I don’t usually have sufficient motivation to post much on any social media platform. This is rare for me. I am putting this out in the world in part hoping for some validation, in part hoping it sparks some kind of social action to save some semblance of privacy and dignity in this modern world.
Warning: this is long.
I just wrote an email to a recruiter withdrawing my interest in pursuing a job (it’s a recruiter hired by the hiring company). I am a software engineer with decades of experience who has been unemployed for almost a year with almost no interviews. I’m hungry for paying work. Yet. I did this. Below is the email I wrote, and it is hopefully self explanatory.
I think my career might be over - especially if the kind of process I experienced is now the standard for hiring. I want nothing to do with it.
I wrote this after multiple days of trying to set up my system for the “assessment”. I ended up having to install Windows 11 (I’m a Linux guy) because the assessment environment simply didn’t work. I tried FireFox, disabled plugins, tried two versions of Chrome - neither would work. It apparently had to be the Google version.
I upgraded an old version of Win 10 (because Microsoft pretty much forced it). Got it to work on Firefox for Windows.
Twice, mid-way through the assessment, it reset itself to square one. I didn’t try a third time. This assessment software monitored my face and would raise an alarm if I looked away. It controlled my microphone. It required full access to every aspect of the browser and had me do an alt-tab partway through this “test” in order to ensure I wasn’t using any other software. Insulting. Invasive. My equipment. My home.
---- the email ----8<----
First, I appreciate your understanding and that you gave me what information you have on how this software works. Now, the hard part. My disappointment will show in the text, and it is not directed at you or your company.
I’m inclined to cease pursuing this. I feel insulted by the process in the first place, but went through it understanding that we, as job seekers, have to accept compromises we would not otherwise accept because having a job is a fundamental requirement to literally survive and provide for our children.
However, the more I’m expected to change my personal, owned equipment and software in an invasive fashion just so some stranger can have 100% surveillance on my activities in my home in order to be considered for a job interview, the more insulted I become.
Granted, I’m unusual. I’ve dedicated myself to protecting my electronic privacy by installing malware and advertisement blockers on my phones, computers, tablets. I use VPN. I built my own home NAS because I am uncomfortable with placing all my personal, financial, and health records into “the cloud” (and being charged for the privilege). I am teaching myself how to use AI by downloading and running models in my home lab because I don’t want to give out my privacy and income to strangers.
I stopped using Windows at home years ago because I could not stand the way it was dictating to me how to run my computer and constantly seeking to part me from my money with distracting advertisements while siphoning everything about me back to their servers to better market to me. Worse, it was forcing me to buy new hardware in order to simply run the system after upgrades.
Here I am, faced with a stark choice. Debase my values for the sake of the possibility of a job with a company that apparently doesn’t consider applicants worthy of dignity, or remain unemployed - possibly forced to exit the career I love if everybody is doing this - and potentially fall into poverty.
If they’re doing this before they even talk to me, it tells me that as an employee I will have at minimum this same level of surveillance. Knowing this in the back of my mind will burn me out in under six months.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I could live with myself if I chose the first option, so I respectfully withdraw myself from this process. I’m a professional. I expect to be treated like one. If there are companies who are serious about hiring a professional, I’m all in. Please engage me.
I feel this is the one of the after effects of AI is now a common distrust in anyone applying to a new role. With the rampant rise in cheating/faking one’s own skills with the utilization of AI comes with recruiters having to come up with a rather invasive way to ensure recruits aren’t utilizing AI during interviews to test real skills we’ve developed from our own experiences.
Instead of utilization, say: use Instead of utilizing, say: using
I am also a software developer. The interview process in our industry has become increasingly offensive over the last 30 years. That started out with high-prestige companies who provided exceptional pay and benefits. Some people were willing to put up with that, so they mostly got away with it. Now most companies assume they have all the power and can demand whatever they want from applicants.
Refusing to participate is perfectly legitimate. It may keep you from finding a job, at least in this industry, but that may be better than giving up your self-respect for basic survival. And there are still decent software companies to work for, although they are hard to find. Changing careers is also a viable option.
