As someone that has built software for a long time it’s intrinsically understood by me that order matters. How you take in and verify data or the succession of steps you show a user to facilitate an action or transaction getting it correct matters.

Which is why despite the market we currently reside in, where hirers have far more power than seekers, it still surprises me when one doesn’t consider the order of steps in the process. Especially for a job hiring coders.

This morning I applied for a job. It had some minor red flags that stood out on the description, but overall it seemed legitimate including being – supposedly – from a domain that would require a fair amount of investment to obtain. However after applying the next steps were:

1. Required to watch a 5 minute video describing the process, in order to trigger the next step.
2. Required to take two assessments – one a generic comprehension test and one apparently a technical test.

All before even talking to a human being and being able to ask questions to even see if this job is right for me and worth investing time from my one wild and precious life to do all that work. Just to “earn” the right to talk to an actual human.

This was further compounded by a sales pitch that consisted of the introductory email outlining all this telling me it’s because I’d “earned” the right to move forward by being “assessed in the top 10% of applicants”. All within less than 3 minutes of applying. Which seems impressive, if not impossible.

I guess my point is that while the power dynamic shifts with the market this is a two dimensional conversation – you’re selling me why I should lease my time to you and I’m selling you why you should lease my time over someone else’s. So doing it in this order with a pitch and approach that seems right out of “this is just something to prey on desperate job seekers to give free labor to train our LLM” leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I have, at least currently, the privilege of not wondering how I’m going to pay rent / mortgage or buy food next week. So I reported it as fake, which it seems to be, marked the emails as spam and moved on – other than writing this.

My point is mainly that there is an inherent social contract at play here. So if you have the same privilege and encounter this, please show courage and do similar. So that, hopefully, there’s less of this to take advantage of those that don’t have that same privilege. We need to look out for and support each other as best we can. Kindness matters.