I saw this story going viral: Why Tech Job Interviews Became Such a Nightmare. Getting hired for tech jobs is more competitive and difficult than ever before, with job seekers having to clear increasingly high hurdles:
John Moore, a technical curriculum developer and instructional designer, wrote in to say that it’s not just software engineers or programmers who are facing days-long homework assignments for job interviews. “These ‘prompts,’ as they are euphemistically called, are no joke—they are like work projects. It’s like being on American Idol trying to land a job in the tech industry in 2024.”
Same for the epidemic of ‘ghosting‘ in regard to job applications or interviews, in which the applicant is ghosted instead of formally rejected (e.g. an email, letter, call or other correspondence). It’s out of control now, as many people on Reddit and elsewhere can attest.
In agreement with Richard Hanania, the threat of DEI seems somewhat overblown. Companies seem to be more demanding than ever in the hiring process in terms of filtering for competence and other factors unrelated to race or gender.
Or impersonal in the firing process, in which the decision making process or directive is increasingly divorced from the individuals affected. Examples include being locked out of a login screen, fired via email, as well as the dehumanizing process of being escorted of out of the office by security as if you’re a violent criminal being led out of a courtroom in chains, and personal effects packed in boxes and shipped at a later date.
Despite DEI, companies have more pre-employment screening then ever before, including but not limited to:
…personality inventories, background checks, automated resume filtering, drug tests, private data brokers, Wonderlic, credentialism, etc. These did not exist 30 years ago or were more limited and tend to hurt less intelligent applicants. Background checks, which can be done automated at scale thanks to technology, are an indirect IQ filter. Employers today have access to huge troves of information that employers of decades ago could have never conceived of. Instead of just a name on a resume, it’s possible to create an entire profile of the applicant based on social media and other information.
Ghosting is one way to expedite this process by filtering those who fall short while mitigating legal risk by making the process as impersonal as possible. The irony is that wokeness and DEI has the effect of making things more objective, impersonal, and standardized, as opposed to subjective.
DEI is a useful smokescreen or deflection for companies to get away with being more ruthless or dispassionate everywhere else. They can hire their handful of token POC for the brochure or compliance reasons, but otherwise it’s business as usual.
Companies rarely ‘hate’ things like regulation; what the Right assumes is bad, is a mixed bag or even a blessing depending on how you look at it or who benefits. A common example is how regulation disproportionately hurts small businesses, compared to big ones who have lobbyists.