The Job-Haver's Tale

Three years ago, I started my dream job.

I was fortunate, during my stretch in the DOD civil service, to get the kind the projects that allowed me to build credible expertise as a software engineer. Fortunate, because once 2021 happened, my opportunities for gainful employment in my PhD DOD-centric area of expertise basically disappeared for a year. Fortunate as well in that I enjoy software engineering more, earn more money, work with (on average) nicer people in an environment that, while not without its aggravations, is much less politically toxic than I endured in the post-2004 DOD. Fortunate, finally, in enjoying greater personal flexibility for reasons that are behond the scope of the present analogy. Likewise, my new employer seems pretty happy with my contributions, or at any rate the positive feedback I receive for my work is much greater than I am used to, and in particular has allowed me to build new domain-specific expertise that would make me difficult to replace. And our company enjoys a dominant position in our market; with all the turmoil in the technology sector, I have not heard about any layoffs having been contemplated.

So in summary:

• I don't want to quit;
• They don't want to fire me; and
• They won't go bankrupt.

Probably.

Most companies operate their own job portals where they post (theoretically) open positions and receive résumés. These posts usually wind up echoed on the public job boards (e.g. Career Builder), which themselves also offer the opportunity to upload résumés. As near as I could tell, these résumés are hoovered up into the private databases of the third-party headhunter firms, where they can persist long after the source résumé has been taken down. Also as near as I could tell, the headhunter business has been "Uber-ized": the people who are making the recruiting calls are not (I believe) directly employed (W2) by the recruiting company, but rather are independently trying to make these matches based on leads from the company, much like an Uber driver responding to the app. I made this assessment based on the number of calls I was receiving from people with sketchy (i.e. "South Asian") accents, so I could be wrong about the economics of it.

But the point is that, long after I started my new job (which for me was pretty quickly) and had taken down my résumés from the job boards, I continued to receive recruiting calls: "hey, I've seen from your résumé that you have expertise in X field and I'm trying to fill a job with Y defense contractor and are you still available?" And my answer was always they same: yes, I have a job now; no, I'm no longer looking; please remove my name and résumé from your internal database; but . . . thank you for your call. I genuinely appreciate the interest. There is a real hedonic effect when someone says: "We want you. Or might want you pending more information, or at any rate are not rejecting you out of hand." That feels good to me. It feels good even if I'm not looking. It feels good even if the job is objectively terrible (e.g. in DC). At this level of interaction, it is hard to imagine how such expressions of interest have net-negative personal utility.

But I can imagine an alternative scenario. I imagine myself about my business when I cross paths with a stranger, or perhaps not a stranger but someone I know, or know of, but with whom I don't have an ongoing relationship. Being aspirationally pro-social, I say hello, or at any rate make eye-contact and prepare to say hello. I'm not looking for conversation (indeed, would rather not, being busy and regarding most people as uninteresting), but I have it in my head that "hello" is the minimum standard of sociability. But instead of returning the greeting the person says to me, "I work in Human Resources at company X, and I want to take this opportunity to tell you that I wouldn't hire you if you were the last engineer on earth."

In the interest of maximum empathy, I might reason thusly: an HR guy's incentives are different from mine. He has 20 resumes sitting on his desk and he can say yes a maximum of one time. Saying "no" 19 times a day might be personally stressful in a way that saying "no" once every few months is not, and today might have been a particularly tough day. So I say to myself: self, don't take it personally.

But now I imagine having an interaction like this the next day. And the day after that. And the day after that. And every working day and the occasional Sunday for ten years in a row.

I think I would have two thoughts:

1. Is "hello" really the optimum threshold for concluding that someone is a job-seeker? Even granting the maximum empathy above, and even granting that, were I myself a job seeker, I would, lacking imagination, probably start an application with "hello", it seems to me that HR guys are leaning hard into minimizing Type II errors at the expense of a huge number of Type I errors and a lot of net-negative social utility. And this matters to me personally because;

2. That sh!t is demoralizing. To review:

• I don't want to quit;
• They don't want to fire me; and
• They won't go bankrupt.

But on the other hand, these are things that do happen. Work situations that seemed promising become untenable. A company makes the (mis-)calculation that an employee's cost exceeds his benefits. And once- or apparently-strong companies turn out not to be, and disappear. No, probably none of these will happen to me. But the occasional feedback that, if it did, then I wouldn't die jobless and starving? That would have net-positive personal utility. But instead, in this imagined scenario, I would be receiving near-daily reminders that this is exactly what would happen.

"Well, then, don't be such a crappy engineer. Or at any rate, don't look like such a crappy engineer at the level of the negative interactions you are currently experiencing."

This is undeniably good advice and would be exactly what I should do . . . if I were looking for a job. But it seems difficult to operationalize when I am not looking for a job. In this imagined scenario, my boss brings me into his office. "Dr. Phi, as we have told you many times, we are happy with the work you have been doing for us, and we have planned the company's future on the assumption that you will be with us for a long time. But I just received word that you have updated your résumé on Career Builder, and also that you have been spending time developing skills outside of our company's core business line. Are you unhappy here? Are the opportunities we offer not enough for you? Are you . . . planning to leave us?"

I could reply by explaining all this, but it sounds pretty lame even to me.