This could basically be a checklist to determine “is this person not autistic”?
When are we going to reckon with the fact that job interviews are designed to keep the neurodiverse out?
I have this comedy bit that intruded into my head based on shaking hands with men who clearly don’t think shaking hands with a woman makes any kind of logical sense so they do the bone crusher move.
The bit is that, they are assaulting me and I respond as such, headbutting them in the face and going complete racoon mode on them while they’re just stunned that I have broken the unspoken rules of office decorum.
I’m a bit worried that I have cackled to myself so much over this, and made other people laugh from sharing it (it flows better when I verbalise it) that I will one day actually do this just to see what happens.
edit: oh and the reason I find this “funny” is that I very seriously believe they are intentionally covertly causing me pain and damage, so it would be a legitimate self defense argument when I finally end up in front of a judge.
This is obviously very awful, thankfully I don’t THINK I’ve experienced anyone using a checklist like this, thank god
Oh, if only things were this easy. This doesn’t reflect reality at all, which is far worse. The actual checklist is:
- Can you establish rapport with the person who mattersTM in the interview?
If the person who mattersTM vibes with you, you can pretty much break every single rule and still get hired. You’ll ace the technical questions because the person who mattersTM will practically give you the answers. Every single one of your stupid jokes and attempts at being funny will land. Any objections by other interviewers will get shot down by the person who mattersTM. The interview would be best described as you shooting the shit with the person who mattersTM while other interviewers futilely try to keep up the charade by occasionally chiming in with questions that are vaguely relevant to the job position.
If the person who mattersTM doesn’t vibes with you, you can pretty much follow every single rule and still kiss the position goodbye. The person who mattersTM will continuously grill you on technical questions until you inevitably trip up, where they then humiliate you by asking how someone who can’t answer their stupid questions believe they deserve the position. None of your jokes will land. Other interviewers will take the cue from the person who mattersTM to bully and humiliate you as well, turning the interview into an interrogation where they take out their sense of inadequacies on you, the hapless interviewee.
How do you pass the vibe check by the person who mattersTM? It’s literally a dice roll, and your odds improve if you’re an NT cishet able-bodied young white dude because NT cishet able-bodied young white dudes are the people who tend to climb up the ranks where they become the person who mattersTM.
And if you’re none of those? Well, good luck. You’re gonna need it.
I’m convinced that 99% of interviews are just confirming what the hiring manager has already decided. They’ll go in with a preconceived notion of ‘this person is our hire, we’re hunting for things that will confirm that so we can wave them through HR’. If you’re not the confirmed hire, and kf you’re able to establish rapport despite that maybe they’ll finagle something for you later down the track.
Yes, there’s that aspect as well. Even if you could’ve pass the vibe check, a lot of interviews is just people going through the motions because that’s what the onboarding process set up by HR demands them to do. They have already decided on their first choice and second choice applicants and had even given them offer letters, but since the first and second choice applicants didn’t formally accept the offer (slow response, final haggling over salary and benefits), the onboarding process outlines that the hiring manager has to continue interviewing people even though the search is more or less over. Usually for these types of interviews, there’s absolutely no enthusiasm and everything is completely rushed. I’ve had interviews where everyone just reads from a sheet of paper and not even bother looking at me. Well, at least I don’t have to give them eye contact if they don’t bother looking at me lol
I’m still grappling with the fact that you are just supposed to lie on resumes
Why yes, I did spend 10 years as CEO of JP Morgan Chase
I also spent 15 years as the guy who eats all the scrap oreos at the end of the line
Horrible how even Investment Banking CEOs have to have two jobs to get by.
More like kkkrapitalism, amirite?
I was the CEO of Blockbuster!
Abso-goddamn-lutely. And it’s not just lying, you have to be good at bullshitting so they believe you. And if you are good enough, you can make a career out of it.
The really unhinged shit is adding tiny white text that flags you through some bullshit keywords filter. I think people are even doing this to get around AI screeners.
