I won't name names because I got in trouble for that last post but I interviewed with the biggest agency I've ever gotten a call back from. They are 150+ employees, at least one major national corporation as a client.

You would think that because they are so high and mighty they have their s*** together but honestly no. The first interview was with the "big boss" the digital director. The second interview was actually 4 separate teams calls scheduled back to back with a total of 9 people.

The director loved me and told me I would be moving on. He said my second call would be with three people which is hilarious because he wasn't even close to correct.

My second interview was chaos. First call ended up being a different group of project managers than was listed, and they just hammered me with hypothetical situations of conflict the entire time. All rain clouds, no sun.

Second call was two developers who didn't seem that invested in talking to me. They mainly just said that works comes in from many different places and you can be expected to work on a bunch of things while managing a bunch of people AND be suddenly put in front of a client at any point.

My third call was hilarious because the top senior dev and the top senior designer in the company on this call loved me. We clicked on everything - our stance on AI, our views on WordPress and PHP in general, our approach to projects.

My fourth call was back to doom and gloom - more managers and all just hypothetical situations about conflict and everything going wrong. The people on call four were telling ME that a person from call two has a "different idea of what finished means" and were basically talking s*** on this person who is probably their smartest back end developer.

During all of this, the HR person had no idea who I was the entire time. I am interviewing virtually and would have to relocate and she sent me multiple emails about my "In Person Interview". My rejection email was actually the same email sent three times rapid fire from their HR software. I guess they really wanted me to know that are NOT interested /s

So the message I got was that HR is so overwhelmed with staffing they can't see straight. They will waste 10 people's time on a candidate and those 10 people will just project their workplace trauma onto you, or just use you as a nice break in the day to talk about something they care about personally. There are no processes, there are no boundaries, every project turns into a dumpster fire, and the smartest people in the company are treated like crap by management who don't understand the technical aspects of their job.

The job posting asked for 4 years of experience. They want someone who will work for 50k to 70k in an area where rent and utilities would be half of your salary but you are "passionate" aka young and exploitable.