I've been looking for a job all January. Not the most active month, considering how many New Year holidays there were this year - half the month - but still. Notes and observations.

About feedback

I decided to try finding a job as an iOS developer. I posted my resume and, in addition to work experience, attached a portfolio of apps I had made in the form of screenshots, plus indicated that the portfolio could be viewed at http://apps.arm1.ru . After posting the resume on hh.ru, there was silence during the holidays. Once people came back to work, responses started coming in.

Some companies, for example VKontakte, sent an invitation asking me to write to them or fill out an application on their site. I filled it out, sent it - silence in response. In my opinion, that is just piggish. First, if for some reason I am not needed by them or they are not happy with me, why send the invitation in the first place? If I do not fit at the resume review stage, do not send an invitation, or fire your HR people to hell. Second, they managed to find time to look for candidates, but could not find the time to write a simple «sorry, but no». Just piggish. Some I applied to myself - and they cannot even press the «no» button on the site.

With another company (as I understood it, a startup) it was even more spectacular. The company sends an invitation on hh.ru asking me to write to them by email. I write. Two or three days pass, and they finally reply (amusingly, their email arrived at 6:30 in the morning) - please send links to the applications you made. I scratch my head, check my resume - yes, there is definitely a link to apps.arm1.ru there. I reply that the resume contains a link to my work - apps.arm1.ru - and that there are links to each application there. They reply - no, send links to iTunes. In other words, they do not read resumes and common sense seems absent. Okay, I send them my iTunes link, since they do not know how to use a browser. Guess what happened next? Just silence, no reply. So, piggishness again. Their vacancy is still on hh.ru two weeks later.

The next case. In its own way, the opposite. Along the way I saw that a vacancy for an interface developer had appeared at Yandex. Back in September I had already applied there as a frontend developer for Yandex.Mail, and I spectacularly failed the interview, which hit my self-esteem pretty hard and pushed me to go deeper into that area and improve my level. After that failure, HR told me that if I felt up to it in a couple of months, I should try again; there would surely be some interesting vacancy. I felt up to it. I sent my resume. Waited, worried. Seven or eight days after sending it, HR finally got to it and wrote: when can we call you? Any time today or tomorrow (it was Tuesday, I think). The reply: let's do Thursday. Okay. For 2 days I go through my cheat sheets, which I had been saving while studying the topic, to refresh my knowledge. Then, two or three days later, they call me at the appointed time to say that they do not want to talk to me. So one HR person tells me I can try again in a couple of months. Yandex employees I know also tell me I can try again in two or three months. And then, 5 months later, HR tells me they are not ready to talk to me until a year after the failed interview, so wait until September. That's pretty brutal: I waited 11 or 12 days, and in that time I had already received another job offer. You kind of want to know these things when you have a choice. If I am already in their database, why can't they immediately write «no» if they do not even want to find out what level I am at now?

About test assignments

I was invited to try for an iOS developer position at CleverPumpkin. A recruiting agency invited me; they met with me first. Apparently to check whether I had lied in my resume, or maybe that is how they filter out inadequate people. In short, they passed me a test assignment from the company. I did it and sent it in; a few days later the recruiting agency told me that the company was not satisfied with my solution. I asked for comments - I am interested too, damn it, in where I should be looking. I understand that my level may not be as high as they need, but experienced great developers are not born that way, they become that way by working on themselves. They refused to provide comments; they simply told the agency that the solution was about a C. That is just cosmic piggishness - I spend several hours on their assignment, and they cannot spend 10 minutes writing what they did not like. Cosmic piggishness.

After that I showed the test assignment to an iOS developer I know, someone more experienced, and he explained in quite a bit of detail how it could have been done better. He spent about 15 minutes on it, mentioning that in his experience companies that do not give feedback are usually sketchy. Even after the failed Yandex interview in the fall, they gave me feedback - a list of books I should read, and almost every one had a note from the interviewer in the style of «skim through» or «read carefully and try it out».

Those are the stories. I generally caught myself thinking that looking for a job is like going around stores shopping for clothes or shoes - you walk, search, spend time, get angry, get tired of searching, and often either what you find does not suit you, or you are not good enough and cannot afford what you like. And it all takes sooooo long; this waiting is infuriating and exhausting.

If you are hiring people, do not be pigs, do not waste other people's time, and at least reply.