Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article)
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@PleegWat said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
I've got directory trees in a couple of locations
It's pretty rare that you deal with everything in a directory tree the same; most of the time, there are special locations within it. It's rarer that you need to do a complex tree traverse with them, and visited-location tracking within is hardly ever done precisely because the amount of times that a directory “tree” is actually a DAG is minimal. (Unless you follow symlinks…) The order of processing across such trees tends to be of low concern (or of such great concern that it means using a different algorithm altogether).
The dependency graph sorting is a real use case.
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@Arantor Not all programming is the same. If you're building front-end stuff you will probably never need it, but if you're doing simulations, optimizations, machine learning, database engines, etc. you'll probably be shitting out custom search algorithms every other day.
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@anonymous234 said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
simulations
Depends on the simulation. Those that use complex data structures are mostly driven by a system that sorts events by time, so a variation on a time-ordered heap. But most simulations seem to be lock-step affairs involving having everything laid out on a grid and moving time in lock step; their clever algorithms tend to be elsewhere (e.g., in efficient matrix handling).
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@dkf Yeah, directory tree is mostly scanning. We've got a some generic directory transformation stuff and a directory tree containing input files that get scanned, but indeed most of that is rather trivial and doesn't require visit tracking.
The dependency graph sorting does require visit tracking, especially as I also need to verify the graph is acyclic in the same step. It's not really complicated though.
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@PleegWat said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
The dependency graph sorting does require visit tracking, especially as I also need to verify the graph is acyclic in the same step. It's not really complicated though.
Most of the graphs we work with have many different types of arcs so the whole “traverse the whole graph” doesn't make much sense in the first place.
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@anonymous234 that's kind of my point.
Interviewing me, for example (or the guy who wrote the original article) is not so likely to be useful if you're throwing BFS questions at me. Sure I can do them but the odds of me doing them in the role are minimal, making it a questionable interview practice.
If the role includes such CS, sure put it in the interview. If not... yes there is the argument of "how do you solve it, watch me figure it out" but my experience comes back to not needing even that. Most front end devs don't seem to ever do anything technically complex and if you already have the skills for front end dev, that's probably all you need to do that role.
Me, I'm more of a full stack kinda guy and even then the vast bulk of what I've done for the last decade is variations on CRUD that don't do anything particularly clever.
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@dkf said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
How often do you use a tree or graph datastructure?
Ooh! I actually saw a trie the other day https://github.com/browscap/browscap/issues/566. I was so excited to see a legitimate use for that kind of CS201 stuff I started rewriting it myself, for a side project.
It's a map (well not technically a Map, in the sense that it breaks the contract of that interface, but it quacks like a map) where the keys are globs, so
map["a*f"]=x=>map["asdf"]==x. I'd like to add the ability to use regexes as keys, but im not sure how far id be able to get with that. How complex are java regexes when you get right into it? Worse than perl?
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@Buddy Ah, the wonderful world of string match engines. Isn't a trie just for prefix searches though? Even just for generic glob-based matching you'll need something more powerful. If you're heading for regex, I'd recommend an NFA.
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@anonymous234 said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Arantor Not all programming is the same. If you're building front-end stuff you will probably never need it, but if you're doing simulations, optimizations, machine learning, database engines, etc. you'll probably be shitting out custom search algorithms every other day.
Hence why there is a Computer Science degree, and people seem to have forgotten the various purposes for each Programming degree type.
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@Buddy said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
How complex are java regexes when you get right into it? Worse than perl?
They're basically a port of PCRE, with all that that implies (good and bad).
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@PleegWat well, the problem with having mappings on them, compared to regular pattern matching, is that a string could match multiple patterns in the map. So backtracking is your only option, because even after you match "a*f", you need to go back and see if "a??f" points to a different value. So each node has, in addition the set of regular child nodes that you'd expect in a trie, a set of wildcard nodes, each of which must be checked to see if its result can be added to the result set.
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@dkf I like how the very first thing they get into on the manpage is a major wtf: multi-line mode and single line mode aren't inverses of each other, in fact, they can be used together.
