Recently I have gone through a few industry job applications. Here is a few examples that manifest how amusing this procedure can become

1. Company A desk-rejected me for a position I did not apply for (i.e., I applied for a full-time position, and I received an email from HR that they would not consider me for an intern—yes I made the correct application as I have checked my receipt—and this HR email was “no-reply”).
2. Fun fact: company A is famous for AI, ML, DL, and all fancy things. I wonder if AI safety would be undermined if the basic database procedure goes corrupted.
3. After finishing the a very long interview with Company B, I received an email from HR saying this interview had been rearranged to another day. It turned out in the first three minutes the interviewer had a connection issue and contacted the HR. This interviewer managed to go back but the HR did not know.
4. Fun fact: company B is famous for AI, ML, DL, and all fancy things. I guess at least I could trust their differential privacy.
5. Company C asked effectively identical interview questions in two subsequent sessions. I cannot help but to repeat to the fact that company C is famous for AI, ML, DL, and all fancy things.
6. I am not extremely thrilled with the fact that most tech companies requires no more statistical knowledge than the level of the first three chapters of “regression and other story”–not saying it is not a good book. But I guess a MD would be depressed too if they were only examined by their knowledge on babysitting skills.
7. To be fair, finance companies often had much harder math problems, until I learned afterwards that many, if not all, of their problems were from one published book, and this book and sold on Amazon. We would certainly eliminate all overfitting issues in machine learning if all test data are sold on Amazon.
8. Many tech companies desk-reject me. I was later informed that an insider referral was often necessarily for a resume to be picked from the pile in the first place. I guess a referral is not always bad: not everyone can afford a PPO plan.
9. It is like we are running a linear regression with covariate dimension = 1e6 so we have to run some pre-screening, and we do so by sequentially pick the variables that have high insider correlation from the all currently-selected variables. Don’t ask what an insider correlation means. I don’t even know what it means in human context.

Well, let me take a step back. People make mistakes. I mess up things a lot in my work if not always. So I should not laugh at those inconvenience I encounter. But the cynical part of me, which gets amplified after all these, has the following cynical advice to future job seeker. An ideal candidate in modern job market should have an ivy degree so the hiring manager would be happy. However, during the graduate school, instead of going to lectures, they should spend as much time as possible on

1. building linkedin connections,
2. reading first 3 chapters of RAOS,
3. practicing leetcode,
4. buying that hedge fund book from Amazon,
5. praying that the company’s email database would work,
6. Besides, don’t do anything else. Weeeee!