You're Not Interviewing for the Job. You're Auditioning for the Job Title

It's been 10 years since I did an interview and I think I would rather retire and grow rare lizards than jump through the interview hoops at a new company. I am 90% sure I couldn't pass the interview for my current position but I'm the one who designed the whole thing. -staff level backend engineer

I was 14 years in a job at senior level and got laid off.

And yeah, it's pretty much as bad as you describe.

Yep. I didn't even "pass" some of the coding challenges despite hiring, firing, and writing coding challenges myself!

What I often saw was many of those jobs were sitting on the market for months and months just getting relisted every few weeks. The ones that actually led to interviews, I had one dipshit proudly tell me about his 2-hour commute five days a week. Another told me they wanted to vomit-out mini-MVPs and were replacing the new guy who wasn't doing it fast enough. Just an ocean of fake jobs and awful jobs lol.

I had a coding challenge where if you didn’t implement what was essentially a Set in the exact way that they expected, you couldn’t proceed since the evaluation assumed you’d match their ordering (which was arbitrary). One of those automated test things and there was no way to contact a human and say, your process is broken. I’m eagerly counting down the days until I can retire. Between broken hiring processes and the rise of LLM coding, I’m left wondering if this is how I want to spend my precious time.

The cynical mind would assume that would be an excellent way for a corporation to rig the hiring process by preventing American qualified applicants from progressing and therefore making a claim that foreign labor must definitely be imported at a fraction of the salary and under visa-indenturement who … wouldn’t you know … magically happen to know the answers and pass the very arbitrary coding challenge somehow.

The only way this gets solved is by making any and all H-1B hires require the hiring corporation pay a 200% tax in addition to all other employment related taxes for the absolutely necessary and critical H-1B talent.