I recently got thrown (unwillingly) into the interviews market since my employer fired everyone. IT recession is a bitch.
Anyway, there's a type of interview that I loathe: the take-home interview. You have a vaguely defined problem, noone to talk about it with, no criteria for "pass" or "fail" and you're supposed to invest two or three days grinding on it before sending the finite product into the black hole for evaluation. 99% of the times nothing gets out of the black hole, otherwise it wouldn't deserve it's name. The 1% of the time you do receive "feedback" (like I did), is along "not good enough, we decided to move along with someone else". No explanation, no compensation for the time wasted.
Motherfuckers are getting better at wasting your time! Gone are the times when you got a massive hole into your time budget before ever even speaking to a human agent. They figured out the "sunken cost fallacy" soon enough so they play this game. It's standard recruiter "game". They "call" you although it's got zero relevance, because if they get you to spend half an hour into talking with them, you're already invested. Half an hour is gone, is it lost forever or you continue standing in the queue?
Because it's always a queue, a very long queue with very low chance of getting anything solved (getting hired). I'm attaching a local meme which refers to interacting with the state bureaucracy, which involves long preparations followed by long standing in lines for the chance to face a disgruntled employee who tells you to fuck off. Translation says:" "When you're feeling down think that right at this moment, someone stands in the queue of a physical bureaucracy office and thinks they have all the required papers upon them!".
So long gone are the times when a machine asked 8 investment hours from you before you even saw a human. This time the UK fuckers had me waste 30 minutes on a HR call, 30 minutes on some "manager" call, 1 hour on a technical evaluation and then only then, fuckers asked for three days of work upon implementing a "homework", all for the chance of working two full time jobs, a developer and a quant, paid $300,000 base + $300,000 bonus in the US, but in my case only getting £30,000.
I wasted an opportunity to tell them to 1: print the homework on a piece of paper, 2: position it below their cruch and between their legs and finally 3: beat if off their dick. Instead of asking them my full rate for 3 days (€750), I actually invested an hour for free into making a proof of concept of the thing they asked, document myself on the algo (first time hear about it), copy best implementation from stackoverflow, test it briefly, build a C++ multithreaded proof of concept around it, zip it, make a Zoom recording on how to compile, build and generally use the whole thing and send it to them. I was also pretty wasted from the day before so maybe my voice in the Zoom recording didn't sound all that rehearsed and I was too exhausted by the end of the hour to record again, with a script this time. Sent them the whole pack, got about a week of ghosting followed by a predictably uninformative "you failed".
Well they can go fuck themselves, if I wasn't already explicit enough on my interaction with them already.
Anyway, there's a type of interview that I loathe: the take-home interview. You have a vaguely defined problem, noone to talk about it with, no criteria for "pass" or "fail" and you're supposed to invest two or three days grinding on it before sending the finite product into the black hole for evaluation. 99% of the times nothing gets out of the black hole, otherwise it wouldn't deserve it's name. The 1% of the time you do receive "feedback" (like I did), is along "not good enough, we decided to move along with someone else". No explanation, no compensation for the time wasted.
Motherfuckers are getting better at wasting your time! Gone are the times when you got a massive hole into your time budget before ever even speaking to a human agent. They figured out the "sunken cost fallacy" soon enough so they play this game. It's standard recruiter "game". They "call" you although it's got zero relevance, because if they get you to spend half an hour into talking with them, you're already invested. Half an hour is gone, is it lost forever or you continue standing in the queue?
Because it's always a queue, a very long queue with very low chance of getting anything solved (getting hired). I'm attaching a local meme which refers to interacting with the state bureaucracy, which involves long preparations followed by long standing in lines for the chance to face a disgruntled employee who tells you to fuck off. Translation says:" "When you're feeling down think that right at this moment, someone stands in the queue of a physical bureaucracy office and thinks they have all the required papers upon them!".
So long gone are the times when a machine asked 8 investment hours from you before you even saw a human. This time the UK fuckers had me waste 30 minutes on a HR call, 30 minutes on some "manager" call, 1 hour on a technical evaluation and then only then, fuckers asked for three days of work upon implementing a "homework", all for the chance of working two full time jobs, a developer and a quant, paid $300,000 base + $300,000 bonus in the US, but in my case only getting £30,000.
I wasted an opportunity to tell them to 1: print the homework on a piece of paper, 2: position it below their cruch and between their legs and finally 3: beat if off their dick. Instead of asking them my full rate for 3 days (€750), I actually invested an hour for free into making a proof of concept of the thing they asked, document myself on the algo (first time hear about it), copy best implementation from stackoverflow, test it briefly, build a C++ multithreaded proof of concept around it, zip it, make a Zoom recording on how to compile, build and generally use the whole thing and send it to them. I was also pretty wasted from the day before so maybe my voice in the Zoom recording didn't sound all that rehearsed and I was too exhausted by the end of the hour to record again, with a script this time. Sent them the whole pack, got about a week of ghosting followed by a predictably uninformative "you failed".
Well they can go fuck themselves, if I wasn't already explicit enough on my interaction with them already.
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