April, 17, 2024 archives

“We had the chance to review your application and while your experience is impressive, it doesn't align perfectly with what the team is looking for so unfortunately we won't be moving forward with your candidacy.”

I can’t help but feel that I dodged a bullet on this one, because looking for “perfect” alignment from a candidate is a huge red flag.

It is also a really strange thing to say when you put this in your job description:

“P.S. If you don’t tick every box in this ad, please don’t rule yourself out. We take pride in inclusion and hiring incredible human beings with great potential over ticking boxes – so if this role resonates with you, hit that apply button!”

I’m a white guy with an enormous amount of privilege, so whatever. But I hope that Linktree isn’t sending this awful form rejection to the diverse candidates they claim to be trying to include.

Kill It with Fire: Manage Aging Computer Systems (and Future Proof Modern Ones) by Marianne Bellotti was recommended to me by a college classmate on a post I made on LinkedIn a while back. (Part of a series of observations about how terrible ZipRecruiter is.)

This book is great, and I would highly recommend it to any software engineer. It’s not only about modernizing software applications, but has a lot of insight into how being a long-lived project is a reasonably likely outcome for any project, and you can save someone in the future from a lot of trouble by making some better decisions up front.

It also leans into the human factors and business realities of how software is developed, something I feel like I have been complaining about here and elsewhere.