I had an interview yesterday with the CEO of a startup going into Series A for the position of Principal Developer, remote. I've only ever heard of 'tech-bros', but I was unfortunate to meet one in-person. It went something like this:

CEO-bro: Good morning.
Me: Morning.
CEO-bro: It says here on your resume you live in X. That place is a shithole, and I have to look down on you because of that, bro. LoL.
Me: ......
(40 minutes of self-promotion pass)
CEO-bro: Anyway, we don't pay high salaries but offer bonuses for high performing staff instead. I'll ask HR to send you an offer.
Me: Let me think about it.
CEO-bro: One question bro. You have siblings?
Me: One.
CEO-bro: Parents still alive?
Me: No...what?!
CEO-bro: Yeah, me too. People like us don't let anything get in the way.

I wrote them an email this morning withdrawing my application 🤦🏽‍♂️

The most disappointing (not so sure about upsetting) rejection was from none other than Google.

I was ecstatic when Google respond to my application by inviting me to an interview. If I recall rightly I had two pre-interview screenings, two technical interviews, and about four interviews with people. The people were great and the HR person I was dealing with was open that the feedback was all good.

And then the rejection came! I called the HR guy and asked what happened. He said there’s a central group somewhere who approve all hiring and they decided I hadn’t worked for a “big enough” company in the past.

Yet - my potential colleagues and manager thought I could do the job, I passed the Google-scale technical tests … and then some faceless person somewhere says “meh” and that’s that.

It’s not like they didn’t have my resume that whole time, or the opportunity to ask any questions they wanted !

So that sucked.

Interviewer: We keep having devs take off for other opportunities after a short period of time. We need someone loyal who will be sticking around for the long haul. Oh wait, you only have one dev company you’ve worked for on your resume? Yeah that’s not good, we only hire devs who have worked for lots and lots of companies.

Dev: …

Worst fight I've had with a co-worker?

Had my share of 'disagreements', but one that seemed like it could have gone to blows was a developer, 'T', that tried to man-splain me how ADO.Net worked with SQLServer.

<T walks into our work area>
T: "Your solution is going to cause a lot of problems in SQLServer"
Me: "No, its not, your solution is worse. For performance, its better to use ADO.Net connection pooling."
T: "NO! Every single transaction is atomic! SQLServer will prioritize the operation thread, making the whole transaction faster than what you're trying to do."
<T goes on and on about threads, made up nonsense about priority queues, on and on>
Me: "No it won't, unless you change something in the connection string, ADO.Net will utilize connection pooling and use the same SPID, even if you explicitly call Close() on the connection. You are just wasting code thinking that works."

T walks over, stands over me (he's about 6.5", 300+ pounds), maybe 6 inches away

T: "I've been doing .net development for over 10 years. I know what I'm doing!"

I turn my chair to face him, look up, cross my arms.

Me: "I know I'm kinda new to this, but let me show you something ..."

<I threw together a C# console app, simple connect, get some data, close the connection>

Me: "I'll fire up SQLProfiler and we can see the actual connection SPID and when sql server closes the SPID....see....the connection to SQLServer is still has an active SPID after I called Close. When I exit the application, SQLServer will drop the SPD....tada...see?"
T: "Wha...what is that...SQLProfiler? Is that some kind of hacking tool? DBAs should know about that!"
Me: "It's part of the SQLServer client tools, its on everyone's machine, including yours."
T: "Doesn't prove a damn thing! I'm going to do my own experiment and prove my solution works."
Me: "Look forward to seeing what you come up with ... and you haven't been doing .net for 10 years. I was part of the team that reviewed your resume when you were hired. You're going to have to try that on someone else."

About 10 seconds later I hear him from across the room slam his keyboard on his desk.

100% sure he would have kicked my ass, but that day I let him know his bully tactics worked on some, but wouldn't work on me.

So for everyone looking for a job, that keeps getting rejection or crickets I'll give you the following tip.

Most of the first level screen of resumes are done by automated machines that are basically just doing keyword matching. So if you want your resume to get through more of these automated scanners, what you do is create a second page on your resume and cram it with every keyword, and buzzword you can thinking of, like "10 years react experience." "20 years java architect", "AR/VR 5 years", "15 years mobile", etc ,etc.