Our overall economy is so broken in favor of the super rich and their corporations that individuals really do have very little power. Organized actions, of various types, give us some counter-leverage. Collective bargaining, strikes, and political efforts to push for better regulations all have the potential to improve things, at least in the middle- to long-term.
We all need to keep the big picture in mind while we do what we need to get by individually.
this kind of disaffected ‘we’ll get to it later’ politicking is what got us here in the first place. sucks to be u, CA
If the company goes to those lengths to try to catch assessment cheaters, it’s not going to get better if you get hired. If they suspect you without having a reason, then they will always suspect you. You made the right choice.
Yeah, I’ve had this type of interview lately. Not for software though. You install what probably might as well be a rootkit on your machine. They monitor your eyes through webcam. The slightest detection of your eyes looking away is an instant fail. That’s the gist of the process now.
Unfortunately for most people, they aren’t technical enough to know what they’re getting themselves into. They just follow the instructions.
Nobody is going to read the mountains of terms and conditions of all the services required to jump through along the application process. People are just trying to get a job to they can eat tonight.
IMHO, the response is a bit wordy, but I agree with where you’re coming from. You should consider trying to work for yourself, it may be very rewarding for you.
You should consider trying to work for yourself
How do you even start this?
Yes, I do tend to over explain and it does annoy people, especially my son. I have a near pathological need to make sure others understand the why. I’m working on it.
Been looking into Stoicism lately, and not explaining yourself (to people who don’t care or can’t comprehend) is one of the tenents - not wasting precious energy.
If it’s worth anything, I appreciate the level of detail in your explanation. It makes you more human and allows me additional points to empathize. Also, if I were a hiring manager and had the background on your approach to technology, I’d be much more inclined to hire you.
The hiring company failed the interview. It happens, and IMO you’ve exercised good judgement here.
My personal suspicion is that this sort of inhumane, inhuman, hiring process filters for people who are either desperate for work, or who don’t see anything wrong with this sort of thing.
I totally agree. It’s a test of submission. I bet my life savings that job would have increasingly creeping amounts of unpaid work and extended working hours, with the implicit threat that saying no means you’re fired.
You mean like my last job. Yes, it was the insulting treatment at my most recent employer that gave me an extra bit of self respect that pushed me to make that decision. The proverbial last straw.
As much as I generally agree with you on principles, you sound utterly insufferable
This is not what constructive criticism or dialogue looks like. You’re just insulting OP and offering nothing else.
I was afraid that might be the collective response. Fortunately, that was not the case.
I am saddened so many had similar experiences, but glad I am not alone in my disgust and dismay at the state of affairs.
What in my writing gave you that sense? Perhaps I can improve my communication for the future.
For me it was that all you did in your email was talk about how you didn’t want to compromise your ideals. All that stuff your told us about how hard you tried, how much you compromised, how many times you were blocked then reset aren’t there. Those are the things that make your experience actually meaningful and relatable.
It would have been a lot better to send your preamble and wrap up with, “if you are able to provide a functional setup with the required environment for me to continue my application, I am happy to continue, otherwise I am afraid I must withdraw.”
Aha, okay. It would have been redundant to put that in there since we had just gone through that process together. I’d also mentioned my reservations in earlier emails.
Thanks for explaining it, it didn’t occur to me. You are right though about alternatives. He’d actually offered to seek another way, but I was emotionally unable to accept that at the time due to all the effort already sunk. For me it was cutting my losses, and I might have done myself a disservice there.
Valid
I experienced a similar thing a few years ago, applying for a management position with a nonprofit. (A nonprofit!)
My reply …
Hi $PERSON,
Your application was strong and we’re really pleased to advise you that you’ve progressed to the next stage.
Great! Thanks for getting back to me so quickly.
We’d like you to answer a few quick questions using our online video platform, SparkHire. This will help us get to know more about you and what skills and experience you can bring to the role, the team and $NONPROFIT.
