pastProlog

Companies throw up barriers in front of themselves, set up a high jump bar, and then wonder why people aren't running to them, to what is often a not-that-great opportunity.

To me, the whole interview process is about companies achieving social dominance over you. No matter how desperate they are, they still need you to be crawling to them, not vice versa.

Sometimes an outside headhunter calls me and asks if I want to talk to a company. I call and talk to someone at the company, and before I've even met anyone they want three references from me, preferably (or absolutely) former bosses. So before I even meet anyone, I'm supposed to call three former bosses and ask them all for a favor.

It might happen a little farther down the process, but still. What it really means for me is I don't do "one off" interviews. Every few years or so I decide to get a new job, I fix my resume etc., ask my former bosses if they'd give me a recommendation, and then start interviewing at lots of companies. What this means is I'm only available for several weeks every few years. It wouldn't be a big thing for me to check out some new company half-way into my employment somewhere, but I'm not going to bother my old bosses every few months for one-off interviews. And why bother going and stammering in front of some officious HR person or manager about how you don't feel comfortable giving out recommendations so early on. Their expectations already turn the interview sour, "what am I hiding"?

Then interviewers also expect you to work on their schedule. I have a job, things aren't going well there, yet they expect me to come in the middle of a work day and spend some hours there. I might even take the day off and the interviewer might call and cancel. Then should I wear a suit (I'm not in the Bay Area)? I used to drop my suit off in a friend's office, go to work, go to my friend's office, get in the suit, interview, go back to my friend's office, change, go back to work, then go to my friend's office, get the suit and go home.

Or the interviewer asks very officiously why I want to work at the company. The answer I usually want to give is that I don't necessarily want to, someone called and asked if I was interested so I'm checking it out. But if an outside headhunter asked me to, it sounds kind of hollow. Blog posts with tips on interviewing say I should have a set BS answer for this but why should I? I want to work there for a fucking paycheck, why do you think I want to work there?

Then other bullshit. Obviously I wouldn't badmouth people at my current or former employers. But if they ask me about the process at my current job and I'm honest about how fucked up it is it becomes my fault. Let's say I said we have no revision control, no staging servers, everything goes straight into production, no code reviews, no integration tests etc. Or maybe not that bad, but whatever. Or the company won't spend money to hire the amount of personnel they need, the machines they need, the software they need, whatever. Then they say why not? I say I've asked management and management said no. It becomes my fault when I'm honest and say I couldn't shake the pennies from management to set up a proper system. Even if I'm just a lowly developer and not even a team lead or something.

Then there's the requirements. BSCS from a good school required. A few classes short and lots of experience? Tough luck. Or super-specific requirements for a number of technologies, all at a high level and for many years. Often for a crappy company, a crappy position that doesn't need anywhere near that kind of experience. Sometimes there will be a posting on some tech forum where people are laughing about a Craigslist posting asking for "9 years of experience with iPhone apps". It kind of drives home the point. Nowadays I usually don't even have the experience problem, but it's ridiculous when a requirement is for their version control system or something. I mean, how long would it really take me to learn perforce if I know subversion, git etc., as well as all the other job listing requirements?

Companies make the interview process unpleasant, throw up all kinds of barriers and then wonder why they can't find good candidates.

They also wonder why person to person recruiting is so effective, people bringing in people they know. The reason is because the inside person usually tells me "the job is yours if you want it". Most of my jobs have been gotten this way, I've only worked at two companies where I went in cold via a headhunter. It's just too unpleasant.

One phenomenon which Facebook takes into account which Twitter does not is that of the loquacious acquaintance, possibly someone with a business constantly hyping things, possibly someone who just likes to hear themselves speak more often than I do. They apply slight pressure to me to follow them on Twitter or friend them on Facebook so I do so.

On Facebook I can easily set people to three settings which are private to me - read everything they write, read only significant things they write (things which get more than ordinary likes/replies, or whatever), or ignore them. This is great for me, otherwise my entire Facebook feed would be filled with my 4-5 chattiest friends or current/former coworkers, I'd have to scroll through their collective 10-12 posts a day to see anyone elses, etc.

Twitter does not have this option where I publicly follow someone, due to them pressuring me to follow them on Twitter, but where I can actually privately ignore them. Which just tends to mean I use Twitter less. Maybe there is an option buried somewhere where I can do this, but it's definitely not obvious like on Facebook. Which just means I use Twitter a lot less. Because all it is for me is a constant stream of 4-5 chatty acquaintances with the dozens of others I follow popping in once in a while.

