[VLM]

You'd read your friends code, right?

Get a relationship, however minimal, with an inside contact, who shows his boss your code or conference presentation or whatever, he calls you and schedules an interview, then HR is told to find two bodies off the street to interview to make the hiring decision look good.

Their code doesn't get read. I'm always kinda pissed when I'm brought in for that kind of interview and I figure out I'm just a placeholder. I've never said anything unpleasant but I have mostly politely walked out of interviews like that. Once its clear they just needed a checkbox and my showing up was the checkbox, theres no point in continuing. This is why sometimes you get callbacks for the craziest jobs you can imagine, like seriously, what in my carefully resume made you think I wanted to program FORTRAN exactly? You're hiring someone who's 90% of the time a graphics artist and all I know about photoshop is I'm familiar with the name? You need a .net programmer and what in my resume made you think that was me, let me know so I can burn it off the page with fire? Or there's a massive experience or salary mismatch, etc.