…
A set of questions will appear on the screen (some filmed, others just text) and you’ll have the opportunity to create video recordings of your answers, within a specified time limit. You can review and re-record your answers as many times as you need.
I’d love to catch up either face to face, in a video chat, or even a phone call to discuss how I could use my skills and experience to help out the $NONPROFIT team. To be honest though I’m not at all keen on recording a one-way video interview.
I do have several concerns with SparkHire (no data retention policy that I could find; and enhanced privacy protection for EU customers only; email instructions years old that referenced Flash).
But my main concern is that the idea of one-sided video interview feels … well, one-sided and dehumanising. To be honest it’s quite the opposite of what I’d have expected from the employee experience of an organisation like $NONPROFIT.
Even if I were placed in the role, I’d be reluctant to refer friends if they were also required to participate in a one-sided video interview.
Please drop me an email at $EMAIL or give me a call on $PHONE if you’d like to chat further, either virtually or in person.
This was a spot on response. Tells em you are in charge of your own morals while still keeping the door open. A wise recruiter would see the error of their ways and apologize and skip the one sided bullshit.
So you won’t be getting that job lol
No, though they did see if they could bend the process for me. Turns out not.
Keeping doors open is important. I once had a great contracting gig as an exec EM with an org that had more or less fired me (declined to renew my contract while keeping the rest of the team) some years ago. Second time around they wanted my approach, first time I stepped on toes.
Unless the reason is something truly egregious, don’t burn bridges on your way out, even if you’ve had a bad time. Organisations change as their management changes, and you never know where you’ll be in a decade’s time.
Very nice reply, and I’m rather stunned a nonprofit did this… unless it’s one of those giant, well funded ones like NFL or Red Cross.
You set and communicated a healthy boundary. I think your email clearly communicates your reasoning and expectations and hopefully the recruiter passes it along to the company itself so they can receive the feedback, or at the very least uses it to tailor what sort of opportunities they send your way.
Playing devil’s advocate: The reason companies feel the need to put these systems in place is most likely because many candidates cheat using chatbots.
In my company, until very recently, engineers were running the first and second stages of interviews (right after CV vetting) and I’ve heard many times in the last couple of years that my colleagues suspected candidates of using LLMs. There would be unnatural pauses, typing after every asked question etc.
Granted, I don’t think any have slipped through to being hired, as it’s still pretty obvious, but I can understand why companies may want to put safeguards in place.
Are they going too far here? Absolutely.
For us, we actually sit with the candidate in a pair-programming kind of setup to gauge their vibes, way of thinking and confidence as they solve coding problems that closely match what they would do on the job. That usually eliminates “seniors” that haven’t coded for 5 years or that got there by nepotism or sheer passage of time.
Then the solution is to do an on site Interview, not to ask a candidate which they’ll later reject to install spyware on their personal computer.
Many of our candidates are from abroad, and we pay their VISAs and help them move here if they are hired.
You can offer in-person as an option, but I’m not sure most of our applicants would want to travel hours for an interview. Especially if there is more than one stage with deliberation needed in between.
Most of our applicants seem to be people currently in employment but who don’t like their job. They are likely doing interviews on the sly during work hours and likely don’t want to take a full day off or signal to their employer they are looking for a job.
All this to say I doubt forcing employees to do in-person interviews is a good option for most people, but I do agree it should be an option the interviewee can ask for.
Fair enough, but in that case please don’t ask them to install spyware on their personal computer. A video call for a face to face interview is OK, but what this post described is understandably infuriating.
Most serious tech companies have just straight-up stopped all remote interviews. It’s simply too fraught with cheating, fake people, and foreign operatives. Interviews are in person and include hand-written code, because we’re back to high school trust issues baybeeeeee
We let people use chatbots in our technical interview and don’t even mark down for it, since they’re a tool that exists.
I have yet to see a candidate who uses chatbots be anywhere near as good at producing good solutions quickly as the ones who don’t.
