Just finished another interview. It was painful because the interview was the type where the interviewer spends the whole time smugly trying to find an excuse to eliminate you. Anyone who’s applied for jobs knows this kind of interview is sadly fairly common. They have no trust in anyone else and are paranoid about making a “false positive” – or maybe they don’t want to hire more “competition” in the first place and are only interviewing you because their boss ordered them to – and so they go into it with the mindset of “what excuse can I use to reject this candidate” and try to justify their preconceived notion.
Even if it were a legitimate interviewing strategy, when it’s done blatantly obviously it’s uncomfortable, degrading, and humiliating from the perspective of the interviewee. Moreso when you consider that I’ve already had multiple rounds of interviews and completed a coding project. And this was a relatively mildly uncomfortable interview, I’ve had way way worse.
This had me wondering – what if the tables were turned and employers were the ones who had to go through our interview process and beg us to hire them? Why do us wage slaves have to jump through all these hoops and put on these fake smiles pretending like our life’s passion is to sell ourselves to these corporations and that we’re not repulsed by these smug revolting personalities that suggest some deep subconscious lack of personal happiness? We’re the ones selling our bodies and the majority of our waking hours to these “bosses”, shouldn’t they be the one’s begging us to submit to them?
The entire process of interviewing is downright humiliating. This increases tenfold when the prospective employee is unemployed, and so employers are aware that the candidate is quite possibly a month or two away from getting evicted and having to wait in line behind homeless people at the local soup kitchen, yet they make you sit their for an hour while they smugly ask you to complete these irrelevant domain-specific technical problems that they spent all week thinking about while looking for any excuse to reject you and feel intellectually superior and validated for having a job that other people now can’t get.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Interviewing would not be so degrading if employees weren’t literally dependent on their employers to put a roof over their heads and food on the table. If we had a Universal Basic Income, then there would be no desperation or fear of destitution, so prospective employees and employers would be on the same playing field.
It’s time to end a Universal Basic Income and end this madness. One more smug interviewer wasting my time trying to stroke his own pathetic insecure ego and I might just have to opt out of this whole madness and live on a f***ing farm growing my own food and refusing to deal with this wage slave nonsense.
J. Savage 