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@Buddy which is where matching multiple patterns in parallel and defining priority orders comes in. You don't want to have to find the 'best' match first; you just need to know it's the best match.
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@Buddy Without looking, I believe what you call 'single line mode' is usually called 'whole line mode', and means the pattern matches the entire input. Still a misnomer in multiline mode, of course.
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@Arantor said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Most front end devs don't seem to ever do anything technically complex
So how would you test that the guy's got a brain and not just a SO account and copy-paste skills?
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@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Arantor said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Most front end devs don't seem to ever do anything technically complex
So how would you test that the guy's got a brain and not just a SO account and copy-paste skills?
Using an icepick usually works.
... unless you wanted a non-destructive test?
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@cartman82 I think he's explaining badly that the recruiting process overtly treats people as things. Tangential: His Google example presumably works for Google because they need people who understand abstract algorithms.
Generally his examples don't reveal the sector, which usually have common technical test problems for their company. If BigCorp A was a gaming company, maze-solving seems like a reasonable test.
If I was confronted by one of these unusual algorithms, I would get my phone out and google for help. If they objected I would ask "what? your employees don't get to use google?". I'd work how I normally work.
It's possible that these articles fascinate you because you are reading the rantings of a person who knows there's a problem, but doesn't understand what the problem is, so they just list every single part which put stress on them.
As such I'm interested to see how fascinated you are by my own ranting:
My recent jobsearch was unusually difficult. Triggered by my currency-trading employer deciding they wanted to outsource all development to Poland (I live in UK and no I wasn't going to suddenly dump everything and move) because the other UK developer handed in his notice days after I joined at the beginning of November. I found out about this in the middle of December.
Trivia: apparently they were upset that the other developer had left without negotiating. If you're the kind of person who is upset because your employee left without negotiating, you are the reason they're leaving, you psychopathic child.
Massive tangents aside, here are a list of bad recruitment practises and why they're bad:
- Sending me the technical test, and halfway through I find out the position has been filled. Timewasters. Fuck you.
- Online personality testing is an example of how there are no bad ideas, but there are poor applications of ideas. Have you ever tried answering 90 questions in 15 minutes without your mind wondering? It might seem simple at first: 90 two-option multiple choice questions is one every 10 seconds. The problem is that putting a mind into this state for 15 minutes like a robot is impractical unless you're hiring a mentat. They could have asked me outright whether I was either a robot or mentat and I would have said 'no' before they had given me the technical test which I had to spend time on. Naturally when they said "why did the 15 minute test take you 31 minutes?" the answer was "because it took 31 minutes for me to complete the test. Why was only 15 minutes allowed? Is this still part of the personality test?". The point is that it makes me livid that because someone has written a test, you're automatically wrong if you can't pass it, rather than the test being wrong. I guess I'm mostly annoyed because I'd clearly failed this, having passed the technical test, and missed out on another hugely fun opportunity because I'd agreed to do it on a Sunday. I partly brought it on myself by agreeing to time constraints which were stupid, but they chose to administer a test which would have resulted in my working alongside people who chose 90 random answers which represented their personality not-at-all, making my technical test time wasted. Man, that was a textwall. Donald Trump could probably keep Mexicans out with that.
- This next example covers a mistake by HR, which at least wasn't a timewaste, but resulted in a brief flurry of angry messaging. I'd had the interview and they had said my knowledge of Angularjs wasn't sufficient. This was bullshit, because a) I had answered their questions correctly, and b) out of everything on my skillset, Angularjs is not the weak point. I knew they'd made a mistake, so I decided to email them explaining why I knew it was a mistake. This turned out to sound a lot angrier than I'd meant it to, in the way it does when you're basically paraphrasing "if you had wanted to test me further on this skill, you should have done so rather than blaming me when you hadn't gotten your results together properly". I already didn't want to work for them, but I wanted the recruiter to understand the company he was representing had fucked up, not me. Predictably, he got back to me saying they had rejected me for lacking in other skills (probably TDD, Agile, etc, which I've never seen done well anywhere I've ever worked, so naturally I don't know how to do them properly either).
