This isn’t a “beware” it’s a warning about arc.dev and the sites like it. You’ve seen sites like this popping up like explosive diarrhea. You need to know the background before you jump in with one. It isn’t as bad as the 13 sites the FBI just shut down. It’s also not as bad as 24-Mag or the hiring companies hosted on Go Daddy.
I have often written about this topic. Chapter 15.8 Avoiding a Hell-Hole in this book. Many sections in The Minimum You Need to Know About the Phallus of Agile talked about Hell-Holes and avoiding them.
You need some background first
I’ve been in IT for over four decades. The past decade has been spent mostly in the embedded systems world generally making medical devices that save lives or test equipment for testing medical devices. During my twenties and thirties technical recruiters were professionals. We had the Technical Recruiter Network. Members actually read the weekly trade press so they at least knew CICS only existed on IBM. Sorry Wang coder, you cannot snow your way through an interview with a fake resume! They weren’t the non-English speakers who by their second week on the job achieve this.
Unlike most reading this, I have unique exposure to IT consulting and recruiting. During those same twenties and thirties I dated two different professional technical recruiters. One was a short dating period of a few weeks then we became best friends. Those words come up a bit short though. Best friends through her getting married, having a daughter, and becoming a widow. The other I dated far more off than on for something like six or ten years. I don’t keep in touch with either of them anymore but I will share the insights with you.
Only the spineless stay
I don’t think it has ever been written down in a textbook, but that is the mantra in HR for Hell-Hole companies. This started at least in the 1960s if not before. It was rampant in the 1970s. Like for-profit universities announcing “Less than five percent of applicants make it in” MBA run corporations started spouting similar marketing fraud. They wanted to make it sound like only the cream of the cream could get into their companies. The Varsity Blues scandal showed just how false such a belief was for supposedly elite universities.
Corporations will toss out phrases like “loyalty” and such, but it is all synonyms for “spineless.” They want to hire someone who will never say they are wrong or cause any ripples what-so-ever. The ideal candidate is someone they can hire on Monday then tell on Wednesday they have to take a 20% pay cut to stay, knowing full well the person will still be coming in doing their job six months later.
This is a Hell-Hole.
Only the spineless stay at a Hell-Hole. Upper management can (and sometimes does) stop purchasing toilet paper for the employee restrooms (not the executive of course!) and the people they hire will gladly bring in their own. You think I’m making this up, but I’ve worked with people who worked at places where their desk was up on warehouse pallets. Yes, they were computer programmers typing away up there. Why the pallets? The room where they worked routinely flooded. All electrical connections had to be made via a power strip mounted on top of their desk.
I kid you not.
1960s and the paper days – 6 different ways
Most HR training and processes in the 1960s through mid-1970s was about identifying the spineless and scaring the person who still had one vertebra left into peeing their pants so they wouldn’t use it. Identifying the spineless became obvious in retrospect, but it took an evil genius to come up with it.
Repeat the application questions across multiple sets of application paperwork. We aren’t talking two or three sets of documents, it would take a minimum of four hours. When the clear Bic ink pens came out, you would deliberately be given one with your first set of paperwork that was more than half gone. Why? It would run out of ink before you got to the last set of application paperwork. They wanted to see if you would ask for another pen or use one of your own. See above comment about toilet paper.
This paperwork would take at least four hours to fill out. That time was universal. Didn’t matter which Hell-Hole you were applying at. If they claimed to only hire a tiny percentage of applicants this was how they achieved it. Nobody with a spine would answer the same set of questions in different orders on different bundles of application paperwork.
Today’s touchy-feely Silicon Valley anything but Agile multi-day hiring process is the modern version of this. You have to burn at least half your vacation time to “apply” at any one company. This means you can only apply to two per year. The Hell-Holes that are true Shit-Holes will have you do multiple days of “shadowing the team” not only to burn up all your vacation time, but to have lots of work done for free. You aren’t the only candidate shadowing the team.
This mentality exists across all employment levels. Just watch this documentary.
Illegal Questions
Over the years certain “illegal questions” came into being. You can’t ask someone how many kids they have or what church (if any) they attend. On bundle number two you can ask them to list their hobbies and extra curricular activities though.
“Oh, I see you coach little league. That’s nice, do you enjoy it?”
“Yes, my son Bobby really likes the game.”
Gotcha!
Same goes for those who put down Knights of Columbus, Free Masons, etc. Most people who are active in such things put it down. This gets around the questions. Making them sign with a clause all answers are truthful means you can fire them if they don’t put it down in the application.
Double gotcha!
