A Somewhat Recent Improvement

As I am unfortunately, at the time of writing, looking for jobs, I've noticed quite the positive trend. It's not so much to do with companies getting back to me faster or anything. Maybe it's not even real, but I've seen a lot more companies, even larger ones, not use Workday for applications. Now, sometimes the more custom ones suck just as much, but the other portals like Ashby or Greenhouse are really helping to preserve my sanity.

For Workday, I understand that it's probably difficult to have it so that profiles are synced across applications due to architectural or legal reasons. But that doesn't make me less mad that their resume parser consistently misses or generally messes up. Some people might say that using an external autofill utility alleviates this situation, but I think that's just a poor excuse for a poor utility.

As a sidenote: Simplify's Firefox extension has the worst memory leak I've ever witnessed. Somehow, they managed to get it to a point where Firefox was taking up upwards of 20GB of RAM in less than an hour.

Universal Complaints

Latency

The slightly better portals may be doing things better, however they are not immune to some silliness. For inputs like School or Location, there is a very perceptible delay added by a lookup request. If you've ever looked at the network tab of the browser utilities while something like Amazon, they'll happily send a bunch of MB sized requests. So why is it absolutely forbidden for these websites to send me a list of every valid input as a Trie or something. It's not as if text takes up a lot of space. For example, The Iliad is 808.3 kB, and we know that people designing big and modern websites don't care about bandwidth usage. So it really doesn't make sense to me why I have to wait just that little more, since I'd think that the list of all the higher Ed. Schools in the world might be shorter than The Iliad.

Non-standard-ness

Basic HTML is awesome, please use it. It has a date picker, you shouldn't feel the need to make your own latency-filled picker. It also has radio and checkmark buttons as well, which will never have the level of ambiguity that custom ones have (is it pick one or pick many?). I'll give a pass for things like <input type="month"> since Desktop Firefox doesn't support it for whatever reason.

This is more of a minor thing, but the inconsistencies with common questions like Work Authorization and Demographics bug me. If I see the same question on a different application, ideally I'd want to always select the same response. Additionally, that response should be in the same place, i.e. Yes should always be first and No second.

EEO Forms

If responses to these are optional, why are they made to be not optional. It's the same thing as 'optional' cookies, but with this information, they're not supposed to be sold off to data brokers.

Workday

As I previously said, I understand that information can't be shared across tenants, but why do I need to make a new account for each distinct company? How in the world is the general usage of the website so sluggish? None of the questions involve any media, and I can't imagine there's much in the way of complex logic. So why does it take a second or two for each page to load some text and input fields. Somehow https://linkedin.com/in/edison-fuh doesn't count as a valid LinkedIn URL? Does having drop down inputs as buttons instead of <select>s really enhance the experience?

Conclusion

I'm sure theres many more dumb stuff I could rant about, but I think I've probably got my point across well enough.