My job search has made me angry and frustrated at the sheer bald-faced lack of respect that corpos have for candidates as people. They don’t respect our time, they don’t respect our experience, and they can’t even be honest with us and treat us as adults during the interview process. We are given no indication as to why we were rejected, nor a chance to offer any rebuttal or clear up any misunderstandings that led to that rejection. We are merely discarded after wasting our time and pretending to give us hope.
They subject us to weeks-long interview processes that are outdated and draconian and ask all the wrong questions. Those processes may have been worthwhile 20 years ago for some companies when there were still fewer candidates than there were positions to be filled, but that is no longer true and hasn’t been for quite some time. The corpos have laid off so many good, experienced people that there’s a wealth of talented individuals out there and yet these arrogant assholes have the audacity to claim that “we just can’t find the right people!”
Their job descriptions are written in such a way that they are essentially looking either for a person that doesn’t exist, or the one single person in the world that does, and denying all other candidates that don’t meet their ridiculous criteria for capricious and unaccountable reasons while having the gall and audacity to couch their rejections with inane statements like “we sincerely thank you for taking the time to talk with us! Good luck in your job search!”, as if we can’t see through to the hidden subtext underneath. All they want is to be able to hyper-selectively pick and choose and not feel bad about treating human beings like interchangeable parts.
They don’t bother to train the technical people doing human, face-to-face interviews on what really makes a good employee that can do the job, so those interviewers just interview for people who are either robots or just like themselves, assuming they’re even really paying attention to the candidate at all because they’ve got their own work to do and this pesky candidate has just forced them to context-switch away from it. And there’s no indication of success criteria for one of those nebulous “we just want to see how you think” situations because that would be considered “insider information” and we certainly can’t have candidates that aren’t perfect or “culture fit” gaming the system, now can we?
The fact that every interview question is a surprise, giving the candidate no chance to think about their answers ahead of time or even begin to think through how to solve a problem just so the company (or rather, the 2 or 3 individuals on behalf of the entire company) can assess how the candidate can “think fast” or “think on their feet” belies their contempt for candidates who are not yet employees. This same follows for never telling a candidate how many people they’re actually competing against for the position, because while they will never call it a competition, we all know that it 100% is a competition. The interview is harder than the actual job itself because the actual job is nothing like the contrived situations that these corpos manufacture for their interviews.
The problem is not me. I’ve got nearly 30 years in the tech industry. I’ve worked my way up the positional ladder from Level 3 Support Engineer all the way to Principal Software Engineer. I’ve never been fired from any company for which I have worked, and I have worked at most companies for a minimum of 3 years (not counting a startup or two that crashed and burned in glorious fashion). I’ve done pretty much All The Jobs(TM). I know I’m not a “code ninja” or a “rockstar” nor God’s gift to coding by any means, but I know how to do the job, I can do it well, and I Get Shit Done for my company as long as it’s ethical and I believe in what I’m doing. I can and will learn whatever is necessary to do my job. I’m also good at communication, teamwork, and interacting with other humans, which a surprising number of tech workers are not good at. In short, I am a catch and you should want me (and people like me) working for your company.
The problem is not you either, fellow candidate. You’re just as good as 90% of the people already there. But they want someone that is better than anyone they’ve seen thus far, and that’s an impossible set of shoes to fill for the vast majority of us.
No, the problem is them and their elitist, arrogant, and self-serving system(s). We all know that their system is broken; they seem to be the only ones that don’t. We don’t want to participate by their rules, but we have to because we need money in order to live thanks to our glorious economic system. They make us compete for jobs that are pretty much exactly the same at every company, because they know that we have to. To them, we’re just randos in the teeming, unwashed masses and the cold, hard truth is that they really don’t want 99% of us to actually work there. They do these interviews on the off-chance that they’ll get lucky and find that mythical person that they’re looking for, and the rest of us can really just sod off.
Case in point: “Why should we hire you?”
“Because I’ve done this exact same job at 10 other companies, because my resume alone shows that I can, but mainly because I invested the time and preparation to participate in your broken, self-aggrandizing, hunger games interview process, you absolute tit!”
Fuck them.
