How I Screwed Myself Out Of A Job At Insomniac Games

[Thuleman]

What you are describing, if that is truthfully the way it works at your company, is not patronage. And that is not the way it works at most modern companies. Furthermore, even your company is acting highly unethical by posting a job opening to the public, wasting a sizable chunk of time of hundreds (or thousands if a reputable company) of applicants, and then not even seriously considering them since you have already made the decision before posting the opening.

I think that maybe you haven't been on the hiring side that often.

Here's how hiring works:
50% of the time a job that gets posted is already filled, meaning that the hiring authority has someone in mind who will get the job, but has to open it to competitive hiring due to policies, rules, regulations, laws.
50% of the remaining time there is a qualified internal applicant who has not been selected prior to the job posting opening, but who's essentially guaranteed the job if s/he were to apply for it.
This leaves a statistical 25% for external applicants.

That is the way the world works, ask anyone who does hiring frequently and it's guaranteed that if you ask a sufficient amount of people you will end up with the 50/50/25 result.

When you have someone to fill the job in mind you do the bare minimum of interviewing required, which usually means to interview two other candidates once and that's that.

You are not treating your prospective employees (even if for another position in the future that you actually need someone for) with respect, so why should you expect them to treat your company with respect?

Is this a trick question?
If not, go ahead and pose it to people like Cyber Coders or Robert Half Technologies who post jobs that don't exist just to farm your resume and sell it to other recruiters.

I think what we have here is the difference between how some people think hiring should happen and how hiring actually happens in real life.

Instead of,
"Hire the person we already know to be a good fit (for our company mission/values) and a high performer,"

it is,

"Hire the person we already know to be a good fit (for our unethical/dishonest and/or prejudiced culture) and who one of our managers or top employees regularly goes out bar hopping and getting hammered with."

THAT is patronage, and that is the way it works at most modern companies.

Once again I think that the issue here is that some people assume that it works like described by you above (and seen in movies) but in reality that doesn't actually happen that way.

I am in middle management, I make a comfortable almost upper-middle class salary, why would I risk my own performance review, my compensation, the influence I have, and essentially my livelihood by hiring a buddy of mine when I know that he can't do the job? That makes no sense at all.

Yes, you absolutely hire people you know, but only if you also know that they can do the job because your own job depends on not hiring duds.

Maybe what you are talking about happens in small business or in family owned business a lot, but in businesses where performance actually matters you can't get away with hiring people who can't do the work.

---

Related to the "you have to have experience to get a job but even entry level requires experience" issue. This is a matter of weeding those people out who aren't serious about working. If one comes out of college without experience then one didn't make good use of the college time and didn't have one's future in mind. Why would anyone want to hire a person like that?

There are shittons of opportunities to receive relevant work experience while being in college. Those people who are driven, inventive, creative, and personable will get that done (i.e. work study, internships, volunteering (yes, volunteering is HUGE to gain professional experience, doesn't matter whether it's IT or not). The rest is just inept chaff who doesn't give a shit about becoming useful. Welcome to real life!

 

[rudy]

IMO there is a difference between a head hunt and a job application. Some people like Thuleman have wasted everyone's time opening a search when what they really meant to do was a head hunt. I won't buy into any one practice, you could argue that its easier to head hunt and takes less resources. But then you are limited to the people who know of and may be missing obvious candidates that are better. I just think its dumb when people lie to themselves about what they area really doing. Its like pasting a recycling sign on a trash can or claiming that an upscaled image with 1080p.

 

[GearChoices]

Yeah, I pretty much knew there would be no point in discussing anything further with him when he started defending disrepectful/unethical/unprofessional practices with the age old argument, "everyone else does it," and then mentioned he was part of management.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

If the whole Market Basket situation is any indicator though, people are starting to get fed up enough that they are willing to stick their necks out, and hopefully that sentiment will lead to change.

Just realized that maybe the Market Basket controversy hasn't gotten as much national news attention as it has here in New England.

The readers digest version is as follows:

Market Basket is a 70+ store chain of supermarkets in New England known for their low prices and paying livable wages and benefits to their workers, resulting in extremely low turnover.

During a board coup the CEO, Arthur T. Demoulas, highly respected by the workforce and credited with making Market Basket what it is was ousted by his cousin Arthur S. Demoulas. Workers and managers upset with the cost slashing direction of the new management have walked out and are protesting to have Arthur T reinstated as CEO.

