I wanted to sympathize with OP, but I sense that the blog post was written while they were still fuming, and some of their behavior during the process (esp the first job) gave me pause. Maybe its just the timing that makes it feel aggressive.
Imagine you are a contractor on a gig. You don't wait until things break before you ask for access. You ask, before the job starts, what all the doors are and who has the the keys. So: "hey, Recruiter, in order to make this task a success next week and make you and me both look good I will need some stuff ready on day 1: what's your code repo system ? MFA?internal comms channel? bug system? internal knowledge base? and most importantly, if it's not you who can administer access to these things, who is the person I talk to, and can you arrange an intro on day 1?"
To not show this level of initiative, and sit around while your friend navigates the corporate machine for you, is the behavior of a new intern, not a senior developer. OP also doesnt say that they arranged a live end of Day 1 checkin with their task manager, which is another miss, since it allows for the latter to mop up any lingering issues ("oh yeah I forgot you need access to X, let me sort that out") and for the former to remind them that this is an odd task ("it was interesting that you asked an Elixir dev to work on a browser extension")
As far as being asked to work in TypeScript not Elixir, thats certainly odd, but could have been deliberate and not necessarily foolish. Maybe they wanted to see how intellectually adaptable OP was. Maybe they wanted to see if you would speak up and handle potential conflict. Or maybe they had a mixup between two candidates. We'll never know because OP sent a wall of text which surely would not have helped defuse the situation.
Every time I've gone through the hiring process I contemplate starting my own recruitment agency because to a man (or women) every recruiter I've worked with has been shit. The internal ones are decent but 3rd-party recruiters know almost nothing. It's a revolving door of staff with zero expertise of recruiting and zero understanding of the roles they are hiring for. They are terrible at communicating, will ghost you for scheduled calls, and you have to prod them constantly.
In once case I knew someone at the company I was apply to, the recruiter I was forced to interact with did nothing and kept stalling. Finally I had my friend end-run the process and hand my resume to someone and a day later I had an interview and got the job.
That said, while I know it sucks being on the receiving end, giving feedback is a minefield and not an easy task. I understand the frustration, I've felt it myself many times but being on the other side of the table helped clarify the challenges.
I wanted to sympathize with OP, but I sense that the blog post was written while they were still fuming, and some of their behavior during the process (esp the first job) gave me pause. Maybe its just the timing that makes it feel aggressive.
Imagine you are a contractor on a gig. You don't wait until things break before you ask for access. You ask, before the job starts, what all the doors are and who has the the keys. So: "hey, Recruiter, in order to make this task a success next week and make you and me both look good I will need some stuff ready on day 1: what's your code repo system ? MFA?internal comms channel? bug system? internal knowledge base? and most importantly, if it's not you who can administer access to these things, who is the person I talk to, and can you arrange an intro on day 1?"
To not show this level of initiative, and sit around while your friend navigates the corporate machine for you, is the behavior of a new intern, not a senior developer. OP also doesnt say that they arranged a live end of Day 1 checkin with their task manager, which is another miss, since it allows for the latter to mop up any lingering issues ("oh yeah I forgot you need access to X, let me sort that out") and for the former to remind them that this is an odd task ("it was interesting that you asked an Elixir dev to work on a browser extension")
As far as being asked to work in TypeScript not Elixir, thats certainly odd, but could have been deliberate and not necessarily foolish. Maybe they wanted to see how intellectually adaptable OP was. Maybe they wanted to see if you would speak up and handle potential conflict. Or maybe they had a mixup between two candidates. We'll never know because OP sent a wall of text which surely would not have helped defuse the situation.
Every time I've gone through the hiring process I contemplate starting my own recruitment agency because to a man (or women) every recruiter I've worked with has been shit. The internal ones are decent but 3rd-party recruiters know almost nothing. It's a revolving door of staff with zero expertise of recruiting and zero understanding of the roles they are hiring for. They are terrible at communicating, will ghost you for scheduled calls, and you have to prod them constantly.
In once case I knew someone at the company I was apply to, the recruiter I was forced to interact with did nothing and kept stalling. Finally I had my friend end-run the process and hand my resume to someone and a day later I had an interview and got the job.
That said, while I know it sucks being on the receiving end, giving feedback is a minefield and not an easy task. I understand the frustration, I've felt it myself many times but being on the other side of the table helped clarify the challenges.
AUDACITY !!!!!!!