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Mike Bybee • Edited

Include: Pretty much everything I'm doing (my own thang, complete architectural control), but with more money for my bank account and budget to hire others.

Exclude: All the crap I've put up with in my career and job searches and/or been forced to impose on others in a hiring/lead role, including but not limited to:

  • Preemptive reference checks (protect the people you depend on from overexposure, devs)
  • Lying recruiters
  • Hiring process black holes/silent rejection
  • Pointless, timed, on-the-spot coding challenges which tell you nothing about developer candidates
  • Requiring degrees, which also tell you nothing about devs
  • Video interviews
  • Micromanagers
  • Onsite anything except conferences, getaways, possibly prospective client meetings (and I'll probably just take them out for food/drinks instead like I do now, cheaper than an office and more relaxed decision making)
  • Failing to shield devs/sprint backlog from issues which belong in product backlog/icebox
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Marko Shiva

Greatly said all of the bad things related to job search as a developer.

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Helen Anderson

Well said! The hiring and interview process in our industry needs to be improved.

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Sergey Todyshev

I might add. Dear HR specialists, if are doing screening process and you did not read the code of a massive testing task you don't respect a software engineer. Please be respectful, read the code :)

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Lorraine Lee

I'm not very put off by silent rejection and in fact consider it a lesser evil than polite rejection or flattering rejection. Actual feedback is the only kind of rejection message that would be useful, but I can only assume that's categorically nonexistent because we live in a litigious society.

Requiring degrees is problematic, but I'm more harmed by aggressively-stated experience requirements. Admittedly, I'm generation X, so I got a degree before the real tuition hyperinflation set in. Which brings me to the subject of age discrimination. Surely IT is on the short list of industries that don't even pretend not to practice age discrimination. So age discrimination always figures prominently on my IT-industry shit list.

Maybe I date myself by saying "IT industry" instead of "tech." That's deliberate message discipline, combating erasure of general technology. Technology is synonymous with "applied science" or perhaps "engineering." Technology includes such diverse disciplines as civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, agriculture, medicine, etc.

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Mike Bybee

I agree that I'd rather get an automated rejection, or possibly even ghosted, than some BS passed back to a recruiter like "we just didn't feel like Mike was strong enough in [that language he's been writing in for the last 18 years, while keeping up with modern standards updates and frameworks/libraries]."

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Mike Bybee • Edited

I don't call it IT (and I've been doing this 20 years overall) because I worked on the IT side of tech (where I got my formal start after many years of freelancing), and made a lateral move to the software side (again formally, being a freelance developer for years prior as well) after I realized the pay in IT would continue to suck no matter how many certs I got nor what an infosec rockstar I might become.