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I've an extremely talented developer friend. Like many, he's been out of work for some time. He's been in the industry for decades and specializes in developing and deploying global tech infra. He's *good*.

After months of searching, getting ignored for jobs that he's almost certainly one of the best candidates for, he finally got an interview.

They're going to LeetCode him 🙁

This entry was edited (4 months ago)
in reply to Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)

Dan Sugalski
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Dan Sugalski
• •
these interviews are always a bit surreal. (And when you get rejected because you lack competence in an area you’re an actual expert in
 that’s always “fun”)
in reply to Dan Sugalski

Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
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@wordshaper The BBC once turned me down for a #Perl job because I "wasn't qualified in Perl." I mentioned that to the London Perl Mongers group and they *quickly* got that shit sorted out. Not everyone is lucky enough to have an accidental army at their back.
#perl @Dan Sugalski
in reply to Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)

T Alex Beamish
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T Alex Beamish
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@wordshaper I heard about one interviewer who would drill Perl developers on more and more arcane elements of the language until they were floundering.

I've never understood this approach. It seems akin to Ramsay yelling, red-faced, at people in his kitchen.

@Dan Sugalski
in reply to T Alex Beamish

Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
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@talexb @wordshaper Twice now I've overrun the time allotted for a Perl test. When challenged on it, I explained that I was correcting the errors in their tests 😀
@Dan Sugalski @T Alex Beamish
in reply to Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)

Dan Sugalski
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Dan Sugalski
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hah! Reminds me of the time I interviewed at Amazon, which was apparently a huge Perl shop. Failed the interview because my Perl OO skills just weren’t any good. (This was a couple of years into me running the Parrot project) Which, frankly, bullet dodged but it was kind of hilarious at the time.
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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
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@wordshaper For a Perl+UniData contracting gig, I refused to continue the interview process after the vice president of the company was disgusted that I couldn't answer his Java tech stack questions.

They kept begging me to come back because that particular set of skills is impossible to find.

@Dan Sugalski
in reply to Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)

Chris [list of emoji]
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Chris [list of emoji]
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@wordshaper

I once had an interviewer ask me all kinds of functional programming theory questions ("What is currying? What is a closure?") for a pure C++ job. I have no idea why. They weren't even *good* questions, just "have you memorized this term?" My best guess is that they guy *really* liked FP and I'd mentioned a few FP-related things on my résumé.

(It was one of those jobs that would have sucked but not quite enough to not take it, so it was kind of a relief.)

@Dan Sugalski
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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)
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@suetanvil @wordshaper My worst was getting rejected for *college classes*. I wanted to take one to brush up on my C and they told me "no, we don't allow them to most students because OOP is the future and C is obsolete."

This was back in the early 2000s, even. Ivory tower gonna ivory tower and all that.

@Dan Sugalski @Chris [list of emoji]
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