Recently I wrote an article on my experience with job interviews while under the influence of methylphenidate (MPH). The overall aim was to illustrate that with MPH, my performance is a lot more consistent. In particular, I find the experience overall a lot more tolerable whereas in the past I sometimes just got bored or even annoyed, which led me to exhibiting some eccentric behavior. However, I want to avoid having a lopsided perception of the impact of MPH, so I recently had another job interview, admittedly with a company I did not care a lot about. I deliberately skipped taking MPH just to see how it would go.
For context, one of the many tech startups had reached out to me. This particular company has been around for a few years. It is privately held so data regarding their business performance is not easy to come by but they had assured me that they are “profitable”, yet were hesitant to tell me how they defined this term. Normally, when startups tell you that they are profitable they mean something quite different from the bottom line. In terms of size, it was the typical SME with between 50 and 100 employees. There are a lot of such companies out there like that. As they normally do not have a lot of brand recognition, they very often proactively approach people online, either via a headhunter or directly. One of the people they approached was yours truly, inquiring whether I would potentially be interested in taking on a new professional challenge.
The first call was with HR and it went about as well as I had imagined. My biggest surprise was that their hiring expectations were completely unrealistic. They were looking for someone who was an expert software architect, a very seasoned software engineer, and also a site reliability specialist. Oh, and if you could take care of provisioning their laptops that would be great, too! When I listened to the role expectations, I had the impression that they wanted to hire one person to essentially do the job of at least two to three people. Upon learning more about their history, this did not surprise me that much anymore. The engineering team was led by one of the founders, there were a few people around who apparently did anything that came up, and now they would like to add a few more senior people or, apparently, just one to work as a senior in any area. This did not seem to be a professionally run company.
I tend to read people quite well. The HR woman I spoke to I assessed to have some kind of inferiority complex and she seemed to enjoy herself talking about how important experience in some technology was, dismissing my remarks that I had worked in some other technology which is quite comparable and considered interchangeable with theirs. A more technically minded HR person would understand this, and a hiring manager in tech would know this anyway. However, if you give someone the instruction to check whether the candidate knows every skill mentioned on an arbitrary list you are going to lose a lot of candidates.
At some point, I had a hard time taking this interview seriously anymore so I had to take the lead and cut in. I bluntly stated that the person they are looking for does not exist. After some defensive babbling that included terms like “high bar”, “very selective”, “right fit”, I followed up and asked her, “If you do not mind me asking, for how many months has this position been vacant?” As it turned out, they had been looking for their dream candidate for about half a year already and he or, presumably ideally, she just does not show up. The world is so unjust! I thought that this was clear evidence of wishful thinking on behalf of this HR person. I wonder how many qualified candidates never made it past the initial HR screen, for utterly bogus reasons. As I quite enjoyed the role of being a harsh inquirer, I had to explore why she thought they have such a hard time finding a suitable candidate as it seemed a bit unlikely that absolutely nobody they spoke to in half a year would be a good fit, assuming such a person is out there. I even mused what the root cause may be and offered to help her out of her quandary. I said, “Well, let us assume the position of the ideal candidate. What exactly is it about your company that is so unique that it cannot be found anywhere else? Clearly, you have a really high bar but there obviously is a give-and-take.” She looked at me, speechless. After about ten seconds she gave me some lame HR answer that seemed to not even convince herself.
A little later I wished her good luck with finding a candidate who meets all criteria and ended the conversation with the usual politeness phrases. Unsurprisingly, they thanked me for my time the next day and informed me that they will not proceed with my application, albeit they had approached me first so I had technically not even applied to this role. Of course, this was the kind of position I do not care that much about anyway. As I had not taken any MPH I did not bother to play along and just pushed back a little. It was obvious from the first few minutes onward that I am only going to waste my time. With MPH I would have found it very easy to play along. In this particular case this was not relevant. Nonetheless, the comparison pre-MPH vs MPH and now MPH vs no-MPH was quite revealing.
“The first call was with HR and it went about as well as I had imagined.”
By the time a company has an HR department, it’s too late.