Success occurred when I interviewed with a technical guy who wanted Angularjs (my leading skill) but javascript in general as well (by extension, better than my other skills... yes I know it's a terrible syntax). I got on with the senior management who were interested in my extra-curricular skills (part of the Turing Test) and HR who, when I mentioned my friends wanted me to go to Barcelona with them (yes, Spain again. I'm interesting) said "oh yeah, you've got to go on holiday with your friends". I realised this was working throughout the entire interview, and I start on Tuesday.
I actually learned a lot in the last couple of months about managing my time when people kept demanding it. I've been keeping a calendar for a long time anyway because I do a lot of stuff, but also giving myself a couple of days for a technical test (they say two hours, but it's a lie). I should probably write a blog since I feel like I got down a process that worked, having not been this challenged at finding work for many years.
Anyway, that's my massive rant. I want to come back and check for responses, but if I don't, it's because I don't know how to use this forum software.
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@Yamikuronue good question. I'd still be asking questions that are at least in the right ball park, though, that bear some resemblance to real world matters.
cartman's CSV handling or blakeyrat's multiply challenges seem better suited to me than hardcore algorithmic stuff, you hit the same "problem solving" challenges, without the CS barrier.
Though for some aspects, someone who can follow instructions and not be creative about it can be useful too.
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Sending me the technical test, and halfway through I find out the position has been filled. Timewasters. Fuck you.
They probably told you as soon as they'd filled the position. Or should they put the whole recruiting process on hold every time they schedule a second interview?
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
I knew they'd made a mistake, so I decided to email them explaining why I knew it was a mistake. This turned out to sound a lot angrier than I'd meant it to
You sent them an angry rant and expected, what, exactly?
I feel like the number one thing missing from these candidate rants is understanding that employment isn't all about "I'm awesome, hire me". The company has shit going on and their own needs as well!
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@Arantor said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
you hit the same "problem solving" challenges
Cue angry rant about "We never process CSV files in the frontend, how can I be expected to know this stuff!!!!!"
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@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Sending me the technical test, and halfway through I find out the position has been filled. Timewasters. Fuck you.
They probably told you as soon as they'd filled the position. Or should they put the whole recruiting process on hold every time they schedule a second interview?
So it's ok for them to waste my time but not for me to waste theirs. Employers market. Is that good? I assert that it's not.
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
I knew they'd made a mistake, so I decided to email them explaining why I knew it was a mistake. This turned out to sound a lot angrier than I'd meant it to
You sent them an angry rant and expected, what, exactly?
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
I wanted the recruiter to understand the company he was representing had fucked up, not me.
I feel like the number one thing missing from these candidate rants is understanding that employment isn't all about "I'm awesome, hire me". The company has shit going on and their own needs as well!
That's great. It really is. I feel like the number one thing missing from the recruitment process is understanding that employment isn't all about "We're awesome, do as we tell you". The person has shit going on and their own needs as well.
Mean as that reversal might seem, my point is that the entire statement applies to the the employee as well. We have a paradigm where we have to import food and export time to survive. 40 hour weeks are considered the bare minimum when people used to plough their fields in 20. We've become immune to most diseases. We don't die much any more except at the hands of each other, and we're told there aren't enough jobs while people are being overworked.
The dodgy recruitment process is a symptom of a oppressive system run by psychopaths, so yes I have a problem with it.
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
So it's ok for them to waste my time
Lolwat? They thought you'd be a contender, so they gave you a test. Later, they found someone who was perfect, extended them an offer, and told you, don't bother. And you're mad that they "wasted your time"?
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
a oppressive system run by psychopaths
Lol ok. Whatever.
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@Yamikuronue by explaining that sometimes you get things outside the direct area of expertise but don't need to have the CS backing to solve it. I doubt that maze solving, if you've never done it before, is something most peop,e could reason out inside an hour.
