If they have the opportunity to be selecting from a wide pool and picking the best out of the candidates, good for them. Still sucks to be an applicant to such a company.
this post was submitted on 05 Feb 2025
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real 😭
Isn't that like almost every job, not just being a programmer
So true. At the same time, this happens because a lot of hiring managers don't know intimately what the job actually does, so they resort to cookie-cutter interview techniques.
"Do leetcode hard on screen share for 12 hours over three months, and then we'll let you know if there's any openings anyone here actually wants to hire you for...then the teams will interview you. Oh and if we don't find a fit within a year of the phone screen you start all over lol"
Google, meta, etc. Fuck them all.
Bonus: If you score really high on the pointless quizzes, then you might get a chance at a remote job, which puts you first on the chopping block for layoffs every quarter!
Extra bonus: There's an office near you, but we're only hiring somewhere else right now that had a shitload of layoffs recently due to shitty management that didn't get fired, so you'll have to uproot your entire life and place your future in our hands for the privilege.
Then don’t work for them.
The reason they can get away with this is because they have troves and troves of people who grovel pathetically at their feet like they’re some sort of God to be worshipped in the “career” plane of existence.
Be honest. People want to work for them for the money (not that there’s anything inherently wrong with that) and so they can tell their friends and update their LinkedIn profiles with “I work at Google” to impress everyone else.
There are plenty of well paying, respectable tech jobs that are much more ‘morally noble’ than these conglomerates of parasites that will make you much happier to wake up every morning without having to perform some Freudian ritual in the mirror trying to convince yourself that what you’re doing is “making the world a better place”. Because it’s not. And these other companies won’t have you doing some absolutely dildo-to-ass inducing interview process where you’re essentially giving them labour market data for absolutely nothing in exchange (except to maybe be considered to have someone look at your resume for 0.7 seconds).
This is a major issue I have with tech. I’ve had the displeasure of being in big tech for many, many years after college (while I was still brainwashed) and working with plenty of truly abhorrent coworkers and people I’ve ever encountered. It’s astonishing, disgraceful, and terrifying how many people in tech have absolutely zero moral compass, and pigeonhole themselves into just “thinking about the science of it all” without thinking about the human impact (isn’t this supposed to be the point of advancing science and technology?).
And now look at the state of the world because of this. Fucking look around you. You can point the finger at others and blame others for this shit world we’re creating (and yes- there are certainly those in power who wield much more influence and control than any lowly coder), but if you want to help change things, you have to try. At least a little bit. And one way to do this is by just trying to not be working for companies like these. Is that really so fucking difficult? Go somewhere else. Trust me- if the Google’s and Meta’s and Amazon’s of the world begin losing genuine talent because workers aren’t morally willing to contribute to a soulless and arguably evil entity, then they will change real fucking quickly.
So - STOP GIVING THESE COMPANIES YOUR TIME AND MONEY BY INTERVIEWING FOR THEM. Take a stance for once and stand by your values and conscience. Think about the type of organization you want to work for and how it would align morally with your values. All it takes is a few minutes to research companies that aren’t so fucking awful for the world, and there are plenty of them around depending on what your values are. I have SO much more respect for others who took a position at a “less prestigious” company than those who worked at a Google.
People will still want to impress others and showcase their egos (to say I’m not guilty of this would be a lie), but if the collective metric for what we consider prestige aligned more with human value output of a company rather than raw salary or profit, then I really do think things could change. But you and I have to put in the leg work. No, it’s not fair that this is the world we were shoved into. But it’s what we have to do.
Anyway….sorry for the rant lol. I needed to get that off my chest.
You're absolutely totally right. Would I still work, I'd be ashamed if I had to say "I work at google". Since they removed "don't be evil" as their motto, that is.
But you also explained it...we all get brainwashed. From indoctrination to outright brainwashing. Daily, every where. And if you dare to question something, you're suddenly alone. One sane in a herd of insane? Must be me,they can't ALL be wrong,right?...RIGHT?
Tiny story: when I still worked, one job was at a very highly deemed top association that stood for curing cancer. Or helping people with it, or doing studies, paying studies, you name it. Sounded awesome. I was admin and had access to everything. I quit 6 months later, I couldn't take it anymore.
-a whole floor with lawyers to legally fuck people out of their money and to fend of incoming.
-another floor full of marketing people who did nothing else than quench old (or dying of cancer) people for their inheritance.
-the cellar was full of hundreds of millions worth of inherited stuff, paintings and shit.
-the bosses drove 250k cars, flew multiple times a month to "meetings" (which meant at least 1000 each for food alone, coz it had to be fancy).
-oh right the building was just recently bought, because it was soooo fancy and in front of a large river here (in our small country it's like US's central park). It was an 8 figure move. Totally unneeded.
