> Applicants don’t have to apply to Google or Facebook for jobs they’re not qualified for, and if they stopped, the mess you’re referring to would disappear.

Counter-point: employers don't have to pay garbage wages while demanding FAANG-quality candidates, thus focusing the talent pool on the few companies that do pay wages that might help candidates reach into the bottom of the Middle Class.

> It might move somewhere else simply because there are a lot of people (literally everyone) looking for jobs that pay well.

That is the (unspoken) point I've been trying to make, without being so overt about it. People need more money. Prices keep going up, productivity has skyrocketed, but wages have stubbornly refused to keep historical pace in the long view. The need for ever-growing sums of money just to survive is a key driver in the constant glut of applicants for jobs, one that is exacerbated by the staunch refusal of businesses to pay appropriate wages outside of the tech sector.

> It’s funny to tell someone on the other side of the interview table that they’re confused, when they’re giving you information that can help you.

They're really not, though. Employers whine about a lack of qualified domestic candidates as justification for outsourcing jobs or importing migrants on precarious visas, but then also refuse to engage with local Higher Education institutions to "properly train" the candidates they need or contribute to on-the-job training. As the age-old HR koan goes: The CEO asks HR, "What if we pay for job training and they leave?", while HR replies, "What if we don't pay for training and they stay?" There is no zero-sum game being played, here, and the actions of employers do not align with their verbal complaints about the state of job applications and the labor market. They're complaining the basement is flooded while leaving the firehose turned on.

> The lore about having to job-hop has always existed, it was true 30 years ago, and it’s still a story people tell today.

Yeah, nah. This is a recent trend, and a very recent narrative. In the 2000s and early 2010s, I was still being actively penalized for the appearance of job hopping, in the form of lower salaries and limited upward mobility. That really only began changing in the 2014-2016 window, when suddenly it became more acceptable as most millennials and Xers hadn't exactly had stable careers like our predecessors. In less than a decade, that shift from "job hopping=bad" to "job hopping=acceptable" accelerated to "job hopping=required if you want to survive and thrive". That attitude only came about because the cost of everything kept going up, and up, and up, while our wages and upward mobility stagnated if we stayed put. Loyalty hasn't been rewarded since the 80s, but especially in a post-2008 world, it's been a hindrance to individual success and is solely the fault of employers, not employees.

> You need more first-hand knowledge of how many people don’t have to job hop.

I have plenty of first-hand knowledge from my own career, and have second-hand knowledge from the careers of my parents' circles compared to the careers of my senior mentors (Xers), colleagues, and juniors. Add in the data curated by all the other groups trying to sell their own narrative, data gathered by governments, and just casual observations of both domestic and global employment trends, and this isn't exactly a difficult conclusion to reach by anyone reasonably well-informed and suitably objective about it.

> Instead of insisting it’s a fight and wallowing, go find the good jobs at good companies working for good managers and figure out how to stand out from the applicants who are less qualified than you.

It is a fight, though. A fight for everyone to be able to make rent, pay bills, and have a decent quality of life on a full-time job. That's the fight. Such a lifestyle has increasingly been constrained solely to those in Big Tech, especially in urban areas, and it's why there's such a fierce resistance to arbitrary RTO mandates and a willfulness to cheat on exams. Your retorts to me essentially boil down to the age-old propaganda of, "Workers should know their place and follow the rules for their own good," which only works when the rules ensure their basic needs are met. That is not the case, as can be evidenced from even a casual glance at current global events. Populism doesn't arise from peace, love, and good times for all, it arises from a broken system that doesn't satisfy the needs of the masses. That is why hiring is broken, in a nutshell.

A good leader understands the system they operate within, its flaws as well as its strengths, and what is or isn't within their ability to fix or improve upon. Individual managers and employers simply cannot fix what amounts to a broken system rooted in short-termism. Sure, working with recruiters can ease the burden, but that also comes at a substantial cost. The point is that the usual refrains in self-help books or "visionary thought leaders" don't work when the system itself is at fault, and that's very much the case here. It's not possible to eliminate cheating solely through discipline; rather, the system must be amended such that there's little to no incentive to cheat in the first place. Right now, there's every incentive to cheat the system when it could lift you out of poverty or give you a substantially improved quality of life, and that's why it's on the rise professionally today, just as it was in academia not a decade ago.

Desperation is the root cause of a multitude of negative outcomes. To reduce those outcomes, you must reduce the amount of desperation in a society.