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
The dodgy recruitment process is a symptom of a oppressive system run by psychopaths, so yes I have a problem with it.
It is funny, it is broken because of stupid recruiters and people in charge of hiring. Companies do not benefit from losing good candidates too.
In my current job (that I recently quit) there is a huge demand to hire developers. My boss (as he says with pride) looks for keywords in their resume and the universities they attended! Somehow all the candidates we got were total waste of time: One of them did not expect to get hired (he outright told me so) and just wanted to see what courses he has to get in the university (
my boss wasted my time interviewing him), another one supposed to be firmware engineer was not familiar with char *, the good one assumed all variables are bitfields to get bit number 4 . I think here they do not want to get top talent they want to hold a front and have contractors do everything, even then they cannot even hire mediocre developers! Considering that the plan is to sell the unicorn instead of making it a viable business, it is a good strategy to get lemons and sell them as Avocados. They are not dumb, and it is aligned with their business strategy I guess.
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
So it's ok for them to waste my time but not for me to waste theirs.
The equivalent on your part would be applying for another job you'd like better while you're under consideration. I don't think anyone is suggesting that's unreasonable.
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@PleegWat said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Without looking, I believe what you call 'single line mode' is usually called 'whole line mode', and means the pattern matches the entire input. Still a misnomer in multiline mode, of course.
There's several different things. In particular, these two are independent though frequently conflated:
- Do
^and$match at the start and end of a line? - Does
.(and a few other related things) match a newline?
- Do
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@Yamikuronue @Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
We never process CSV files in the frontend,
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@CarrieVS said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
So it's ok for them to waste my time but not for me to waste theirs.
The equivalent on your part would be applying for another job you'd like better while you're under consideration. I don't think anyone is suggesting that's unreasonable.
Indeed. When I applied for a position as a teacher, I did so in several states at once at the same time.The state I actually wanted to go gave me a job one week after another state also offered me a position.
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@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
So it's ok for them to waste my time
Lolwat? They thought you'd be a contender, so they gave you a test. Later, they found someone who was perfect, extended them an offer, and told you, don't bother. And you're mad that they "wasted your time"?
How do they know the other contender is 'perfect'? What is 'perfect'? What you mean to say is, they got in 'first' (or perhaps 'frist' is more appropriate to this forum).
@CarrieVS said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
So it's ok for them to waste my time but not for me to waste theirs.
The equivalent on your part would be applying for another job you'd like better while you're under consideration. I don't think anyone is suggesting that's unreasonable.
It's a poor system. Somebody gets their time wasted, but it's usually the person who has less power to exert otherwise. On the other side, sometimes they invite me in for a technical test, maybe some paired programming. It saves time because they know what kind of person they're getting behind the technical skills and I'm getting constant feedback from facial cues, etc. Also I get to see what they're like while doing the equivalent of my job. Otherwise, they've got my github account to look at.
@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
a oppressive system run by psychopaths
Lol ok. Whatever.
You try and tell me this is not the case. Do you live in America? If so, one of your presidential candidates is talking about making the Mexicans build a wall to keep themselves out. I wrote this post about a manager who sent a sarcastic, unprofessional blame-gaming email. What about the recruiter featured in another one of my long rants?
Do these look like rational people to you? These are a tiny sample of individuals I've had to deal with who are out entirely for themselves and not giving a shit about other people or who they tread on to get what they want. That is called a psychopath. They are running the system at varying levels. These are not people I read about (other than Trump) so I'm brought to conclude that other people have their own personal stash of histories with dodgy individuals who I've never heard of, which must mean there's a lot of them involved with this at every level.
Which psychopath do you want to vote for in the next election? Is it going to be Psychopath A, Psychopath B, Psychopath C or Bernie Sanders (I could be wrong about my US politics, but most of the candidates do excellent impressions of psychopaths)?
So yeah. Very whatever indeed.
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@Rhywden said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@CarrieVS said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
So it's ok for them to waste my time but not for me to waste theirs.
