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.

I think I agree with the spirit of your post mostly, but this bit:

> 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?"

I could not imagine asking a recruiter this, if it’s anything like the current recruiters we use, they know none of this, are likely incapable of figuring out how to learn this, and it’ll be blind leading the blind to expect this.

Honestly, it’s fine to expect a fair bit of inefficiency in your first few weeks as you onboard to systems, learn who people are, etc.

I think it’s just as well he was opinionated and realized it wasn’t going to work. Ironically, if this was actually the start of the job, I think bailing might have made more sense. Given that it was just a one week work trial, I feel like there’s little downside in just toughing out the remaining couple days and then deciding. Personally, if I found out the Typescript thing was a secret test of adaptability (which seems extremely unlikely) I would move on, I wouldn’t want a place that plays those kind of games.

OP here

> Maybe they wanted to see if you would speak up and handle potential conflict. Or maybe they had a mixup between two candidates.

I did speak up during the call if that is really what they want me to do as I have literally 0 experience with that. It was literally my first action after I heard that. I pointed it out to them, that it is not what I was expecting from this position.

They didn't care. It was how they roll.

> 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.

I do agree. The situation is certainly frustrating. But to me, "by the first evening, I was ready to go postal" is... something of a red flag about their manageability? I'll acknowledge that we have our lanes, and that LI is much more established, but if you were at a startup or smaller org, the whole "not my job" anger after just a few hours would be problematic.