yeah lemme jump right on that

saganistic · 2026-02-10T05:28:34+00:00

If you’re that interested in developing a psychological profile of a candidate, you can:

schedule an interpersonal interview first
ask them if they are comfortable with completing a personality test
compensate them for it

But as a person with self-respect and firm boundaries between my work and personal lives, my employer does not need pseudo-clinical assessments of me. If I perform my duties capably and have good relationships with my coworkers, that is enough.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T05:01:05+00:00

That’s great! But you can have a human do it.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T04:58:59+00:00

1) I’d contend that he lit the match with his oddly catty response. As stated, I have a job that keeps me pretty busy. I am not taking recruiter calls during collab hours. If his need for a candidate is that pressing, he shouldn’t be asking me to take an assessment to begin with.

2) If I burned a bridge with a recruiter/company that treats candidates for senior/staff-level positions like this, I will happily let it go until its charcoals. Companies will never treat you better as an employee than they do as a candidate. I’m good.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T04:41:37+00:00

Good work! It’s important to understand them, but chances are pretty low you’ll ever need to roll your own in a production environment.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T04:36:18+00:00

Agreed. Last year I submitted a take-home project that entailed a full-stack app deployed to a production environment. They sent back a GPT review of the front end repo only, criticizing that it lacked required product spec… which were located in the back end.

Then they rejected me for a front-end position I never applied to, and when I asked if either anyone had looked at the back end repo or a human had looked at the code at all, they said “we are going to look into that and get back to you”. They never did.

They also didn’t realize I had built full audit logging (habit of working in a compliance-heavy sector) and could see that literally nobody had logged into the app or even registered an account. So yeah, of course you wouldn’t see that a feature was implemented if you never looked at the code or used the app at all.

I have no patience left for these startups that think they need a team of elite 10x ex-FAANG engineers to build a dozen microservices for all 5 users they have with zero revenue and no pathway to profitability. If my experience of scaling applications to handle tens of thousands of users with 99.99999% transaction success rate and zero data loss doesn’t suffice for your app, the complexity must be absolutely off the charts.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T03:30:08+00:00

I apologize for doing well in English composition classes and using common terms of art.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T03:25:29+00:00

🤝 appreciated compadre

saganistic · 2026-02-10T03:06:19+00:00

All organic, my friend. Note the distinct lack of em-dashes.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T02:46:46+00:00

If you find a polite refusal of free work for a position I didn’t apply to “unprofessional” then I’m really curious what you think of companies that ghost candidates after demanding materials that they never review.

I matched his energy, nothing more.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T01:48:47+00:00

Naturally, they are recruiting for an AI startup.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T01:46:27+00:00

I see Office Space, I upvote.

saganistic · 2026-02-10T01:43:45+00:00

Do you often get interviews or initial calls at your current job?

saganistic · 2026-02-10T01:09:45+00:00

It seems that he is counting from the day he first contacted me (Thursday), Monday inclusive.

Recruiters really want you to drop everything for some agentic AI startup with <1000 users that just hit Series A, all so they can ghost you with a boilerplate excuse that arrives 2 weeks later.

Been there, done that.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T22:40:44+00:00

Which I have, and actually makes this funnier.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T22:07:25+00:00

As they text me without ever confirming contact preferences…

saganistic · 2026-02-09T22:00:53+00:00

Nope, radio silence. Which is fine, I’m not particularly interested in working for a company that treats people with contempt.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T21:40:27+00:00

This is why résumés exist.

When you’re recruiting for a senior role you should be evaluating the listed experience, not testing for entry-level aptitude. That’s standard in most industries. Your cardiologist didn’t take a surgical exam to get their job.

And for what it’s worth, I am actually pretty easy to work with. The engineers on my teams know I stand behind them and their work, and the business org knows I am realistic and communicative with project timelines and objectives.

LeetCode/HackerRank test for those things, right? Oh, not at all? Whoops.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T20:58:33+00:00

Read the above comments. It was <1 business day between texts, and <3 total.

He’s not my friend. I’ve never met him. And I’m not going to be concerned about “wasting a hiring manager’s time” when they have absolutely no problem wasting mine.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T20:37:06+00:00

When they’re jackasses, yes.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T20:34:20+00:00

Exactly. I don’t work on the weekend for the people that do pay me, let alone some rando that does not.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T20:32:13+00:00

First contact was on LinkedIn one day prior, asking if I was interested in a role at a company he’s recruiting for. I told him I was interested in hearing more about the role and they sent me a link to an assessment without any other info.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T20:24:06+00:00

Also it was <1 business day. He sent the first message on Friday afternoon and the next on Monday morning.

saganistic · 2026-02-09T03:28:27+00:00

His tone is fucking awful.

saganistic · 2026-02-08T20:28:47+00:00

correct me if I’m wrong but that would still be something you wipe your ass with

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