The rise of never-ending job interviews

The last two jobs I applied for were like this. The first one had 8 interview rounds on 8 separate days. It was a remote company, and I was working in an office at the time, so I had to figure out 8 separate excuses for sneaking away from work for an hour to take video calls. It was ridiculous.

Yes and that's true of ACLs as well which I think underscores my point: Questions should be an opener to dialogue. A topic, not a conclusion.

Discussion of these whys and hows and whens is the most valuable part of an interview and will more accurately illustrate depth and breadth than any number of fixed questions.

I'd struggle to code a five-line program that'd compile in languages I've written tens of thousands of lines of code in, in Notepad, that'd actually compile & run on the first try. I might fail that in a language I was writing last week. I mean, I might manage it, but it'd be sheer luck. Decent chance I forget, in the moment and under pressure and without examples to crib off of, IDE support, or the ability to check the manual, the correct way to do comparisons for all types, even, or basic stuff like how to print to the console or what this language's sugar for a "for-each" is, or whether it has such sugar. Reading input? The right calls for file IO? Anything more complicated than that? Oh god, there's no way.

Luckily I never fucking ever have to do that in my actual job. If I did, I might well get good at it. Since I don't, I... don't. I also haven't gotten much better at driving semi trucks or framing a wall, in my over-a-decade career writing software. Go figure.

This is not the case at Amazon. They are known for PIPing engineers. They’re not shy about it.

Also all of these big tech companies can just not refresh your stock if they don’t want to bother with firing you, which effectively halves your compensation.

> Why is this objectionable? [to reduce an employee to "utility as a walking set of tech keywords"] > Why is it important to you that your employer view you as a person?

If what you mean is that it can be rewarding (intrinsically and extrinsically) to think about skill, craftsmanship, and other ways to make your labor a great value add, sure. Most of us benefit by thinking about that.

If you're really asking about why keywordification is a problem, well... keywordification of job roles indicates a way in which companies are quite possibly struggling to actually model the roles they're hiring for and identify what makes make an individual productive within them.

This happens on at least two levels:

1) Technological. Engineering decisions are sometimes "we have a specific problem, specific tech is the solution to our problem, therefore we need expertise in specific tech." In that case, the keywords regarding that tech are meaningful. But for non-trivial use cases, engineering problems are very, very rarely just that, they're commonly the aggregation of off-the-shelf + consideration of how to mix them with what tradeoffs + in-house custom solutions embedded in an organization attempting to understand and model its domain problems and fit/reshape all those solutions to those models. This is not exactly a keyword-driven process. Keywords represent the shallow end of the pool.

2) Human. While labor clearly is something bought and sold on the market, even from a point of view of a value system which is OK thinking of humans primarily as industrial inputs, it turns out that's a significantly leaky abstraction and most of us have all kinds of "compiler flags" or other inputs of our own that make us more or less productive. Some might consider this to be too warm and fuzzy; they might find it comforting that it can be approached from as a-humane and manipulative point of view as one might approach tweaking a database to get it to perform better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HkFztAgK-8U

As for whether it's OK to think of humans primarily as inputs to any process on a moral level... like Terry Pratchett's character Granny Weatherwax said “Sin, young man, is when you treat people like things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.” What are the consequences when social institutions consideration human beings primarily as inputs to institutional purposes? Generally, individual life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness become valued less, and individual suffering is more freely disregarded. Not super desirable under my value system. YMMV.