Then select the text and change it to white. No human being will see it, but the automated scanners will and rocket you to the top of the list.

Your welcome. Now help me get my penguin!

I should put "Have 3 years of meetings experience" in my resume.

I fucking got scammed.

Scenario 1: Had literally no experience in B2C, no experience in experimentation, 0% fitment.

Verdict: got hired in just one round in a top domestic brand which is a profit making startup.

Scenario 2: A friend from ex-org got referred in a global brand for an international location. Hadn't interviewed for 4+ years. Created his resume in 15 minutes, got shortlisted, screened, interviewed, and hired in less than 2 weeks.
(This guy is a good friend I am incredibly happy for him and that he scored the gig and in now way I wish bad for his outcome).

Scenario 3: I also got a strong refferal for the same brand and location. I have been interviewing for past 6 months, resume is super polished where companies like FAANG spoke to me.
Got rejected in shortlisting. The referral guy got me in the pool because it was his team
In screening round, I was a good fit, answered everything well. Yes, I wasn't concise as much (and that's the feedback I kept getting and I was working on it).
Verdict: rejected. They didn't ask me relevant questions and rejected me on the basis of not having the required experience.

Seems like the hiring manager didn't want me to clear so came up with reasons.

And now it feels that, if the HM wants you, they'll hire you irrespective of anything and if they don't they'll kick you out for lamest of the reason.

My life is split in two part, the first three decades were surely shit and this was my last chance of making sure the next three are worth remembering on the death bed.

I failed. Miserably. For the factors outside of my control. Not that I haven't failed in past. Not that I didn't try again.

But man, I am doing persisting. The game is rigged. One cannot win without extreme luck.

Millions of dreams shattered. A shitty day, is now a shitty life.

Being born in third nation is a fucking curse.

Dear companies.

Please don't read resume on holidays.
It make me doubt work environment.

First time committing a ticket is scary… I can’t stop thinking how my colleagues and tech lead gonna look at my code and question me if I lied on my resume…

Fucking A.I. resume filter bots.

As if tech interviews weren't hard enough, I have to fill my resume with keywords to get past a bot! Every damn application and cover letter has to be unique.

And when I get past a bot, a hiring manager replies with "Sorry, you seem to have more experience with Typescript than JavaScript, and we can't take that risk."

It's the same.damn.language.

Yes, I spend my spare time with C and Python. Why does that say "unsuitable candidate" instead of "versatile"??!!

$#*%!?&@ tech industry.

Take your "Good luck with your future endeavors" and stuff it up your ass.

I mistyped graduate year in my resume.......

Recruiter reaches out to me, he says he saw my LinkedIn and thinks I'd be a great fit.

I say ok and send my resume.

He gets me a phone screen. I do it, I think I do a pretty good job. (I'm able to answer all the questions well, I think I'm onto the coding interview for sure.)

A couple days later I get a generic rejection email.

I'm not sure what happened. They had my resume, I know I did well on the technical questions (I do that kind of thing for my current job all the time.)

No idea why I'm rejected. If it was something about my experience, they could have seen that from my resume. If it was something from my phone screen, I have no idea what it could have been.

Just wanted to rant >:[

*sighs heavily, utters a few profanities, starts updating resume*

This one is on me. I thought I had vetted this place well and asked the right probing questions during the interview, the core product is very cool but the company is too functionally immature.

it feels like Im in a relationship with someone who is really nice, very attractive and clearly very book-smart but has absolutely zero emotional intelligence and even less of a clue in general about what they actually want and need from the relationship. And to that I say:

“…yeah nah.”

Government re-employment resume wizard: "Enter your job title for this job experience."

Me: "Development Manager"

Wizard: "Did you mean Biofuels/Biodiesel Technology and Product Development Manager,
Training and Development Manager, or
Wind Energy Development Manager?"

Me: "Web Development Manager"

Wizard: "Website Administrator it is!"

Me: ... bruh ...

Recruiters who cold e-mail me get hard and specific questions before I ever give them a resume and phone number. Been doing this too long to just randomly hand a resume and contact info to whoever. YOU came to ME. Make it worth my while.

Just graduated in CS.
All jobs required experience in stuff I never seen/heard before (back then I didn’t know most job listings were copy pasted by people who knew less than me).
I felt so inadequate that I replied to a job offer as a seller as they asked only fluency in 2 foreign languages.

