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HR: What technology is your team using?

[several intervening information-destroying communication hops later]

Team: Well, it’s a C# project, but what we really need is…

[back through the lossy hops]

HR: Great! This is a mid-level position, so we’ll say “3-5 years of C# experience.” Now to search the web for some random C# quiz we can use for screening!

Job “requirements” aren’t really requirements at all; they’re corporate Mad Libs.

2/

That’s how you end up with job postings like the one that made the rounds on social media a while back that required “5+ years of Swift experience”…one year after Swift was released.

In most cases, of course, those hard requirements on years and tools knowledge aren’t even what the team is looking for in a candidate. They’re looking for •somebody they want on their team•.

3/

Another anecdote I heard: a team kept getting terribly unqualified candidates when they reached the technical interview phase, and couldn’t understand why. They finally looked up and started their own interview process, and found that HR had walled the position with some random tech screening quiz they found online…that had •the wrong answers•. HR was actively screening out candidates with basic knowledge!

4/

What’s the moral of this story?

(1) The hiring process is mostly not about you. That sounds weird, but it’s true.

(2) As an applicant, your job is to jump through nonsensical hoops — or walk around them, if you can — until you can reach the point where you’re having a real conversation with somebody who’s actually involved with the position in question.

(2a) That often means straight-up ignoring clearly stated job requirements.

5/

Let’s sit with 2a for a moment. Getting a job often involves ignoring the stated job requirements.

Who does that benefit? Who does it harm?

6/

We educators call stuff like this “hidden curriculum:” secret knowledge that’s never stated explicitly, but people who are already in-group / acculturated / privileged acquire through ambient experience and/or interpersonal networks.

In my experience, these stated-job-requirements-that-aren’t-really-requirements cause exactly, exactly the disproportionate harm you’d expect: they reward privileged identities and backgrounds. This isn’t hypothetical. I’ve seen it up close, with real people.

7/

I shudder to think how LLMs are going to multiply the harm of everything upthread.

HR departments are already grabbing unvetted crap from web searches to fill out the job descriptions nobody’s given them enough info to create properly. Half of what I wrote upthread is •already• the sort of bullshit that LLMs do: generating formally appropriate text without comprehension of the underlying idea. Now that’s automatable.

8/

Moral: HR is awful and totally the problem, right?

No. I agree with what @grimalkina said here:
https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112417767538483847

Teams need to take responsibility for vetting their own hiring processes.

Managers and orgs need to make it •possible• for teams to vet their own hiring processes.

And…

9/

And, just as @grimalkina says here in the replies, companies need to finally get serious about process and methods in hiring.

Hiring people is delicate social science. You can’t slap it together out of prefab parts and expect it just work.

https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/112417774017693587

(NB: Cat mentions recruiters, which can mean hiring org or 3rd parties. To be clear, I’m talking about companies themselves. Good 3rd-party recruiters are sometimes the ones picking up the slack here. Sometimes.)

10/

I think there’s a sense out there that at some level, companies must be fundamentally competent or they’d have gone out of business, whatever they’re doing must make some kind of sense, and therefore it’s up to job applicants to please •them•, to meet •their• standards.

It takes a decade or two in industry to understand how barely-functional more human orgs are, how much of the world runs on humans scrambling to mop up the slop our own processes create.

11/

Re that last sentence:
https://how.complexsystems.fail

“Complex systems contain changing mixtures of failures latent within them.”
“Complex systems run as broken systems.”
“Catastrophe is always just around the corner.”
“Human operators have dual roles: as producers & as defenders against failure.”

•That• is the reality every one of us is walking into as either a job applicant or a hiring org. As a human in the world.

12/

That sense that it’s the job applicant’s job to please the infallible company is especially keen with students. Trained their whole lives to seek out gold stars, students are always looking for how to get the next A — and feel lost walking into a world where that’s not how it works anymore, where the only people handing out gold stars are people looking to manipulate you.

13/

I’ve seen companies abuse that desire to please. Google in particular recruited on campus throughout the 2010s with the same attitude as the cocky high schooler whose dating strategy is to act like nobody is good enough for them. (That parallel was close enough to make me deeply uncomfortable.) Google was seen among students as the gold star that proved that you’re one of the smart ones, that you’ll make it.

Another reason those layoffs did so much psychological damage.

14/

@inthehands I'm building teams of junior programmers. It actually makes me quite happy that the HR processes are so terrible, because that means there is a huge gap on the market for me. All I need to do is to make sense. Of course I would still need to have connections, because nobody cares about results if they are friends with the CEO, but at least I'd be able to select and train my students better, and make them more efficient, and then I'd have hands full of people who can do stuff well.

@inthehands see, because we never felt that desire to seek out a gold star

because teachers didn't view us as human (we were a visibly autistic kid), so they made it very clear that good grades were simply unavailable to us no matter how far ahead of the class we were in knowledge terms

@inthehands so we never connected with the artificial reward system. it never got substitute for the real incentives that come from the heart, curiosity for its own sake.

@inthehands it made things a LOT harder for us in the short term

how could it not? the entire world is social systems. to be entirely outside them, yet not die, is .. absurd

@inthehands since we did survive, since we did walk through the desert of the human soul and come back out of it, we view it as an obligation to help other people learn from that experience

these bullshit artificial rewards - whether it's grades or money - are NOT here to help you. they never were.

@inthehands this is one of those truths that applies across many areas of life

in the context of a job search, it means: don't set your self-worth based on your job title. you have inherent worth, which can never be taken away from you. never, ever let some bullshit set of HR requirements make you believe otherwise.

@ireneista
I’m happy you were able to reach that destination, and sorry for the pain that took you there.

I had the extraordinary fortune of an opposite experience: my elementary school had no grades; we just revised things until they were good, moving through the work at our own individual paces. That vision of better education carried me through everything after, up to and including the present day.

@inthehands oh that's really lovely to hear. we've heard of such schools, but never met someone who's been through them before.

@inthehands and thank you for the kind words. the meaning of our pain is that it teaches us how to help other people with theirs.

@ireneista
Common responses to pain: to shrink from ever feeling it again, to make others feel it too, or to prevent others from feeling in too. To find the third is a great blessing.

Yes, the school was extraordinary! I was fortunate beyond belief.