[malwrar]

I don’t think about my life and experiences that way. It’s hard for me to just reach into my past and pick some specific instance of an arbitrary experience category in a portable story form. I have to prep, or otherwise just hope I don’t do bad enough that it damages my prospects.

[sh34r]

I could do it really easily if I had 30 minutes to write it out. Doing it in a conversation, though? I might prefer being waterboarded. I'll remember a much better example less than an hour after the call ends, too.

I'm convinced neurotypical people just lie through their teeth in these STAR interviews. It'd be so easy to just tell them some bullshit story. It sure seems like they only want to hear some absolute bullshit.

[sensanaty]

I mean yeah, you should lie in interviews. Mind you I don't mean make up ridiculous fabrications like "I single-handedly saved the entire company from bankruptcy", more like little white lies and twisting of real truth to make for a better story. It's unfortunate that that's how it has to be done, but it's an adversarial circumstance to begin with, so I understand why people do it even if I'd prefer to not have to.

Companies absolutely will lie and cheat if they can get away with it, for example by saying their hiring budget is only X amount for the role when the recruiter knows full well the real budget is X + 20,000. They will absolutely lie about things like PTO and flexibility. So there's no reason for you not to also engage in it, because you're really only screwing yourself over if you don't. It's unfortunate, but that's the system we've built.

[sh34r]

I’m used to embellishing things a bit, telling a more favorable story of the truth. That is categorically different from what hiring panels crave now. People used to be able to smell flagrant bullshit. Now, they don’t just fall for it. They reject everything but bullshit.

They want you to pretend like you were a cowboy coder in a regulated environment where redundancy is a requirement, not a dirty word.

I dunno if they’ve just spent too much time chatting to stochastic parrots, if we desperately need to bring back onsite interviews, or if HR is deliberately sabotaging anyone with integrity. God knows only a psychopath could work in HR and still sleep at night. But you’re right. Let them eat slop.