I remember a Java job interview like that. "Tell us what you would do to improve this code" with a couple pages of code printed out :-D

I took a paper coding test in 2004 when I was job hunting. It was pretty hilarious to me, really, since it was so incredibly easy (multiple choice data-structures type questions) for anybody who had any skills at all.

They finally offered me a job 3 months later after I already had started working somewhere else.

Second unpopular take: This was better for all involved, but it constrained the job market to geographical boundaries. People did not apply to jobs in other states/countries/continents because they did not see the job postings for other states/countries/continents.

Those jobs aren't meant for you... they post in the classifieds with the hopes nobody responds. All to game the labor market test allowing their visa worker to get a green card.

Ah yes, the h1b box checker ads.

According too the linked article, you should try faxing your resume to them. Have you tried that?

Chewy! Yay

My job interview at this event went like: my name is first last name. I am a professional and I want to work for you. And they responded: we can tell you are a professional and we want you to work for us. It’s way harder now-a-days!

I did that when I was younger. Also, the advice was to print your resumes on heavy bond paper so that you looked upper class.

As someone who lived in NYC for a while circa 1999 the process at the time as I recall it was using a newspaper classified ad to find a broker to find an apartment.

The vast majority of actual apartment listings were all gatekept within the broker system making hiring a broker (with an insane fee) effectively mandatory for actually finding a place to live in a reasonable timeframe.

Laser printers were expensive AF for poor guys just out of college looking for a job.

My BJ200 ca. 1993 had awesome print quality, comparable to a Laserjet II, if you used slightly glossy paper (so the ink wouldn’t bleed) and you waited a bit for the ink to dry on each sheet.

I worked on a project in 1990/1991 (pre-WWW) that involved making the phone book electronically accessible. For development my client purchased CD-ROMs containing the White Pages from the entire NYC tri-state area (NY, NJ, and CT), making it trivial for me to search by name and/or number. Once the web had been around for a few years, reverse-lookup became commonplace.

In 2000 you could go to the library and look up the number in the Polk directory. There was one for each borough. There was an alphabetical section, a section by street address, and a section by phone number. You can still go down to the library and use them, for example if you want to know what was at 867 Madison Ave in 1926, or who had the phone number PENnsylvania 5000.

> Now that guy is probably competing with tons of people more talented willing to work for less

This strikes at the core of it. Life was simpler for those in the know about how the world worked. If you were lucky enough to grow up with the right parents, friends, family members, and class mates to help guide you through how the world worked it was easy. You could count on less competition by knowing where to look, how to present yourself, and what to say. Someone very talented but stuck in a situation where they didn't know how to find these jobs and apply properly was hard. You would lose career advancement at every step of the way relative to peers who had a social network that fed them this information.

If you're one of the people with more talent and hungry for work, life actually got simpler for you in modern times. The advantages of being well-connected and groomed by your parents for success are still there, but they're diminished when everyone can find advice on the internet.

I grew up on the cusp of this change. It's hard to communicate just how hard it was to navigate even simple things like interview prep or even dressing correctly for interviews if you weren't surrounded by people who had up to date info.

EDIT: To be clear, I was raised with a lot of advantages and had a lot of benefits. It was still striking how much of the early job search I had to fumble my way through in ways that would have been so easy to address with the unlimited online resources available today, which many of my peers had handled by their classmates or their parents' friend who had some industry familiarity. A specific example is that I didn't know that there were specific books for learning how to do programming job interviews. At first I just thought you had to learn how to be really good at programming, so I challenged myself to do a lot of tasks like I saw in the first interview I did. These days, it's unthinkable that someone would get all the way through college and into interview loops without knowing what a tech interview would be like and having the opportunity to practice.

Simplicity and convenience are often inversely correlated.

Life was for sure simpler in times gone by, but that doesn't necessarily mean it was better. Definitely different.

I'm sure future posters will look back on these years with fondness for this or that as well.

Back in the day, the 4x5 (medium format film) experience requirement would have filtered out a lot of candidates. It was arty, weird and required expensive gear (Hasselblad or equivalent) and even more expensive film (around $1/exposure).

These days everybody can shoot unlimited high-res imagery for free with the phone in their pocket.

Used to flip both ways...

I.e. for a time, it became easier for talented people to find a better role.

In the last 5-10 years though, between the race to the bottom and AI/Bot spam (even ignoring the overall decrease in job availability) things frankly suck.

This but after going inside the building without authorization and saying you will not leave without a job.

> ... strong handshake ...

Years ago I had an important job interview. Unfortunately, 2 days prior I broke a bone in my right hand during a bicycle wreck. I didn't wanna show up to the interview with a cast on my hand/arm ("this guy is reckless."), so I cut it off. I interviewed with about 10 dudes that day, and they all wanted to give me a "strong handshake". It hurt like hell, but I had to maintain composure. I got the job. And I've been here for almost 25 years. :)

Fixed, thanks!

Thanks. What a pity, the mutilated title sounded promising.

Nope, this is a common expression.

If someone's feeling especially playful, they might ask if it's a metric or imperial buttload. An imperial buttload would be loosely based on the idealized/claimed size of some prominent arse in the past, while a metric buttload implies the existence of a platinum-iridium reference derriere.

Boat load?