Shelves of the $4B company have been empty for weeks as most of its 25,000 employees have walked out and are demonstrating.

I'm hoping this is a trend that forces a reversal of the trend of greedy management management marginalizing and mistreating employees.

Time will tell, but right now I'm rooting for Artie T to come back!

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Just realized that maybe the Market Basket controversy hasn't gotten as much national news attention as it has here in New England.

The readers digest version is as follows:

Market Basket is a 70+ store chain of supermarkets in New England known for their low prices and paying livable wages and benefits to their workers, resulting in extremely low turnover.

During a board coup the CEO, Arthur T. Demoulas, highly respected by the workforce and credited with making Market Basket what it is was ousted by his cousin Arthur S. Demoulas. Workers and managers upset with the cost slashing direction of the new management have walked out and are protesting to have Arthur T reinstated as CEO.

Shelves of the $4B company have been empty for weeks as most of its 25,000 employees have walked out and are demonstrating.

I'm hoping this is a trend that forces a reversal of the trend of greedy management management marginalizing and mistreating employees.

Time will tell, but right now I'm rooting for Artie T to come back!

Some business schools are apparently already talking about using this situation as a case study to train the next generation of managers in the need to view employees more like stakeholders and less like resources.

Time will tell...

 

[Thuleman]

Yeah, I pretty much knew there would be no point in discussing anything further with him when he started defending disrepectful/unethical/unprofessional practices with the age old argument, "everyone else does it," and then mentioned he was part of management.

LOL
I am not defending anything, I am explaining how real world hiring works. It's irrelevant whether you think it's right, or fair, or whatever, this is how it's done. It's done that way because hiring is expensive, hiring the wrong person is even more expensive, and organizations generally like to make as much profit as possible.

If you think that it's disrepectful/unethical/unprofessional then the only option you have is to open your own business and do better. Every single app you sent in somewhere is subject to the practices you oh-so-much loathe, so really, put your money where your mouth is an never apply for another job anywhere again.

 

[Thuleman]

And really, external candidates as a group have a 25% chance to get the job. As an individual an external candidate has an approximately 0.25% chance to get an interview given 100 applicants. That's why people have to put in hundreds of apps to land a job.

Even at the executive level stats (read somewhere) show that executives (C-level) get one interview for every seven apps they put in.

This is what the job market is like, I am not sure why anyone is even upset about this.

 

[Serpent]

A shitload of people today have their job because they know someone.

Isn't that almost always the case?

Companies are asking too much most of the time. One of the jobs I applied for was asking for apple troubleshooting skills. I asked them about it, and the guy told me, he doesn't know why it's in the requirements as they don't use any apple computers.

Lots of other jobs are posting things they don't need or is even relevant to that job.

 

[collegeboy69us]

kinda getting a kick out of the replies here....

the people that are whining about the "who you know" factor... need to get off their ass and meet some people.

two of the big jobs i've had I got because of who I knew that could get me in and drop my name where it needed to be dropped. Usually any job description you find... in reality you will only actually have to know and/or do 1/2 of what's listed. For some reason HR ass-hats *like* making things over complicated.

To the people that want to get rid of the "buddy system" or referrals... must not understand a damn thing about efficiency. If I need to hire some people, and I start asking around when a trusted source gives me a name, it already has 10X the weight of some random applicant. Why should an employer spend many times more money and time to find a good employee when they can hire the friend of a friend?

yeah - in a perfect happy world where unicorns fart money, the best random applicant would always get the job. The real world is way way different. Adapt and deal with it.

I hate meeting people, i hate the whole aspect of networking... but if it gets you the job, and gets you paid, I power through that shit. Right now I'm on and oil rig in the middle of no where in north dakota (Texas native) it sucks but the money is great and the job is pretty damn easy (still learning as an MWD specialist)

 

[Exavior]

Related to the "you have to have experience to get a job but even entry level requires experience" issue. This is a matter of weeding those people out who aren't serious about working. If one comes out of college without experience then one didn't make good use of the college time and didn't have one's future in mind. Why would anyone want to hire a person like that?

