I agree that a lot of the steps involved in making a sale can be better automated. Having said that, I don't think we are anywhere near to AI overtaking a charismatic salesman. Very few times in life I've seen true, blindingly examples of a charismatic person. I know a guy who could charm his way to selling ice to an eskimo, but funny enough he doesn't believe he's a good salesman. Or rather, he doesn't believe that a good salesman can make a killing in any industry.

Source: that same guy got out of breaking some laws and disappeared overnight from a military base, coming back drunk and being caught after trying to not pay the taxi driver. He charmed his way into getting a slap on the wrist when other guys would get their dicks pounded on the dirt for months .

You all missed my point entirely. There was nothing remotely close to AI or sales in my thoughts.

Cultural fit is easy to solve. Employee and employer take a poll. Computer select * from A & B where * = *, and you have a match.

Automated resume sifting is a data problem.

You cannot solve "I love you." Programming companies optimize for this, quite often well past talent.

I reckon "devops" would be good for you DaveT good luck.

The term is pretty ambiguous, I guess I'm pretty much a devops at the moment (but maybe I'm wrong) - little bit of almost everything, basically try and make sure things get done. One day AWS, one day MS Excel, one day Win10 firewall setup on teamviewer, maybe some hardware troubleshooting, another day Wordpress theme fixing.

That phone call never came. It was strange because the initial reply was that my email hit the spam box and he only found it while doing another search, which why it took over a month to respond to me.

I reply back within 2 hours confirming the phone call, but didn't receive a reply. This morning, I send two emails, one from my personal email and one from my website email, asking if the call is still on, saying I sent two emails in case one goes to spam.

Guess it wasn't meant to be... am I the only one on earth who checks their spam box?

I check my spam box about once every 3 months. I rarely find anything that shouldn't have been spam.

But I use gmail and don't really get (or want) emails from random people / mailing lists / etc.

That's strange. I get about 1 important email a week in any one of my spam boxes. I use gmail and gsuite. I find orders, queries for work, emails from friends, and all sorts of stuff.

Eh, guess it's perspective. I seriously thought spam didn't work that well.

Is this common in the real world or just a programming thing where they seem to express interest in you, spend hours interviewing and then just suddenly pretend you don't exist? Like even a simple "we chose someone else" would be fine. Instead of wondering if the email got lost in the mail. Really weird for people who are obsessed with "culture". I kind of can't imagine doing that and it seems very strange.

um yes. All the time. I had an interview about a year ago at a "code ninja" place who gave me a 3 hours min/20 hours max code challenge. I did it in ~6 and skipped some "optional" parts. I was grilled in the onsite about it, at the end it was clear they only hired the 20 hour people, and they didn't even bother sending me a reject email or phone call. Lesson learned.

Be like, "our culture is for closers!"

Are the interviewsers just meeting a quota or something? Why have you onsite if they know they are gonna pass?

If you are cynical, you can think that companies can't show evidence of a talent shortage without a large pile of rejects.

I don't think I've ever been on an interview where I thought I had zero chance before walking in. I've had people contact me "on a flyer" which is just them saying I'm dumb on paper and they needed to fill a contact-list quota.

As for the long drawn-out interviews, consider that you are, more often than not, being interviewed by a 20-something who works at a place with a pool table, video games, free beers, weekend outings, and lives with 10 coworkers in a hacker house. This sounds like a frat house, and to get in, you sort of have to deal with a month-long hazing ritual. Obviously, over-generalizing here, but a self-taught, especially one who never went to college, wouldn't have any intuitive understanding of this.

OmgGlutten, why do you think they were just gonna pass on you (as opposed to passing on you after the interview)?

I agree there's no excuse for not sending a follow-up email to anyone that has invested real time in your interview process (for us, that's anyone that gets to the stage where they talk to someone on the phone, but not people that just send in a resume).

Edit: Also, Dave, I think you've almost certainly got the motivations wrong. I would guess that the majority of companies don't reward their recruiters for filling a quota of interviews scheduled. The incentive is usually in getting people hired. And the best way to get people hired is to interview people - especially if places don't also penalize recruiters for having a low conversion rate. The technical people have incentives to only hire people they want to work with (which, yes, is frequently a problem) and so the equilibrium is often going to be recruiters trying to push as many people as possible into the interview pipeline while the technical people try to stop many of them from getting through.

None of this is some conspiracy theory about the talent shortage.

Well yes. Many places still want face to face meetings for stuff. I think some of this is just aspie mimicry, but w/e. I was simply talking about recruiters btw. Not salespeople in general, which is what I thought LL was talking about. (NB: Sales intelligence tools have been all the rage in SaaS for a long long time and I don't see that changing.)