The equivalent on your part would be applying for another job you'd like better while you're under consideration. I don't think anyone is suggesting that's unreasonable.
Indeed. When I applied for a position as a teacher, I did so in several states at once at the same time.The state I actually wanted to go gave me a job one week after another state also offered me a position.
This is the problem with having a decentralised system where every component is out for itself.
I think there's a rabbit hole of problems here. I suspect capitalism comes into it somewhere.
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Your bad recruitment practices:
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Sent you a technical test, then called to let you know they filled the position
Meh. What would you rather happen: they tell you not to bother right away, or wait until you wasted bunch of time, and then pretend they decided to go with a different candidate?
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Online personality test with a too short time limit
I can't say I ever took a personality test as part of a job interview, but did it occur to you that time limit might be an integral part of the test? Force you to answer instinctively instead of think about the answer? See how you act under pressure?
I guess you failed that one either way.
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I don't understand this one. You think you should have scored higher on the angular test, you wrote an angry rant in an email, and they gave you the "let's just get this guy off our backs" pat response.
It could be they made a mistake, it could be you made a mistake in the test and didn't realize it. Either way, there were probably more diplomatic ways to handle the dispute.
Or just walk away. Not every interview will work out. Sometimes it's just not meant to be.
None of these sound too bad, to be frank. Things just didn't work out a few times, and then they did. You focused mostly on the personal inconveniences, rather than pointing out some systemic problem and maybe even offering a solution or an alternative way of doing things.
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@cartman82 said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Your bad recruitment practices:
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Sent you a technical test, then called to let you know they filled the position
Meh. What would you rather happen: they tell you not to bother right away, or wait until you wasted bunch of time, and then pretend they decided to go with a different candidate?
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Online personality test with a too short time limit
I can't say I ever took a personality test as part of a job interview, but did it occur to you that time limit might be an integral part of the test? Force you to answer instinctively instead of think about the answer? See how you act under pressure?
I guess you failed that one either way.
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I don't understand this one. You think you should have scored higher on the angular test, you wrote an angry rant in an email, and they gave you the "let's just get this guy off our backs" pat response.
It could be they made a mistake, it could be you made a mistake in the test and didn't realize it. Either way, there were probably more diplomatic ways to handle the dispute.
Or just walk away. Not every interview will work out. Sometimes it's just not meant to be.
None of these sound too bad, to be frank. Things just didn't work out a few times, and then they did. You focused mostly on the personal inconveniences, rather than pointing out some systemic problem and maybe even offering a solution or an alternative way of doing things.
- Admittedly this one is not straightforward to resolve. In trivia, for another interview I was talking to a recruiter who was of the opinion that a technical test should be done within the company. Admittedly his company hosts interviews for other companies.
- The problem with this personality test is that it doesn't actually test any of those things. It tests for my ability to think like this when commanded to do so. In practise, it actually tests my ability to answer a personality question instinctively. I don't know what practical use that has, and as far I'm concerned I can argue that the test has failed me. In this particular case, it wasted a lot of my time as well, which was why I was upset about it.
- This one actually isn't too bad. I sent them an angry email because they told me I failed a test for reasons which were clearly incorrect, and I wanted to make sure that they understood the actual reasons. Angularjs is not my weak skill. You're probably right that they just wanted to get me off their backs at this point, but it's not fair to test somebody and not give feedback, and especially not to give false feedback. Helping people to learn is a massively underrated part of our society. How much do your teachers get paid? Ours don't survive long into retirement.
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
it actually tests my ability to answer a personality question instinctively.
If you can, very quickly, come up with the right answer to a difficult customer interaction problem, does it matter if that's what you'd prefer to do? After all, you'd want to keep the job, so you'll behave in the way your employer prefers, for the same reasons you'd game the personality test. At that point, there's no difference between having the right personality and being able to fake it.
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
it's not fair to test somebody and not give feedback
Sure it is. Giving feedback opens them up to angry shits like you writing them nasty letters about how wrong their test is. Not giving any feedback other than "Sorry, not the right fit" lets them and you both move on with your job searches.
