You didn't address this part of the problem. This friction is one of the reasons the job market is so distorted.
When you apply for a company, they have to assume you aren't very good, because most people who apply aren't very good. (Because people with strong skills get snapped up, and people with weak skills spam their resume everywhere they can.). Figuring out who's worth spending time interviewing is a hard problem in itself. And there's no silver bullet here - people lie about their work experience all the time. There are so many user accounts on github with copies or forks of random people's code, with basically no changes. I suspect they exist support lies on resumes.
I don't think it distorts the market, but it is annoying. A recruiter I talked to a few years ago said she thinks its crazy we don't use an agency model for programmers like actors do. The idea there is that good programmers pay a small percentage of their salary to a manager, who's job is to find you the best roles that suit your skills and negotiate pay on your behalf and so on. She tried to set up a business doing just that but she couldn't get enough clients to make it work. Good programmers balked at the idea of paying a few % of our salary to someone in an ongoing way, to look after our career. Having to prove your skills in each and every interview, and form those social connections on your own? Thats a choice we make.
It's extremely saddening how prevalent this prejudice is.
But what if I am still looking for work and companies literally don't reply to my applying to them? I might be the next John Carmack but if nobody gives me a chance (for reasons outside of my control and unrelated to my proficiency) then according to you I suck. :(
It's very broken to assume that skilled people get snapped up immediately so whoever is available must be mediocre (or bad).
It is an awfully imprecise assumption!
Prejudice?
Look, companies wouldn't be advertising for roles if they didn't think qualified candidates (like you?) are out there. But its a numbers game; of course there are more unqualified people looking for work than qualified people at any given moment. Qualified people don't get snapped up immediately; but they aren't usually actively looking for work for long. And they often are picky about which places they apply to - for good reason. A highly qualified candidate might apply for 3 roles, get 2 offers and accept 1 of them. A weak candidate might apply for 50 roles. If those are the only two people sending out resumes - (or in general the pool has 50% strong candidates and 50% weak candidates), still only 6% of resumes will come from strong candidates.
Thats not none. And I really hear you about how frustrating it must be for companies to not even bother to reply - I mean, thats pretty rude. But ... what behaviour do you expect? What would you do with a pile of 100 resumes if you expected only 6 of them will be strong candidates? Should they bring all 100 people in for interviews, just in case there's a young John Carmack amongst them who has terrible resume writing skills? (I've interviewed 2 people who fit that description out of the 400 or so I interviewed in the last year. They definitely exist. But finding those people is prohibitively expensive for most companies.)
Flawed? Yes. Biased? A little. Prejudiced? That seems like a stretch. Can you think of a better system? That conversation seems more interesting than just complaining about it.
Which is, really, as good a way to learn about someone as most of the techniques we try. You only have ten or fifteen minutes to ask the company questions. What did you hunk was worthwhile to expend that time on?
Is this a problem for other professionals? Why not? When an accountant with a successful career spanning 15 years applies to a new job, does the company "have to" assume that know exactly nothing?
It does distort the market. It trades off against the desire to switch jobs, which distorts the availability of job switchers. When I get an email from a recruiter, I'm not just thinking "would that job be better for me?", I'm also thinking "am I willing to practice and perform the whiteboard code ritual right now?".
Such things do exist (at least in some form) but I haven't had a good experience. Same old story: like everyone else, they're looking for seniors, turning down juniors, and complaining about shortage of talent.
Storytime: I used to work at a huge Japanese multinational (you can probably guess which one), and I rose through the ranks pretty quickly. After two years (which given their turnaround, made me pretty ancient), I left the firm for greener pastures.
A few years later, they started a new sub-division, and a personal contact recommended me. It was a decent pay bump, and despite the negative press, I didn't mind working there, during my tenure. I figured I'd be a shoo-in. It was for a non-technical role (PM), but they wanted someone with a tech background, which I had. They then wanted to give me an online engineering test just as a formality. It was a quick test, and I solved it with little issue.
Fast forward 2 weeks and I get a rejection email, saying that my code wasn't up to snuff, and they'd be moving on. It took everything in me to not write back saying, "Hey, go to your main service and log-in. Ok yeah, so the interface and client backend to your SSO and the user management services that millions of your users interact with each day -- I wrote all of that. Oh yeah, your absurdly complicated coupon system -- I wrote a lot if not all of that too."
Companies keep complaining that they can't find talent, while their interviewers are asking candidates to implement red-black trees on a whiteboard in 5 minutes.
Sometimes it is worth writing back. Because people often don't realize there are flaws in the process they are using. Either they will ignore the feedback and it's business as usual or they will take it and work towards improving the system.