Here’s the interesting thing. I found out any kind of computer use during an interview was “cheeting” during my prior job search. For years, I’d been taking notes during interviews, like names, key points about the job, answers to my questions. Somewhere along the way, that became a problem. I also used to search for things occasionally.
Silly me, I thought searching, researching, taking notes, etc., was part of the job and an indication of smart working. Now, we are expected to recall the smallest syntax detail from memory - On the spot, while being watched and timed, in a high stakes interaction.
This is less like someone looking for paid help for a business and more like a sadistic exercise in prisoner torture.
Now, imagine having ADHD and going through that.
Oh well that’s depressing. I last interviewed about 3 years ago and I guess it might well have changed overall. OTOH I get to run the interviews where I’m at now and I can assure you that ‘actually using your available resources’ would never be a problem :)
That’s a fair point. I think some of our interviewers have said that they don’t mind the candidate using a LLM, as long as they are up-front that they are doing so.
I’d say the kind of use is important. If they are using it as a form of advanced auto-complete, that’s fine. If they are using it uncritically, or to avoid thinking about the problem, I doubt I’d hire them.
We need engineers who can solve problems, not a salaried middle-man to an LLM.
I see jobs with interview requirements like this occasionally. I don’t bother with them. I doubt I even would have spent the time writing an email, except to convey briefly that the web page didn’t work.
I’m a professional. I expect to be treated like one. If there are companies who are serious about hiring a professional, I’m all in. Please engage me.
That’s really well said.
I remember being in the same situation a couple years ago in which I was accepted to an interview through a video chat web application hosted by the company.
To my horror, when I joined the meeting, it was not a video chat interview. It was a series of recorded clips of their HR person reading off questions, the clips pausing, and then a timer showing up on the screen noting “You have 15 seconds to answer”.
I was so put off by this that after the first question, I decided to spend the rest of the time I was being recorded explaining to them under no uncertainties that this was one of the most unprofessional interview processes I had ever engaged in, and that they had made it clear that they did not value my time whatsoever, so I had no reason to reciprocate.
“Speak your answer. You have 15 seconds to comply.”
Unfortunately I’m inclined to believe this is on purpose to filter out people with self-respect such as yourself.
It’s not just a cost-saving thing (though I’m sure that’s also a factor), it’s a way to make sure the only people who go through with such interviews are those who are very desperate. Because people who are desperate are more willing to subject themselves to poorer work conditions.
Companies will only stop doing this when it actually stops working, which is unlikely given the massive inequality in our world today.
Way too clever. It’s probably just to cut costs, as per usual.
Yeah. I half expect that if I went to the next step, I’d be in an AI Zoom interview next.
I went through the exact same thing with Dyson back in ~2018 worst interview process I’ve ever experienced.
Why would you feel bad, the interview is a 2 way process. They are evaluating you but YOU are also evaluating them. It’s actually VERY costly to you too if you start working for the wrong company. If you realize after a week or a month that truly the culture, the tooling, etc basically anything but the pay does not match YOUR needs, whatever they may be, they you HAVE to pull out.
You can be polite about removing your application, as you were, but you should not feel bad. It is precisely WHY there are interview. Candidate think about it as only them being evaluated and that’s very wrong. As your title says clearly it is about self respect but not just during the interview, the whole time. If you are not a match sure it does suck, for both, but that’s again better than a forced match that will bring both down over time.
Finally regarding your last part, I recommend you edit your post to put your precise skillset and experience there. Hopefully someone can refer you to the right place.
Instead of declining the role, you should have told them their assessment platform is so broken that it’s undoubtedly costing them good applicants, and that you’d be happy to make that your first project as a staff engineer.
What if the intent is to filter out people who won’t put up with this sort of shit? It might be working very well indeed from the perspective of the hiring managers.
It’s a product they use, not their own. If I were talking to the actual company rep, I might have given it a try.
Still they chose the platform and pay for it. They actively decided to use it.
I’ve worked in large corporations. Many times such decisions are made without knowing important gotchas. It’s often a result of sleazy marketing by vendors.
