r/interviewhammer

I sent out about 130 applications as someone with a bachelor's degree and 17 years of work experience, and I got 5 interviews in 5 months. My degree is in biology, and my experience is very diverse in terms of skills. I applied to all kinds of jobs, not just in one narrow field.

These companies act like they desperately need help, and then they want someone who meets 95% of their wish list with no flexibility at all. On top of that, the pay is insulting half the time, and the schedules are often impossible if you have a family.

When is this going to change? Are we all going to stop going along with this game at some point? They can't fire everyone, right?

I was rejected for a promotion that, honestly, I felt was almost guaranteed. After the internal interview process, I found out that someone on the team with less experience and weaker management skills was the one who got it.

I told them I was upset, but I had annual leave booked and traveled the next morning.

The CEO messaged me while I was away and said she wanted to talk about opportunities for possible future roles, or whether there are any courses or development plans that could help me prepare for the next step.

Since then, I've heard from several managers that the person who got the job would probably have been let go if I had gotten the promotion, because a large part of her old responsibilities has now been folded into this role. So to me, it feels like the outcome had been decided before the process even started. There is also supposed to be another opening coming up that is 3 levels above my current position, but I'm not very confident that this one will go in my favor either.

I have a meeting with the CEO at the end of this week, and I'm not sure what I should or shouldn't say in that conversation.

I'm prepared to leave if nothing real comes out of this, but my contract will also need renewal in about 6 weeks, so I don't want to go in too aggressively.

Any advice on how to handle the situation?

My manager got fired. Before he left, he told me that I'm probably going to get fired too.

Earlier this week, my manager was end for "job abandonment." He had bronchitis and was absent because he was sick, and upper management clearly used that as a reason to finally push him out.

He and I were in almost the same situation. When I was having issues with my medication, my attendance got really bad because I kept clocking in late. Our company calls them "points." If you get 4, you get written up. Two write-ups and you're out. We both had 8 at one point. He worked something out with HR and our old regional manager (who is also gone now, because of the same person above us) so we wouldn't lose our jobs as long as we reduced the points. A point drops off after 75 days. I'm not sure where he had gotten to, but I went down from 8 to 5, and it's supposed to drop to 4 the week after next. By the beginning of February, I'm supposed to be back to zero.

This afternoon, he came in to collect his things. He pulled me aside and told me I'd be next. Apparently the "backup role" they're hiring someone for, for my same position, isn't a backup at all - it's my replacement. So basically, I have until they find someone else and train them.

He also said the real reason he got fired was that he had proof that someone above us was falsifying paperwork. That same person is now in charge of our office, and all of us regular employees are quietly worried because no one knows who is safe.

I'm stuck and I don't know what the smart move is. There's a meeting on Monday to explain all the changes that are happening. Do I believe my old manager and start sending out applications now? Or do I act like I didn't hear any of this and just keep doing my job like normal? I had previously asked about extra training, and they told me to talk to the same person who fired him. Honestly, I'd rather walk into a cage with a mountain lion.

I'm scared and I have absolutely no idea what to do.

I spent the better half of yesterday afternoon dealing with an interview panel that perfectly highlights why tech recruiting is totally broken right now. The company is a mid sized infrastructure firm that advertised a massive need for internal workflow optimization. On paper, they wanted someone who could sit down, look at their engineering bottlenecks, and build custom scripts to stop their production team from wasting hundreds of hours on manual data entry inside their modeling environment.

The panel consisted of a young HR representative who looked completely lost the entire time and a senior engineering manager who apparently had not touched a production environment since the late nineties. The first twenty minutes were just the standard corporate buzzword bingo about synergy and adapting to corporate culture. I played along, nodding my head like a complete idiot, waiting for the conversation to finally shift to actual technical mechanics.

When the manager finally asked how I would approach reducing their turnaround times on large scale data checking, I decided to just show them instead of talking about it. I pulled out my laptop and walked them through a custom library I built last year. It is a clean, modular Python setup that automatically parses clunky model data, cross references it against design specs, and highlights critical geometry clashes in under two minutes. It is a tool that literally eliminates three days of mindless clicking for a standard engineering team.

Instead of being impressed, the manager completely froze. He stared at the terminal output like I was running some kind of illegal operation on his network. Then he looked at me with genuine suspicion and asked what happens to the junior staff if a script can do their entire weekly job before lunch on Monday. He literally said we have established protocols for a reason and introducing automated overrides might disrupt the internal harmony of the drafting team.

The HR girl immediately chimed in after that, asking if my approach meant I was difficult to manage because I preferred working with code rather than collaborating through standard company touchpoints. They did not care that the script was clean, well documented, or completely accurate. They were terrified because it was an actual functional solution that threatened their bloated, slow corporate timeline. They wanted a tech innovator on their job board but what they actually wanted in the office was a compliant drone who would manually click buttons for eight hours a day without asking questions.

I closed my laptop, told them that it sounded like their current workflow was exactly what they deserved, and left the office before the HR rep could finish her wrap up speech about their open door policy.

My cat has a better understanding of macro efficiency than that entire engineering board combined.

Spent an hour yesterday listening to a head of talent acquisition tell me that my seven years of technical infrastructure management looked great on paper, but she was deeply concerned about my lack of outward enthusiasm. This was for a senior backend infrastructure role where the job description literally demanded someone who can work autonomously in a server room and handle high stress deployment environments without hand holding.

The first part of the interview was with a senior engineer who actually knew his stuff, we talked shop, went over some server configurations, and it was completely fine. But then he hands me over to this corporate culture lead whose entire job seems to be policing facial expressions. She started asking these bizarre abstract questions about how I visualize my personal growth within the ecosystem of their corporate family and what kind of team activities get me hyped for the work week.

I told her straight up that I am a quiet guy, I like solving complex technical routing problems, keeping the network alive, and going home to my family. Apparently that was the wrong answer. She frowned, looked at my resume like it was covered in grease, and noted that she did not see any volunteer work or leadership camp certifications on my profile. She literally asked how I planned to inspire the junior staff if I am just sitting there managing servers all day.

The absolute peak of the comedy was when she asked me what my favorite motivational quote was and how it guides my daily workflow. I just stared at her. I thought she was joking but she was totally deadpan. I told her I do not have one, but I usually just prefer things to work according to the technical documentation so we do not have to do emergency rollbacks at two in the morning .

She sighed, wrote something down in her notebook, and gave me this pitying look before launching into a ten minute speech about how they are a high energy tribe and they need people who bring a vibrant presence to the office floor. I got the automated rejection email about four hours later stating that while my technical skills are exceptional, they decided to go with a candidate who aligns closer with their core interactive values.

They basically rejected a solid engineer because I do not smile at spreadsheets or collect corporate buzzwords.