I’d say there’s nothing wrong with doing a founder’s job as long as you get a founder’s pay, namely a large salary plus equity. I’m guessing these geniuses figured they could get someone like this for under six figures, though. That’s another thing I see plenty of.
But in this case, given the roles you listed (architect/developer/site reliability engineer/IT) come from at least three separate disciplines, yes, this is ridiculous. If anyone actually claims to meet all those requirements, your first thought should be that you’re dealing with a likely con artist. I wonder if the HR genius drew up this list herself, since it looks a lot like the lunatic lists of requirements women come up with for men before they’re willing to date them.
“However, if you give someone the instruction to check whether the candidate knows every skill mentioned on an arbitrary list you are going to lose a lot of candidates.”
I get maybe one interested reply per 50+ job applications. At this point I’m convinced these people don’t even read my resume, or quite possibly can’t. More likely, they just look at the race/gender/disability/veteran status self-identification section (which is of course supposed to be for federal record-keeping purposes only and to play no role whatsoever in hiring decisions) and see that I either refuse to self-identify or, if I don’t care enough to refuse, that I identify as the wrong kind of person.
Also typical is the inability to grasp that many technologies that have diverse names (purely for branding reasons!) are actually analogous or even nearly identical. Oh, you wrote your own C# compiler/interpreter but you don’t know Java, sorry, next. All these people understand is brands. They have no ability to judge what is behind those brands. That’s fine if you’re in a make-believe industry like public relations or fashion. Not so much in an engineering business where something either works or it doesn’t.
“I bluntly stated that the person they are looking for does not exist.”
Little wonder that software and web sites are slower, vastly more bloated, less functional, and less well designed than they were 30 years ago.
Tech companies aren’t selecting for people who can do the job, they’re selecting for people who can pass an HR screen. In a sane world, HR has one job – handle the regulatory overhead involved in hiring you, and make sure you’re not a felon. That candidates for a technical role can be disqualified by someone who would probably flunk algebra, let alone a university engineering course, is patently insane.
Given the role has gone unfilled for half a year, I’d ask why it even exists. If it were mission-critical, the company would clearly have gone under by now. Imagine if your company’s job was to refine oil or enforce nuclear plant safety or desalinate water or build infrastructure or haul garbage, and you decided to just not do it for six months because you couldn’t even figure out how to identify suitable candidates! Obviously these are not serious people.
Of course, another part of the problem is that the lawyers have made it impossible to fire bad hires (especially the ones made for diversity reasons,) so employers are terrified of actually hiring anyone. I imagine this problem is even worse in Europe than the US.
Even if you have candidates screened by people who are actually in the role, there’s another problem that as far as I can tell goes utterly unrecognized – the ability to do any complex job is a completely separate skillset from determining whether another person is good at that same job. I’ve had hours of training in conducting interviews, and I’d still hesitate to trust myself to do it.
In my case, the most valuable traits I bring to any job don’t surface well in interviews (not surprisingly, because it’s a totally artificial environment.) When I bring them up myself, the interviewer tunes it out because it’s not in the script. They’re much more interested in seeing me do Comp Sci 101 problems. As for drilling into anything in my resume? Fuhgeddabboudit.
“Unsurprisingly, they thanked me for my time the next day and informed me that they will not proceed with my application”
This is what happens to a feminized company, industry, or country. They’d rather let the whole thing crash and burn than be kept afloat by men who might slip and introduce the slightest sliver of reality into their make-believe bubble, which would hurt their feelings. Once they’re in the unemployment line they’ll no doubt blame sexism, misogyny, climate change, slavery, or whatever, until they land their next overpaid do-worse-than-nothing gig.
Your point that technical candidates can be disqualified by someone unlikely to pass Algebra is quite relevant. The power of HR in companies is truly mindboggling. It was a great victory for the left to turn the staid ‘personnel’ department into HR, greatly expanding its powers and responsibilities. It is a great example of the march through the institutions. More importantly, once you control HR, you control the future of the company or, more correctly, the few remaining viable years of a company as a heavily political bias in recruitment leads to disregarding professional and academic merit. HR decides which people the hiring manager gets to interact with and if they think that the company needs a bit more diversity then the white man is out of luck. I should also add that I have met some very competent recruiters, often men, who seemed to understand quite well what skills the company needs.