You seem to be under the impression that any job-hunt activity that does not result in a hire is a "waste of time". It's not. It's important for both parties to be able to rule out bad fits.
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
It tests for my ability to think like this when commanded to do so.
Without an actual test to examine, we can only guess what they wanted to test and whether it was a good pick for them.
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
You're probably right that they just wanted to get me off their backs at this point, but it's not fair to test somebody and not give feedback, and especially not to give false feedback
The more feedback they give you, the more ammunition you have for a potential lawsuit.
Also, when you reject a job offer or brush off a recruiter, do you feel obliged to explain yourself to them?
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@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Giving feedback opens them up to angry shits like you writing them nasty letters about how wrong their test is.
That's never stopped UK companies; I've received feedback from every interview I've ever been to, successful or not.
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@RaceProUK said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
That's never stopped UK companies; I've received feedback from every interview I've ever been to, successful or not.
In writing or just in person?
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@asdf Over the phone, actually
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@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
it actually tests my ability to answer a personality question instinctively.
If you can, very quickly, come up with the right answer to a difficult customer interaction problem, does it matter if that's what you'd prefer to do? After all, you'd want to keep the job, so you'll behave in the way your employer prefers, for the same reasons you'd game the personality test. At that point, there's no difference between having the right personality and being able to fake it.
Many customers ask me whether I'd prefer to work on my own or work with a person.
That was sarcasm. It was mean. Perhaps unnecessarily.
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
it's not fair to test somebody and not give feedback
Sure it is. Giving feedback opens them up to angry shits like you writing them nasty letters about how wrong their test is. Not giving any feedback other than "Sorry, not the right fit" lets them and you both move on with your job searches.
That's the wrong answer. I'm not telling you why it's wrong. It's just wrong.
That's how that works.
@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
You seem to be under the impression that any job-hunt activity that does not result in a hire is a "waste of time". It's not. It's important for both parties to be able to rule out bad fits.
Ok, well that's just not true. I've interviewed with plenty of companies who said things like "not enough SASS/TDD" and I responded by learning more about SASS/TDD. The point is, not only have I not considered every failed application a waste of time, I've used the feedback they gave me to improve myself, which takes us back to your previous point about fair tests not needing to provide feedback. I spend the time on the test, they spend the time marking it, I can't believe they wouldn't have reasons why they don't like it, so it can't possibly take them that long to send them over. Therefore, not only do I not understand how it's fair to not provide feedback, I don't understand how it's impractical to provide feedback.
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@Shoreline I'll just leave some links:
are job candidates entitled to feedback?
This post was originally published on March 8, 2009. When a candidate asks for feedback after not getting the job, if there's an easily articulable
my requests for post-job-rejection feedback are being ignored!
Continuing our Memorial Day weekend flood of posts... A reader writes: I work for a county (non federal) government agency. Three times since 2009, I have
job rejections and vitriol, part 2
About a year ago, I wrote a post about how a small fraction of job applicants respond to rejection notices with outrage, rudeness, or general vitriol, and
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@PleegWat Jesus, this is why interviewing with IT people sucks: they can't ever even talk about interviewing without getting off-tracked into some boring dumb discussion about which algorithm is optimal in which situation.
The answer to that question, BTW, is: who fucking cares? Why don't you defer that mental masturbation until you actually need to solve a problem of this type? (Which will be in approximately forever years.)
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@cartman82 said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
It tests for my ability to think like this when commanded to do so.
Without an actual test to examine, we can only guess what they wanted to test and whether it was a good pick for them.
I'm sure there's an application for automated testing of human personalities. I just think this one is designed to hire robots. It just seems bizarre that they want robots.
@cartman82 said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
You're probably right that they just wanted to get me off their backs at this point, but it's not fair to test somebody and not give feedback, and especially not to give false feedback
The more feedback they give you, the more ammunition you have for a potential lawsuit.
By the sound of things, they need to be careful about how they write a job spec.