Ugh, do you really have to do that these days? I still haven’t added that to my resume. What exactly are people adding? Is it just a string of keywords or is it AI instruction as well?
I think most companies know about the this trick now, I probably wouldn’t try it
and you better be sure almost every sentence you write sells yourself as above and fucking beyond, because most these recruiters skim like 6 words before tossing it in a pile, assuming their racist AI screener didn’t already
Capitalist “meritocracy” is really just eugenics. This is a direct consequence of workers having zero bargaining power in society. America is a cursed shit hole country that kills millions of people per year so it’s elite can live like god kings and it’s a damn shame that the rest of the west happily copies at least in part the things it does since it’s the global hegemon.
America is a nation not a country.
What?
Forgive me, its a godforsaken evil irredeemable shithole settler colonial entity with a near global empire-level sphere of influence that needs to be totally and utterly annihilated before it kills every single human being on earth.
ACTUALLY, it’s a continent with 35 states.
ive been NEET for a while but the last time i did a real interview i masked so hard i literally felt dirty for a week. then the job landed me in the psych ward anyway. it’s really a hostile world to us.
strong vocabulary
Odd, because they really didn’t like it when I used strong words like “Fuck” or “Damn” or “You are of the wrong haplogroup, you deviant of the Ham Sandwich People”
This is ass-backward, but absolutely download and memorize this list, because it’s how you ace any interview, aside from technical testing components.
These are the things that you want to practice
Can’t believe I’ve been practicing for interviews by ensuring I can demonstrate my knowledge of the subject material and am capable of meeting the requirements of the role instead of focusing on maintaining eye contact and improving my posture
Being able to answer quickly and confidently is more important to them then answering accurately, ususally
I have been blindsided by really technically-minded interviewers, but it’s rare IME
Knowing how to stall while you think of an answer is also a strat. It gives you that illusion of confidence while you scramble for a plausible answer.
You flatter their ego while thinking [fabricating/repackaging/searching your word doc for] your response “Wow that’s a fantastic question, there’s a few ways that I could take this, do you mind if I think for just a moment while I consider the example that best responds to your question?” or “I have a number of examples that I think would perfectly match what you’re looking for, but to give me a bit more direction, would you prefer one which is more customer-relations focussed, stakeholder focussed, or upwards management…?”
They’ll be like wow this person can talk. I wrote down about half a dozen of these stalling scripts and rehearsed the absolute shit out of them.
You should write an effortpost of protips and hacks. I do this stuff fairly naturally for someone who’s pretty neuro divergent, or I used to, I crashed out bad and am NEETing and terrified of re-entering the workforce in case it destroys what is left of my sanity.
I had a decent effort reply on an old (deleted) acct I wish I’d saved it. I’ll jot some notes down if I can but I think I respond better to prompts/questions than to self-directed long form drafting… will lyk if I get anything together
Neat. I’m hitting that save post button on your original comment now, because I realise like, just reading what you wrote gave me hope that I can probably succeed enough to stop feeling like a total waste of love and resources. It’s a terrible mentality but I can’t seem to reorganise my mind in a healthier way.
Anyway the point I was originally going to make is you already helped me with your post, but my suggestion that you could effort post comes from a feeling that you have the right tools and perspective to help a lot of other posters manage the mindfuck of doing job applications and interviews etc.
You should feel no obligation to do so though. Like I said you already helped me. Thank you.
tl;dr Rehearse your responses and behaviours and if you lie, just make it fit within the larger context of your work history so it’s plausible
I’m very glad I could help. I was unemployed for most of 2023 and had to study, introspect and practice all of those interview and job hunting things anew, and realise how so much of it is this strange set of inculcated norms.
But the flip side of that is that recruiters do put out these resources that you can reverse engineer and practice like scripts, and I found that I was able to learn them and ‘act’ (like in the sense of an actor) the role convincingly for long enough to get through online interviews.
My main technique for online interviews was to have a word document out with pre-prepared responses against each of the main selection criteria, written out as dot points into an STAR format. When I got a relevant question, I would use a stalling reply from above while scrolling through the doc for the best example.