That is a dick move wrt not sending a reject. Answering long aspie questions about why is a "maybe I do, maybe I don't", but sending a "Hey, didn't hire you. Will be in touch if we're looking for a different role that is suited for your skillset." is just a normal professional thing to do.

Noobs imo.

I was going off of Grue's comment "I was grilled in the onsite about it, at the end it was clear they only hired the 20 hour people"...

I have to say my experience with Gmail has been the same as jj's. I rarely find something I consider legitimate in my spam folder.

Sent from my SM-G900R4 using Tapatalk

Ah, I missed that.

I'm skeptical of claims like "at the end it was clear they only hired the 20 hour people". I'm sure sometimes its true but much more often personal bias + small sample size + incomplete knowledge means its an incorrect conclusion.

I definitely could have been wrong.

Happens more than it should happen. It is an awful way to deal with a candidate who spent time interviewing, classless.

I don't think it is weird to be concerned about "culture." Collaboration is essential in producing complex software products.

I'm in the process of applying for jobs EVERYWHERE now and it is getting harder for me to do everything by the books. I've gotten some interviews and code challenges which is leading me to believe I am doing some things right, but its generally been a crap shoot. 95% of the time you don't hear anything at all about what is happening with the application. For the other 5% that I do get something back and I can see that it is a real person's email sending it, I do write a simple "thank you for letting me know, I appreciate the time".

I've done some ridiculous code challenges/projects. I mean each company that sends me a "simple" online test ends up being a 1 hour-2 hour test from which each company uses a distinctly ****ty site and interacting with that site is a whole learning experience on its own. Like, havent they heard of Hackerrank or something that doesn't look like it was made in the 90s testing my python knowledge?

Or how about those "simple projects" like Grue was mentioning that its not very clear on what they are looking to critique you on? How finished and polished can a web app be in 1-2 hours without looking like a turd assuming you just didnt use someone's project off of github?

Lastly, if anyone has any leads/pointers on getting a position working with Python or hell even React/ React Native ( turns out I like it) please let me know.

Caveat, my take FWIW.

Sometimes I think it would be better to just tell some prospective employers to go to hell instead of jumping through their hoops. Just keep in mind that it is not an objective process. You can check all the boxes and not get the job. Also keep in mind that a lot of employers (overwhelming majority?) are pretty clueless when push comes to shove. Having previous experience with similar work, a decent reputation for doing quality work means a lot to employers has been my experience.

I was specifically talking about recruiters and recruiting companies. Many do have phone call quotas to fill, and there are recruiters going through LinkedIn and github to collect data points and names (thus recruiter spam). A few recruiters have told me outright they didn't really want to talk to me, but did it out of curiosity or a requirement (along with expressing shock that I actually talked with half a brain).

So 1 day after my previous side gig ends, looks like I have another one. I'm interested in anyone's thoughts:

1. The app basically allows content producers to upload small snippets of content.
2. This is already a viable business, they're just using dropbox and doing everything manually right now.
3. Other user roles review and approve the content (2 levels of review). An accounting role triggers payments to the content producers. An admin role manages users.
4. We're not tackling the micro-payment part at first, but it could come later.
5. Server performance is not an issue as there might only be 200 users total, most not using the system at the same time.
6. The active DB shouldn't get too large as we can archive stuff once payment is made.
7. Client performance could be an issue as they want to be able to upload large batches of small files at once. Chrome, FF and Safari all have multi-file upload. But I haven't tested say 500 small files at a time to see if it crashes the browser.
8. The only other tricky client piece is a massive interactive grid of all this content to allow the reviewers or approve or reject it, sort, filter by status, etc. I figure I should look for some kind of plugin for this.
9. Need to pick a framework or go with vanilla JS/jquery. Do people use vanilla for SPAs?
10. There has to be some plugin out there for user login, password reset, logout, etc. - right? That's always such a PITA and it's complete standard across millions of web-apps.

So my plan is to use AWS for everything. This seems to have everything I need, node, noSql, file storage: https://aws.amazon.com/getting-start...ervices-costs/. I don't know squat about AWS. But if we move to a real micro-payment platform, and all the security/privacy concerns that come with that, I don't want to be on something like heroku or digital ocean.

Any thoughts would are greatly appreciated. Oh yeah - I might farm out the front-end stuff. Checking with a couple people I know. But if they're not interested and one of you front-end hotshots is, lmk.

#8 (+9?) sounds like a job for React!

I've been playing with it recently and wow is it so incredibly awesome compared to anything I've used in the past such as Vanilla JS / Dojo / JQuery. But then it's like I've got this shiny new hammer and everything looks like a nail, so idk

Ok, that was confusing.

If you're just talking about recruiters and recruiting companies I'd say you shouldn't spend any time at all dealing with these people when they contact you.

Ha