February 2026 ⸱ AI Summary
Everyone's applied to a job and felt their resume disappear into the void. That experience isn't an accident. It's the result of decades of misaligned incentives, lazy buyers, and a market that's never had to compete on the basis of product quality. This is a breakdown of why applicant tracking systems are structurally broken, why building one is a trap most founders don't see coming, and what I learned building one anyway.
Paul Copplestone - e/postgres @ kiwicopple There is something seriously misaligned here
Database platform: $25/month
Hiring platform: $7,491 / year
What are the best ATS platforms on the market? Anything open source? 12:13 PM · Jul 30, 2024 · 113.6K Views
HR technology has always felt like a field that great designers and engineers avoided. My original thesis was simple: it has a talent problem. If fintech, which is a "boring" and regulated field, could attract exceptional builders, HR should have been able to as well. And yet there aren't many examples to point to.
Inversely, the domain experts in the field (namely HR professionals with deep knowledge of the industry) are often not technical or design-focused, even when their title is "Head of Technology." This lack of care for craft has persisted for decades, and you can feel it in every interface, every workflow, every nine-click process — nowhere more than Workday.
... continue reading