And the yearly spending for curing cancer? 5%. Still a large sum, but it was just an alibi for everything else. And it was probably THE most reputable association here. Last day I ever donated anything. I understand that overhead is needed. But it should be, by definition, kept to a minimum.i wanted to work there for the cause, not to get moneyz.
I stopped sitting in on interviews at my old job. Everyone that I thought was a great interview ended up being a shitty employee.
Interview: “reverse this binary tree with an algorithmic efficiency of O(1)”
Job: “The marketing team would like you to indent this button by 10 pixels”
All of this. When I tell people I meet that we don't do coding tests, we instead do tiny assignments, they often get quite excited. It also seems to be way, way more effective
production code: "hehe this is running at polynomial scaling"
Add another column labelled "knowing the right people" with the bar so large the other two are blips.
Also just being liked by the interviewer. For my current job I had an interview of about 90min, and basically just had a rather one-sided chat with the two guys. They seemed to like me, just let me talk and the next day I had the contract draft in my email.
I certainly did not excel at anything during the interview.
I came here to say that. Who you know makes the other two criteria become irrelevant.
At my work they openly mention that 80% of their hires are from referrals. And I’m not talking about a little unknown company. They have more than 10,000 employees. I’m one of the 20%.
However, I only got my first job because I knew a VP at that company.
Same
So true! Out of the five jobs I got over my career, three were from referrals.
Most people can do most jobs.
Companies shouldn't legally be allowed to be this selective.
Do you have any qualifiers for that? Like "with sufficient time to learn" or something? Is there some kind of personal development that you think could enable that?
In my understanding, asking a chef to be a doctor or a software engineer to be an artist often doesn't work great.
How selective do you think is appropriate?
To be clear: I'm a hiring manager for some specialized stuff. I'm genuinely curious about your perspective because I hope it can help how I do that work. I'm not trying to argue with you or prove you wrong or anything.
Given enough time.
Obviously professions that take years to study have that barrier to entry.
But if your job isn't life or death most likely they will already have to teach you everything you need to know on the job.
Got it. Okay, that makes much more sense. Nothing new there for me, then.
When you say companies shouldn't be "this selective," what are you referencing that they're being too selective about? If I'm being more picky than I need to be, I should stop, so I'm eager to learn something here
I think collecting applications for months just to tell 99% of applicants they wasted their time is part of what's making the job market so horrible, that and most job postings being fake.
For service jobs and really any job that doesn't require special licenses there's absolutely no good reason why they shouldn't hire one of the first to apply instead of holding out.
oh man, I got rejected so many times from supermarkets and fast food joints while they were still advertising that they were hiring. Absolutely fucked.
As an IT/Development manager, I only had one role that I hired for where the skills for getting the job matched the skills for doing the job: Business Analyst. Not job entailed presenting information clearly, both written and verbally. So I expected the resume and cover letter to be organized and clear.
Programmers, on the other hand, I wouldn't expect the same level of polish. But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count -- a lot.
A lot of the people that applied, and that I hired, did not have English as a first language. So I gave a lot of latitude with regard to word selection and grammar. But not spelling. Use a goofy word or two, but spell them right.
I figured that most people were highly motivated when writing a resume -- about an motivated on you can get. And if not level of motivation cannot get you to take care, then you'll just be a bug creation machine if I let you touch my codebase.
100% this
And the same thinking applies to interviews, but that's very difficult. My leadership sometimes gets surprised about how much I help interviewees, and I have to clarify to them that I don't care about how good they are at interviewing. I care how good they are at the job.
Unfortunately, this makes my interviews super long, but we have arguably the best engineering team in the company.
Our new CTO was very skeptical of our long interviews and ordered us to shorten them. Fortunately, we had one scheduled already. He sat in on it and is no longer worried about our long interviews. He understood the value once he was able to see where the candidate stumbled and excelled in our ... simulations? of the work. We try to simulate certain tasks in the interview, especially collaborative ones, to see how they would actually do the work. It's really hard for us as interviewers to prepare and run, but it's proven highly effective so far
But I would expect a complete absence of spelling errors and typos. Because in programming these things count -- a lot.
Let's not exaggerate. We have many kinds of spell checkers, all kinds of autocomplete, code reviews, automated testing, linters, and compilers that won't compile if something is spelled wrong. Spelling is the least of a programme's concerns, as it should be.
Except I'm not actually talking about spelling, per se, but about attention to detail. Spelling errors in a resume is just sloppy rubbish.
Ah, right, the proxy evaluation that's so famously effective. Lol
put a triple the height column right there - luck to get an interview in the first place. You're lucky if an actual human reads your CV nowadays, instead of an AI fishing for keywords
I'd even say add another column of "Skills to get the interview".
I'd rather present it as a non-overlapping Venn diagram. It's not the level, those are different skills completely
At some point you'll need to know the basic syntax of some programing language.
sobs in social anxiety
The more HR takes over the interview process, the more important getting past HR becomes than doing the job.
