"I'm saying it would be trivial to do so, and the economic incentives align perfectly. Create synthetic candidates with plausible resumes, have them apply to thousands of jobs, employers see inflated numbers and think the platform is working. They renew their subscriptions."
"That's dark."
"That's business," Jian says. "The real question is why anyone still uses them."
"Because where else do you go?" Alex stretches, feeling the accumulated tension of three months of non-stop recruiting in his shoulders. "We got lucky. The PhD pipeline saved us."
"Berkeley and Stanford graduates," Jian nods. "Fresh out of their programs, no industry experience, but they actually understand transformers and attention mechanisms. They want to work on real problems, not just publish papers."
"And the sysadmins," Alex adds. "The guys from those B-tier companies in Fremont and San Jose. Their leadership missed the AI boat completely, and now they're watching their companies bleed talent while they try to figure out what a 'large language model' is."
"Desperate times make for good hiring," Jian observes. "Those engineers have ten years of infrastructure experience and nowhere to apply it. Their companies are still arguing about whether to 'do AI' while we're actually building systems."
"We got lucky," Alex repeats, because it bears repeating. "Three months of hell, but we got the team."
Jian's laptop chimes. He glances at the screen, then his expression shifts. "Email from Maddy."
Alex leans forward. "What's the damage?"
Jian reads aloud: