Ask HN: When did corporate America become so flaky?

[geeky4qwerty]

HI HN!

TL:DR - When did poor communication etiquette become normalized in American corporate culture?

I re-entered the job market several months ago after not needing to touch my resume since 2008 (see last submission) and my experience has been nothing short of brutally sobering. My age (40s) and experience (20+ years in IT) was definitely helpful in keeping me resilient through the process, and I'm extremely fortunate to have landed a senior IT leadership role that I love.

BUT I have come away from this entire ordeal a touch jaded and syndical towards much corporate America and how people are treated within the job search process (almost all other job seekers I spoke to had very similar experiences) . These are several key takeaways from my job hunt that I wanted to get some feedback/input from the HN community on potentially why this is happening and why it seems to be so prevalent across so many companies today:

1. Of the 13 staff-level (not recruiters) virtual interviews I had where no job offer was given, 9 of them that moved onto second interviews, 4 to third, I only received follow-up "dear john" communication from 2 of them. Ironically these were both from first-round interview companies. Is it normal practice to ghost applicants at the staff-level interview process? In brutal self reflection I even recorded several of the interviews and shared them with friends in senior leadership positions to ask for coaching advice and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

2. Communications, especially logistical planning for interviews, was at times borderline comical. This is not hyperbole when I say that more often than not I would need to write follow-up emails after an email communication would go unresponded to for over a week, sometimes longer, sometimes not at all.

3. I have, as of today, well over 30 ATL optimized applications still sitting in "applications purgatory" with many large fortune 500 companies. Most of these applications are from 3-4 months ago. The fact that these companies have no automated purge/rejection process seems bizarre to me.

Help me out HN. How does your company handle communication etiquette? Am I out of touch to be expecting email replies to relevant, time sensitive information within days, not weeks? Why is ghosting tolerated, or is it normal now and I'm just expecting too much from this new generation?

[logicalmonster]

IMO, here's 4 partial explanations, that I may or may not be right about.

1) Companies fear being sued for discriminatory hiring practices. There is zero risk of being sued if you keep your mouth shut and don't communicate with candidates. There is a minor risk of being sued if you give any feedback, even if you don't intend any offense. Sadly, the legal culture means that the safest thing to do is ignore candidates.

2) I don't mean offense to anybody and this is obviously not true in anywhere near 100% of cases. But as a generality, the people who tend to gravitate towards a career in HR departments in today's world are useless and often petty people who have often never held a real productive job.

3) This is more noticeable, particularly in CURRENT_YEAR, but society has broken down in some ways due to current events as well as the media's business model of fear-mongering. Regardless of political stance, a lot of people are feeling scared and hopeless about the future and that has an impact on normal interactions.

4) This may be controversial on HN, but Corporate America learned during Occupy Wall Street that they can take heat off of the 1% by bending the knee and taking certain stances on certain social issues. Keeping the attention off themselves by having the correct politics and flying the correct colorful ribbons is about the only "ethical" issue they care about.

[Red_Leaves_Flyy]

1- only reasonable if the companies staff are prejudicial against protected groups. Granted this is true of most companies, so perhaps reforming toxic culture should take a higher precedent if lawsuits are so scary…

2- have you had an hr job? I haven’t, but have had the misfortune of working closely with several different hr agents and the shit they deal with is exhausting.

3- accurate

4- this is losing its efficacy as even the poors are realizing all the glitz is for show when the cashier wearing a corporate mandated pride flag and blm patch will still mutter slurs under their breath.

I would add 5- recruiters have had the tables turned on them for the first time nationwide outside of history books about dead or dying people. These folks weren’t trained to sell but to extract and most people simply aren’t elastic enough to adapt as fast as their potential victims are adapting.

6-generational and class divide. There’s the generation and class of people who bought homes, second homes, summer cars, boats, rvs, and had litters of children on meager salaries. Many of these folks aren’t well educated or informed and have no way to conceptualize how much the world has changed around them as they’ve sleepwalked through life working, raising children, and watching television. Even if they can conceptualize a piece of the new world they inhabit it’s rare that they can reform their entire worldview to incorporate the new information and adjusting their opinions is an entire other bag of worms.

[patrick451]

> 1- only reasonable if the companies staff are prejudicial against protected groups. Granted this is true of most companies, so perhaps reforming toxic culture should take a higher precedent if lawsuits are so scary…

You seem to be assuming that lawsuits are only filed for legitimate grievances. It's easier to never have to deal with a lawsuit than try to prove you didn't discriminate.

[humanistbot]

> more often than not I would need to write follow-up emails after an email communication would go unresponded to for over a week

I know this is a "kids these days" anecdote, but I'm seeing a big generational gap in this kind of activity. I was in a frustrating conversation with an undergrad intern who hadn't responded to an e-mail. I was trying to make it a learning experience: at least in this workplace, if I send an e-mail with a question or task, I expect a reply in a reasonable time. He said that I should have sent him a reminder or ping, in a tone implying that it wasn't really his fault. I said that if you have trouble remembering to do your job, that is your problem and something you need to work on.

He did not respond well to that.

[rjbwork]

I blame the email spam. It's made email nearly useless for me in my career except for when I worked at a global investment bank as an intern many years ago. I'm mid 30's principal and I basically ignore email. I check it once a week I'd say. The absolute bulk of communication in my career has been via hipchat/slack/teams, fogbugz/jira/azure devops/monday and our source control systems.

[lostgame]

This, this, this. Commenter above definitely needs to keep this in mind.

I have explicitly told my coworkers - all of them - to reach me exclusively on Microsoft Teams; because my Outlook ‘inbox’ is so consistently full of garbage that I’d say about 1/40 messages are actually relevant to me.

Email is a problem that needs to be solved. I could never - do never - blame anyone for not answering an email.

[r_hoods_ghost]

And I (and half of my company at this point) am the opposite. Except for the one day a week I'm in the office I'm permanently on do not disturb on teams chat except for my boss and the CEO, and teams calls are forwarded to voicemail with an "if you need to ask me a question, send me an email or request a meetingand send me an agenda. In an emergency call me on my real phone." Asynchronous communication for the win! Also set email rules. My favourite is any email I am just cc'd in to is automatically moved into my ignore folder (unless it's from boss or CEO). I have a job that requires being able to concentrate on a task for long periods and instant messaging and calls are absolute productivity killers.

[lostgame]

Sounds like you and I wouldn’t get along. :P

The joy of synchronous communication is that it is also asynchronous. If you didn’t get my Teams message at the time - you will after!

Email offers no benefits I can see compared to instant messaging. Plus, you can always turn off notifications. I also don’t need to make filters to drown out the massive amount of sheer noise and unrelated garbage.

When someone sends me a direct message on Teams, I know that’s a real person, asking for me directly.

I have never had a Teams notification, at my current workplace of 3+ years - sent to me by a robot. Imagine that!

In contrast - least 90% of the email sent to ‘me’ from within my company is not from a real person. I’d say 98% of email - not exaggerating whatsoever - is completely unrelated to me, or effectively ‘corporate spam’.

What benefit does email provide above a service like Teams, and how does it curtail all of the above issues?

By requesting people use email exclusively to reach you; you’re choosing to inconvenience me, and many others - because you’ve refused to move on to the next logical step in communicating with your coworkers. You’re forcing me to use a service to communicate with others that is ineffective at best - frustrating at hell at worst.

It appears entitled, and; frankly, you’re the type of person I’d hate working with because of it.

An email sent to me is a fish in a bucket of mostly fake fish.

An IM sent to me is a direct message, sent by a human; specially to me - and if I don’t see it when it’s sent to me - I can still see it later.

[joe-collins]

Agree. 33 years old, gmail, with a handful of other accounts used to corral expected spam from low quality websites. My inbox is 100% automated messages, and the only one going back through July that I explicitly solicited is from a concert ticket purchase.

Email, like the telephone, is polluted into uselessness.

[SyneRyder]

Assuming you're a developer, by 33 you should have programmed email filters to handle this. The whole point of email is to have it automatically prioritized and sorted before you even start reading it. If your inbox is 100% automated messages, something has gone seriously wrong.

I wonder if Gmail is part of the problem. All the spam I receive at a Fastmail-hosted account is coming from hacked Gmail accounts. Google is doing nothing to stop it, even though a very simple filter at my end can automatically flag it. Gmail's outgoing mail servers are getting reported into blocklist reputation oblivion in recent weeks - could be worth switching to a paid provider.

[feet]

I'm sorry but not everyone is a programmer. What about the other 95% of the population who deals with the same spam fatigue?

[tomcam]

How do you know Gmail is doing nothing to stop it?

[SyneRyder]

I've reported it to admins via various methods (eg Spamcop), and Google was declining to accept spam reports. (ie Google's email contact address was listed as "[e-mail]") I'll double check that is still the case and try again with Google when the next one comes through.

The spam I'm talking about almost always has "new autobot" or "new cryptobot" in the subject, and usually has an infected PDF attached. A simple outbound check for that would be enough to flag likely compromised accounts. That's the simple filter rule I'm using to kick it automatically into my spam folder for later review.

One of the more egregious servers is mail-lf1-f48.google.com:

https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.167.48

But it's also coming from mail-yw1-f180.google.com, mail-yw1-f181.google.com and mail-yw1-f182.google.com, and those are just the servers I've seen in the last 24 hours.

https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.128.180

https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.128.181

https://www.abuseipdb.com/check/209.85.128.182

I am assuming it is the Google accounts that are compromised, and not Google's own mail servers. But I suppose it's possible that Google itself is pwned.

[ad404b8a372f2b9]

One of my first big dressing down at work, as a young engineer, was a result of this.

A manager had been emailing me monthly requests to update some time-tracking excel sheet, but his emails looked like the kind of automated spam you get from every other service reminding you to do something or other so I ignored them. And I was tracking my time following a different process (you had to do both unbeknownst to me) so I assumed it was just an automatic reminder and I was good.

Anyway 6 months into the job he called me on the phone and gave me the dressing down of a lifetime about responsibility and answering your emails and so forth. Very unpleasant experience all around.

[origin_path]

In fairness to the manager it's a bit odd to assume that if an email reminder is auto-generated, you don't have to do it.

[juve1996]

Is it really surprising to you why he didn't respond well to that? I would not be happy if someone said to me what you said to him.

[slt2021]

people are overloaded these days. You can only expect something if (1) the person is your Direct report and (2) if there is tracking item in JIRA or something.

in all other cases - it is not business critical and it is person's courtesy to reply you on time

[thankful69]

Send him a slack/{insert app here} message instead, you are in no position to demand a response "in time" from anyone really. Many people prefer using real-time collab tools for a reason, and only check their email once or twice a day.

[throwaway8374ac]

1) Any feedback is viewed with the fear, real or imagined, that it could lead to some sort of hiring discrimination claim.

2) There are too many people involved in the modern tech hiring interview process and they are perennially confused about their role in the process. Maybe the hiring manager thought their internal recruiter would send feedback. The recruiter thought the “talent acquisition specialist”would send the feedback. The talent acquisition specialist thought the recruiting software would do it.

3) Any technical position posted attracts a huge number of candidates, most of them completely unqualified. (I don’t mean “Go backend dev applies for Swift frontend job”, I mean person with no education or obvious relevant experience with a background in various MLM endeavors applies for a sr-level architect/engineering manager position. Sometimes there are hundreds of unqualified applicants for a single position.)

4) Candidates are ghosting companies just as much, and the recruiters/hiring managers get jaded.

5) The hiring manager — the person with, arguably, the most to lose from a poor candidate experience — probably does hiring the least of their major job responsibilities and just isn’t very good at it.

* Bonus #6 I forgot — if your LinkedIn profile sucks, and by “sucks” I mean doesn’t stand alone as a portrait of your skillset, fix that. Put a summary under each job you’ve held, have a paragraph in there about your strengths, goals, etc. I cannot count the number of times I’ve interviewed someone and been given the candidates “resume” only to find out it was a screenscrape of their linkedin profile that was completely useless, but that the candidate did upload a detailed, well-thought-out resume which our talent management software discarded for no discernible reason. Now, those are just the candidates I’m aware of - I imagine the number discarded by the recruiter based on a faulty assessment driven by the same data is much higher. *

Just my personal opinion, based on my experience as a hiring manager at a medium-sized tech company.

[hnaccount141]

> 1) Any feedback is viewed with the fear, real or imagined, that it could lead to some sort of hiring discrimination claim.

My favorite is getting ghosted by the recruiter when asking for feedback after an onsite only to get an automated email a few days later asking to fill out a survey about their hiring process.

[giantg2]

I have noticed that communication has gone substantially downhill since the pandemic. Even communicating with people like some doctors, paralegals, and nurses has been tough.

There's some incorrect information in my kid's medical file. It's basically impossible to get it corrected. The courts will also take the word of some nurse who entered the note over the parent. Why? Simply because they're a nurse. Yet they're still human, and there's no audit or error correcting mechanism/process in their note taking.

I'm not sure what may be causing the communication issues. My personal theory is that people don't care. The narrative is out there that people don't want to work, etc. Even if it's not true, I think many people have taken that and the relatively safe job market to slack off on stuff they don't see as important. I see this somewhat in my own career, although there are a few other factors there.

[wswope]

> There's some incorrect information in my kid's medical file. It's basically impossible to get it corrected.

Not the case, chief - that's covered by HIPAA. If you submit a formal correction request, they're obligated to respond or land in very hot water with HHS. If they disagree with your correction request, you have the right to get a statement of disagreement added to your records.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-individuals/medical-records/in...

[giantg2]

I believe that only applies to the general record, not the notes which are generally not included with the patient-available record, right?

[wswope]

If I’m reading you right, you’re talking about something like Epic’s “sticky note” system, where providers can leave general comments about a patient not associated with specific encounter? That’s a really good question - and one I’d have to leave up to an attorney. My naive guess would be that the patient’s right to access those may depend on whether or not a practice is using them to store health information, or just general non-medical tidbits (I believe some orgs tell staff not to keep any PHI in them as a matter of policy).

[afarrell]

> my personal theory is that people don’t care

Apathy and exhaustion are extremely difficult to tell apart. It is also possible that many people, especially in the medical sector are burnt out.

[giantg2]

I think apathy and physical exhaustion is fairly easy to tell apart. I do agree that burnout and apathy can be difficult to distinguish, mostly because they're the same just with different motives (apathy is generally voluntary but burnout is apathy that's involuntary because the person simply can't care anymore while staying sane). But it's definitely across industries and not just in healthcare.

[dieselgate]

I agree with both point you and Parent make (difficult/easy to tell apart). But seems to me in person vs remote communications are the crux of the distinction

[giantg2]

Oh, mine were all in-person examples. I feel that remote had a few issues prior to this, and that I have a similar number of issues currently.

[spookthesunset]

Nobody wants to fucking do any work anymore. I hate to blame it on all this remote work crap but I highly suspect it plays a lot into it. When everybody is a small rectangular box featuring a head and shoulders, the human connection is completely gone. It's all fake internet shit now so who cares? Plus all interaction has to be gated through meetings and shit. Things happen much, much slower.

I dunno man. It isn't the pandemic itself that did this. It's societies response to it that caused all this mess and it will take quite some time for things to revert back to the mean. It sucks. I hate it. But that is what it is gonna be.

The last 2.5 years has felt like some dystopian nightmare that refuses to go away. It completely sucks.

[canadaduane]

I wonder if we're going through a transformation period where we don't yet have a grasp on the cultural habits and institutions that make our hybrid online-offline worlds fulfill our human needs--like meaning, significance, belonging, achievement, etc.

I suspect there are some things we took for granted in a "fully offline" world that we haven't figured out yet. Things like how "being seen" while working helped establish self-confidence; or, "overhearing" a conversation in the office helped make work a social-first experience.

I'm trying to understand what some of these might be, because I want to help cultivate the solution at relm.us. My personal work is to better understand psychological human needs and translate the fulfillment of them into an enabling social (spatial) platform.

Maybe it's the answer, and maybe it isn't. But as you've outlined, the cost of not understanding the problem are very high.

[gnz11]

> Nobody wants to fucking do any work anymore.