There are shittons of opportunities to receive relevant work experience while being in college. Those people who are driven, inventive, creative, and personable will get that done (i.e. work study, internships, volunteering (yes, volunteering is HUGE to gain professional experience, doesn't matter whether it's IT or not). The rest is just inept chaff who doesn't give a shit about becoming useful. Welcome to real life!

This actually depends on your field and where you live. Also depends on what YOU want to call work experience.

Personally I majored in programming. There was no work study for programming only IT work. There were no places that did internships for programming. There was a single place around my school that did CO-OPs however you only got paid min wage for doing a co-op and had to skip a semester of college to do it. So for somebody like me that didn't have money saved up and didn't live around the college, but was from hundreds of miles away. I could not afford to do a co-op as I wouldn't have been able to afford a place to live. Even had I done that co-op after getting out of college everyone wanted / expected 15+ years experience for an entry level position.

Even now a days, entry level game designers need to have 2+ games published on a console to get a job at many of the development houses.

Other fields are going to be similar where you can't get the level of experience in college that is expected when you get out.

If you live in one of the larger cities, or go to a select group of colleges then yes you might have chances like that. But not everyone lives in large cities, go to the "right" college for something like that, or is in a field where you can't get enough experience.

And all of that ignore those who are trying to better their lives and are working a full time job to pay for college already and can't do anything additional.

So it isn't always that people don't care enough as you put it, in some cases there is no possible way for that to happen.

 

[rudy]

That is why there is volatility in hiring. look if you don't get any real experience but you are a strait 4.0 student whom finishes in 3 years. I would be surprised if you had any trouble getting a job. It may not be at Insomniac or Thulemans amazing business but you will get offers. Likewise if you grades / finishing time are not impressive but you were part of some indy or open source project you will probably get a job. The problem is what if you have neither? Then it all comes down to the applicant pool and companies people want to work at will probably have enough applicants to pass you by right out of college.

But the main point is different companies have different ideas of what is effective. Often it isn't based off of any meaningful number of experiences. They just have a knee jerk reaction. Like remember Tim, he had decent grades out of college but he sucked, so from now on we only hire people who have had internships. Meanwhile the next department is doing the opposite and saying we only take ivy league grads. Look at the stir Yahoo got.

 

[Arcygenical]

Haha, they had an "objective" in their resume. I'm guessing they were applying for a job in 1998?

It really fucking hurts that I had to do that when I went back to college, as part of my career prep course. I about sshut myself. In my old field, I would throw out resumes with objectives and yet they were still being taught. ha.

 

[Thuleman]

Digging this thread back up because I just received a very to the point vacancy announcement by email;

They are hiring a Director of IT, and here's what the requirements section says (among other things):

Have a bachelor's degree in computer science, management information systems or related discipline from an accredited institution completed by October 1, 2014;

The job has already been given to someone who will complete his or her degree by October 1st but who by the time the app may not have finished it yet. There's literally no other reason to put such specific language and date into the vacancy announcement unless you do it for a specific candidate and you will be hard pressed to find such language in any other job announcement.

Just in case they edit their announcement, here's a screenshot of it:

Go to https://jobs.losrios.edu and search for posting number 0001603 if you want to see for yourself.

That's how it's done in the real world.

 

[Exavior]

Digging this thread back up because I just received a very to the point vacancy announcement by email;

They are hiring a Director of IT, and here's what the requirements section says (among other things):



The job has already been given to someone who will complete his or her degree by October 1st but who by the time the app may not have finished it yet. There's literally no other reason to put such specific language and date into the vacancy announcement unless you do it for a specific candidate and you will be hard pressed to find such language in any other job announcement.

Just in case they edit their announcement, here's a screenshot of it:

Go to https://jobs.losrios.edu and search for posting number 0001603 if you want to see for yourself.

That's how it's done in the real world.

I do agree that wording it like that is very odd. However given that the job doesn't start till Nov 1st I wonder if it might be their way to allow people to apply that have not graduated yet but will be completing their summer semester soon? At which point Oct 1st is really an odd date, but is 1 month before you would start the position. I know some colleges are on crazy cycles and instead of just having something like Aug - Dec is your fall, Jan - may is your spring and may - aug is your summer. they have something like Aug - Dec, Oct - feb, Jan - may, march - july, aug - oct. The second track starts up something like 6 weeks after the "normal' track. If that is common in other places they "might" be trying to allow somebody to finish something like that before the start of the job and still be considered.