I genuinely can't tell if my time in college and my 20's (2004-2016) were genuinely that good for content or if I'm just nostalgic like Henry Hill: "It was a glorious time. And wiseguy bloggers were all over the place. It was before Fat Penguin sold Uproxx and before Cracked decided to lay off all their original writers. It was when I met the world."
It was possible to find an entire community of like-minded jerkwads (the kind of people who would enjoy a review where Vince managed to make both a crass "your mom" joke AND a reference to Flannery O'Connor). The commenters on WithSpandex are a group I STILL interact with on Discord and that vertical has been dead for almost 4 years (when you find a group of leftist irreverent PRO WRESTLING fans you hang on).
I honestly don't know how the status quo is sustainable. The same private equity new guilded age ghouls keep ruining things that people enjoyed (their ability to ruin such a diverse spectrum of things from New York and San Francisco to movies to blogs to all varieties of store is almost impressive) and those things are just fucked, their audience is unhappy, and these plutocrats move on to the next thing.
As someone who has been laid off twice due to financial crises (2008 and 2020) I would have to disagree about the rejection email vs. no communication on job applications. I'd rather know something is off the table and move on than be left in limbo.
I also wouldn't be so sure that someone actually read your resume. Maybe it's different in journalism, but these day most resumes are screened out by algorithms before they even reach a set of human eyeballs in an HR department. Apparently there are ways you need to format your resume and use the right keywords to get past these screens, but no one seems to know definitively what they are.
I've heard just copying some of the words they use in the job listings tend to help with resume filtering, but there's no way I'm rewriting my resume that many times.
"And yet with each application...I’d get a form rejection letter 48-72 hours later. These are somehow even worse than not hearing back at all..."
I just applied to grad school - great idea!! - and it was even worse after interviewing places. You mean you MET me in person and still said no?? I have such a great personality!
(I got rejected from a school w/o an interview that's more well-known as a culinary school - and there's nothing wrong with that! - and felt nothing, but somehow made it to an interview w/ a goddamn Ivy League school and the rejection after that really stung, lol.)
I genuinely can't tell if my time in college and my 20's (2004-2016) were genuinely that good for content or if I'm just nostalgic like Henry Hill: "It was a glorious time. And wiseguy bloggers were all over the place. It was before Fat Penguin sold Uproxx and before Cracked decided to lay off all their original writers. It was when I met the world."
It was possible to find an entire community of like-minded jerkwads (the kind of people who would enjoy a review where Vince managed to make both a crass "your mom" joke AND a reference to Flannery O'Connor). The commenters on WithSpandex are a group I STILL interact with on Discord and that vertical has been dead for almost 4 years (when you find a group of leftist irreverent PRO WRESTLING fans you hang on).
I honestly don't know how the status quo is sustainable. The same private equity new guilded age ghouls keep ruining things that people enjoyed (their ability to ruin such a diverse spectrum of things from New York and San Francisco to movies to blogs to all varieties of store is almost impressive) and those things are just fucked, their audience is unhappy, and these plutocrats move on to the next thing.
As someone who has been laid off twice due to financial crises (2008 and 2020) I would have to disagree about the rejection email vs. no communication on job applications. I'd rather know something is off the table and move on than be left in limbo.
I also wouldn't be so sure that someone actually read your resume. Maybe it's different in journalism, but these day most resumes are screened out by algorithms before they even reach a set of human eyeballs in an HR department. Apparently there are ways you need to format your resume and use the right keywords to get past these screens, but no one seems to know definitively what they are.
What an absolutely fucked process, cheers!
I've heard just copying some of the words they use in the job listings tend to help with resume filtering, but there's no way I'm rewriting my resume that many times.
"And yet with each application...I’d get a form rejection letter 48-72 hours later. These are somehow even worse than not hearing back at all..."
I just applied to grad school - great idea!! - and it was even worse after interviewing places. You mean you MET me in person and still said no?? I have such a great personality!
(I got rejected from a school w/o an interview that's more well-known as a culinary school - and there's nothing wrong with that! - and felt nothing, but somehow made it to an interview w/ a goddamn Ivy League school and the rejection after that really stung, lol.)
Has Vince taught you nothing about the folly of the Ivy Leagues???
If anything I avoided great calamity!
I'd never send my kid to an Ivy League school today!
I'm going to pretend that this was why I never got hired at The Messenger.