Or maybe it’s years of corporations treating their employees like dogshit “resources” catching up to them? No career mobility, low pay, toxic middle managers, little vacation time, etc.

[jollyllama]

Yes, hiring is not the only area where OP's points hold true.

Almost everyone is either worn down by overwork or societal issues. Many fall into both categories. Apathy, as you note, is a common defense mechanism.

Can anyone think of any services that have gotten better and stayed that way since 2020?

[giantg2]

Depends on the definition of "better", but bill collectors, maybe.

[watwut]

> The narrative is out there that people don't want to work, etc

Employment is pretty high, that is all there is to people don't want to work. A lot of them have job options, so they are not desperate.

[Unit520]

Some sort of systemic corruption in corporate culture must have emerged at least around the time when Personell was renamed to "Human Resources". I mean, think about it for a second, if you were to hire some people to help you with something, would you unironically call them "human resource"? Even if you might think about them in private as easily replaceable and therefore not of much value, would you go ahead and call them "human resource" to their face without feeling weird at all?

Something strange is going on here.

[thenerdhead]

Misaligned incentives.

If you align with the incentive, you'll be properly escorted through the red carpet like the rockstar programmer you are.

As soon as you don't align with it or fail to meet expectations, you'll be discarded like the rest.

We have surely lost our grace to make a little more money in the process. The generation that was raised with these normalcies are now the ones recruiting & hiring which make it the new normal.

I don't tolerate ghosting, especially when I make a final round. I follow-up until I hear an answer such as "we went with another candidate". If people waste my time, I will be asking for theirs. I just can't believe it has become just as normal at the end as it is the beginning. It has burnt many bridges of "I definitely don't want to work there in the future".

[shapefrog]

> 1. Is it normal practice to ghost applicants at the staff-level interview process?

Apparently yes. Also, am I meant to follow up after the interview, write a thank you message etc?

Reminds me of this gem (2019) - I've been hiring people for 10 years, and I still swear by a simple rule: If someone doesn't send a thank-you email, don't hire them. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-write-thank-you-email...

> 2. Communications ...

Email hasnt been instant or efficient since the last blackberry rolled off.

> 3. I have, as of today, well over 30 ATL optimized applications still sitting in "applications purgatory" with many large fortune 500 companies ...

LinkedIn applications? I have/had one many years ago, it sat there for multiple years - just waiting for them to get to it and let me know if they want to give me the job or not.

Congrats on getting back in - I expect you are probably seeing these things are no different on the job.

[jasonladuke0311]

> Reminds me of this gem (2019) - I've been hiring people for 10 years, and I still swear by a simple rule: If someone doesn't send a thank-you email, don't hire them. https://www.businessinsider.c

A fuckin thank-you email?! That lady is out of her gourd. I didn’t receive a response (even an automated email rejection) to over 50% of the hundred or so applications I submitted during my last job search. Half of the companies to whom I applied didn’t even acknowledge that I applied to work there.

[badpun]

> How does your company handle communication etiquette?

There's no etiquette in hiring today. Anything goes is the current de facto standard, and anything above it is extending courtesy to the candidate.

[chitowneats]

I'm inclined to agree. How long do you feel this has been the case?

[happymellon]

Longer than COVID.

Before COVID I had a couple of applications with some large consulting corps. One is still open, like the status of the job position implies that they might still reach out however unlikely it is at this point.

Another closed the position, then emailed me telling me that HR had closed the position because of funding, they hadn't hired but they had just opened up an identical role with the same team and would like me to apply for it.

Any they wonder why people don't care about the companies that hire them. They dick us about to see how much we will put up with.

[grldd]

It changed around 2015-2016.

[wbsss4412]

I’m not sure when, but as someone who is in their early 30s, what you’ve described is all I’ve ever experienced.

It seems that it likely started to change post 2008 due to the persistently high unemployment and the shift to online applications leading to much larger volumes of applicants for every open position. Now, despite the much tighter labor market, a generation hr employees have entrenched that same culture and people seem confused as to why it’s so “difficult” to hire.

[slt2021]

People dont have time to respond to each and every applicant, given that there are 100s of them for each job. And teams have multiple job opening.

