It stings.
This one is more emotional than most of my writings. More of a "pressure relief" valve of a post than anything.
You can skip it. I'll never know.
Hi [Green],
Thank you so much for your interest in Anthropic and for the time and effort you have invested in our process so far.
After consideration, we have decided not to move forward with your application for the [Pipeline] IT Systems Engineer, Corporate Systems & Infrastructure role. We want to be clear that this is only an update for the [Pipeline] IT Systems Engineer, Corporate Systems & Infrastructure role, and if you applied to other roles at Anthropic, you may still hear back from us if we see strong alignment with our needs.
We receive many applications for our roles and only advance a few to our interview stages. We’re still a relatively small company and are looking for a specific set of skills — unfortunately, we cannot provide more detailed feedback, but the most common reason we do not move forward with a candidate is not seeing enough experience that appears relevant to our needs. Of course, reviewing applications is not a perfect process, and we may sometimes pass on candidates who would have been a great fit!
We are a growing team and new roles open up all the time, so if you're still interested in a role with Anthropic, keep an eye on our jobs page.
We really appreciate the time you took to apply and wish you the best in your job search!
Anthropic
...damn.
This one stings. I didn't think it would, given my boisterous writings and my transparency on my positions. I didn't think it'd sting simply because I am one of thousands of IT professionals who would love that compensation, to work in a company on the cutting edge of something, to build out greenfield deployments and have meaningful impact in a growing, changing, shifting organization in the midst of gargantuan upheavals and immense threats. I didn't think it'd sting because my OCD and anxiety doesn't even consider myself the kind of S-tier talent someone like Anthropic would be looking for, despite previously and repeatedly performing at that level in prior orgs.
Yet it does. It stings because it's one of my unicorn roles, that ability to enter into an organization (relatively) early on, to have profound impacts on it, to shape how people work in meaningful ways that build on my fifteen years of expertise and experience in IT. It stings because it's the only AI company I had a modicum of respect for, one I thought could actually survive what's ahead and contribute positively to society in some way on the grand arc of time.
It stings because I also don't know how much clearer I can make my assets and skills to potential employers, at least absent feedback. Somehow my cost savings and migrations to public cloud providers don't actually count as experience or expertise in said providers. Somehow engineering and deploying greenfield MDM solutions doesn't actually count as MDM experience. Somehow owning seven datacenters of Hyper-V and ESXi nodes and architecting their modernization doesn't count as virtualization experience. Somehow being certified on a specific technology and citing it multiple times across multiple roles doesn't count as experience on said technology anymore.
It all just stings, because whether or not I put in my all (as I did with Anthropic) or my minimum (as with the glut of employers wanting 15-20yrs of experience for pay I made seven years ago but fuck it I gotta make rent and pay bills somehow), I get the same, tired, empty responses.
No feedback.
No human outreach.
Oftentimes not even a form letter.
It's insane out there right now, more insane than I think I've ever seen it before - and I've spent fifteen months unemployed during the Great Recession, for fucks' sake. I thought - perhaps naively - that making it to the level of a Senior IC would at least be enough to land on my feet moderately quickly and with minimal to no long-term loss of earnings, but that doesn't seem to be the case in the current market.
Employers want Azure and AWS and GCP and Hyper-V and VMware; they want Meraki and Cisco and Palo Alto and Fortinet and Watchguard; they want Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace and Teams and Slack and Zoom and WebEx; they ask for SMEs on Linux and macOS and Windows, though don't mention the versions or use cases. They want folks with cost discipline and multiple years of recent wholesale public cloud migration experience, and also someone who can bootstrap their own AI harnesses for deterministic output. Oh, and let's not forget that this one person is going to own the global technology estate for the entire business, and be accountable for its failures.
Good news for them, because I somehow tick all of those fucking boxes.
Pay range? Well seeing as how median rent is $3500 a month, median home prices are $1mil, fuel prices are $4.299/gal, electric rates are up to $0.26/kWh for generation and transmission combined, and the general cost of living necessitates a $160k salary for covering basic necessities in the metro area, they're pitching $95k to $135k, tops. What was home-buying money in 2019 is now can't-make-rent money in 2026, and employers generally seem okay with this math.
This market is as brutal as it is insane, and it's driving me nuts. It feels like two impossible choices every time I apply: do I make a resume crawling with buzzwords to make it past the bot and get rejected by the human, or do I make a resume highlighting accomplishments and achievements in cross-functional projects or disciplines that passes human muster, but gets round-filed by AIs who can't pick out the buzzwords it's looking for?
I don't have an answer, because if I did, I'd go right around and tell people how I got a job that pays me to survive in this shitbox economy. I'd be shouting from the rooftops about the employer who built an intentional recruiting pipeline that had technical humans review technical resumes by other technical humans. I'd be giving away advice on how to find good roles, good employers, at good pay. Hell, if I had an employer actually offer me a role that got me back on the homebuying ladder ($200k+), I'd be dedicated to them for life at this point. You couldn't poach me from there if I finally had a job that let me buy a fucking house, that's the level of loyalty that employer would have out of me.
It stings, this market. I have some other things to try, and unemployment should get extended a bit longer, and I still have some savings to fall back on (technically the down payment on a home I can't buy anymore), but it doesn't take out the daily sting of the process itself.
The final rounds with employers who don't know if their problem needs a generalist or a specialist, so they write a JD for the former and hire the latter.
The deathly silence of applications sent into the void.
Of employers rejecting you without feedback, then reposting the exact same role the same day.
Of a process that so many want to be automated, despite being one that only succeeds with intentional human interaction.
It stings.