LoulouMonkey

Some people say that things might start changing soon due to layoffs. I personally very much doubt it.

An interviewer that doesn't show up is really bad. Not matter where you work, you'd probably end up having a chat with HR if you did that twice.

Sorry about that buddy!

My understanding of the situation is the exact same as yours. Which I find funny now, but obviously not that much back then.

The interview was in person, and she only used her laptop to take down notes. I remember thinking to myself "jeez she could at least have prepared some questions" but nope.

I'm glad it happened though, as I've told this story dozens of times since and it still manages to make me laugh :)

Not really, it was technical support through tickets.

I don't exactly remember the specs, but French and SQL were the main requirements. Actually, more French than SQL.

As we're all sharing some bizarre experiences we've had, I feel I have to chip in.

I had 2 very weird interviews with the same FAANG company, before actually joining the company in 2021.

Anyway, we're in 2011 and my career in tech has just started. I hear back from a recruiter regarding a role I've applied for, and to be considered for this position it is mandatory to be fluent in French. Which shouldn't be a problem as I happen to be French.

The recruiter tells me that the person that was initially supposed to interview me first (a native French speaker) is currently off sick, and that his manager will be interviewing me instead.

I'm in a room in the lovely old offices of this company, by the Bord Gais theatre for those who live in Dublin. The manager I'm about to spend the next 30 minutes with is American, and majored in French. At least according to the recruiter.

She greets me with a "bon matin !" which doesn't sound right in French, but that I immediately realise is the literal translation of "good morning!". She mumbles a few things which I now can't remember, but something along the lines of "la entretien il est aujourd'hui dans le Facebook, pourquoi ?". I just smile at her while trying to process what she just asked me. But I can't, so I ask her to repeat what she just said. V2 of her question is even worse, and we spend the next 5 to 6 minutes trying to understand each other. Eventually she switches to English and goes on to tell me how she moved to Dublin from the US a couple of years ago.

A few hours later, the recruiter emails me and tells me that unfortunately, being fluent in French is mandatory for this role and that I obviously am not.

Funny thing, I've been in Ireland for 16 years now, and I know a ton of people who also had some very weird interviews with this same company, all roughly between 2010 - 2017: like for instance a hiring manager who had brought her dog to the office (and therefore to the interview room). The dog kept barking / jumping on her, and she very clearly didn't pay any attention to the answers my friend was giving her (he didn't get the role). I could go on with stories like these ones for hours. All at the same FAANG company, all in Dublin, all between 2010 and 2017.

Like I said earlier, when I eventually joined in 2021 the interviewing process felt a lot more professional.

I really like your website, it's both very clear / easy to navigate and yet unusual.

Great work!

If anything, I have found my own disability to be a huge plus when looking for a new job. I'm one of these job hoppers and it's been almost 10 years since I have stayed over 3 years within the same company. Coincidentally, I was diagnosed with some condition that I won't name here about 10 years ago.

Now, this is solely based on my own experience, which of course might not apply to your specific field of work and disability type.

What I mean is, most large companies have a voluntary self-identification form at the end of their job application. And I tend to get a lot more responses when applying for roles where I am invited to disclose my disability.

On a funny note, recruiters always want to confirm that I indeed have a disability, but they can't just reach out and ask "hey dude you sure you didn't click on that button by mistake?".

Instead, they always send this very P.C. email that reads like "Here at [insert company name] we pride ourselves on bein inclusive and bla bla bla. You informed us that you had disability, and we want to make sure that we can accommodate you and make you feel welcome. If you need any special arrangement, please let us know".

To which my response is always "Yes I do have this thing, and no I'm fine thanks".

My disability has fucked up a lot of things in my life, but it's boosted my career.

My workmates and I got laid off by our employer (a FAANG company) last summer and I spent 4 months looking for a job (in Ireland). I started using a simple spreadsheet to keep track of all the jobs you apply for: company name, job title, salary, url, outcome (ghosted / rejected / interview).

Over those 4 months I applied for a total of 87 roles for data scientist / analytics engineer. Outcome:

- Ghosted: 49.4% - Rejected: 34.5% - Role cancelled: 3.4% - Interview: 12.6%

That breakdown was consistent across all my former workmates (between 50 to 100 applications before signing a contract), which is largely due to mass layoffs / high competition in the tech sector

Being ghosted is the norm (more on that later)

Avoid recruitment agencies at all cost. Here, they will ghost you for the jobs you apply for, and will then start contacting you for roles you're overqualified for (internships, etc..)

What we realised after a while, from chatting with folks who work in the recruitment field is that if you start getting loads of templated rejection email a few days / weeks after applying for roles, this means that nobody ever read your resume.

Each role we apply for usually receive 100+ applications, and that the recruiter who posted the role is also hiring for a network engineer, a janitor, two junior data analysts, a marketing consultant, a senior project manager, etc..

In other words, they're going to receive several hundreds of resumes, and they won't be able to read all of them. Actually, they'll only read 10 resumes for each role, as is the norm in modern HR.

It seems that most recruiters these days use ATS software to do all of the work for them. Here in Ireland the top ones are "Lever ATS" or "Recruiterbox ATS". Depending on the keywords that the recruiter enters, each resume gets a score. The recruiter then proceeds to open the top 10 applications only, and clicks on a button that sends a templated rejection email to all the unfortunate candidates that didn't make the cut.

Though recruiters usually try and become experts in a specific area ("I'm a tech recruiter", "I'm a recruiter that specialises in finance"), they actually know very little about the jobs that they hire for.

The truth is, 99% of the time, the reason why we get rejected isn't because we're not a good fit for the role. It's because we failed to pass the ATS software filtering process.

Thanks for getting back to me, I'll go through the examples you shared.

Hi Simon, slightly unrelated question.

I'm a big fan of your work, and as I've learnt a lot from reading your blog posts over the years, I'd be curious to know a bit more about typical use cases for wanting to work with Observable notebooks.

The only reason why I'm using A JavaScript notebook tool (Starboard.gg) is to be able to access cool visualisation packages like Anychart or Highcharts.

Given the hype around Observable notebooks, I feel that I'm missing something.

What makes you decide to start something in an Observable notebook rather than in Jupyter?

Thanks!