I am unemployed again. I could go into details as to “why”, but I think I can summarize it with two words: Startup Bullshit.
Because I am yet again unemployed, I have been forced wading through the terrible job market once more, wading through pages of LinkedIn, now filled with low-effort AI-generated inspiration porn in combination with low-effort AI-generated political memes by a bunch of chucklefucks trying to become “thought leaders”. It’s miserable, but I have to do it because I’ve gotten about a dozen interviews because of that horrible site.
Being stuck in the interview loop awakens strange bits of human psychology. When you are in “interview mode”, you are, almost by definition, in a mindset of having to “sell yourself”. You have to try and explain why you are the best fit for this job, over the thousand other people, and more importantly, you have to do it convincingly, so you have to try and force yourself to think it’s true.
The thing that bothers me the most now, though, is the increasing tendency of ghosting candidates.
I had a series of five interviews with a big corporation. I don’t want to say their name, so let’s just say it’s something like “Inaccessible Bowel Movement”. Instead of giving me any updates, my application has been “pending” for three months. I have emailed the hiring manager, I’ve emailed the recruiter, I’ve stalked people on LinkedIn, and I have gotten no response.
I understand that they can’t give me a detailed and elaborate rejection letter for legal reasons, but how fucking hard is it to send a rejection letter? Just a boring “we regret to inform you…” letter from a noreply email address? Is that really so hard? Apparently so.
I have pretty negative opinions of cowards. People can justify pretty reprehensible things to themselves because of cowardice. No one likes delivering bad news, no one wants to tell someone something that they know they won’t like, but people who aren’t cowards will grow the fuck up and do it anyway. I guess I shouldn’t expect bravery from a corporation.
Companies (particularly large companies) are controlled by cowards who spend nearly every waking second trying to convince everyone they’re not. What a lovely world we live in.