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Admin
shakes fist
I guess that's better than waking up to realize you're living in the Matrix.. and then it turns out to be a VB6 application :|
Dim You as New MatrixSlave
captcha: serena ...Dimensions? (the real wtf)
Admin
You can't get fired from a gubment job... Why couldn't he just make himself a completely inadequate applicant? I would think a few choice insults and he'd be rejected by Mr. The Hut there.
Admin
Just goes to show how useless all the government paperwork is if things ever have to deviate from their path. It doesn't make me desire to work in a government position.
Admin
bwahahaha... For some reasons scenes of the rancor went through my head.
Admin
sounds like a horror movie... better than a job from hell thoguh...
Admin
nothing on IT, but good )
Admin
Good story but it sounds like a discarded scene from Brazil.
Admin
"he had ever been threatened to be" Come on.
Admin
Didn't he already have to demonstrate adequacy to get the interview?
Admin
Ed should have shouted back "You can't hire me! Where is your 27 B-6?!".
Oh my...
Admin
I work for the gov't and people get fired all the time...
Admin
I see you are using VB 6's auto-create syntax so if I kill myself, I'll get recreated the next time someone tries to use me. It's like Southpark's version of hell, but the pitchforks are made out of Nerf.
Admin
We control the horizontal... elevator stops
and the vertical... elevator starts moving sideways
Sorry, little Outer Limits reference there.
Admin
Theatrics aside, if after interviewing you rudely tell the interviewer that you couldn't work for them, they will most likely be upset. And while they probably won't chase you down demanding you sign a form damning you to hell (I somehow doubt that happened anyways), they could do a lot to ruin your future career hopes.
And if you are going to refuse an otherwise fine job just because the manager has a dirty office, you might want to see the proctologist to get that giant steel rod removed from your ass...
Admin
I loved the way he wrote all those unpleasant -yet funny- noises .. and of course, the "action-movie-plot-like" story.
P.S. Hell yeah, I love inventing words.
Admin
LMAO
Admin
While I do believe the stories are true to some extent, I have to agree that WTF is going downhill.
What exactly has this story got to do with "Curious Perversions in Information Technology"?
In short it's just another normal story that can be posted on any other site/forum that can be talking about almost anything.
I would appreciate if it posts start reverting back to more relevant issues in IT, even if the posting frequency drops to once in 2 days.
Admin
I want to know what the people complaining would do in the same situation. It wasn't just the dirty office he didn't like, it was the job itself. Would you accept a crappy job, just so you don't hurt someones feelings? What's the diplomatic way of getting out of this situation?
--Founder
Admin
Admin
One time, after a mass interview, one co-op student begged me not to hire him. He didn't have to beg, a simple request would suffice, but he didn't know that, so he begged.
The university had a rule that if a co-op student rejected a job offer then the student failed their co-op term. This had already happened. Some students had told the big computer company that they preferred to take other job offers, the company agreed, everyone was happy ... then the work term ended, the university found out about it, and the university failed the students for their work terms.
I think I have some amount of sense (though there are people who disagree with this opinion). I immediately agreed not to offer him a job. Even if there hadn't been 101 other applicants for the same positions, I wouldn't force a job on someone who didn't want it.
Admin
I felt like I was observing a D&D gaming session. With the putrid smells and the high speed chase. Where was the roll determining if the elevator would come quickly enough!?!?
Admin
I think the problem was that this was not a "fine job" at all. Read the story again. As the interviewee found out, the job he was interviewing for entailed taking long trips during which he would be spending lots of time with that manager. I think it would also be safe to assume he would also have to spend a lot of time in that grimy office.
Sure the manager was angry by the interviewee's awkward exit, but I suspect it came more from the narcissistic idea that an interview is some kind of gift and that those granted that "gift" are fully expected to take the job.
Admin
reminds of an interview where the job sounded very challenging and interesting. being the new guy to take over the development of one of the more complicated chunks of the framework and having a techie chief with good understanding of your daily work and internals.... i was almost in... until they had the idea to send me with the other developers for lunch to get known. big fault! more than half of the troop was simply sitting there, nervously trying to get back to their life-support machine... err, their computers. you practically saw them wasting away. the rest were either sitting silently, nervous not knowing how to behave in this alien situation (uh... communication? uh... what baud rate, port? accoustic? uh... where's the keyboard?), just eating and one or two were even trying hard to get out some questions, maybe one of them was even happy seing another human being capable of using his tongue for chatting... after the lunch i knew i would not work between those zombies...
some trivia: as anonymous poster you get a captcha to type in, my one was "xevious", cool! was wasting hours on the Atari with this game...
Admin
Hmm, Not being in the situation to start with.
Perhaps he should have asked for form b2398 signed by a practitioner in room 2b.
Filed under Terry Prachett.
Admin
.. or it could have been Ed, I guess
Admin
You are free to reject it, but you do need to be polite about it. There are business etiquette guidelines you should have learned on how to deal with these situations. And with regard to the "it just wasn't a good fit at all" argument, you should have some knowledge about the job when you come in, so you should have known that ahead of time.
