Over the past two months, I’ve had the… pleasure of looking for a new job in IT in the Netherlands as a back-end developer. I would like to consider myself average. I have a bit under five years of professional experience under my belt, know a few different programming languages, keep up with the technologies… and yet, finding a job, in what is supposedly one of the most dynamic job markets, was nothing short of a nightmare.

As IT professionals, we are by definition problem solvers. So, faced with the problem of looking for a job - how will you solve it?

Where to look?

There’s only one place to look, and that’s LinkedIn. While there are better solutions out there, LinkedIn is what recruiters know and love so, by God, this is what you must learn to know and love. Having an active LinkedIn profile isn’t necessary, but you should fill out your entire profile if you can.

No response

I’ve applied to 35 jobs in total. Out of those 35, I’ve received a response - any kind of response - from 16.

To put it slightly differently, you have a roughly 1 in 2 chance that no one will even look at your CV and cover letter and the ten questions you were forced to answer that just rehash what is in your CV before submitting your application. Later in the process, I found out many companies use an automated tool to extract data from a CV, and I guess my single-page CV with two columns doesn’t play well with it. A LinkedIn Premium trial lets you submit a CV to one of those systems and see what a recruiter might see. There’s absolutely no reason why we need to have an AI extracting data from a PDF as a gold standard of IT hiring, especially because almost every programmer can crank out a JSON or a YAML file with their eyes closed, but we made the technology so we have to live with it.

When it comes to your CV, most people in bigger companies won’t see it (due to the artificial “intelligence” they’re using), and most people in smaller companies will read it regardless of what it looks like. One thing that might help is the infamous cover letter - anecdotally I had more success with applications that included one. I still dread writing them because I’m never sure what to write. Ultimately I settled on a greeting, a few highlights from my CV mentioning the projects I worked on, a thing about the company that I like, and a “p.s. I have all the necessary permits to work and live in the Netherlands” because most people can’t point at Croatia on a map (not that I can blame them). They usually end up being no more than 200 words in total. With some practice this only takes a few minutes, yet improves your chances of hearing back from a company.

Finally, I have to give a big shout-out to Apple, who never reached back to me about a job at all, but did send me a survey asking me how was my experience with their hiring process. I couldn’t think of a more Apple thing to do.

Immediate rejection

One step above getting no response at all is the immediate rejection, which I’ve been graced by with seven companies. Mostly, these focused on me not being Dutch or not living in the Netherlands yet. Ironically, this was also the reasoning given by champions of diversity GitHub. I can only surmise that none of those companies read my cover letters at all, as it was specified very clearly that I’d be moving to the Netherlands within six weeks regardless of whether I’m hired or not and that, as an EU citizen, I don’t need a work permit or visa sponsorship.

GitHub (and, by extension, Microsoft) can hire whomever they like, but I find it very hypocritical that they would spin diversity and inclusivity as their core values, and then only allow applicants from a handful of rich Western countries. If I don’t have a chance, and I have all the necessary permits and financial means to move to one of those countries, I can’t imagine how someone from South America or Africa might fare. I hope GitHub revisits this policy in the future and allows skilled engineers from all walks of life to have a chance and show off their knowledge before making a decision. This also applies to other companies that rejected me for this reason, but I can’t hold a 30-person consultancy or agency to the same standard as Microsoft.

There were also several vague “we don’t think you’re a good fit right now” responses. I appreciate that the HR departments of Stripe and Shopify are probably busy places and that they are probably looking for a more senior developer. The fact that I’ve received any response is positive, so I’ll just make my peace with it.

The Interview

You’ve managed to score an interview - congratulations! Now it is time for you to sit in front of two other people you have never met in your entire life, internalize for a few seconds that they are going to be deciding what kind of food (if any) will you be putting on your table for the next few years, then solve a simple algorithmic problem that they came up with. Just relax, man, they are your friends!

Is this the best that we can do? My GitHub account is not chock-full of famous public repositories, but there’s still enough there for a reasonable person to surmise that I do know how to crank out some code. And from my experience on the other side of the table, I know that we still ask people with diplomas to do things they should have done in university. There should at least be some way for a future company to know that I can indeed write FizzBuzz.

Personal preferences, anxiety and introversion aside, I find that putting a person in the spotlight and asking them to come up with an algorithm on the spot for a made-up problem that they will never face in the real world is not a productive use of anyone’s time. I appreciated the take-home assignments much more, as they allowed me to showcase what I know and work on a real-world problem.

As a fun bit of anecdotal evidence, I’ve interviewed with a company that rejected me after I did relatively good at a theoretical question about testing, but didn’t perform as well on the algorithm question. It was my first live coding interview, I was very anxious and my heart rate was through the roof. Of course, after the interview was over I found the “correct” solution in about ten minutes and much less lines of code. The company, of course, rejected me, stating that they found a better fit for the position. To this day, the same job posting is still open.

The Negotiation

At some point, you will be asked to come up with a number. The Other Person will be visibly confused if you somehow manage to ask them about the number before they manage to ask you. The person on the other side of the fiber optic line has been given a range and your response should fit in that range. The job of the Other Person is to make this number as small as possible, yet comfortable for you.

The Other Person will provide various excuses for this - you’ve performed this well on our 90-minute benchmark, which puts you in that range on our Scale. We must be Fair™️ towards our existing employees, after all, and the way to keep things Fair is to propose this number, which is (always!) smaller than your number. For an unknown reason, keeping things Fair™️ by increasing the existing employees’ number is never an option.

This Fair™️ number is miraculously different for same-sized companies within the same area, which leads me to believe there must be different levels of Fair™️ness that are not for my mortal brain to understand.

You might also provide various excuses in order to make the number go as high as possible, yet comfortable for the Other Person. The sad fact of life is that the business can usually afford to not hire you, whereas your rent will be due on the 1st regardless of whether you take the Fair™️ number or not.

I have nothing much to add here, except that a certain hip and trendy bank suggested that my number would be X, then turned it around and said that it’s actually 0.8x and if I could please come work for them for free for one day so that they can ensure that they can even spare that much. If you’re going to do that, then please just hang up on me when I suggest a number that doesn’t fit your Fair™️ scale.

So, where does that leave us?

I can’t say I’ve had a positive experience for the vast majority of the companies that I applied with. At times it felt like I was fighting against a machine than looking for my place with my fellow programmers.

If you’re in charge of hiring at your company, please try to go through your own process. Send out rejection emails instead of leaving people in the dark, allow them to apply regardless of their current physical location or nationality, read their CVs and cover letters, check out their websites and projects before subjecting them to a generic algorithmic question.

That’s all I ask.

Cover photo by Susan Yin on Unsplash