“It is solely a game of referral: it does not matter what you apply with because other people are cheating in the application process.”
A decade of shipped work and five rejections a day. The industry spent years insisting it was a meritocracy while running hiring entirely on who knows whom, and the resume screen is now an LLM filtering for keywords another LLM wrote. Anybody without the network gets sorted out before a person reads a word. That was always the design. The market just got loose enough to stop pretending otherwise.