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

(idiallo.com)
191 points foxfired | 2 comments | 02 Sep 25 21:31 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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neilv ◴[03 Sep 25 02:15 UTC] No.45111589[source]▶
> This isn't malicious. It's structural, driven by several interconnected forces:

An additional reason is religion. People were told that these are the interview rituals you should do, they spent a lot of time rehearsing for it (to the exclusion of learning or doing useful things), and they think everyone should have to do it, or they are bad people.

An additional reason is that some people don't know much about the field, other than particular interview rituals.

An additional reason is that most people who know how to do their jobs, still don't know how to interview, so just mimic what they've seen.

An additional reason is justifying your existence/status. Sometimes, when I see a job description with requirements seemingly puffed up to sound impressive, I get the impression that it's not by someone who doesn't understand the role, but rather by someone who wants to make the role look impressive to their boss, for their own status or that of their team. Similar with interview practices.

An additional reason is frat hazing, for the sake of frat hazing. When easy upper-middle-class money entered the field, it attracted some baggery.

Not all organizations or interviewers have all the above reasons, but you can probably guess at least one of these is at play any time you get an ineffective/counterproductive interview "loop".

replies(1): >>45119884 #
1. WorldMaker ◴[03 Sep 25 20:08 UTC] No.45119884[source]▶
> An additional reason is frat hazing, for the sake of frat hazing. When easy upper-middle-class money entered the field, it attracted some baggery.

I don't think it was money that caused this, but that many beloved tech giants were intentional built as fraternities by college dropouts and recent college graduates, many of whom did not themselves join a fraternity in college but got soaked in a lot of the atmosphere of them. It's most obvious in the case of Facebook, as publicly documented in things like the movie The Social Network, but it's a foundational DNA strand in Microsoft and Google and nearly any other big tech company that still prefers to call its headquarters/office park a "campus". (It's kind of a through line in the HBO show Silicon Valley too, how much tech companies intentionally copy the "pizza and beer and all-nighters and weird dorm room living" college vibe.)

(The presumption that most of these company executives never were themselves directly involved in college fraternities is that fact that they allow/encourage/build hazing rituals. Fraternities have had somewhat strict anti-hazing education requirements since the 1990s and most Universities have also had strict No Hazing Policies since around then. Since 2024, that education and policy enforcement has spread outside the Greek System to all students at most major Universities that get federal funding directly or indirectly, but before that it is certainly easy to understand how many might have missed the messages and education if they only saw fraternities from the outside.)

replies(1): >>45120004 #
2. neilv ◴[03 Sep 25 20:23 UTC] No.45120004[source]▶
But the same kind of self-congratulatory exclusionary clique thinking behind frat pledging, and the same thinking behind the historical attendant hazing, could still be at play?

Not necessarily because company leadership and random interviewers are mindlessly mimicking what they experienced in school, but because some ideas tend to arise from power/privilege baggery.

(Though we also now have the mimicking of other tech companies, and we could just call it that, but "frat hazing" is still a better understood term, already with negative connotations.)