I’d have rehearsed each of these multiple times before the interview so I could recite them fluidly and hit on major points while still giving the appearance that they were off the top of the dome. It was exhausting.
(Fortunately they were still mostly doing them online in 2023 but the return to offline only would be a whole nother mountain to summit. The other thing I’ve seen is that some online interviewers insist that interviewees share their screen so that they know that they’re not using an LLM to spit out answers. The trick here is that you can cradle your phone underneath the camera and load the LLM up there while maintaining something similar to ‘eye contact’.)
About 30% of my responses are lies (as in it’s truth and lies mixed together for an aggregate 30% mistruth). Firstly because I will shoehorn any rehearsed example into a response because it’s better to have a fluid, prompt response than to have dead air. Secondly, because if I stumble and misspeak I do not stop to correct myself because this fails their ‘fluency’ test and makes you look untrustworthy or forgetful.
You kind of just have to barrel on. They will take everything at face value, so if you make something up they may ask you about it to expand upon. E.g. if you misspeak and say you were reporting to a section manager (more superior) instead of a line manager, then you kinda gotta roll with it. Just port across whatever action you took with the line manager and say section manager instead. They probably won’t ask why you were reporting to a section manager instead of a line manager because unless the place you’re interviewing for is /very/ similar in structure to the one you’re getting your example from, then they’re in no position to call you out.
The only thing that will most likely trip you up is lying whole-cloth. You’ve got to make your lies fit within the context of your CV (embellished ofc).
i have ADHD/OCD/general anxiety disorder so ive spent my whole life practicing how to mask to seem neurotypical, but it usually just results in me seeming distant, monotone, and hard to read
I always get involved with hiring asap anywhere I work to fix this shit immediately. Especially because crafting a hiring rubric that discriminates against autistic people is the best way to make sure you have an absolutely dogshit engineering department.
I work for an engineering subcontractor and… How does one find neurotypical engineers lol? Like, I talk to a lot of engineers, our clients (who are from other engineering companies, well, mostly fabrication), drafters etc… Not one has actually struck me as neurotypical, even the ones that claim to be. A lot of chuds tho
I have a feeling many of the IT people at my job are neurodivergent or at least a little bit on the spectrum, which is probably why I was able to easily get the job (contract, not the full-time positions I applied and interviewed for).
I’ve worked with some, which is always really jarring, because they still expect to be defining the culture and communication norms, but like… my sister in christ look where you are. You are out numbered. Your preference for eye contact has no power here.
There’s this screenshot of a comment I used to have saved for a while that goes something like “You hired this man because in high school he built a plumbing system in his garage. It had real human shit in it and he thought it was cool. He’s paid to look at spreadsheets of plastics all day and he loves his job. It’s a wonder any of these engineers speak to you at all.”
Maybe if I move to a larger company.
So basically, “did they answer the questions the right way?” And not “Did they answer the questions correctly/while showing expertise.”
This must be why I dont get call backs. They ask me what I would do in a given situation and I tell them in detail, drawing from experience, what I would do, and why.
Its a completely different way of communicating than, state context, state action, state result. I’m crafting a narrative about how I would act. While they’re looking for a lab report of a sterile setting where I assume I know outcomes.
Like others have said this is such bullshit for any remotely technical position. I try to demonstrate expertise when they, apparently, want me to demonstrate conformity.
Fuck corpo culture
This could basically be a checklist to determine “is this person not autistic”?
Is this like an inverted checklist or something? I don’t think anybody, autistic or not, would be able to actually satisfy all of this.
It’s not about being able to satisfy all of it — virtually every item on the list are NT communication norms that autistic people typically do not satisfy. Much of it is entirely subjective. Like “Responses are communicated in a sincere and honest manner” — for some reason allistic people, who stereotypically love lying and do so constantly, seem to think autistic people have insincere and dishonest vibes.
There’s been a bunch of studies done about how NT people make snap judgements that put autistic people in the “creepy and weird” category. No matter how hard we mask, we fail those secret vibe checks. This whole checklist is full of items like that.
