Tech Job Interviews Are Out of Control

I have worked at two different start ups where the boss explicitly didn't want to hire anyone with kids and had to be informed that there are laws about that, so yes, definitely anti-parent. One of them also kept saying that they only wanted employees like our autistic coworker when we asked him why he had spent weeks rejecting every interviewee that we had liked. Don't even get me started on people that the CEO wouldn't have a beer with, and how often they just so happen to be women or foreigners! Just gross shit all around.

It's very clear when you work closely with founders that they see their businesses as a moral good in the world, and as a result, they have a lot of entitlement about their relationship with labor. They view laws about it as inconveniences on their moral imperative to grow the startup.

Probably by design, to be honest. Jobs tend to be very anti-parent, especially in US states where FMLA is legally protected.

I’m fortunate to work for a company that has a culture of prioritizing real life so you can do your best work. Sadly, that’s antithetical to next quarter thinking, so it’s not the norm.

The dumb thing is (in my experience) parents seem to work harder and stay at companies for longer than childless folks. They’re just shorter on free time and need some basic flexibility to address emergent issues. Not to mention being better at teaching and managing in general.

An internship isn't a magic bullet that cures all ills but it does improve thing meaningfully in several ways.

To address your point, I agree with you in part but giving people a chance who otherwise would not, does build loyalty making it more likely they will stay longer (on average). You still have to be a good company to have a chance of retaining people, it isn't just a cynical ploy to fool people into working for you. There is a middle ground between your example of 20-40 years vs 2-4 that is very meaningful because it takes a lot more time than people give credit, to get good at a job. So that >2 years time frame is very valuable.

I do think a lot of companies, but crucially not all, effectively treat even highly skilled labor as a disposable asset to leech off of. I also think an employment system that expects career advancement to require changing employers, is crazy shortsighted. Just as is degrading the public education system and putting young people into massive debt with college. The system has problems all over the place but an internship is a very practical way for a company to do better.

Thank you for the words of encouragement.

Thanks. Yeah, it definitely seems bleak. I just keep making things though while trying to basically get a CS degree without the actual piece of paper. Lots of resources online and I have family and friends in the industry, so that helps keep me motivated.

Good luck to you on the job search. I have hope that your hard work will pay off.

Not the OP but it doesn’t read as satire to me

LinkedIn and Indeed mostly. I also use Dice, ZIPrecruiter, and Glassdoor sparingly.

you can build a to do list app in a handful of minutes if you know your way around

No you can't. You're mistaking a "hastily thrown together prototype", for an "actual app" with all its requirements, tests, multiple target support, hundreds of tiny features, QA for all that, then deployment, and ongoing support.

Depending on where on the scale between "prototype" and "final product" you look at, it's going to be anywhere from less than an hour, to a full team working for years.

Now, arguably, showing whether you know the difference, can be the real test.

I'm facing this as well across the board, not just where a CS degree is expected. I started off in CS, then a year in discovered I liked working at my school paper enough to drop out after hitting managing ed and having no one left to learn from because the J-school had been gutted in the '80s ... in 2000.

So, no degree. Which now means no job. Not even interviews. I never had any pure development titles that AI would pick up on, so the coding I've done also doesn't count. Your basic bottom-of-the-barrel "and then we were able to lay off half the team" automation that then got me pushed out for providing a useful but unrequested solution that made me a threat.

I determine my needs and then choose my tools, so sure, I'll get back up to speed in Python for a visualization project, but I'm not going to spend a couple of weeks trying to retain things with zero goal.

It's not a litmus test, it's just a basic filter. You don't understand the time wasted (for both parties) when recruiters present "self starters" and "driven" and "passionate" candidates. It's not our goal to give people a chance, it's our goal to find a great fit for the position.

it seems like an easy way to save time and money on hiring

If you are seeing this change based on whether you exclude people without comp sci degrees, what you're really seeing is your recruitment firm/ team's lack of effort or expertise. It's literally the job of recruiters to separate the wheat from the chaff. If you're doing it yourselves by putting hard restrictions on the recruitment team to remove the bad results they are letting go through, you should be taking a hard look at that company or team.

Don;t mention Minecraft. You implemented and adminstered a MYSQL database system which supported N concurrent users and Y transactions per minute with 99.xxx uptime over Z years, you also developed a custom front-end etc etc

The cool thing is, you're right that you've got marketable skills that employers want, you just gotta present them in corporate lingo that sanitizes it of any humanity and fun, lmao. You could rephrase that part about the Minecraft server to something like "Actively maintaining a high-uptime server with [X amount] of daily clients by utilizing [insert type of tools/languages here, e.g. MySQL databases]."

I've always hated the process of "translating" real life experience into the marketable buzzwords that employers like to see, but until it seems like hiring managers on a wider scale are willing to listen to words that normal people would write, I'm gonna keep trying to speak their language.

Sometimes, the less you say, the better. You have to manipulate them and do not worry about if it's bad/wrong. In the corporate world, most are just greedy assholes who don't care about who you are.

Don't ever lie on your resume, just make it glittery on how THEY want to see it, not how you feel about it.

It's a sad world we are living in right now, good luck don't ever give up !

Just to put out the other side of this, you're competing with a lot of people with more visible credentials. If the hiring manager can look through the stack and pick out 10 people to interview all with easily understood credentials, they have no reason to consider anyone else. Interviewing isn't free for the company, every additional candidate to consider is probably at least an hour or more of time the company is paying someone for.

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