I had a phone interview with a recruiter last friday. She had called me at 8:45 in the morning to schedule it at 2:00PM. She had also been spamming my linked in messages for months about "an opportunity."

So I sent her my resume at around 10, and she calls me at around 1:30 to ask me if she could move the call back to 2:30. I agree.

I get on the call and she tells me she isn't sure about my 7 year work gap after college for starters. I have been learning how to code for the last several years and taking care of my elderly father. It's also been hard to even find a job... anywhere, as I've mentioned. Covid hit, and the focus was keeping my father safe, as well as continuing to build things and learn new technologies and concepts.

I insisted to the lady that I was proficient in the main skills of the job, which includes, knowledge of the "Wordpress and SquareSpace CMS", SQL Server, HTML,CSS and Windows Server. I point out that the first item on my resume is the link to my WordPress blog that I put up on a VPS (don't want to share for the sake of security by obscurity), and that I have built fullstack apps using Postgres and MySQL and that I can learn and get up to speed with Microsofts dialect of SQL. She told me that employers tell her that "they don't want people who say that they will learn things, they want people who can hit the ground running." She then told me that the position required a candidate to know things like HTML and CSS for 5-7 years, which actually wasn't even in the posting, and I said that no one needs to learn HTML and CSS for 5-7 years. She asked how much I was looking for as far as salary and I said "You said earlier it was 75-95 so I'd be okay with 85" and she told me those numbers were only for people with 5-7 years experience. She told me she was concerned about the 4 project links on my resume (for the sake of keeping the resume at 1 page) and I insisted that she tell the hiring manager to look my github profile, which is linked at the top of the resume. I asked her if she knew how git worked, and that it's really not easy to fake github progress and usage such as commits and branches and merges, to which she said "I know," which I honestly doubt. She asked if I was vaccinated because the job requires you to work on site and I told her I as vaccinated and boosted and that I was looking at my vaccination card on my desk. So it was a laundry list of 'concerns' she had and I had a response for each and every lousy item and I still have radio silence because apparently I'm not a worthy candidate for a job whose posting calls Squarespace a CMS. I told my father about this and he laughs and says it seems she doesn't want to give people like you that sort of job. So, what more can I do if these gatekeepers don't want me to get a job in this field?

Would you like me to tell you the story about how MongoDB reached out to me for a customer support role and they seemingly didn't hire me because I said that you could see if an SSH call to a server completes its handshake instead of using the `ping` command and that I didn't actually use MongoDB all that much (my therapist insists that the second statement is why I didn't get the job) in projects were apparently reason enough to reject me for the $60k/yr position, or is that tldr enough?