Also they have current job responsibilities/deliverables which are of higher priority.

Basically you can only expect good communication if you are top tier candidate for a critical job function, and company really really needs you. If job is not business critical - it will be slow.

Most of companies are freezing hiring/slowing down, and are not as desperate for people as they were before.

[goosedragons]

What frustrates me is many many companies will force you to rehash your resume into individual fields so they can search it up in some database better but they can't have the courtesy to have a "reject" button somewhere in whatever client they are using that tosses out a template email. It's ridiculous. Loads of effort to make their life easier, zero concern for the people applying.

[rupi]

This.

Also, I have friends in high level HR roles and HR functions have become smaller and smaller over time with a lot of offshoring and outsourcing. So a lot of 'nice to do' things that were traditionally done by HR simply aren't done anymore.

[mouzogu]

I remember only 12 or so years ago, there wasn't really such a thing as a hiring manager, or recruiter.

Now there seems to be several layers of gatekeeping, an industry built up around hiring, with it a stream of "shit" jobs like "talent managers" and so this kind of shitty bureaucracy you described.

[ktrnka]

I saw it decline over the last year at my employer. In 2021, the recruiting team and I were all on the same page about letting candidates know the decision within a day either way. In 2022 there was some desire to do that, but the recruiting team lost their most senior people and became very understaffed for a while, so it often took a while to get notice sent.

In 2021 my recruiting partners were cool with me moving candidates through stages, which triggered automated notification emails for the candidates. In 2022 I didn't have the permissions for that. Not sure how that all happened, but there was definitely a lack of an ATS admin of some sort.

[mikewarot]

I'd say it started with a Corporate Lawyer named Abraham Lincoln[1] and his defense of the Illinois Central Railroad.

  "What status did Abraham Lincoln believe corporations held? In one of Lincoln's railroad cases, a plaintiff's attorney attacked Lincoln for defending "great soulless corporations." Lincoln's response indicates that he viewed a corporation as a "legal person"."

[1] - https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/217044254.pdf

[tomcam]

Americans became flaky long ago. I just made reservations at a veterinarian and a restaurant. Today they both called me on the day before the appointment to make sure I would be there. My doctors are threatening fairly substantial penalties (say, around $75) for missing appointments, a practice of which I approve heartily.

[dirtybird04]

I recently read there that someone waited 9 months to go through Google's hiring process. That's a LOOOONG time to be waiting around for one job offer, it's ridiculous!

Tech hiring in America has been broken for about a decade now. Shitty leetcode style coding questions, unprepared interviewers, lack of any decency or communication etiquette, merry-go-rounds of design interview, it's really insane when you think about it. But everyone puts up with it because there's so much money involved. And that money is not going away anytime soon, and unfortunately, neither are these practices.

[Mezzie]

My favorite was the giant university who flew me across the country for an evening + 8 hour interview for a tenure-track position and then ghosted me. Bullet dodged, in my opinion.

[faangiq]

It’s actually better this way. Rather than a veneer of politeness, let the race to the mercenary truth begin. Also you’re not old enough that this should be a new thing to you.

[dmitrygr]

> I even recorded several of the interviews and shared them

Oof, watch out, in many states this would be quite illegal

[mrguyorama]

It saves them like 3 cents worth of effort and they'll never hurt for applicants, and if they do they'll just go on empathetic news networks and bitch to boomers about how "nobody wants to work anymore"

Employees have no power in the relationship, so there's no reason not to treat them as expendable trash

[danbmil99]

As an aging Boomer I find this ghosting shit completely unacceptable. Are Millennials really such delicate flowers that they can't be bothered to tell someone they're not going to hire them?

I have the funny feeling they're importing these practices from their dating life. I would find it unacceptable in that context as well, but to be honest as long as I stick to my age range I don't see that happening. Our generation was just brought up better than that.

[jaygreco]

See many of the reasons listed above for the non-responses. Almost none of them boil down to the reductionist generational stereotypes you’re throwing out here as if they’re fact.

I’d hit you with the “ok boomer”, but this is HN and I hold my comments to a higher standard than that.