A form letter, email, whatever would be better than what I experienced in my last job hunt. It was silence after silence. Was the rec closed/filled? Am I even in the running or was I rejected early on and now I am just waiting for no reason?
A lot of the companies used automated submission systems, which confirmed they received the resume, but they never sent out a notification that the position was filled/closed/rejected. Just a one line email would have been better than nothing. I feel even that common (and super automatable) courtesy has been lost.
Just explaining not defending: That's partially due to the volume seen with online applications.
Even 2-5 person companies will sometimes receive ~20-30 resumes a day for an open job, and 90% of them will be obviously inappropriate for the job even just from glancing at their resume.
It's a positive feedback loop: People have learned to "shotgun" their resume everywhere, and as a result even small companies have learned to process resumes as "efficiently" as possible (which often includes not sending responses to rejected candidates at that stage). This leads to more shotgunning, etc. etc.
While a wonderful comment, it doesn't not address OPs concerns. If they are processing things as efficiently as possible by automating, when they decide a candidate isn't a fit and click a button to not consider them for the position, why not have it automatically send out a one line email so they are aware?
Or at bare minimum, automatically mail them when the position is set to closed?
1. You're assuming they're using an ATS with that feature, which isn't as common as you'd think. You'd be surprised how many companies track incoming candidates using spreadsheets and email.
2. Part of that "efficiency" is not actually taking the 5 extra seconds to reject candidates, but instead just ignoring rejected candidates.
Think of it as leaving something read in your email inbox vs. choosing to archive it. Imagine you're getting 100 emails a day. Now imagine how many people you know (not necessarily you) who would leave those emails as unread in their inbox and quickly scan for important ones vs. choosing to go through each one and archive them as necessary.
> Or at bare minimum, automatically mail them when the position is set to closed?
Many places will leave positions open for opportunistic hires, e.g. see how many places are constantly hiring for "software engineer". Many job positions never actually close.
> Many places will leave positions open for opportunistic hires, e.g. see how many places are constantly hiring for "software engineer". Many job positions never actually close.
This is a good point, and while it's weird and a little frustrating from the outside, it's awesome from the inside:
The right time to hire is not when you're ramping something up or strapped for time and really need someone immediately. The right time to hire is when you've got someone awesome who is really interested in the job.
Keeping the req open gives you a better chance of grabbing that awesome person: whenever they are ready, the position is waiting. If you have to align the stars so that you're looking at the same time they are, you're going to miss some opportunities.
There's a difference between ignoring a resume and ignoring somebody who took the time to interview with you. I can see why you wouldn't want to reply to a bunch of resumes you just trashed, but if you bring somebody in for an interview, be a human and tell them they didn't get the job so they can move on.
That doesn't excuse neglecting to send a rejection notice for candidates that were initially considered. If a company contacts me, I expect the conversation to be concluded formally. I do not expect to be ghosted.
I don't expect to be contacted again after a screening conversation or a simple application, but if I am interviewed in-person by multiple people I consider it common courtesy to provide at least a from letter "No". This is becoming very uncommon these days for the various reasons given, as well as the fact that there is little downside to being rude - it's not like the candidate can do anything to the interviewing company.
However, in my own hiring I always send a thank you for the candidates time, because I'm old, and manners, etc. but also I consider it the long game. You never know when you will run into someone again and in what context, and the extra effort to email a "thanks for interviewing with us" is tiny compared to potential upside/downside.
> it's not like the candidate can do anything to the interviewing company
It's true to a point. However, when you ghost someone, you've effectively as a company burned your bridges with someone, all for want of a simple and not at all burdensome small amount of courtesy. Even if you're not interviewing them in person, a simple notification that the application will not be considered further means they aren't left hanging on pointlessly.
If you want to hire them in the future, they might just blow you off.
If they pass on their bad experience to others, your reputation has suffered and you'll make it harder to recruit others in their social circle.
You might be immune to the effects of rude behaviour in the short term, but it will come back to bite to some degree later. As an example, after some really rather abrupt telephone interviews with Google, and a really rude on-site interviewer, I told them never to contact me ever again. I have no intention of considering them again in the future.
I think your point about considering the long game is spot on. I had the dilemma of interviewing with two companies and getting two good offers. The company I ended up rejecting were really nice, made a really great effort to sell themselves, and I left with nothing but positive feelings. Nearly a year later, they would still love to have me on their team. Should I need to in the future, I'm fairly certain I could give them a call and start work the next day, all because they did a really good job of building a good relationship.
Phone screen from HR? Maybe not. Though I'd prefer a simple form email "sorry, not interested". As noted elsewhere, build it into the HRIS - as soon as the applicants status is flipped to "No", automatically generate the email.
Phone call with hiring manager or team members? I expect a rejection of some sort.
I don't bother with automated submission systems anymore. A few years ago I saw a post about a position that might have been interesting-- maybe-- so I went to the site. They started having me do an automated test along the lines of can you read English, can you solve a puzzle. The position was not junior. An applicant would be expected to have more than five years experience, maybe more than ten years, a graduate degree, etc. And they wanted to see if I could solve a puzzle? I was curious but not curious enough to spend a half hour taking a test.
The irony of the automated hiring process for me is that it is more unlikely than ever that I would ever get a job any other way than through personal contacts.
I worked remotely as a consultant for 12 years, before going back to full-time in an office job. The main driving factor for going back was the lack of consistent social interaction. I started my remote career in San Francisco, where I had non-work activities that were very active in the local community for nearly a decade. I was going out regularly and had many close friends. Being in a walkable area with decent public transportation was perfect for ease of social interactions.
