I think what's more worrying to me (if other systems work like this ATS) is that it seems to judge based on a bunch of factors that will probably disqualify a ton of decent to good participants.
For example, 65 points are given for a mix of personal projects and open source contributions. Which is great if your one and only interest is in tech, and you don't have a family, dependents or a second/third job. If you have any of those other things, well the odds seem like they're incredibly stacked against you.
And it makes me wonder how many of these systems are stacked in favour of wealthy people with a near special interest level of obsession with tech and no worries outside of going to college/working a single job in their industry of choice.
Yeah, the over valuing personal/open source projects is worrying and kind of sucks. I can use myself as an example, I don't do personal projects really, outside of work. My only actual programming work experience is during work hours for my employer. My hobbies are tech-adjacent (3D printing, some hardware/arduino stuff, photography) but they aren't "make a bunch of projects and put them on github" type hobbies. I'm certainly not going to make some BS fake CRUD or SaaS apps just to show off for potential employers, what a waste of time.
I, intentionally, have zero online presence in that regard. You won't find any public repos on my github, I don't blog, etc. Its even infected the ops/syadmin side of the field (where I work), and that's somehow even worse. Like of course I don't have a bunch of environment specific scripts on my GH, why would I? It's irrelevant to anyone that doesn't work in my department at my current employer.
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I know that some think this is just some cold hard straight talk but this style of individualistic thinking lacks empathy. And more practically, it’s a trap.
In context, the “doing things” and “opportunities” that we’re talking about are jobs, careers. So by promoting the idea that one must work harder or longer to get or keep a career that they’ve already built sounds like a path to opt-in servitude.
In hiring, we pass laws to prevent abuses. In many countries and soon a few states, being asked to work outside of work hours is considered an abuse. Expecting that someone does work related activity outside of work hours is something I would actually consider regulating out of the application process!
Of course life isn't fair. But here the result is that companies will ignore potentially great candidates which dedicate all their programming time to their job and instead consider candidates which may be not just worse programmers, but also are more interested in their hobbies (or padding their CV) that doing their job.
I'm saying this as somebody who most of the time has some side project going on.
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> There's many great candidates
Perhaps for top-paying companies, but that's never been my experience when I was involved in interviewing and hiring.
“Fair” is one thing, “systemically impossible to even approach fair” is another.
For example, you can’t “conscious long-term effort” your way out of being stop and frisked by cops because you were walking while black.
This setup isn’t even good for employers. Having your job as your hobby doesn’t automatically make you better at your job.