Looking for a job is terrible by itself, but a whole other level of terribleness is added by low quality emails and questions. Add in recruiters who don't really care about what they are doing and just want to move fast without understanding or proofreading anything.
In my job search I've come across a lot of very bad job descriptions, incredibly weird questions on applications, and very odd interactions with recruiters of all kinds. I've been documenting these with screenshots as I come across them, so I thought I might as well share them here.
I do want to clarify that not every recruiter, job application, or assessment is terrible. There are quite a few great recruiters I have worked with who genuinely care and want to find the perfect role for me. Most job descriptions are clear and well written. Many technical assessments or other tests are presented well and assess real-world skills. However, obviously none of these are funny or strange, thus they do not appear below.
I replied to this email: "Hello {Recruiter: firstname}, I am interested in {position}!
I'd love the opportunity to work for [Company Name]!
I have absolutely no idea what is meant by this line. If you have individual years of experience they don't count?
Is this an insult?
I would like to work as a farmer on a crop-to-crop basis please. The JavaScript harvest is coming up soon and the objects are starting to ripen.
This feels like it was generated by an AI. Note that it lists needing to understand SEO twice. This one I posted to Reddit and it is my highest voted post so far!
Ah yes, I always speak directly to the server, no need to type letters into a file
I know what extreme programming is, but it's not a term I hear often and the phrasing here just made me laugh.
Note that as of writing, Angular 2.x has only existed since 2016 (7 years) and React since 2013 (10 years). What they are asking for Angular is impossible, and what they are asking for React is a very tall order - to have used it ever since it was initially introduced.
Here they want you to have more experience with an Angular library than with Angular itself.
Ever worked with MangoDB? It's a delicious and juicy database, but watch out for the huge seed in the middle!
Perhaps we have a different definition of what a "drawn-out interview process" is. This adds up to at least 4 hours plus a week of waiting.
This company wants 9 hours of my time, more than an entire work day, before they even consider giving a job offer!
Wow, what a tempting offer!
This is on a job posting for a web developer. Only a good web developer will have 200+ completely inauthentic social media connections!
This is a legit requirement, but I'm amazed that there is anyone out there still doing ColdFusion development!
CONSENT!
You are required to have a disability! Ok fine, they just put the validation message in a bad spot.
Hmm, yes, how did I find this form?
The phone section of this form makes me select "phone" as my phone.
Ah yes, this will help me narrow down my search
Are you SURE you don't need sponsorship?
Why am I allowed to start one of my previous jobs 20+ years in the future?
Optional is actually required! Please type a word to prove you read this
Are you sure you know how much you'd like to make?
I guess this is the best way to describe my experience.
Good luck finding your country code prefix in here
What is a full stack engineer supposed to choose in this situation?
I feel like only one of these messages was meant for me
Yes sir, that's correct, I have nearly 2 billion years of experience with JavaScript. My previous position was on Pangaea and all my references are amoebas.
This is a pretty wild and irrelevant job application question. Why do you need to see my desktop? I posted this on mastodon and it's got a lot of feedback!
Absolutely the most bizarre questions I have ever seen on anything related to a job! This was for a programming-adjacent writing job related to AI, so not a strict web development position. But still! I posted this on mastodon and you can go there to see the story I wrote bout Sam's green octopus.
When you upload your resume file the site tries to parse out the information, which almost never works.
My phone number has an 850 area code, and was auto-filled here. Since the "+1" country code was not autofilled it assumed the first digit must be the country code. 8 is the country code for North Korea!
Yep, that's me: Charlotte North (Carolina) - this happened more than once!
export default diploma
This will certainly weed out the unskilled web developers!
Please set aside several hours from your day to take a test so we can determine if we want to interview you or not.
BEFBEBIEFSEEDPFESJEEJDEDEPJET
Another excellent way to know how good of a software developer someone is: have them compare things like love, poisoning the city water, and prostitution.
Like all normal software development sessions my chin and forehead are always completely visible and am am not indulging in suspicious activities.
Emotion detection. Now this is just silly. I assume this is to weed out the psychopaths and people who can't feel empathy?
I just feel bad for the lady who had to pose for this stock photo
This blue person cutting in line is so me! This will help the company know if I am good at programming Angular applications! I've always wanted to visit Pandora...
Ah yes, let's look through a list of 100 side-by-side numbers and see if they are the same or not (there was another identical tests for strings of text too). Only a good developer will want to do this manually instead of creating a simple program to do this for them. I actually tried to open the dev console to ty this, but they blocked the UI out when focus left the window.
I'm glad the code in the answers here are well formatted and easy to read...