1990s and the Rise of HR Generalists
There were a lot of things coming into play here. HR Generalists were almost as much to blame as the Gartner Group being paid to market “Right-sizing” immediately in front of Y2K. (We get to go through Y2K again in 2038 btw. 2027 is supposed to be another year with a smaller Y2K ripple. Lots of 2-digit year COBOL shops hacked their date routines so numbers 27 and under got 20 in front of them. Bitch of it is many people live to see 90 now.)
HR Generalists hate recruiting. They hate technical recruiting most of all. When I was living with (not as a couple, she just lived closer to a client than I could find housing) one of the technical recruiters I had dated she left the consulting world to become a contract recruiter. Every week she would vent about the HR Generalists just sitting around thinking great thoughts and getting nothing done. It got to be a running joke where we would turn our palms up, glance skyward and chant “Ooooohhhhmmmmm.”
That got me in trouble at a client site blood drive where girl sitting next to me struck up a conversation. She told me she was an HR Generalist . . . yeah, it was a reflex.
The Mass Expansion
As luck would have it, the client she was working at had a mass expansion. My then friend and ex-girlfriend needed to fill something like 50 positions in under a month. They weren’t just IT, it was all over. She went to her boss and said “You gals have to help.” A meeting was quickly convened. All the HR Generalists sat at a table sating things like “I spend 6% of my day recruiting.” “I spend 5% of my day…” You get the picture.
8*60 = 480 * .06 = 28.8 minutes.
Exactly how much recruiting can you get done in that amount of time? I told you this was a journey, and we are getting close to where the story came in.
Naturally the meeting ended in about 15 minutes with “let’s get her a consultant.”
HR Generalists really love review time. My then friend and ex-girlfriend truly amazed me. One of the chipper Glee Club HR Generalists gave her a good review, ending it with “You really need to work on your HR Generalist skills.” They seem to think everyone wants to be an HR Generalist. “Yeah, okay, I’ll work on that” was her response.
I could have never held my tongue! When she got home I heard multiple times what she really wanted to say.
“I’m a $74/hr technical recruiter. You are a $50K/yr HR Generalist. I know because one of the shit-ton of jobs I’m trying to fill is for yet another HR Generalist here. Brushing up on my HR Generalist skills would lead a severe pay cut.”
Two Facing Pages
Age discrimination is illegal. Age discrimination is rampant. There are two ways companies blatantly engage in age discrimination. There may be more, but these are the two biggest.
- Hire shit HR people who throw out any resume longer than two facing pages. In today’s single keyword searching non-English speaker world, you have to list all of the skills you used on a gig. If you’ve worked on more than three projects, the skills list can be more than two pages.
- Degree no longer relevant. This is the latest insidious age discrimination scam. They make you fill in your degree and date of graduation. If your degree is more than twenty years old they declare it no longer relevant and throw out your resume.
With automated systems it is quite easy for your “AI filter” to throw all of these out. When the government comes knocking you say “It isn’t our software.”
External Testing Services
These scams have been around since the mid-1990s. There was one that got big in the Chicago area. Can’t remember the name. They charged the candidate $35/test. Corporations and head hunters were always demanding a fresh test. No, last week’s test wasn’t good enough. Then they would refuse to interview anyone that didn’t score above 95%.
This was a result of HR Generalists wanting a one & done “solution” to their hiring problem. This particular company whose name I cannot remember got in severe legal trouble. They were only around a couple of years. Don’t remember the exact details. Seem to recall they were actually owned by one of the big head hunting firms (through a few layers of course) so firm got to juice its numbers by mandating everyone take the tests on their own dime.
The Explosion
There is now an explosion of “one & done solutions” for HR Generalists forced to do technical recruiting. Arc.dev is just one in a looong line that includes LeetCode and other supposed skills testing sites.
Note: If you have a LeetCode account, you are never getting hired on one of my projects.
Any company using such sites is a Hell-Hole.
That’s not an uneducated statement. Those “cute coding skills sites” do not teach programmers to develop maintainable code. They teach people to use the edges of programming language standards. Anyone who gets hired based on a score from one of those sites will leave their employer with an unmaintainable steaming pile of code. I’ve had to sweep it up!
Definitions
Your Job
Your job as a programmer (or whatever title) is writing well documented code that the most junior programmer fresh out of college can maintain. It isn’t to use compiler edge cases, undocumented CMake routines, or swap two integer numbers without using a temporary variable. Ten years from now, a fresh college graduation can be handed your code, told to make a change, and without using AI or anything else, get the change done in a day. Not a re-write, a change.