The company owner during the interview looked at me and told me I needed to look elsewhere, that mine was a good resume and then he dropped this:
“I can see you are a good guy, but for this job I need an asshole”

Back then it was very hard for me but now I understand

I feel very anxious when developers interviewing me asks
1. is nodejs single threaded or multithreaded ?
2. How does node handle requests
3. How do u manage concurrency
4. What is event emitter and callback.

Dude i have given you my resume, without knowing these things i could never do that ?

I feel the discussion must be based on concepts and general problem solving rather than focusing on one technology. Tech can always be learnt.

I've never been a frontend guy, I only could modify existing FE code and had some clues about how to write a hello-world using angular.

I've just refactored ~150 files in an Angular project, created half a dozen new modules and modularized lots of loose artefacts.

And after recompiling the project still works! And is now more maintainable!

I think I now can safely add "Angular" to my resume :)

P.S. Damn it, Angular is cool!!!

I am so 😢🤒😡 right now. I applied for a remote job, so they gave me an assessment and the language was c++. The funny thing is that c++ was not in my resume.
So I decided to explore c++. "I don't know what the fuss is, C++ is not so hard". It was very easy for me to grasp. It took me two days to understand it.
Then I did one of those online test and I scored 58/60.
Now I went back to take the assessment test on C++ but lo and behold the assessment is now on Rest API.
But Rest API is also not on my resume. They are not assessing me on my strengths like Java or kotlin or python or my my lesser strengths like C# or JavaScript.

I've actually already discussed this one on here I believe

I see this job looking for an android developer for Kotlin with UI experience with XD & Figma and experience with Firebase. I have all of these qualifications so I throw my resume into the fray within an 2 hours the recruiters contact me. they have an offer of 76,000 and I'm looking for junior so I'm like, eh whatever, I give them a copy of my resume and we hold discussion for a few days and then radio silence. I then see a job posting EXTREMELY similar but with a "different company" so I throw my resume in and again within 2 hours I get a call only THIS TIME ITS THE INTERNAL HR. She sounds interested we have a good conversation and sets me up for 96,000 and they schedule me for my first interview within the week. Interview goes great, next I meet with the CTO and we have a pretty good conversation, I'm expecting a technical exam but it doesn't happen instead they give me a case study. they send me requirements for an app API to use, architecture, and a week time span to do it. I finish the app with extra features within 6 days, in my understanding of MVVM and I was excited and happy about this app because its JUST NICE. a week goes by and I meet with the tech team. They grill me on my application, scalability, use cases, how would I advertise or place advertisement and I'm answering everything they love the UI (I included mockups I made on XD), they say everything sounds good everyone leaves with smiles they say they have to find out on what team to place me because they have multiple apps and that HR will be in contact with me in the next few days... A WEEK GOES BY and I randomly get the declination email that next Friday. When I asked for feedback they said it wasn't true MVVM. I was devastated until the next week when I was accepted for a higher paying job that didn't require me to move. After I accepted this job guess who calls? THE FIRST RECRUITER and for this long I was wondering if this was the same job due to the very similar job description so I ask "is your client XXXXXXX?" it was I just told him "I'm good" and hung up

HR declared day as holiday.
You Resume work next day and Git commits channel had 400 unread messages,
Silently telling at you like - hmm lazy lots get back to work!
To the hard workers You could’ve waited to push your commits the next day brother, we know you don’t like holidays like we do.

My job search is so frustrating. Despite having a job for two years and my Bachelor’s degree being almost complete (less than a year left) over half of the jobs give me an instant rejection because I don’t have a college degree (yet). The worst part is knowing that if I apply next year they would probably invite me to an interview.

I so much hyped myself in my new resume that I giggle each time I read the statements.

Is there a minimum amount of months I need to work for a company I'm fed up with so it doesn't look too bad on my resume when I finally quit?

I swear I keep thinking of quitting more and more every passing week.

How do I put "forced to cowtow to a product manager who doesn't know the product" into my resume?

As an addition, maybe add in "asked questions several times but was browbeat into conformity only to realize conformity was wrong" and "asked for support I never got, then thrown under the bus when I acted on my own on a deadline". If it helps matters, I have been in meetings I never should have been in and had to make decisions I never should have been in the position to make.

