mitsuchen

> And that's a risk that could potentially be spotted by a competent HR.

It's a risk that could only be spotted be HR, don't know about the "competent" part. There would be no emotional-kid risks to speak of if it weren't for useless HR.

> Maybe, but juniors are (unfortunately) seen as a commodity by the market. Commodities are about uniformity and adherence to some standard, rather than uniqueness.

It's making even less sense now. If we are commodities and it's all about uniformity and standard, why do we see senior engineers complaining about this, too? It also makes no economic sense to spend so much time and effort on elaborate bullshit on "commodities". I don't mind being a commodity if the standards that you speak of exist, and I don't want to be unique. But guess what? It's the HR that wants us to be the unique commodities.

Most of us don't have the privilege to negotiate, we are fresh grads. Who doesn't want to work for larger companies in the hope for a better career path? And don't forget about power asymmetry.

You made the mistake to assume that we are idiotic enough to be emotional for job interviews.

It's harder to deal with people who think they are competent and know it all than emotional kids.

For everyone saying that it's risk mitigation, I recently asked about something similar[0] for a junior position, and the process still hasn't finished. For context, the company is a medium-size tech company with presence mostly in Europe and Asia.

I don't know these things well enough but it makes no sense to me. For starters, in the tech sector in my country the salary for fresh grads like me actually come mostly from the government. Moreover, these companies are all secretive about compensation, and they probably think they can get away with it by dangling their "reputation" in front of you like a carrot. In most cases the salary is about the same as a small startup because, again, they get the money from the government.

People can argue about spending time and resources on training and what not but basically every job ad, from "top" companies to the web dev garage down the road, expects us to learn by ourselves anyway?

It's frustrating for early career starters that most of my friends and I are going through. It's such a huge waste of everyone's time and people are just churning because of this crap. Please get rid of non-technical HR and interviewers.

Sorry for the emotional rant. I would really like to know what risks (other than useless non-technical HR keeping their jobs) there are after candidates have past a certain threshold for quality, particularly for junior positions.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881668

I am new to all of this and don't have enough experience to say confidently, but at least none of my friends have encountered something like this before.

The whole process is now approaching a month. Spending over 20 hours on the presentation on top of other commitments really tested my limits. I hope this is the last of it because, like you said, I am not sure that it will be a fair use of my time if this keeps going. :(

Thank you! That's something I hadn't considered at all, I will try to see if I could get more information the next time I speak with HR!