Bad job interview #1
Plus, my guide: "AI for Dummies Like Me"
Before today’s short and cozy column, I wanted to share something with you I’ve been researching and writing and that’s a primer on AI for regular people. It’s not an ode to ChatGPT or full of AI hacks or prompts, but rather a helpful essay meant to help you understand AI in general. I get into what normal people might want to know, should be thinking about, and how it could change life as we know it. FAST.
It lives on my Substack, but I didn’t share it as a regular column because 1) I’m in no way converting More to Your Life into an AI column, and 2) It might have scared you off as a regular post because, well, it ain’t short. But it is readable and as fun as I could make something that touches on such fluffy topics like grave risks to humanity.
As I state in the article, “we can’t really talk about AI without caring about what makes life cool and people interesting. And, conversely, we can’t talk about the latter without sometimes talking about AI.” Give AI for Dummies Like Me a read, a like (♡), and share it if you find it as helpful as initial readers have.
AI for Dummies Like Me
This bad boy is for people—including those who already use it—who find most of the talk about AI alarming, overwhelming, or more technical than most of us need. The briefest possible summary of this article is as follows: AI is here to stay, you might want to use it, its capabilities are exponentially increasing, and there are some very proximal and alarming possibilities for all of us.
Now, for today’s regularly-scheduled column!
The job interview from you-know-where
Do you ever wish you could go back in time to validate one of your vivid memories that just doesn’t seem like it can actually have happened?
Here’s one of mine:
Years ago, I’m going to say 16 years ago, I was job searching. This was before I got into tech, and, with my American Studies bachelors of arts degree, was wonderfully qualified for all kinds of glamorous admin jobs. People lined up for the privilege of hiring me! (No, they didn’t!)
Lest you think I’m knocking my degree, I’m not. I’m just stating the fact that liberal arts degrees haven’t typically correlated to exciting work unless you pair them with some skill the marketplace wants, or make your own exciting thing. Hence my move a few years later to the Bay Area where this “adult learner” survived an immersive web development bootcamp and somehow learned enough web development skills for a decade of gainful tech employment. Sometime I’ll tell you about my envy (I’m realizing I’ve struggled with this particular deadly sin for some time now) of a KFC employee who “looked like he knew was he was doing” when it felt like I had no clue.
Back to job searching, can you even imagine answering energizing questions such as, “Tell me about a time you failed?” or “What’s your greatest weakness?” for the rest of your forever? Especially if asked by AI or a stereotypically corporate panel of people who cannot be cracked no matter how hard you try to connect. You know the kind—the cold ones who on Zoom meetings are “professional,” don’t smile, haven’t laughed since childhood, and most certainly have never lived outside the corporate safety zone. Endless interviews like that would be my personal hell.
I guess I can be grateful that, in this particular situation which may or may not have happened (see intro), the questions were at least not boring. The one I vividly remember, and which sealed my, ah, disinterest in the job went something like this: “How do you think you’d react to having things thrown at you?” In my can’t-be-verified-memory, I laughed before the interviewer clarified. “You know, things like staplers.”
She wasn’t joking, not even slightly. This was, in her estimation, an important question to ask applicants for the position for which I was applying. And, GET THIS, she was not referencing poor treatment from customers. It was The Boss who had been known to throw staplers at his employees. I wonder if that guy is still a boss…
Like I wonder if this actually happened. My nighttime times are even more interesting than this, so I guarantee it wasn’t a nighttime dream. And I don’t think I’d pick something like this up from a Dateline episode or casual conversation and have the memory be so vivid, so let’s say it’s 89 to 11 that it happened.
Do you have any bad interview stories which may or may not have happened? I’d love to hear them. Share away in the comments!
Isn’t life cool, and are people interesting? See you in the next one…
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I went on an interview once at a New York finance firm, and the guys interviewing me were so stressed out I wanted to tell them, hey, there are other jobs out there, go find a better one. I thanked them politely and walked away. No toxic work environment for me, please.