i’ve been in new york for over a month now, and i’ve gone on countless interviews. i still have no job, and i’ve received a nice range of responses:
- not a good cultural fit
- we like you, but we can’t proceed because of { other applicants , no reason given }
- hiring freeze!
- no response (which i guess is kind of a response)
the response i haven’t received, one that i think would help me out the most, would be one that indicated why i was being passed on – we liked you but we thought you lacked X. to be fair, one company, art.sy, did give that kind of feedback, though unfortunately it was of the “you don’t have enough experience” variety, which is a bit harder for me to remedy in the short-term. at least it was a response.
what i’m finding, in general, is that new york tech startups seem to be pretty snobby in what they want from a candidate. or maybe snobby isn’t the right word – specific, maybe? where i’m sitting, i know php and i know python lightly and i’ve worked with mvc frameworks and i’ve built interesting things – i have no concerns that i’d be able to pick up django or rails or whatever, and there’s no question that i’d be value-add to these companies. however, i think my lack of professional experience with rails/django/whatever the newest technology is leading to a lot of places passing on me without having the balls to at least say “well we wish you had 3 years of django experience” because that’s kind of a stupid, bullshit reason to not hire me (or at least from my biased perspective it is).
when i ask for specific feedback, i usually get silence. so i have no choice but to keep looking, but i’m getting pretty annoyed and tired of this whole process and i don’t know what to do about it. listen, rails doesn’t scale, assholes. django is fine, but really, half of you chose django at random. mvc is great, and i get that, so test me on mvc principles if you think i don’t ‘get’ django.
godfuckingdammit would someone interview me in a way that actually seems like they want to see if i know anything rather than fucking comparing my resume and what i say against some invisible checklist?
maybe there’s an opportunity here.