Loved this article. Over a year ago, I decided to leave both my technology stack (in which I had 8 years experience), and the big corporate employment record behind. I had about 10 years of industry experience, and considered myself a generalist - capable in many technology stacks, and highly capable of learning and quickly becoming effective in a new one.

Also, I had a nice comfy savings account, so I decided not to work for 6 months while I focused on me-time and learning NewTechnologyStack. I fell in love with it, and havent looked at OldTechnologyStack since. I wrote many demo apps, started making open source contribs, and engaged with NewTechStack communities online. Damn that was fun! I joined local meetup groups and other communities to fill my sponge-like passion for NewTechStack to the max.

Let me also state that with OldTechStack, I never, ever had a problem finding a job - really, it usually takes me about a week to land a new job somewhere else in my bustling tech-hub city. My resume with OldTechStack was, well, very trendy. I could often tell in interviews that people were going to hire me based on my resume before they even spoke to me in person, and that the in-person resume was just to reassure themselves that I wasnt bullshitting them. Dont get me wrong, Im a great programmer, but I know I was hired because my resume was nice 'n trendy (with the OldTechStack culture).

So, once I started looking for jobs in NewTechStack culture, the reality of the superficial hiring process really set in. Firstly, NewTechStack people have a cultural internalization that OldTechStack really sucks. Mind you, I am not referring to technical folk, but HR people, recruiters, entrepreneurial types, etc. Secondly, I had no idea that taking time off from work made me look really bad to most folks at the base level of recruitment. Because I was not currently employed, I was not making it past many screening interviews. Thirdly, there was this magic phrase, "x many years of PRODUCTION experience in NewTechnologyStack..." that was really screwing me over. Despite the fact that I am proficient in 4-5 major programming languages, and have experience in several more. Despite the fact that I have lots of demonstrable work, both public open source, and my own creations (living at live URLs). Despite that my career experience has given me challenges that are scaled many-powers-of-ten beyond what your rinky-dink logistics app's customers demand. Despite that I interview wonderfully, am willing to do programming challenges for free, and usually deliver above and beyond expectations... Despite basically being a wonderful candidate from your engineering team's perspective, I found myself being rejected for these and many other superficial reasons.

Right now I am elated that none of those companies hired me, as I found my way via freelance contracts, and my life could not possibly be more well balanced and I have never been happier in my career. Right now I also work on about 7 different NewTechnologyStack production websites with relatively complex e-commerce and marketplace challenges, as again, I handle generalism well, and well adopt AnyTechnologyStack much better than your "senior dev" with a whopping "5 years production experience."

Guess what? Every single company that I interviewed with about 9 months ago is still hiring for the same damned position I applied for. Some of them have even reached out to me on StackOverFlow or other career sites, like a zombie, unknowing that theyve already interviewed this candidate...

Why?

Because theyre obsessed with an irrational, non-science based, peacock-dance, superficial standard for hiring people, specifically with standards they are not at all knowledgeable of, that they somehow believe will lead them to "hiring the best" and becoming the next Google (with their rinky-dink logistics app with about 4K customers).

I am not suggesting some "science based" checklist system take its place. I do think the peacock-dance, and other completely inauthentic behavioral checks, need to be removed from evaluation. Dont get me started on all the dinosaurs still relying on "technical tests" that throw college-level abstract puzzle games at you, which have been scientifically proven to produce false positives as well as false negatives.

Pro tip: copy and paste documentation from YourTechnologyStack official site to your blog, write one sentence saying, "please leave a comment below!" and youre instantly more hireable (to recruiters at the screening level) because, well, youre a blogger, and youre clearly engaged in the community.

Companies are so obsessed with "hiring the best" that they basically buy a "hiring kit 'n a box" and hope it automates itself, when all theyre doing is creating an absurd gauntlet that rejects lots of great candidates, and leaves them without any hired candidates 6 months later. The "rockstar" programmer, mythical though she/he may be, is still the goose that lays the golden egg and turns your company into NextGoogle.

The level of absurdity with the hiring process as a software engineer is obscene. For people who spend most of their professional time dwelling in thought-realms of pure logic, getting hired is a maddeningly illogical process.