this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2026
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[–] jtrek@startrek.website 67 points 19 hours ago (5 children)

I feel like a lot of people involved in the hiring process are incompetent and shouldn't be there. Like you have HR people who can barely use Word asking if you know Java or JavaScript

[–] PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world 5 points 13 hours ago

Shit maybe I should get a job as HR sounds easy as hell

[–] Hazmatastic@lemmy.world 22 points 19 hours ago

As someone who briefly worked in recruitment, the amount of people interviewed by people who have no frame of reference for anything about the job requirements is astonishing. Some people may say "but surely not for the high-level positions-" No. Especially for those positions. Because people like owners and c-suites want final say. And guess who knows nothing about these positions. Them. They literally hire presidents and vice-presidents based on vibe. Technical positions see a lot of this, primarily because even a bad interviewee is going to know more about their job than an executive whose primary job is the "idea and vision" guy. Just spit enough jargon, laugh at their jokes and you're in.

For reference, that company had a head of maintenance who as a friend of a friend of the owners. He just delegated the whole time and hit on any woman he found half-attractive. Thought he was just an asshole until I heard that he had honestly asked a production manager which side of a tape measure was the inches and which was the centimeters. Guy gave a visual run-down on how to use a tape measure to him. The head of maintenance. And he said thanks, and that he'd post it in the tool shed for his staff to reference. It became clear that he delegated everything because he literally didn't know about thing about his job. I would be surprised if he could point out a phillip's-head. Apparently he had the same job at a nursing home before that. I shudder to think of why he may have lost that job.

A few months after he got inevitably let go, he delivered my dominoes pizza. I don't look down on jobs like that, but that felt good.

[–] Zink@programming.dev 13 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

At past employers it has seemed to me that most of what the internal recruiters do is look back and forth between resumes and job descriptions and throw away the resumes that don't have enough bullet points matching.

And now we have AI that can do it even worse and even faster!

[–] Lumelore@lemmy.blahaj.zone 18 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

A month after I graduated college I got an interview for a springboot position and I was telling the guy about my springboot project and he was like "we don't actually use springboot here, we use kafka instead" and I was just like wtf. Dude supposedly had 10 years experience as a dev and somehow my fresh out of college ass knew more than him. (Didn't get the job, still unemployed and its been a bit over a year since)

[–] yermaw@sh.itjust.works 24 points 19 hours ago

See your problem was knowing how to do the job. You should have focused on knowing Dave. Dave would have got you in.

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 12 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Yup I had a HR personally message me saying the person I recommended doesn't have a certification needed for the job. They have that in a different state, getting it in the state the job is in is as simple as saying "hey I passed the same exams you guys take (it's national), I'm registered and practicing in that other state, can I get approved here?" And they say "sure". It's small documentation and a bit of waiting period, but that's shorter than the training period of the job itself. I said a bit about that but they're like they don't have it in this state. Which I'd understand if it's just a way to say no without saying that person is not qualified for other reasons. Because most other openings I see in our industry gives the candidates 6months to get the certificate because it's easy

[–] jtrek@startrek.website 11 points 17 hours ago (2 children)

I need to find a better phrase than "cargo cult" but I see a lot of that at work. People who don't understand why a system is the way it is become fanatical about doing it particular ways.

Like, you have to do "file -> save as" into the directory. If you save it somewhere else first and copy it that's NO GOOD

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 7 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Yeah. I think sometimes it comes from using a lot of shitty softwares that only work with "happy path" so they like to repeat what works and won't experiment (because that means repeated work).

I have a lot of "we have to do it this way", me: "this is better", them: "we always do this way".

As well as, me:"hey it's easier this way, I think clients will like this way, even if we do the original they have to switch eventually", them: "no, they asked for this, we NEED to do this", me: "can we ask?", them: "...", i talked to the clients and they were already thinking about the new one and had no problem, saved us weeks of work trying to back port an already existing solution

[–] jtrek@startrek.website 4 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

I just had a flashback to one of my first office jobs.

They had weekly reporting that needed to be done, and someone non-technical had been assigned to do it. They had like gone into the database and copy-pasted records into excel, and the whole operation took a full day.

I was like, "Hold on. What? You know you can script all of this, right?"

Luckily my boss liked me, and let me go ahead. Changed the task into an hour, including making whatever charts and slide-deck management wanted that month.

Though I do wonder if sometimes doing things badly is a weird pro-labor move- They get paid the same if they take all day versus an hour, so why bother speeding it up?

[–] thevoidzero@lemmy.world 3 points 15 hours ago

I think that's honestly how it goes. If you're efficient and just get more tasks, or get called off for not working (if you're done with work and doing something else), then you have to pace yourself. Lot if work I get is copy paste this from here to here that takes hours, I could have written an script to do all that in the time I spent cooy pasting, but then I'd be the only one who could do it again. Even though the next time it'd take 5-10 minutes

[–] Snowclone@lemmy.world 4 points 17 hours ago

sounds more like state religion