There are ways to deal with this on Twitter, but none of them are that good. I can create another account, but then there are problems from that - accounts with private tweets I no longer have access to or have to ask for two adds from everyone etc. I can create a private list without these people on it, but then I have to go to the trouble of maintaining two lists - the main list and the private list. Facebook just makes this a lot easier.

Absolutely. Another thing is the "rock stars" these companies are looking for would never work at a Fortune 1000 company doing CRUD applications on an old, poorly-written code base in class B office space. They're not finding the candidates they're looking for because those candidates would never apply there.

I worked at a company where I learned after joining that we were mandated to stay until 6 PM. Yet with my particular job, I was on-call at night (and sometimes was called and would work through the night), had to do weekend work etc. Everyone else worked 9AM-6PM, I had to work the extra 5 hours a week, for complete bullshit corporate purposes, plus all the other hours that were specific to my job. Complete bullshit. At previous jobs I was always there at 6PM anyway, but being forced to drove me crazy. I eventually left.

Companies put up barriers for applicants, then wonder why they can't find anyone.

A big thing for me is references. I have good references but I don't like to bother people. These are often from bosses who I worked with four years before and have only had sporadic contact with since, I don't want to be asking for favors every other contact.

Some companies, in e-mails before I even talk to anyone want me to send them references. I mean it's not like people ask for references as the last step before making an offer.

So what I have to do is when I'm looking for work, contact all my references, make sure my phone # etc. for them is current, and ask if they'll give me a reference - they always say yes. I figure I'm then good for the next few weeks/months in terms of that.

But it also means I basically have to make the major commitment of saying I want another job. Then I go looking and look until I find one.

If people were not so free with asking for references before I even talk to someone on the phone even, I could look for work at my leisure. If a headhunter contacted me, even if I wasn't looking, I could talk to the company. If they said they were almost set with the decision and just wanted some references, then I could do that as a last step.

Really it limits when I am available to hear offers. I am only open for offers every 2-3 years, in the weeks and months I am looking for a new job. I'm not open 18 months into a job, because I'm not going to hassle 3 old bosses for one company which hasn't even decided if they want to do a phone interview with me yet.

Of course I can always say I don't give references until later in the process, but usually it's some HR drone handing me a sheet and telling me to fill it out. If I don't put contact for references they tell me I should fill that in. It's like I'm sloppy for not bringing contact information, or have something to hide in not wanting to hand out reference information freely. People can say "tell 'them' so-and-so" but there's no them, there's an HR information sheet and some HR drone only peripherally connected with the hiring process.

It's not a big deal for me, it just limits my availability for talking to a 4-6 week cycle out of every 100-150 weeks. Companies throw up these barriers against themselves, then wonder why they can't find people.

There's other things as well. I work from 9 to 5. But companies want me to come in at 10 AM, I wait around 30 minutes for the first person to talk to me, then they want me to talk to someone else etc. Then two people who I have to talk to before getting hired are busy or not there. Also, if I schedule one a vacation day during the week, my current company might wonder what I'm doing. How am I supposed to make time for these long, drawn out interviews during the work week?

Then of course there is specialization. Wanting someone who knows a language like C++ is fine. Even wanting someone who knows OpenGL is fine. Or even more specifically, OpenGL ES if OpenGL is too general. But then they want people who know who Objective C for Apple hooks into C++ with OpenGL ES, as opposed to someone who has maybe been doing Java and JNI hooks into C++ with OpenGL ES. Or if that is not specific enough, then something even more specific.

Or it might say BSCS required. So if you're a few classes short - tough luck.

The entire interview process is geared towards company's establishing their dominance in the relationship from the get-go. You go hassle your old bosses, asking them to put in a good word for you. You come here when you're supposed to be working. And so on. Companies throw up these barriers as if there is a huge excess of good programmers they can pick and choose from. When that pool dries up, do they think, gee, maybe we should change how we interview? Of course not, they just complain how they can't find talented developers, and lobby Washington so that foreign programmers don't have to hop through the immigration hoops everyone else has to.

They don't see a lack of talented programmers, they see a lack of a large pool of talented programmers they can put over a barrel. Because otherwise they would have changed how they do interviewing.

While they only have the option of griping about lack of talent, we have options beyond griping about interviews. With the cloud, growth of mobile and app stores etc., as everyone says, now it's easier than ever to get your own personal (or partnered) income stream going. Hopefully mine grows to the point where the spectre about potentially having to go on a job interview ever again diminishes to nothing. I dislike enough the more easy interviews about whether I will consult on a project for a few months.