Honest cover letter

My brain is telling me that if I can still laugh about this, it means I haven't been applying to enough jobs. My brain and I don't really talk.

§Honest cover letter

To the hiring manager at StartuplyAI,

I am writing to express interest in the opening you have posted for a Senior Full Stack Engineer (Client Experience). I think this opportunity would be a great fit for me, because I have read the job description, and, honestly, I think I could do a lot worse. You've probably seen what things look like out there.

I see that most of your stack is Go. I don't have any real experience with Go, other than getting mad at Rob Pike for hating on syntax highlighting, but I am intellectually curious, and always strive to pick up new technologies. Plus, Go was designed to be easily taught to recent college grads who might still think that being a software engineer requires them to know how to balance a binary tree or find the shortest path through the graph, and we all know the only thing we need to balance is the intra-company politics while finding the shortest path through yet another stakeholder meeting, so how hard can learning this language possibly be?

In addition, I am prepared to set aside my principles, and learn — "learn" — how to use whatever AI tools are popular with your team, so that I can vibe code any and all amount of the stack, and I do mean all. My conscience was opposed to that, but I told it to try paying my bills, and it didn't have a good come back. My brain might start having notions about AI leading to the collapse of our industry, and possibly the world, but definitely not until I'm a few paychecks in. It turns out my morals and personal values want to have a place to live, too. You've probably seen what things look like out there.

I appreciate that this job is fully remote — remember when that was, like, all of them? I don't either, it's been a minute. Being able to work from home, or another environment of my choice, allows me the flexibility to not have to sit in my headphones all day, by myself, in a dark conference room, so that I can actually get through whatever it is I need to do. This way, I can also continue supporting mass transit in spirit, rather than by having to put myself on the bus and the train, where there are people.

I have been praised for high productivity in my previous roles, although that one time, they might have confused me with a co-worker, and I almost said something before I didn't. Actually, it might have been more than once. (I still haven't found a way to apologise to Sven that they promoted me instead of him). But I have been productive at crucial moments in my previous positions, because I managed to pull something out at hour eleven before the deadline, after spending the bulk of the previous two weeks in escapist fantasy. That's just my process, and I trust that StartuplyAI doesn't hire micromanagers who ask "How it's going" on a regular basis, or pick on me when I tell a joke instead of giving a real update during weekly standup. Wait, you do standup daily? Jesus Christ, that's a lot of jokes. But I am excited to grow into that role.

I have maybe three good hours of real work in me per day, maybe, and that should be divided in half for every meeting, or, honestly, any interaction where I can't provide a canned response — and that's on a good day. It's also if I at least kind of find my work interesting. If I don't find it interesting? I have no doubt that all the work that you do at StartuplyAI will be interesting if I am on the project. You may one day discover that key parts of our stack are now written in Rust, not Go (wouldn't that be interesting?), and that we generously contribute to open source projects with a handful of stars on GitHub. I will clear it with you ahead of time, of course, after the work had been underway for several months.

If it's not a good day, you will see much more of me on Slack (and I do mean Slack, it had better not be Teams), to make sure I at least show up as being online the whole day. If I respond to a message within 30 seconds, and sound positive and enthusiastic, it is definitely not a good day.

I noticed the job description mentions that your team uses test-driven development. I have to inform you that I, too, strictly adhere to test-driven development. If I am on your team, and my pull request gets held up in code review because I didn't include any tests, that was the test. You'd be amazed how many of my previous teams have failed, again and again, despite the numerous chances I gave them to succeed.

Some other things, to make sure we all have the right expectations, and don't waste each other's time:

• I will need reasonable accommodations, as provided by law, to never be required to complete any forms (especially "employee survey" forms) that have non-optional freeform text inputs. I don't know who came up with those, or what it is that they think we all do here, but they ought to know that asking software engineers to submit open-ended writing assignments is like trying to run concurrent high-dimensional matrix operations, on millions of matrices, in pure Python. There are better tools for the job (I think they're all in Sales)
• I'm glad to see the team currently doesn't have an on-call rotation. I was about to come in citing how requiring engineers to do on-call violates the Geneva Conventions, or The Hague Charter, or maybe the Paris Accords, I don't remember, but it's one of those, and, anyway, it's not relevant, because you don't do on-call. If the leadership ever suggests "exploring what a voluntary on-call rotation might look like", I will do my absolute best to send that exploration off the map by proposing the most byzantine, unworkable ways of implementing "voluntary" on-call, because both you and I know it's always voluntary until it's not
• I know I probably can't get out of performance reviews (can I?), but I hope you at least don't do the thing where I'd have to "review" my teammates or, worse, myself. On top of those things having a plethora of mandatory text inputs (as discussed above, no thank you), requiring employees to do this kind of thing is just plain weird. Someone recently told me that those so-called "360 reviews" are a best practice first pioneered by the KGB, and I don't need to fact-check it to believe it. Even when I briefly consider doing "360 reviews" honestly, the part of my brain that wants me to stay alive reminds me that snitches get stitches, and it does so with particular vigour when I am "reviewing" myself
• If there is a regular meeting that regularly runs over its slot on the calendar, I may start to have regular unexpected problems with my Internet connection at around the time the meeting is supposed to end

I am very excited for this opportunity, and to speak to you and the rest of the team. Honestly, when I first clicked on this job posting and saw that interviews at StartuplyAI have eleven rounds, I said "what the fuck" and immediately closed the tab. But then I dug through my history and found it again, because I have now seen enough other job postings to understand that in the current year, it is standard procedure to require prospective hires of pre-revenue startups to speak with the hiring manager, the lead engineer on the team, every other engineer on the team, the Head of Talent (is it okay if I mentally call them HR?), the CTO, the CEO, the CEO's brother, the CEO's brother's dog – a chow chow pitbull mix, I am genuinely excited for that one – and then the hiring manager again, so that I can see if I still remember their name, or my own. I'm looking forward to getting to know the team throughout this process, while revealing the least I can get away with about my real self. If I ever feel like backing out, I will just look at my bank statement, and find the energy to keep going.

Please just let me know before you contact my references, so that I can "remind" them I "worked" with them at those "companies", and apologise to Sven before I ask him to say he was my "supervisor". I think he's gone back to Norway, or wherever he's from that has actual healthcare, so he can't be that mad. If anything, I helped him.

I look forward to hearing back from you soon. My conscience wants to know when it can start harassing me again.

Thank you for your time,

Anna