Only companies who enjoy an unassailable monopoly seem to be able to withstand the corrosive impact of HR. However, even such companies are not invulnerable, in particular if they interact with the real world. Boeing is a great example. Disney has also suffered dearly. I recently came across a video on Disney merchandise, in particular Star Wars figures, piling up in the discount bin. In contrast, if you sell a free product, such as access to a social network in exchange for personal data, then performance apparently needs to degrade quite significantly before customers begin leaving in droves.
“When I listened to the role expectations, I had the impression that they wanted to hire one person to essentially do the job of at least two to three people.”
So, you basically had a taste of what job interviews in third-world countries often are. Congratulations.
The female interviewer did not hail from the first world. She had a Spanish accent but I did not bother to inquire whether she was from Europe or South America. Besides, such questions are seen as no longer being politically correct anyway.
I would lean Spaniard, but yeah, she could’ve been LatAm. A tour guide I met in Prague was a (hot) Chilean girl, after all, and the jobs in both my and your examples have a strong female element.
I know what I’m going to say now will sound incredibly biased, but we do make better immigrants in general than other third-worlders. The thing in the US is that, frankly, there are gangs of every persuasion imaginable there. Yes, Mexicans are the most prevalent, and there were also the Salvadorans, the Colombians (the further we get from the US borders, the fewer criminals get exported, at least from LatAm: there are certainly no significant Argentinian gangs there), etc. But the most famous gangsters used to be Italians, and there are also Asian gangs; almost no ethnicity gets spared.
“Besides, such questions are seen as no longer being politically correct anyway.”
In Europe, when you’re the one being interviewed, are you required to put down your race on the application? If so, I’m wondering if it’d be a worthwhile experiment to put yourself down as a brotha and fein ignorance, like it was a mistake. Maybe your call back rate would go up. Somebody’s had to have done this before.
Some companies indeed do this. I normally pick “decline to answer”. My assumption is that if I picked “white/Caucasian”, I would shoot myself in the foot. Now I also wonder what a slip of the mouse would result in. It is certainly worth trying.
I also have an impression that Latin Americans are hard working people in the US. My coworkers are usually very strong physically.
Latin men are also rather masculine as well.
@Sleazy,
This proves you are an impeccably honest person!
@Sleazy,
Do you still sit meditating?
It seems that when you were young, you meditated regularly and this gave astute mental clarity.
But do you think, currently, it does not work for you anymore? Perhaps due to the aging of the brain and changes in neurotransmitters?
Do you spend time on the net a lot?
I still mediate, basically every day. Aging of the brain is overrated. There is obviously some cognitive decline as you age, but you can remain pretty sharp throughout your life. I wish there was more research on this, but one fascinating paper on this subject I came across years ago argued that cognitive decline is inversely correlated with IQ, i.e. the more intelligent you are, the less you will cognitively decline as you age. Thus, the low-IQ crowd ends up being really stupid in old age whereas people on the other end of the spectrum will remain far above the average. In fact, the effect of aging is so small that an IQ gap of about ten points or so never even gets closed if you remove age as a factor, i.e. a guy with an IQ of 120 at his physical peak will rank below someone who had an IQ 130 at his physical peak but is now 60 years older. I wish I had saved this document. Based on my own experience, I see little reason to doubt these observations. The g factor is one aspect, quite another is crystallized intelligence, which is one reason why there are some fields where people peak only in their 50s. All things considered, you probably want to be young and extremely intelligent, though.
What do you aim at with your second question? I obviously do own a smartphone and technically I am online 24/7. If you are asking about browsing the web mindlessly or doomscrolling then the answer is that I do not really engage in such activities. I would say that I am quite disciplined about my use of technology.
Ok, I see. That is really good and it motivates me to be more diligent in meditating.
I just thought you drop meditation and took medicine because meditation no longer worked for you.
Yeah, you have answered my intended question.
After reading the article I get the sense that the company gained a lot more insight from you than if you had just played along and ghosted them later. Whether it sinks in or not is another matter.