I built a simple joke tool to analyze all the rejection emails (over 1600) that I got during the recent job searches and create simple bar graphs from it. Wrote a blog about it https://github.com/khante/l here https://rohankhante.substack.com/p/thank-you-for-your-applic....
PS - The results are entirely obvious.
Referrals are also getting games. If your company has a referral bonus, then I promise you pretty much every single referral you have looked at, is from a guy who DIDNT know the guy. I applied to 20 Big Tech companies last month. All from "referrals". Check out teamblind.com if you don't know (Be careful. The site is like a tech version of 4 chan. Well maybe not THAT bad.) The whole game is messed up.
SDET here. A year ago when AI came into play SDET/QA roles started disappearing. People were like oh ya anyone can write tests. Then with the recent fiascos about outages and what not, I am seeing the SDE roles are disappearing and SDET roles are going back up?! Apparently AI is good at writing applications but you still need someone to make sure it is doing the right things.