Rejected

So, yesterday I received notification that I did not get the job I had been interviewing for. I’ve had some time to sit with it, and I still don’t know how I feel about it. You’d think it would be emotions of frustration, anger, sadness etc, but what I’m realizing is that those are there, but they’re also balanced by feelings of relief, calm, and dare I say it, a bit of joy.

It was a position that I initially thought I really wanted. It’s with a company that makes a product that has greatly improved the quality of life for a family member. After working for a series of companies that make products or services I really don’t care about, I was excited about the possibility of doing something that actually could make a difference.

I did have a little worry under the surface as I’ve been burned at jobs before that I’ve been passionate about, and had that passion exploited. But I had hoped that I had learned from my previous experiences and would be better at balancing things and not just work excessively.

But I began this process in October. It is now February. Granted the end of year happened in there, and with everyone taking off time for the holidays things like hiring can slip a bit. But the time really started feeling like a red flag. As did the 6 interviews and the major take home assignment they had me do.

The assignment was just… weird. They apologized as they gave it saying they have coding tests for developers, and as such they felt they needed to have something to give to someone interviewing for a developer manager, so they gave me a series of questions like “Provide an example of a time you disagreed with senior management and how you responded” that I needed to fill out. It basically ate a weekend because there were 20+ questions and my finished document was over 25 pages in length.

Then they gave me a series of coding challenges given by other people applying for developer positions, and I had to write up evaluations on them, and give recommendations for who I would hire, based solely on having access to their code in their online coding test system for 45 minutes.

In my career I’ve worked at companies with very strict coding tests given to applicants, and worked at companies without them. In every case I’ve preferred working at the latter.

For those with the regimented tests, the tests and the entire interview process felt a bit like fraternity hazing. Developers at the company had to go through the hazing and pass all the tests to get hired, so they felt like they were part of an exclusive club. And so they wanted to keep feeling exceptional by keeping it exclusive. So the tests gradually became harder and more niche.

And they don’t really prove much of anything. Once I got past the interviews at other companies, I never had to stand up again in front of a whiteboard and code in front of other people, so what does demonstrating that skill in an interview actually indicate? I’m sure there were plenty of others who were far better developers than I who failed the process because they code better and faster with the language documentation up, or leveraging the autocomplete in their IDE.

Secondly is just the exclusionary nature of these hiring processes. Tests created by a bunch of college educated white dudes, are best going to be answered by college educated white dudes. Some of the best developers I’ve ever worked with came out of coding boot camps or were self taught. They may not have been able to explain exactly how a doubly linked list works because they didn’t have that in a CS class, but virtually every language has abstracted those, if they even have them anymore. Again how is that relevant to anything a developer would be doing?

HR organizations look around and wonder why they don’t have any diversity, and yet they have an interview / coding test process that actively discourages it. Those that pass the test are going to look and think like those that created it.

Looking back at what I’ve written so far, I didn’t intend to write so much about interview, assignment, and coding challenges, and it is probably going to sound to some people reading it like “He just didn’t pass the tests, and so he’s mad at them.”

In all honesty, it’s more like a lot of nervous energy is being released because I KNEW everything I was seeing in the interview process was a red flag. And yet I was still going forward with things for so long because I thought I wanted to work at that specific company.

Had it been anywhere else, I would have thanked them for their time, and moved on after the second month, or the 3rd or 4th interview. The fact that I put up with so much, and wasted so much time doing things that I disagree with, makes me really kind of glad I eventually got rejected.

But the longer the process went on the more and more nervous I got. I assumed it was being nervous that I wouldn’t get the job, but I now wonder how much of it was being nervous that I actually would get it.

Not sure where the future is headed. I wasn’t actively looking, this was just an opening I heard about from a friend of a friend. I don’t love the current situation at my job, but it isn’t critical I find something now, so just kind of still keeping a vague eye out for things.

The real problem has been I know I’m sliding back into burnout at my current role. I’ve been there before, and it’s a pattern that has me wondering if I just need to get out of tech entirely.

-af

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