I later moved to a city in southern California, which was a more suburban environment. It wasn't walkable, you had to take a car everywhere and I didn't know anyone other than my partner when we first moved here. I now was in a situation where I had to re-establish my social connections without my previous activities (I had stopped being involved a few years before the move) and I also didn't have a work environment where I had also made many social connections over the years.
For the first 5+ years, this was fine, I was able to make a handful of new friends but many of them started moving because of cost of living and starting new families. At this point, I feel like it really started to become determinantal to my mental health. Honestly, it took a long time for me to even notice and admit it was affecting me, but eventually, it was pretty debilitating. This wasn't the only source, but it was a major factor to be sure.
That being said, after being back in the office for 2 years (they have pretty strong no work at home policy) I am ready to go back to remote work. I loved the benefits of remote work but I also now am much more aware of the importance of getting out and finding more social activities to balance this out. Also, I wouldn't go back as a consultant. Having a rotating cast of people you interact with made it much harder to form longer-term social bonds and also there was never dedicated time planned to meet in person at regular intervals, as a lot of remote-first companies do.
I love and really miss the flexibility of my schedule and if I can find an environment that supports stable interactions with people and I continue to re-engage in more social activities outside of work, I would jump back into remote work in a heartbeat.
I have seen a progressive failure with my USB-C and the Plugable TBT3 doc. I never had a problem with it for the first year but now I am having to reboot the laptop regularly because it no longer talks to the display port and plugging/unplugging stops working after a while.
Also, what is up with macbookpro's Bluetooth? Everyone at my office has the 13" and no one can use Bluetooth consistantly. Lost connections, no connections, etc.
I migrated to the mobile app after discovering the site. I find the app greatly increases the readability of the site by adding just a few more colors, some icons for particularly popular threads, and a palatable dark mode.
Foresee Medical | San Diego, CA | Senior DevOps Engineer | ONSITE
ForeSee Medical is a tech start-up with a legacy management team focusing on improving the patient care landscape. ForeSee engineers develop the next-generation open platform, cognitive processing software solutions that place data in the hands of providers and care teams to empower them to positively influence health outcomes. We’re looking for engineers who bring fresh, progressive ideas and the spirit of innovation as we embark on our journey.
The Senior DevOps Engineer works side by side with engineering, platform, development and operations teams and will be primarily responsible for designing, implementing and automating build, release, deploy, monitoring and configuration activities. The Senior DevOps Engineer is responsible for bridging the gap between development, operations, and infrastructure.
The simple fact that Panasonic sees a (profitable) need for something like their Human Blinkers, it feels more like a cure for the symptom and not the cause.
Yup, AS3 was based completely on the ECMA draft at the time and was a spec implementation. Macromedia then later Adobe had representatives on the W3C board and due to politics, worry about compilation, the lack of "learning to code from reading source" and from what I recall concern for backward compatibility the draft was killed. Harmony was the next draft and it eventually evolved into ES5.
It's true that it is much easier now in JS, but that is because the browsers and the core web technologies have radically evolved in that 10+ years since Flash was the dominant way of creating interactive experiences. Looking back at the eco-system when Flash was still a viable technology, we have to recall where the browsers were at, where HTML was at and also JavaScript itself.
At the start of 2005, I was helping lead a team build a highly interactive experience for a major car company using Macromedia Flash and Flex 2. When we launched the site we had full cross-browser pixel accuracy, fully supported URL deep-linking, bookmarking, page history navigation, web crawling, keyboard navigation, screen reading support, interactive video, highly animated experiences and even had fully integrated web mapping using a beta version of Microsofts first interactive map tech (it eventually became branded as Bing maps).
What we built then was possible only because of Flash, there was no way we could have created the complete experience in JS/HTML/CSS. Granted, we could have done a lot of it in native web tech (and in some cases, we had to under the hood), but to make it fully pixel accurate cross-browser would be tripled the dev & testing time. On top of that, some of the features would have been impossible without Flash.
Let's recall where we were in 2005. Chrome was still 3 years away (it was released in 2008), Firefox was still version 1.0 (1.5 didn't release until Nov. of that year), Gmail was just released into beta (you had to have a friend to get access), Google Maps was still in an experimental beta and was truly pushing the boundaries of what JS/HTML could do. The browser history API didn't exist so we had to do crazy iFrame hacks to create deep-links and history (this was true of any app, no matter what tech). There was no video in browsers without a plugin (HTML5 spec wasn't finalized until Oct. 2015). There was no such thing as CSS animations, they got their first release in Firefox 5 (June 2011).
So, were Flash apps trash? Absolutely, but not all of them. That's like claiming that modern browsers solve it all. We still have massive load times (look at how much time and effort is put into optimizing content delivery), the cross-browser and backward compatibility is a nightmare, and way more of a challenge then it ever has been. In some ways, modern web development is much better than Flash development was, but to be perfectly frank, we have a LONG way to go. Honestly, we haven't caught up to where Flash was 14 years ago.
But, we are getting there for sure. I can see why Steve Klabnik is so excited about WASM. I can envision where it is going and it reminds me of where Flash was trying to go before it was slaughtered by Adobe. It's an exciting time for sure, but we should also look back at where we came from and instead of just stating Flash is trash and it caused the web to be terrible, we should also look at what it did right and what it allowed us to create before we throw it out with the bathwater.
There are different ways to do it based on the transpiler you use. With Webpack and dynamic imports, you could create a custom loader around the promises returned by the Webpack generation.
