We only hire the trendiest
Loved this article. Over a year ago, I decided to leave both my technology stack (in which I had 8 years experience), and the big corporate employment record behind. I had about 10 years of industry experience, and considered myself a generalist - capable in many technology stacks, and highly capable of learning and quickly becoming effective in a new one.<p>Also, I had a nice comfy savings account, so I decided not to work for 6 months while I focused on me-time and learning NewTechnologyStack. I fell in love with it, and havent looked at OldTechnologyStack since. I wrote many demo apps, started making open source contribs, and engaged with NewTechStack communities online. Damn that was fun! I joined local meetup groups and other communities to fill my sponge-like passion for NewTechStack to the max.<p>Let me also state that with OldTechStack, I never, ever had a problem finding a job - really, it usually takes me about a week to land a new job somewhere else in my bustling tech-hub city. My resume with OldTechStack was, well, very trendy. I could often tell in interviews that people were going to hire me based on my resume before they even spoke to me in person, and that the in-person resume was just to reassure themselves that I wasnt bullshitting them. Dont get me wrong, Im a great programmer, but I know I was hired because my resume was nice &#x27;n trendy (with the OldTechStack culture).<p>So, once I started looking for jobs in NewTechStack culture, the reality of the superficial hiring process really set in. Firstly, NewTechStack people have a cultural internalization that OldTechStack really sucks. Mind you, I am <i>not</i> referring to technical folk, but HR people, recruiters, entrepreneurial types, etc. Secondly, I had no idea that taking time off from work made me look really bad to most folks at the base level of recruitment. Because I was not currently employed, I was not making it past many screening interviews. Thirdly, there was this magic phrase, &quot;x many years of <i>PRODUCTION</i> experience in NewTechnologyStack...&quot; that was really screwing me over. Despite the fact that I am proficient in 4-5 major programming languages, and have experience in several more. Despite the fact that I have lots of demonstrable work, both public open source, and my own creations (living at live URLs). Despite that my career experience has given me challenges that are scaled many-powers-of-ten beyond what your rinky-dink logistics app&#x27;s customers demand. Despite that I interview wonderfully, am willing to do programming challenges for free, and usually deliver above and beyond expectations... Despite basically being a wonderful candidate from your engineering team&#x27;s perspective, I found myself being rejected for these and many other superficial reasons.<p>Right now I am elated that none of those companies hired me, as I found my way via freelance contracts, and my life could not possibly be more well balanced and I have never been happier in my career. Right now I also work on about 7 different NewTechnologyStack production websites with relatively complex e-commerce and marketplace challenges, as again, I handle generalism well, and well adopt AnyTechnologyStack much better than your &quot;senior dev&quot; with a whopping &quot;5 years production experience.&quot;<p>Guess what? Every single company that I interviewed with about 9 months ago is <i>still</i> hiring for the same damned position I applied for. Some of them have even reached out to me on StackOverFlow or other career sites, like a zombie, unknowing that theyve already interviewed this candidate...<p>Why?<p>Because theyre obsessed with an irrational, non-science based, peacock-dance, superficial standard for hiring people, specifically with standards they are not at all knowledgeable of, that they somehow believe will lead them to &quot;hiring the best&quot; and becoming the next Google (with their rinky-dink logistics app with about 4K customers).<p>I am not suggesting some &quot;science based&quot; checklist system take its place. I do think the peacock-dance, and other completely inauthentic behavioral checks, need to be removed from evaluation. Dont get me started on all the dinosaurs still relying on &quot;technical tests&quot; that throw college-level abstract puzzle games at you, which have been scientifically proven to produce false positives as well as false negatives.<p>Pro tip: copy and paste documentation from YourTechnologyStack official site to your blog, write one sentence saying, &quot;please leave a comment below!&quot; and youre instantly more hireable (to recruiters at the screening level) because, well, youre a blogger, and youre clearly engaged in the community.<p>Companies are so obsessed with &quot;hiring the best&quot; that they basically buy a &quot;hiring kit &#x27;n a box&quot; and hope it automates itself, when all theyre doing is creating an absurd gauntlet that rejects lots of great candidates, and leaves them without any hired candidates 6 months later. The &quot;rockstar&quot; programmer, mythical though she&#x2F;he may be, is still the goose that lays the golden egg and turns your company into NextGoogle.<p>The level of absurdity with the hiring process as a software engineer is obscene. For people who spend most of their professional time dwelling in thought-realms of pure logic, getting hired is a maddeningly illogical process.