How many keywords are appropriate to put in a "skills" section on a resume?

Technically I've played with a lot of tech and stacks, and done tiny one offs, tutorials and independent projects but nothing that wasnt more than a day on any one of them.

Basically im fast at picking up a language and api and just rolling with it and getting something done, even without tutorials or tons of googling. Though I find myself constantly relying on manuals and reading apis.

Is this normal or should entry level be familiar with the api of something from the get go?

I see a lot of people say to game the system just to get your foot in the front door past the automated keyword filters and on to an interviews where the real requirements are listed.

But I'd rather not list under the skill section something I only used for all of ten hours in one or two sittings.

Also is it acceptable to list a "learning", "would like to learn/know more of", or "planned skill additions" section?

Also what do I add for extras? "Achievements"? "Volunteer work"? "Hobby projects?", "past times?"
Is any of this seen as necessary or well rounded?

If it is really just about the numbers I'll just go scrape junior and entry level positions and take their keywords and automatically fill out template resumes to automate applying.

Could even use SQLite to store the results and track progress lol.

I've never worked as a professional programmer, but it's the only thing I ever enjoyed doing for 12 hours a day.

Do write that you’re open to relocation in your resume?

Get back into regularly maintaining OS projects I used to actively maintain.
And resume the daily Disc Golf Strong exercises/stretches.

They offered a coding test alongside a resume. So I took it and did extremely well. Showcased my talents wonderfully. They ask for an interview (video call). We do the first half of the interview with an HR rep, goes great, a little over schedule. So we go into the second half with a little over twenty minutes left, and the hiring engineer wants me to write some code. He explains my task and sends me to a site where I can write and execute the code and he can watch. I had never written code with an audience before, and between that and my now 20 minute timer, I was a tangled up ball of nerves. Needless to say, I blew it, writing nothing of worth. He ends the call and I open my IDE. Working solution in 7 minutes. I got a rejection email two days later. Worst part? The company employed the author of one of my favorite "learn to code books". Would have been amazing to work with him. Really demotivating to say the least.

So I’m tryina put together a resume and I see a lot of dev résumé talking about increased revenue from x to y or user base from z to w.

What I don’t understand is while yes the user base did increase from z to w it wasn’t just you that caused it. The entire company was working hard at it to get there so why are u claiming that it was you. And apparently recruiters love these kpis that u make out of your ass.

Should I give in and just put them in there anyway?

I worked in a startup so my job didn’t really have a definition of what to be told to do and do I had to deal with building front end with vue to figuring out how to automate our deployment flow and it’s really hard to quantify my performance like sure 3000 tickets solved but u don’t know what portion of them were full blown features what portion was just a one liner.

thoughts on apply to the same place but different roles?

i imagine different people will see your resume? never been that far up on that side of it though. does it get consolidated and it's only one person? do multiple people notice?

Join and Smart Recruiters is really trying very hard to overtake Workday as the worst job application platform.

Join has the effrontery to send me reminder emails to fill in the same details already contained in the resume I uploaded. What the fuck is wrong with these people?

Be me, a ret***

Already 3 months in a new position. (check my previous rant)
Storm have passed for a while but another storm is brewing.

C levels are having disagreement with each other.
Caught in the crossfire as one the of C's hire.
Have some chit chats with both side of C, each telling different stories.

C#1 told me there was a demand from C#2 to force tech guys (not defined who or how many) to resigns.

C#2 told me there is no plan to close the whole tech team. But there's a distrust brewing in the tech team especially on the C#1

Be me, C#1 hire...
Me telling them IDK what their real intentions are but there's a high probability for my reputation to be tarnished on the job Market.

I've always had good review amongst peers and confident I did and do a satisfactory job for my previous employer.

Be me:
Resorted to flexing my connection to high ranking (think of C suites) reference who I've worked and have good relations with.
Connected them to my C#2.
Dunno how the C#2 thinks of me and what my value to C#2 are.

Don't know what the future hold for me.
Tried doing one interview but topics of my reputation comes up because of me jumping to executive position without having "Manager" ever in my resume.
Got a bit too defensive on that and it might eff up my chance to have a backup ready in case I urgently need to jump ship.

Depression and impostor syndrome hits like a truck every day.