Consider the reverse case for a second. Lets say you are interviewing for a job and have gone through a long application process and have just finished the interview. Then the interviewer give you a dirty look, and says something like "You know, I don't think this is going to work, we are really looking for a college hire". Will you be pissed off? Of course. If that is the real reason they dismissed you, they wasted a lot of your time since they should have known from the moment you handed them a resume that you were not a college hire. More likely, you will assume they are lying and think they dismissed you for some personal reason. Either way, that is not proper conduct by the interviewer, and can even lead to lawsuits.
You want to know what to do in this situation? You thank them for their time and leave. If they offer you a position, you thank them but mention you have a few other positions you are looking at. If after considering all your options you eventually do decide to go with a different job (and hopefully for a better reason than because the manager smelled), you follow all relevant business etiquette rules when you tell them you will be going a different direction. Not only is this simply the polite thing to do, it keeps you from burning bridges that you may need to cross someday.
Admin
Admin
A lot of places don't release all the data in their job postings, and leap straight to interviews without giving you much in the way of actual information. I once drove five hours for an interview, and didn't learn that the place used Delphi - and only Delphi - until I was sitting down in front of their tech people, about halfway through the interview proper.
Admin
This was funny... I was picturing every sentence in my mind lol, it seemed like a thriller xD
Admin
Such brilliant meta-sarcasm.
Admin
snicker
Yea, because I want to spend 8 hours a day in the same building as some guy who's making disgusting noises that make me want to vomit all day, in a place I dread, where I'll get sick more often due to its lack of cleanliness and sanitation, that screams of steel-rod-in-ass.
You can have the job, then. I'll stick to my clean, cushy office with no smokers in it.
Admin
There has never been a US govt employee anywhere that has been authorized to hire someone on the spot like that.
Admin
Just read the articles listed as "CodeSOD". Then we all win. You only read code-related WTFs, and the rest of us don't have to listen to your bitching on the threads of the other articles.
Admin
There has never been a mention of the U.S. government in this story.
Admin
I see that you fail to read points 3 and 4. This article, if you do notice, is a general article with regards to a job interview, and we have comments centralizing about what an interview should or shouldn't be, what an interview should have or shouldn't have, etc.
And for your information, I do read non code-related articles here that touch on IT itself, of which there are numerous good examples from before. Even a simple article touching on Agile Programming methodology and its history posted earlier would be better than this general interview article with little or almost no reference to the central theme of this forum here.
And lastly, I don't think my post counts as bitching, as I'm responding to Noah Slater's comment on these articles being cock-and-bull stories, which I believe they aren't. However for this article, it's off-topic as far as I'm concerned. You're free to disagree.
Admin
Admin
And I thought working at FTP Software was bad!!!
Admin
Admin
Perhaps that's true if the job itself isn't a good fit. But it takes an interview sometimes to find out if you might fit in with the others who work there, or if you can even stand working there. As an interviewee, you're interviewing the company just as much as they're interviewing you. And you have the right to get up and walk out just like they have the right to tell you to get out.
I doubt this is the US, unless it's more than 20 years old. I don't think there are any places in the US where you can smoke in your office at work anymore. Especially in government buildings.
Admin
Probably true for most headquarters locations, and all governmennt locations. I know lots of people who work for my state government, and they have really strict rules about smoking. However, I've worked places where people would smoke in their offices just because no one checked. Think remote data centers in the middle of nowhere.
I don't know if you still can do this, but Philip Morris used to be a smoking environment. And this was in the middle of New York City, where you can't smoke anywhere in public buildings.
(I'll bet PM gives out several cartons a year of smokes as a "bonus".)
Admin
you meant Douglas Adams...
Admin
you meant Douglas Adams...
Admin
I hate you.
Admin
> Filed under Terry Prachett.
you meant Douglas Adams...
I think he's actually referring to the nonexistent lecture hall at Unseen University, where wizards often schedule lectures in an attempt to avoid having to actually teach those pesky students.
Admin
Wasn't this in a scene from Brazil?
Oh no its form 115930-stroke-Zed (115930/Z) or some such.
first tacos now cognac captcha's make me hungry.
Admin
It says he was working for "The State". How many other countries refer to their government officials (local, national, or somewhere in between) as working for "The State"?
Admin
If you go to a job offer with no information on the company other than what is written in the job offer, you haven't finished your homework. And even if you discover some aspect of the job doesn't suit you once you get there, you are still expected to be polite about it.
Its no more fitting for you to tell your interviewer that he's a disgusting freak and you would never work for him than for him to say the same to you. Yes, both of you have the right to do so if you really want to. But it certainly isn't considered proper etiquette and could ruin your respective careers when word of your actions gets out (especially in a where you want to work a different job for the same company or government agency and the managers are much more likely to know each other).
Admin
On the rare occasions when I was escorted into said media room, it always smelled like someone had recently been smoking in a confined space.
She eventually had to retire because of health problems -- emphysema and lung cancer.
Admin
@nwbrown
Regardless of whether it was polite, I doubt anyone would hold it against Ed for running away from this guy. From what little dialogue we can infer, it looks as though Ed was trying to politely decline the job, and Mr. Thompson decided to be more than an ass about it.
(captcha: Poindexter, eh? I resemble that remark.)
Admin
As of ~3.5 years ago, PM was still a smoking environment. I had a recruiter call me about a job there and she mentioned that 1) the office was a smoking environment, but very well ventilated, and 2) one of the benefits was two cartons a week of any PM brand. When I mentioned that I didn't smoke, she su ggested that I sell them. Needless to say, I didn't accept the interview offer.