I don't know, if I have enough Daniel Abrahams for the job :-(
Hardest interview I ever had was a job where I worked the least. Second-most lucrative.
I'm interviewing people right now and I feel like it's actually the opposite. I know for a lot of folks this is true, and I've been through those interviews, but fuck, I would love if I could find somebody who is just on par with the interview questions and could just answer them all satisfactorily, because that's what we actually need.
Can you share what kinds of questions you're asking? Or at least generic versions of them?
A lot of people with poorly developed social skills like to pretend that poorly developed social skills don't make them a bad coworker. I don't think I agree with that. Your job isn't just the stuff you like. Organization, prioritization, collaborating and interacting with your coworkers, attending meetings and making useful contributions, just generally not being a dick...all of those are your job. Interviews often take place after they're already convinced that you have the required background, so they're largely interested in discovering whether you're a good chemistry match for the team.
Can't really speak to grueling tech interviews though. That's a whole different category of thing.
I get this, and being good at customer service helps a lot in interviews.
But on the other hand it's really fucked up how we are all expected to go to work and always be pleasant when most of us don't want to be there and are only there so they don't become homeless. So I don't care if my coworkers are pissy, it's healthy to act how you feel.
At 18 years old US society puts a gun to our heads and says "work or die", with no guarentee of being able to find work that pays for a life.
On the one hand the way corporations expect loyalty and devotion all the time in return for a very small percentage of their profits being paid out to us as salary sucks. On the other, having to work if you want to eat is just kind of...life? Not saying we couldn't work on something better as a society, but there's been very few people at any point in human history who didn't have to work hard to survive. I'm glad that I get to at least do soulless work in an office which is mostly just boring instead of hard labor or something actively dangerous.
Nobody is saying work isn't required, but if we only forced people to pay off the debt their existence incurred most people would probably retire before 40
I think for many people it has to do with nervousness. Also power dynamics. When you already have the job, and especially after being there for a couple months, getting on with your coworkers is easy and discussions aren't awkward usually. A random stranger doing an interview that decides whether or not you become homeless puts pressure on people, and they dont know anything about their personality. Should I joke, what do they find funny, do they find that unprofessional, am I being to quiet, do I need to ask more questions, should I bother asking any.
A few weeks after working with Becky I know the exact number of questions to ask her and how we mesh/joke intertwine etc.
Power dynamics is definitely part of it, and I've found that I have much better luck in interviews when I treat them as a conversation rather than just being grilled. It's easier to do in your 40s than in your 20s though.
Yeah, I'm 35 now and I find myself doing better if I just treat them as a casual gathering but I struggle sometimes with not acting extremely mature at all times. I'm not saying unprofessional things, but I will joke, or laugh to often for some people. Had one that someone called me out for having to stand up a bottle that had liquid in it with a screw on lid. Can't remember what the product was but I had a bit of an ADHD moment or something where I just figured, that might leak at some point, and stood it up and one of the interviews asked "did you have to do that?". I laughed it off but it seems a strange thing to ask me when looking back at it.
A lot of people with poorly developed social skills like to pretend that poorly developed social skills don’t make them a bad coworker. I don’t think I agree with that.
this is definitely true, but it's a doubled edged sword, some of the best people in their fields are just complete assholes. Either through time, or ego, sometimes it's just because they're too good for the world. Usually, these people are few and far between.
It's also worth considering how much of the job actually is being socially proficient. In most cases people are willing to put up with people being a little weird and goofy if they're good at what they do. Sometimes those are the best people. Some of the people i have the most respect for in my life, are the weirdest people i've met. Unreasonably kind people, who are a little socially out there, i still really appreciate because they're genuinely good people. Some of the more unruly people are some of the most interesting, and knowledge people i've ever met. They also guarantee a unique perspective on things, which is valuable sometimes.
Different people attract different company, and different people work differently, ultimately the simple rule of getting as many differing points of view on something as possible, still seems to be holding true.
than again, this all depends on the type of team you want. You may want a groundbreaking research team, you may want a greybeard maintenance team, depends on the environment.
The problem with that analysis is that the simple skill checklists used by HR workers who don't even understand what the terms mean are woefully bad at assessing people's job fitness. If you have ABC but not XYZ it doesn't matter if you invented ABC, those glorified hall monitors won't let you interview. But they will if you just lie on the form, knowing you can convince the actual manager that you know ABC inside out and can learn XYZ in five minutes.
This couldn’t be more true for my job. My last job had so many moving parts that we never weren’t under water. My current employer has things so segmented that I’m encouraging friends at the old place to jump ship by telling them how easy things can be when you have proper leadership.
If only you could use ChatGPT during an interview the same way as when you're employed. Then everyone would finally recognize how outstanding you are