I'm starting to believe that you have to fake it till you make it in this job market

Honest people do not make it in this world anymore. I’m starting to realize in order to eat, I might have to completely fabricate and lie on my resume and portfolio about my work experience but make believable and verifiable lies such as buying domain links and setting up a website as a front to make these fake companies believable as work experience, I know people who can be references if required, because legitimate entry level jobs basically do not exist anymore and these employers want you to be Mark Zuckerberg for their company. You do not want to have too much skills or experience or too little because they will say you’re over or underqualified because they do not want to pay you more than 15 dollars an hour for your knowledge, and they don’t want you to have too much knowledge because you’ll be too confident and know what you’re doing and they don’t want that because they want to justify paying you 15 an hour, just the exact amount that the job description says so it’s one less thing they can use against you.

If it says you need experience with PowerBI and Microsoft Excel but you legitimately never used them because you have been using Tableau and Google Sheets, that will be used against you because Alyssa at HR doesn’t know they’re similar enough and will say you do not qualify for the job. So you best be having every single thing the job description has on your resume and no alternatives because these people do not know the difference. Your resume says Postgresql but the job application says MySQL? Disqualified. You gotta have exactly what the damn job description says on your resume because these dinosaurs don’t know the difference or similarities

The job application says it requires a bachelors degree? Just say yes. If you say no you’ll be auto rejected by their system so you basically self disqualified yourself. As long as you’re not applying to be a doctor or whatever. You’re applying to be a web developer, these tech jobs do not require much education, educational requirements for these tech jobs are just a gatekeeping tool. Nothing you can’t do with a 30 dollar course from Colt Steele and Web Dev Simplified. I’ve been taking this stuff seriously for the past 2 years so if interview questions come up I can answer them confidently

If it comes up in an interview just say you have a degree from Arizona State University, pretty much everyone does ASU these days online, as long as its not a company like Google that does rigorous education check. It’s just a check box on job applications. If its a local company no one has ever heard of with like less than 50 people they probably won’t do much verification so you could take your chances on that. Most local small companies will not do much education verification, there’s literally tutorials on how to make fake ASU transcripts and have the envelope sealed with the schools sticker embossed with the schools logo if these companies ask for transcripts. This happened because ASU bought a for profit degree mill called Ashford University and rebranded it to Arizona State University Global but people can’t tell the difference. I won’t tell you how to do this but there’s rogue ASU employees who will do this for you and it won’t be cheap but everything will be verifiable by educational background check, I know someone who had this done… Desperate people will do desperate things. I’ve been tempted on doing this but I’m getting my degree the legit way… I understand why people would do stuff like this, bachelors degrees became a gatekeeping tool to get jobs now. Have a bachelors degree, then they’ll say you don’t have the work experience required.

These jobs all want you to have 5 years of work experience for a 12 dollar an hour web dev CRUD job just to end up rewriting the company website’s ancient API routes to update their forum page that a monkey can do… And I didn’t go to college just to work at JCPenney and fold clothes for 5+ years with no chance of a promotion or a future at this store, JCPenney might not even exist in the next 2 years. That’s the definition of a dead end job. I’ll be back to square one if I stop actively looking and applying for jobs.

How are we supposed to get work experience if these employers are not willing to hire without it? A bachelors degree use to be the minimum qualification. Now it’s 5 years of work experience plus a masters degree. Don’t tell me it’s a wish list, these companies are treating it as if it’s mandatory because all the other job applicants have what Carrie and Alyssa at HR is looking for. Claiming it’s a wish list shows you’re not aware of what these employers is expecting us to have. Just go on Linkedin and see for yourself. “These job qualifications are just wishlists” is the new “no one wants to work anymore” for millennials and Gen Z quote, watch come back to this post in 2 years I can guarantee you this.

The pay isn’t even worth it most of the time. They want you to have mastered full stack development, cloud infrastructure like AWS S3, Google cloud oauth playground, API integration, know the ins and outs of Nextjs as if you created it, but the dude interviewing you doesn’t even know what JavaScript is when he’s recruiting for a React job , all for 12 dollars an hour in an unaffordable country. 1 dozen egg cost 5 dollars here where I live, a gallon of milk is 4, and a bag of 4 bagels is 3. That’s 1 hour of working at these stupid jobs. I do not have enough money to even buy food for the week, I have to use my parents money. You’re lucky to even get 8 hours, they’ll put you to 1 hour under full time on a shift 39 hours a week so you’ll be classed as part time so they don’t have to pay you health insurance

I’m sick of seeing job listings that make it seem like you’re applying for a doctor job when it’s just some underpaid, overworked contract maintaining their outdated ancient systems, or folding clothes at JCPenney with no advancements or promotions possible.

