cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/52088358
I know the market is ass rn, I’ve been looking for a job since I graduated in November of last year with no luck. Every application I get a response like “you are great, your skills are great, you meet every criteria but we found someone better”. I recently decided to start replying to emails to ask why I wasn’t picked (I reply only to emails that aren’t from no-reply or if the say I can ask for feedback). So far I have not even received one reply. Am I wasting my time??? I feel like it’s just from automated systems and they don’t even look at it. Is everything literally a ghost job?? If you have ever asked for feedback have you gotten anything useful from it?
I don’t remember if there was an indication, but I think not, I remember lots of candidates not writing tests, and usually that was fine, they would mention that they didn’t think it was needed for such small code or that they didn’t expect to do it for a take-home. The problem with that guy is that when asked about it he said he didn’t believe in tests (at all) and thought the whole TDD was a hoax.
I will agree that TDD is a bit idealistic and no one follows it strictly, but to say the whole idea of testing your code is useless is a big red flag that you have never worked on large projects or for long enough. When you’re working with huge codebases a change to one file might affect stuff you didn’t even know existed, and even if you specifically know and thought about it doesn’t mean the new hire will know that the function he’s touching is being called indirectly in a completely different part of the code passing a different argument you never suspected because of historical reasons.