Ideally you will write C/C++ code with proper comments and alignment so someone who has only done COBOL all their life but worked at the company a number of years could spend a day with the code and make a series of small changes.
On the flip side your COBOL should be well written and commented such that a C programmer who has never heard of COBOL can make a series of changes in a day.
That’s why a LeetCode (or any of the other ones) holder will never get a job on my projects. I have code that has been in production since 1995. It’s still in production today. Some “priced right” off-shore developers were able to make changes to it and you all know how much their coding skills suck!
Professional
Getting paid to do something does not make you a professional any more than winning $20 shooting hoops in the park would make you a professional basketball player. Professionals are many cuts above. That $20 does not make you an NBA player.
Here’s a more down to earth analogy. Stocking shelves at Walmart does not make you a professional shelf stocker. Watch the movie above. It’s a paycheck. One that makes you decide between living indoors and eating this month or having health insurance.
A Professional
- checks their ego at the parking lot, long before it gets to the door.
- never writes LeetCode.
- does not do Agile.
- writes well documented simple code in a manner that can be maintained by a college graduate their first day on the job.
- never takes a coding test. We have devices in production with millions of lines of code under our belt. Many, if not all of us, have multiple Open-Source projects we work on in our “spare” time.
- mentors junior developers. Not just their code, but the business.
- learns the business. Not the business of programming, but the business they are working in. If that’s truck parts sales, then you learn all about the storage, flow, logistics, and inventory forecasting. Without that knowledge you are nothing but an Agile hacker that will paint themselves and their company into a corner because of a piss poor decision.
- knows that the longest distance between any two points is a shortcut.
Hell-Hole
In general, a Hell-Hole has an HR department staffed with HR Generalists who loathe recruiting. Always looking for a one & done. They use sites like arc.dev so they can send whoever sorts to the top of the dung heap to the hiring manager and quickly get back to “ooooohhhhhhmmmmm.”
You can also get a Hell-Hole just from shit management. In particular I see this with bigger companies that pay Gartner Group to “advise” them. That “advice” tends to be whatever the company was paid to market that week. After about a decade they have every major-now-defunct software tool doing “something” in production but everyone who knew anything about it left. No, they don’t have any documentation. They got rid of that to cut storage costs. They adopted Agile to cut costs further and now have a house of cards that requires constant maintenance. Usually it also requires off-hours support.
HR in this second type tends to be smart or politically savy enough to force managers into doing their own hiring. Since nobody knows anything about what they need they first demand “certifications” in the skills. After they burn through a string of people who just downloaded the certifications online without actually getting certified, they turn to one & done sites like arc.dev.
If you have ethics and actual skills, you will end up being the one person who supports everything. No, you won’t get a raise. You will get a pager though. Yes, most of them will still have a pager. Sometimes they’ve upgraded to a “support phone” that gets passed around.
Shit-Hole
A Shit-Hole is a Hell-Hole with a Vendor Management System.
A Shit-Hole has been driven by “cutting costs” so long that nothing works. They have been flying in visa workers by the plane load without actually vetting them. Every position has a singular requirement: Priced Right.
Most of the “vendors” on the Vendor Management System will be Indian firms. Not one of these Indian firms will actually perform the required background check. You’ve all seen job postings declaring LinkedIn mandatory, right? That’s all they do.
Of the pimps that I deal with, one learned this the hard way. A candidate who had been working through Indian firms at clients this pimp knew had mandatory background checks because the pimp also did business with said firms was presented by said pimp to a client. Three interviews later the client loved him and couldn’t wait for him to start. Background check came back with really bad felony conviction.
“Oh, was it just a DUI?”
Nope. Don’t know what it was just know that federal law barred him from working at this client site . . . and the others he had already worked at.
Keep that in mind, especially if you are a woman. You very well could be working with a convicted rapist because nobody checked the registered sex offender list.
The Video Clip
Of all the things in the arc.dev hiring process, the required video clips are the most incompetent. Banks don’t ever want to meet a mortgage applicant so they can’t be sued for racial bias. Video clips put racial/age/whatever discrimination front and center. No client of arc.dev can pass the red face test when lawyers and the government come knocking.
For years hiring managers at good places to work didn’t even want a name on the resume. HR had to black out candidate and college name in case the candidate went to a Historically Black College. They wanted to make interview decisions based only on listed skills and what the references said . . . assuming the candidate had managerial references.
Summary
What do we know about the companies using arc.dev.
- they have to be Hell-Holes if not worse.
- leave themselves wide open to discrimination lawsuits.
Do you really want to work for one of them?
