Accidental Anonymity

https://macwright.com/2026/06/24/accidental-anonymity

52 16 9 days ago

sachaa• 6 days ago

The irony is that AI makes it easier than ever to show what you can do, but people are using it to hide who they are.

pixl972• 6 days ago

Things like this are easy to say when you're the employer, you get to select whatever portion of resumes you want with impunity. As the employee that needs a job to keep on living people tend to do anything they can to get their foot in the door. Hence, this is why resume inflation/copying known good resumes was a thing long before LLMs.

Now, if you're a smaller business, you'll very likely notice these effects and the number of resumes is rather small. But in larger businesses they may get thousands, tens of thousands of resumes, and the vast majority of them are culled by automatic processes and people that have no understanding of the real requirements of these jobs and said 'generic' resume might just allow you to get past said filter better than randomly stating who you are.

rgbrgb• 6 days ago

randomly stating who you are

it's not random at all. that's literally what the resume is supposed to be and what the hiring manager wants to know! This is a real human hiring manager sharing candid feedback on his acceptance criteria. So there's at least one company where this is pretty sound advice.

your point about the dumb filters is plausible but at some point a human is going to read it and try to decide if they want to work with you. If all they have is some AI output, it's going to be an easy no.

pixl972• 6 days ago

what the hiring manager wants to know

In perfect information theory, yes. In practice we some HN article where on the fifth round some FAANG wants the applicant to juggle dry erase markers while reversing a hash algorithm while standing on their head.

Multitudes of companies use hiring agencies, and at least from what I've seen these agencies are more about numbers than quality. An AI application that overstuffs your abilities is far more likely to be observed than the resume of an earnest person.

Hell, worse than that, there seems to be a growing industry of companies that just put out job listings as a means of collecting information on people and selling it off, rather than providing any kind of job.

kqp• 6 days ago

Speculation is good for finding more questions to ask, not disregarding evidence. That LLMs harm your odds with some hiring managers is evidenced. That LLMs help get you through prior screenings at big companies is speculation. That such effect is greater and also not rendered irrelevant, for example by later review, is also speculation. Combining these three to conclude “LLMs are beneficial here” is not logical, and seems to be motivated by preexisting determination to use LLMs no matter what—the opposite of doing whatever works.

compiler-guy2• 6 days ago

"putting your art, writing, expression out to be judged by others is an act of bravery as much as talent, and a lot of people lack braver-y. Sorry to say it but if you need your work to be polished and beyond reproach, that's a determination and character problem, not a skill problem."

Or maybe you know enough people are just generally mean and jerk enough that you don't want to listen to their silly criticism and over-the-topness. And there really isn't any benefit to you for putting it out there.

malicka• 6 days ago

Or maybe you know enough people are just generally mean and jerk enough that you don't want to listen to their silly criticism and over-the-topness.

Yea, that’s lacking the bravery. Thickening your skin and sharpening your tools is 100% beneficial to you, at least for your personal development. It’s good for culture and society, too, to have more fledgling and amateur artists and creators put themselves out there.

compiler-guy2• 5 days ago

Bold of you to assume that the feedback one gets from random internet commenters helps sharpen one's tools.

One is far more likely to get useful criticism from a mentor or teacher than random internet folks. No upload required.

And there are a million ways to thicken one's skin without putting one's art on the internet for jerks to shoot at.

nicbou• 6 days ago

I don't like this. I'm here to do a job for money. This just pressures me to present myself as whimsical and interesting in an HR-friendly way. I feel for the regular dudes who feel like they have to dance for HR people who spend too much time on LinkedIn.

dixkon• 3 days ago

In one country, thanks to the public administration's ingenuity, it's already the case, literally dancing for HR... An youtuber have documented this, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YD4_Wh9GDKA video is in French but understanding French doesn't help understand what the administrative madness this video show...

CM30• 6 days ago

Perhaps if employers were better at identifying people's skills from their CVs, they wouldn't need to use AI to rewrite them. A lot of the time, it feels like if your profile doesn't match 100% of the keywords in the job description, it's just automatically denied on sight, even if you've clearly got the ability to do the job. Heck, a lot of the time these systems can't identify synonyms or recognise when a skill is blatantly obvious from the description (like knowledge of Git meaning they have knowledge of Version Control).

People are relying on these things because hiring systems are rejecting their applications otherwise.

As for the AI generated portfolios and Git repos... that's not quite the same thing, but even then it's because expectations for employees seem to have become rather ridiculous in recent years. It's apparently not enough that you've got experience working in a field, you're expected to be obsessed with it in your free time too, and document every little thing you ever worked on online for all and sundry to see.

zhainya• 6 days ago

Every one of these articles seems more pretentious than the last.

kmoser• 6 days ago

People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist.

Every day thousands of people visit museums and galleries and peruse thousands of artworks by artists they know little about (even famous artists) and form perfectly valid opinions. Sure, it may help to know about the artist to understand the artwork in greater context, but that is by no means a requirement in order to form an opinion about what you see on the surface.

It's also possible to appreciate and have opinions about ancient art, where we have no idea who the artist is.

stronglikedan• 6 days ago

The perfected, generated, prompted resume is generic and impersonal. It tells me nothing about this person, other than that they use particular tools.

Considering many companies are adding AI-proficiency to their hiring metrics, maybe these folks are onto something. It won't be long before AI is doing the resume shuffling and interviewing, so these candidates will be more an more relatable to the interviewer.

People capable of liking some paintings or prints or whatever can rarely do so without knowing something about the artist.

Rarely? Almost everyone I know that has art hanging in their homes, that they bought because the liked it, couldn't tell me thing one about the artist behind any of it.

1970-01-01• 6 days ago

It's 2026 today. Your work being all-human results in the exact same amount of job offers that the LLM gets you, just slower. It's still WHO you know that gets you work. That results in personal vouching, which results in human-human discussions. How hand-crafted your code looks is permanently not going to shortcut you into anything today.

throw101010• 6 days ago

If I publish my art, my code, my thoughts, etc. They get harvested by the same LLMs this person is complaining about... I don't really see how that's a win. And eventually this person will also be replaced by an AI that will take the decisions he is so humanly and "bravely" taking when hiring people by assessing less subjective criterias.

I keep only sending major works I've created or contributed to, to the potential employers I have carefully selected, privately, by law (in my jurisdiction) they are not allowed to publish/use it.

I still contribute to open-source but clearly these references tend to have less and less value for job hunting in my experience, unless you own a very, very popular repo.

My advice is to publish selectively and only where the expected returns beat the downsides. The data this person wants from potential hires are not included in this. I would safely avoid their company if these are the kind of fire hoops he wants me to jump through.

Accidental Anonymity

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