Job hunting and interviewing sucks big time. Stay with it, you will find a better job with your qualifications.
If he tells them that in advance I guarantee that he won’t have to do the week’s work.
Lightnin’, I believe that visualization is a pretty hot area, and with your skills I bet you can get a job there that makes you work fewer hours and probably pays better.
Clearly the applicant pool for video game jobs is big enough that they feel they can screw you. Is it from all the people who think that working in this area is really cool?
Remember when interviewing for a job to highlight your most significant qualifications, such as being the cousin of the company’s vice president.
There’s definitely a mystique about working on games. Everyone thinks it’s fun, that you’re really just playing games all day long.
Another factor is that just recently there’s been an explosion of colleges teaching game industry courses. Suddenly, there are a lot of new graduates who desperately need a job. For what I’ve been making, companies can hire three artists fresh out of school who will gladly work massive overtime and who don’t have families to support or occasionally want to see.
Yet another factor is that the two big game dev tools- Unity and Unreal- both have asset marketplaces. Want a nice effect? Pay ten bucks and you can download someone else’s work, make a few changes, and call it your own. That’s why I’m not completely averse to art tests anymore- because now there’s a very real danger that the fantastic artist you just hired really only knows how to download assets from other artists.
After being unable to work for a year and looking for work for over two years, I was at the end of my rope when I took a temporary, part-time job as a store cashier at holiday time.
Four years later, I’m still there, working full time. Yes, it’s beneath my education and work experience, and 13 (!) “professionals” tol me to apply for disability instead of continuing to look for work. But I am working.
Keep at it.
It sounds like they already “preselected” one of their cronies and are just going through the motions, to comply with some HR policy. They set stupid high requirements for everyone else, to keep anyone from getting the job they already picked their guy for.
Besides… who the fuck only offers $30K a year anymore? Especially with a Masters degree???
I think you’re better of not getting that job.
It’s a pretty common ask these days; A position traditionally done by 4 experienced professionals, i.e. Server Admin, DBA, senior developer & business analyst, is lumped into a single open position/req. And if that wasn’t ridiculous enough, the rate/salary is an insult to any one of the individual roles. So, yeah, come do the job of 4 professionals for a salary of 75% of any single one.
Fuck right off.
Exactly.
To be fair, that’s more like $31.5K adjusted for inflation 
I don’t normally respond to zombies, but the salary issue touched a chord with me.
When I was available and on the market a few years ago, I was quite surprised to learn how little some large tech companies pay for “support” staff. One large international company (most business people would recognize the name) I interviewed with was quite forward in asking why I was even interviewing with them, because they intended to pay 20% to 25% less than the typical salary range. They justified this because of their “name” and the great working conditions they had. Mind you, the developers (who made them money) earned significantly more than average.
When I say that I’m “support,” I don’t mean an admin position. I’m talking about a position that required at least a BA or BS, at least ten years experience, and a variety of professional certifications. (Think purchasing, accounting, or something similar.)
TL;DR: Some tech employers let you stroll their nice campus and buy lattes at their private coffee kiosks, but don’t pay the staff well at all.
I’ve been teaching at a college since 2000. The last time I scored an interview there was in 2001. I can make it past the initial HR screening but I don’t get interviews anymore. I followed the dept. head’s advice (sent to all of us), wrote a fine cover letter, got great letters of recommendation, have done very well on in-class evaluations/observations, etc. And it’s still not good enough.
A couple of things have changed over the years…
I’ve gotten older.
I cost more to pay now.
Sigh.
Back when I was a software engineer, on an internet forum (not SDMB) I was chatting about my job hunt and how nobody seemed to care about my 20+ years of experience. Someone on the forum replied that of course not, I was being unrealistic. He said he would never pay for any more than 10 years of experience for software people. If that philosophy is widely shared by hiring managers, it’s no wonder that software careers have a short shelf life!
(That’s when I ended up transitioning to business analysis!)
Kinda depends on the masters, doesn’t it?
If you have a master’s degree in mathematics and statistics, the only thing holding you back from a nice paying job would be if you showed up to all the job interviews visibly drunk, or you punched out the receptionist. My wife works in this field and her company literally never removes the “Statistician” listing from the Careers part of the website. There are never, ever enough people who were willing to take that hard a course.
If you have a master’s degree in political science, I hope you got it on a scholarship, because only then would it be worth what you paid for it.
I did software for 37 years before I retired. Chances are stuff you learned 20 years ago to 10 years ago was obsolete. If someone is still learning new stuff, that counts. And demonstrating that you can debug faster because you’ve made every possible mistake at least once helps also. For me knowing about stuff now hidden by APIs and GUIs helped a lot. But all that is recent - experience just by itself don’t cut it any more.