So, I’m currently on the hunt for a job. I was previously in a decently paid if incredibly monotonous QA job and while the firing sucked, I wasn’t particularly distraught over it: I went to work there mainly because there was a lot of downtime and it gave me time to do homework and prepare for tests, so I didn’t have to pick between school and work, and instead do school at work. Beyond that, it was fairly dead-end job and once I was approaching graduation I started looking for greener, brighter pastures. “Maybe a gaming job,” I thought to myself, “or just a regular backend gig. I’m sure I can find some sort of junior position to slot into in no time at all.”

That was about four months ago and now my standards are somewhere along the Mariana Trench.

I want HR teams across the country to understand that if you mark a job as entry level, I should be able to… enter the market using that job. That’s why it’s entry level - it’s at the level of entry. Instead, I get to read such exciting sentences as “Entry-level junior position, 2 years of work experience required.” It’s often not as ambiguous as that either, it’s extremely specific - 2 years of React in a work environment, 1 year of [an extremely specific python library that came out 6 months ago], 3 years of CSS databasing, whatever they think sounds good. It’s unreasonable, and they know it too: I have some older friends who work with hiring teams and they flat out admitted they expect people not to fit their required specifications, which raises the question…

Why make them required??

Just say “I would like this” or “would give an advantage”. Why just bullshit on the application? It gives people even more incentive to bullshit you back, because you’re projecting an atmosphere of “we don’t expect you to be honest. Lie to me.”

But that’s fine, right? I mean it’s not fine, but atleast it’s as difficult to bypass as a sign politely asking you not to step on the grass when you proceed to take a shortcut through the meadow. If it were just that, it’d be one thing, but if you actually manage to get a call back out of the thousands of applicants you are then expected to start doing cartwheels for the HR Team’s entertainment!

I applied for a job in a startup, and I got sent an email saying “hey, we liked your CV! please watch this 50 minute long pitch video to see if you like our offering aswell.” I am not kidding; actual 50 minute investor pitch video. (I skimmed through it.) Once that was done and I sent back the email of “yeah, I’m interested, I’d like to continue the process,” I got back another email saying “oh, actually your CV is underwhelming, we don’t want you.”

So. So why did. Why did you tell me that. Why did you tell me to waste an hour of my life on an investor pitch.

I talked to people who’ve been working in hiring and in tech for a while now, and clawed out a method. This is the actual method they’ve told me with full sincerity I need to apply to try and get a job: if I find a job offer I like, I need to now crawl through the job offer to find the name of the person who posted it, go to their linkedin account, find someone else who works in the same company, ask them to pass my CV to the original person who’s hiring, and then proceed to sit on both of my thumbs anxiously waiting to inevitably receive another email containing the word “Unfortunately”. I need to highlight my Github, my Leetcode, my LinkedIn, probably my fuckin’ Tinder at this point, and mine through all of those sites daily just for the privilege of being personally told to bugger off by an actual human instead of an email.¹ Apparently that’s just what you’re expected to do nowadays.

My standards have lowered significantly in the past few months, as you may imagine. I started wanting a tech job around gaming (high standards, I know), then just a job in gaming, then a backend job anywhere, then any programming job, then a qa engineer job, and now I’m at the level of “just give me money and I’ll stop whining.” I’ve decided I’ll just work on games in my free time and that’ll be my daily satisfaction. Evidently I won’t be able to find a decent job for the next god knows how long.