They’re looking for unicorns on a McDonald’s budget and it’s making me go bald. I’m starting to think the only way to even get an interview these days is to fake it till I make it, aka lying on my resume and in interviews if I happen to be lucky to even get one lie through my teeth to the interviewer because it’s what they want to hear even as I squirm through the chair because I’m uncomfortable with lying, and that shouldn’t be the reality for any of us trying to start our life. People my age are just jumping off the porch and coming into “the real world” and this is what we are introduced with.

These jobs acting like they want “innovative” and “passionate” people, but what they really want is a cog in their endless machine who’s already done the exact job before, for years, with no training required just so they can pay them a slave wage. They’re fishing for the perfect candidate while completely ignoring the reality of what’s happening out here.

And don’t get me started on these college professors I had to deal with last year talking about how these group projects are to prepare us for “the real world”, when these professors never even had a job outside of this college, their professor role was their first and only job they ever had right after they graduated college 20 years ago so you can’t possibly tell me what it’s like in the real world when they never even been in the real world in the first place. This college has been their only planet they been to.

I get these jobs need to be picky, but there’s a difference between hiring smart and being flat out delusional cheapskates. They want you to have 5+ years of experience in stuff that didn’t even exist five years ago, just to manage their janky ass database that some motherfucker hacked up a “solution” with by storing it in god damn Trello, yes I saw job posts listed Trello as a fucking database.

I’m seriously wondering if anyone’s actually getting these jobs because we heard of ghost jobs before where the jobs are being posted but has no intentions of hiring because it’s to make investors think the business is growing. How is this not straight up fraud is beyond me. Or if it’s all just some ridiculous test of patience to see how long you can jump through hoops before you give up like these jobs with 7 rounds of ridiculous interviews. We’re not applying to be doctors, we’re applying to work on stupid company websites that no one cares about and has zero sensitive information that a monkey can legit do. Meanwhile, bills are still coming, and if I see one more listing that is listed as “junior developers” but requires “senior-level” qualification requirements like a Masters degree and 10 years of experience with NextJs when it never existed 10 years ago just to get an interview, I might just lose it.

Not even Walmart or TJ Maxx and Nordstrom is hiring. You think I didn’t apply to these retail jobs? My job application at Fedex delivery has been in “under consideration” since April. I literally cannot apply to any other jobs at Fedex because that one and only job post they have in my area is indefinitely open and I don’t know who to speak to. The managers at one of these offices have no clue because they’re not the ones hiring, they’re just the manager of the store. I applied to fucking Tim Hortons near my area and got a text message from the hiring manager saying they’re not hiring in my area anymore, but there is one hiring 2 hours away, wtf is the point?? Who the fuck will drive 2 hours for a 12 dollars an hour 4 hour shift coffee shop job? I went through the Target one way video interview and still didn’t get the job, a fucking cart pusher job.

And all of these retail jobs that are legitimately hiring are only hiring managers and assistant managers but want you to have a minimum of 5 years of experience in retail management. But the only way to get these retail management interviews is to lie on your resume because these people only hire their own cliques. They’re not hiring your regular cashier or clothes rack hanger girl anymore, they have the assistant managers do that instead to cut costs so they dont have to hire anyone else. These managers are doing what 20 year olds use to do 4 years ago because Marshalls doesn’t want to hire anyone anymore. “no one wants to work” my ass, these companies doesn’t want to hire anyone period. I want to work, I’m about to lose my mind if you couldn’t tell because I can’t get a job because no one is hiring.

Don’t get me started on trades jobs. These trades jobs don’t want to hire inexperienced people. People are flooding into trades jobs like machine operating and CNC and digital printing jobs and it’s facing the same thing these tech jobs are facing now.

At this point, the job market feels more like a scam than an opportunity. It’s not about who you know or how hard you have worked anymore, it’s about playing the game, and right now the rules are stacked against anyone who is honest on their resume and interviews. You cannot be honest in interviews anymore because there are other job applicants who will lie by saying they have more experience and skills than you, and guess what they got the job because you were too honest and didn’t lie in the interview. Honest people don’t make it anymore.