@cartman82 said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Also, when you reject a job offer or brush off a recruiter, do you feel obliged to explain yourself to them?
Yes. They fucking ask me. In trivia, sometimes they try and get me to tell them who else I'm interviewing with, while at the same time telling me not to give that information out to other people, which seems a bit rude, to be honest.
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
In practise, it actually tests my ability to answer a personality question instinctively.
That's the entire point. They also tend to put it questions that are variations of each other, to try to catch any inconsistencies, where you might've lied to sound like a better person than you actually are, but missed one.
I'm not saying it's sound science or anything, but that's why they do it, as far as I can tell.
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@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
@Shoreline I'll just leave some links:
are job candidates entitled to feedback?
This post was originally published on March 8, 2009. When a candidate asks for feedback after not getting the job, if there's an easily articulable
Ok. I only read a couple of paragraphs of the first one and I don't have time for the rest right now so I'll have to come back later, but already I've got this:
For instance, I don’t really want to explain to a candidate that... she seemed so fragile that I couldn’t pair her with that very direct manager without worrying about daily tears or that she just seemed a little crazy.
So, "not the right fit", as they say.
... I don’t really want to explain to a candidate that she came to the interview dressed like a stripper...
I only did that once. I was going for a job as a stripper.
I guess this is why they talk about dressing for the job you want, which is why I wear a suit to interviews for dev jobs for some reason.
Now, you could argue that the right thing to do would be to share this information, hurtful or not. After all, how will these candidates improve if no one tells them what they’re doing wrong? And to that I say: I’m not your job coach.
You're part of the human race. Do you want to contribute or not?
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
You're part of the human race
Sweetie, you're going to have to learn at some point that not everyone's problem can be your responsibility.
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@Shoreline said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Ok, well that's just not true. I've interviewed with plenty of companies who said things like "not enough SASS/TDD" and I responded by learning more about SASS/TDD. The point is, not only have I not considered every failed application a waste of time, I've used the feedback they gave me to improve myself,
If you went, didn't get the job, and got feedback that led you to improve yourself, it wasn't a waste of time.(1) If you went, didn't get the job, got the feedback, and told them to go fuck themselves sideways with a Lexus, *then* it was a waste of time.
(1) There might be "opportunity cost" issues meaning that it wasn't an optimal use of that time, but in the sense that you got something beneficial for it ("improved myself" sounds beneficial), it wasn't wasted.
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@Yamikuronue said in Fuck You, I Quit - Hiring Is Broken (article):
Sweetie, you're going to have to learn at some point that not everyone's problem can be your responsibility.
Jesus, nobody's asking for a letter or a small novella detailing their failings. If you've interviewed someone, take 45 seconds to say 'sorry, looking for more webscale' or 'sorry, had a better applicant' or 'sorry, culture fit'. Use that last one is they smell bad or something.
If almost an entire minute of thinking is too much effort to spend on someone once they are of no more use to you then I recommend business school, because you are clearly a business-lizard.
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@AyGeePlus Sure, it's polite to do so, but blowing it up into some huge deal about it being a contribution to humanity as a whole is blatantly over the top and narcissistic. Nobody owes you feedback. It's nice if they do provide it, but if not, oh well. Isn't that the exact entitlement that people are always claiming millennials are full of?
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I expect people to be polite, especially when it's so easy, as in this case. (caveat sometimes it's not etc etc maybe you had a bad day maybe you smell bad life is full of entropy. This is why you don't get your knickers in a twist about one-offs.)
I guess I feel entitled to strangers being polite most of the time? As a millennial I feel like I'm letting down the side unless I'm entitled to at least one thing per post.
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@AyGeePlus But you don't' see a distinction between expecting basic courtesy and expecting people to go out of their way to help you become a better candidate? I mean, if you ask for feedback and are told "Sorry, I'd rather not, but good luck!" that's also polite.
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I mean yeah, you pay job coaches for that sort of thing, it's rude to expect randos to do it for you. Are we really on the same side of this? It sounds like we are.
