A Long Overdue Pound of Flesh



  • About ten years ago I got laid off for the first time in my life. It was in the middle of a significant downturn on Wall Street, so I was out for six months. As luck would have it, my severence worked out to the equivalent of my full salary for the entire time I was out, but until you find the next job you don't know that, so I worried quite a bit.

    One of the jobs I applied for had the usual phone-screen, then a screen by an HR person, and then the circus. Ten of us on one side of a long conference table with ten PHBs on the other. They would randomly call out stupid technical questions and point at someone who had 10 seconds to answer. After two hours of this, there was no sign it was letting up. If I hadn't been so nervous about being unemployed I would have walked out after ten minutes of that crap. I was eventually offered the job, but the offer was withdrawn a day later because they decided to not hire anyone.

    Fast forward to about three weeks ago. The same place picked up my resume and contacted me about an open position. It's funny how you remember names, even after a decade. The name of the manager rang a bell. He did not remember me. I decided to play along. At a significant cost of my time, and at my insistence, I spent about ten hours meeting everyone on the team, peer teams, customer managers and second level managers. Finally, the offer comes.

    I stall. And stall. And stall.

    Finally, they ask me to come in to see if they can sweeten the pot to tip the scale. I go.

    The hiring manager (who jerked me around ten years ago), his boss and the HR person are all in the room (at my request). They ask what I think of their final offer. I remind them of the abuse of ten years ago, that you can't jerk people around like that, how it wasn't appreciated then, and how did it make them feel now that I wasted their time?

    Then I walked out.

    Immature? Absolutely! But you get so sick of these PHB wanna-be's treating you/others with such utter disregard that sometimes you gotta make a point.

    The really sad part is that the whole point I was trying to make was likely lost on these imbeciles.



  •  I'm not thinking front page category for "Best of Snoofle", I'm thinking a book. The royalties will mean he'll never have to work again (oh wait...the supply of stories will dry up...).



  • @GreyWolf said:

     I'm not thinking front page category for "Best of Snoofle", I'm thinking a book. The royalties will mean he'll never have to work again (oh wait...the supply of stories will dry up...).

    Theres no money in books.  If you're lucky and sell 200,000 copies, you [b]might[/b] get $10,000 if your lucky.


  • @galgorah said:

    @GreyWolf said:

     I'm not thinking front page category for "Best of Snoofle", I'm thinking a book. The royalties will mean he'll never have to work again (oh wait...the supply of stories will dry up...).

    Theres no money in books.  If you're lucky and sell 200,000 copies, you might get $10,000 if your lucky.

    Well, yeah but a book deal can open other avenues to you, think game or movie or tv deal, apparently you can even get knighhood if you play it right



  •  I worship the ground Snoofle walks on.  On behalf of millions of jerked-around job seekers, THANK YOU!

    Also, please post this story on the dice.com forums.  It's a wasteland of negativity and abuse, so a post like this would be like the shining north star on Christmas morning.  

     



  • @GreyWolf said:

     I'm not thinking front page category for "Best of Snoofle", I'm thinking a book. The royalties will mean he'll never have to work again (oh wait...the supply of stories will dry up...).

    Doesn't he work on Wall Street? Seems to me extortion is the way to go.



  • I'm probably in the minority here, but I feel this is a disproportionate response. I just can’t imagine holding on to anger for so long. I’m not even sure the hiring managers did anything that horrible. They just did a group interview and exercised their right to not hire anyone. Getting rejected comes with the territory when job hunting. I mean nobody is entitled to a job, are they?



  • @serguey123 said:

    Well, yeah but a book deal can open other avenues to you, think game or movie or tv deal, apparently you can even get knighhood if you play it right

    I'm trying to imagine a video game of Snoofle's life as seen through his DailyWTF postings. I'm thinking thousands upon thousands of trivial puzzles with the odd fiendish one thrown in. You get to make a move towards solving the puzzle, then a non-player character makes a random move. Every so often, the NPC will insist that its random move was Correct, and revert any moves you make thereafter. A random character (non-player or otherwise) takes the blame for any failures.

    A TV series would be easier - one post per episode, with Snoofle as a kind of sane witness to insanity going on around him. Think of Rob Morrow in one of the more surreal episodes of Northern Exposure.



  • @Ibix said:

    @serguey123 said:

    Well, yeah but a book deal can open other avenues to you, think game or movie or tv deal, apparently you can even get knighhood if you play it right

    I'm trying to imagine a video game of Snoofle's life as seen through his DailyWTF postings. I'm thinking thousands upon thousands of trivial puzzles with the odd fiendish one thrown in. You get to make a move towards solving the puzzle, then a non-player character makes a random move. Every so often, the NPC will insist that its random move was Correct, and revert any moves you make thereafter. A random character (non-player or otherwise) takes the blame for any failures.

    A TV series would be easier - one post per episode, with Snoofle as a kind of sane witness to insanity going on around him. Think of Rob Morrow in one of the more surreal episodes of Northern Exposure.

    Well, for the videogame it could be something like Postal where you play Snoofle inflicting pain on his employers and coworkers (I'm sure we all go there sometimes) and if the game came with tools to to allow importing your own bosses and coworkers as well as custom maps it could become awesome (throw some multiplayer and we are golden).

    About the tv series I was thinking along the lines of The Office.


  • BINNED

    It's not like him and all the other interview candidates were not good enough. He got an offer first. But then they changed their mind, not about him but about needing to hire anybody at all.



  • @topspin said:

    It's not like him and all the other interview candidates were not good enough. He got an offer first. But then they changed their mind, not about him but about needing to hire anybody at all.

    As a business, that's their prerogative.  I'm still not convinced that it's reasonable to be so angry about it.


  • @fritz - it's not that I'm angry about the offer being pulled back after the fact - that's happened before and since (it's part of dealing with companiesthat don't know what they're doing). What pissed me off is the way they treated folks during an interview. I happen to be dyslexic, and sometimes it takes me more than ten seconds to sort out the question, even a simple one, before I can begin to answer. I don't care what the job market -or your hiring budget - is , people deserve to be treated with respect. That sort of an interview is just stupid. They learn nothing of use about you, yet they're wasting your time; it's rude.

    Like I said in the post, sometimes you gotta make a point.



  • @serguey123 said:

    About the tv series I was thinking along the lines of The Office.
     

    Nahh, it's the IT Crowd.  (BBC show, brilliant (with an "i") and funny as hell.)



  • You never said what their response was like.



  • @snoofle said:

    @fritz - it's not that I'm angry about the offer being pulled back after the fact - that's happened before and since (it's part of dealing with companiesthat don't know what they're doing). What pissed me off is the way they treated folks during an interview. I happen to be dyslexic, and sometimes it takes me more than ten seconds to sort out the question, even a simple one, before I can begin to answer. I don't care what the job market -or your hiring budget - is , people deserve to be treated with respect. That sort of an interview is just stupid. They learn nothing of use about you, yet they're wasting your time; it's rude.

    Like I said in the post, sometimes you gotta make a point.

    That sounds like a stress interview to me.  Again, I see no reason to harbor resentment about it.  Experiences like this are not exactly what I would consider adversity.

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