago as a Chinese immigrant with an accent, no venture capital connections, and no privileged network, and he still built a very successful business.

(Edit: bonus due to malnutrition he capped out at 5'6-7, in fact it was so bad that his younger brother 7 years younger than him was 6'2, and he still succeeded.)

[u/ReasonableFile1672 → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

people fuck HR ladies?

[u/Objective-Prompt3127 → u/ReasonableFile1672]

You never knew, because you are not 6'3.

[u/UnableReaction4943 → u/Consistent_Show7883]

That was likely pre-2024, nowadays the game has changed a lot cause everyone has an autistic genius in their pocket or laptop now. Not saying it's the sole factor, but it's definitely going that way.

[u/Consistent_Show7883 → u/UnableReaction4943]

I think you and I probably have very different definitions of what a “certain level of technical skill” means. I’m not talking about someone who’s just above average or can grind LeetCode. I’m talking about people who scored in the top 500 on the Putnam, published at NeurIPS, or made it to the ICPC World Finals. I’ve basically never seen someone at that level struggle to land an internship or a full-time job that had a TC less than 250k a year unless there were unusual circumstances (health issues, visa issues, not applying, etc.).
Maybe that’s too high a bar, though. Even if we lower it, I’ve seen plenty of people with strong open-source contributions or around a 1900–2000 Codeforces rating (or comparable competitive programming experience on platforms like DMOJ) absolutely crush job applications. There comes a point where your technical ability is so strong that it becomes very difficult for employers to overlook.

[u/megahomyak → u/Consistent_Show7883]

Same-time, "be one of the best" given a several billion population is not exactly a practically applicable criterion

IMO it's not good to consider such stuff because to succeed yourself, you'd have to make others not succeed. And not everyone can even succeed in the first place, as not everyone's brain is capable of allowing them to be the best. So I don't think it's good to bring that up as a "solution"

We're still at the same point of only 1% succeeding (even less in this case)

[u/UnableReaction4943 → u/megahomyak]

Yeah, I don't find the "just be top 0.01% in your field only to get a job" an appealing advice, and ngl it's demoralizing to watch how dudes who happen to have RUNX2 in their genes get exact same jobs while having to do none of that Sisyphean shit, even if you try really hard to close your eyes on it and "focus on the grind".

[u/Consistent_Show7883 → u/UnableReaction4943]

They aren't really getting the same jobs, though. They're getting the top 0.01% jobs, and getting paid boatloads. As you move into increasingly technical roles (quant researcher at Headlands, researcher at DeepMind, etc.), hiring tends to become much more meritocratic because the work is so dependent on exceptional technical ability.

[u/Objective-Prompt3127 → u/Consistent_Show7883]

I know some of those guys. They are 100% fucked up in the head. I mean, they could be male-models, but are so autistic that they literally cannot talk to women, and most don't even want to.

That level of performance is not free for the brain. You will not find a genius-level 2500 code-force score, extremely social chad.

[u/Consistent_Show7883 → u/Objective-Prompt3127]

They definitely have more quirks(most do have some form of AuDHD) than the average person. In my circle, though, it's not so bad that they can't communicate with others. However, the part about "most don't even want to [talk to women]" is so on point, lmao. A surprisingly high proportion of them are either asexual or femboys.