How to NOT get a job interview at our small startup

Your Tips to get rejected here aren't very AI-specific and even have some things listed where the usage of GenAI would actually help with mitigations (i.e. Have typos in your CV, Bullshit language like this).

Equating corporate background to a Company culture mismatch is quite a take tbh. You're a PHP-only shop, yet you see Too much emphasis on dated tech as a reason for rejection? ...an Application send by mail is considered "Applying on side channels"? You're a very small shop and seem very far from a corporate organization (something you yourself seem to despise, see above), so why should anybody care for your rigid application-process? I'd personally expect some resiliency from a team of 4!

I'm only writing this here because I feel that your rant really just feels like any unreflective rant, and you should really consider whether you'd want to put it out there as is.

I respect your position, some points are reasonable, others will likely keep many great hires out of your reach. I'm a Staff Level SWE, with 13+ years of experience (startup, not corporate), been head of engineering at smaller startups in the past, I focus on payments/fintech, have lots of experience in many areas such as FE, infrastructure, k8s, dated technologies (angular, old react, php, perl), know some foundational technologies (c, c++, java, assembly), know some computer and circuit design technologies (vlsi, vhdl, etc), know some very proprietary technologies and languages (many embedded manufacturers that make programmable devices create their own ecosystems) etc, and I also know and work daily with many of our modern SFW technologies and languages (go, k8s, Kafka, all the fun stuff).

Most of these I had to know bc I also run my own company and in the beginning if you're bootstrapped, you really need to know lots of things. Recruiters always look at my CV and say it's pretty unusual. I mean, I've been a SCADA engineer in the energy sector, and a transportation systems engineer, so my career is not the typical SWE’s. In fact I have started trying to list experiencein problem domains, like distributed systems, microsservices, kyc, instead of in tools and languages. If you need Django, I can learn it in 1-2 weeks tops, while doing other stuff.

Regarding AI, I have started testing it. My flow is basically feeding my current CV, generic cover letter and a job description and asking it to output a more specific cv and cover letter for this position using the info from my career. I then spend some time editing and making it mine. it saves me a lot of time and I don't think this is cheating.

My main reason for rejection? That I live in Africa, and so:

- Hiring managers think I'm probably scamming them and inflating my credentials

- They have assigned poverty salary brackets to this region and choke when I tell them my minimum rate. Interestingly I live in one of the most expensive cities in the world, so I wonder when they tell me they are matching cost of living, what actual research have they done.

- They post remote positions, but really they're US remote positions.

I accidentally joined a standup in a shared workspace. Ended up with three tasks and a backlog full of bugs to fix. No one’s noticed I'm not on the payroll yet... I’m staying!