Fieldnotes #03
On recruiter ghosting, live coding anxiety, and what the job market does to your head after a few months.
A few months in and the job hunt has settled into a rhythm, if you can call it that. Apply. Wait. Boilerplate rejection. Occasionally: a call. Repeat.
Recruiter ghosting is a specific kind of rude that I find hard to let go of. Someone pursues you, you make time for a conversation, and then nothing. Not a decline — just silence. I understand that inboxes fill up and things slip. What I don’t understand is treating a candidate as disposable once they’ve already engaged.
For the record: I’m not above blame here. When your profile is set to open-to-work the volume of messages is genuinely unmanageable. But I’m defining ghosting specifically as what happens after contact has been established. That’s a choice.
Live coding sessions deserve their own paragraph.
I don’t object to them in principle. Seeing how someone thinks through a problem is useful information. What I object to is what they do to experienced engineers who haven’t coded under observation since their first job.
In the days before mine I was a mess. Heart rate up, barely sleeping, running through problems in my head at 2am. I sat the session with my hands unsteady and my sentences coming out wrong. It went well, apparently — and then I got a polite rejection anyway.
The implication underneath all of it: that forty minutes of observed problem-solving is more revealing than twenty years of shipped work. I disagree. But I don’t make the rules.
In between: Duolingo Spanish, which I started partly out of genuine interest and partly because I needed something that wouldn’t reject me. Duolingo is, to its credit, relentlessly encouraging. Considerably more so than the average hiring manager.
The Bear is excellent. That’s not relevant, but it deserves saying.
Something will come. It always does. But the market is strange right now, and anyone who tells you the process is rational is either lying or hasn’t looked for a job recently.