So AD/HD definite and autism suspecting here so mileage of this as advice will vary but cause communist I feel I’m in an adversarial relationship with my employer from the get go and at the same time, they can’t know that and I follow my messiahs of lying Plain Simple Garak and Geoge Costanza. I’m an undercover agitator who does a job to keep my cover intact in my brain. But you have to kind of enjoy deception a bit, there are people it’s okay to lie to and I will scratch my boss’a back with a well prepared knife with absolute glee. It’s really fun to flatter and bullshit people for your own ends if you’re doing it morally. Just like it’s okay to steal from a store and not from your friends and the right kleptomaniac can feed a block, you can turn certain social interactions into a deceptive game that would be really mean to do yo your friends, but your boss is your enemy. Tell em whatever they wanna hear and then talk shit behind their backs as soon as you gain any trust. Masking isn’t so bad when you take the right perspective. May not work for everyone but works good for me, I like playing Spy
same. like a spy that infiltrates a feudal court that came from a peasant republic commune far away.
every corporation really does feel like a feudal court. with presumptive heirs, mad kings, courtiers, everything.
Jaffar pilled
It’s about as super gross and weird as I expected.
It’s wild how none of this translates to a good worker either. It’s all just a “normalcy” test.
The only stuff it could possibly help on is stuff like sales.
Means fuck-all for almost any other position.
The only stuff it could possibly help on is stuff like sales.
Most corporate leadership are salespeople first and foremost, and sales is always no. 1 in priorities because they’re the ones who can point at their results by saying “we brought in this much money”. Everyone else is on the defensive justifying their work by either “we’re saving this much (money saved is somehow worth less than money earned to executives)” or “we reduced the errors by this much (completely immaterial to the eyes of the P&L statement)”
I unfortunately had to interact with people like that all the time, and it cost me whatever little mental health i have.
full disclosure, i assume i am NT but i’ve not been evaluated and sometimes ND people describe their experiences in a way that resonates. and i tend to intuit ND people better than other NTs and i would say i have an awkward dry/deadpan sense of humor. so who the hell knows anymore.
anyway, this checklist is garbage. it’s not even a good checklist for trying to find people who work well in a team doing some rando scut work. i would bomb this crap because at least 11 of these are a hard no, and i somehow always get glowing reviews in my “plays well with others” evaluation remarks everywhere i’ve worked. it’s as though sincerity and decency are maybe what people actually want to work with, and not some mazda salesman who can look you in the eye, shake your hand, and talk you into a 60 month loan with 0% down and 0% financing for 6 months.
honestly, i suspect the people who come up with junk like this are consciously performing all these moves themselves because they legitimately are disagreeable people with underwhelming competency in the sort of basic resourcefulness, initiative, and personal integrity that inspires somebody with too much shit going on to say, “damn, i need some help around here.”
it’s like those people who have accumulated S-tier interviewing skills, but are pretty buttcheeks at whatever the job is and, if they get in the door, they are gonna try to manipulate and shirk their responsibilities onto others and introduce tension with their bullshit as a smokescreen. i’ve been on hiring panels for positions i would be collaborating with, and holy shit that’s legitimately the only thing i’m ever trying to find out because those people make work worse for everybody.
i would bomb this crap because at least 11 of these are a hard no, and i somehow always get glowing reviews in my “plays well with others” evaluation remarks everywhere i’ve worked.
Because you have shown that during the work, which is where it should really matter, and where you’ve had more than 30 minutes to interact with your colleagues and you know, do stuff. An interview is just a more elaborate vibe check for the company to gamble on whether they’ll regret hiring you or not down the line, without having any actual evidence of how you perform doing the work.
This really bothers me. Part of my job is getting to know people quickly, asking questions, ‘evaluating’, ‘assessing’, etc. And, not only are these questions brimming with subjectivity and bias regarding essentially all ‘demographic’ factors (age, race, sex, income, neurological, cultural, etc) BUT these questions offer me almost NO information about a person whatsoever. So dumb!
