‘We liked your resume, but you’re acting too superior’: A High Ranking Woman in Tech Denied Job Offer For Being Too Qualified and Impressive

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    r/r/womenintech • 3 days ag Maximum-Dealer-6208 Confident or rude? I've been lurking in this (and others) subreddit and was reminded of a situation I found myself in several years ago... I thought I'd post it here to see what I could've done differently, if anything...
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    I (40F at the time) was working as a contract programmer/analyst... I had just finished a big project developing software for a body shop. The software was then sold to other body shops in the area, which made me quite proud, as I was solely responsible for the entire project life cycle specs, design, data conversion, ui, and customer web access to view the progress of their
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    repairs. It was quite a feather in my cap, as the saying goes. For various reasons that aren't important for this post, my chauvinistic car-guy boss was making my life miserable, so I gave notice and quit. That's the background, onto the situation...
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    I was interviewing for a job that was a very good fit for me at the time... the skills I had developed on the previous project were directly applicable to the new job. One of those skills involved having automatic updates and photos uploaded to the a customer website... I set this up, with some difficulty, for the body shop project,
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    and it was very slick... essentially, you could take several digital photos, link them to customer's repair, and the software would upload it to the web with one click (this was before cell phones had cameras, btw). There were half a dozen team members in the interview, all of them. asking me practical questions about whether I knew how to do "this" or
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    "that"... in other words, a technical interview. The team leader asked about the photo upload, and I explained that it was possible and cited my previous project. Another guy flat out said that it was impossible (I'm guessing he had not had any luck trying to do this and felt threatened).
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    I responded that it was possible, but it was complicated since (at the time) it had to accommodate the server's security settings and the website settings. After the interview, the recruiter called and told me they said they liked my resume, and me personally, but one guy was insisting that I was rude and acting superior, and didn't
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    want to work with me. The team leader, though, said I came off as "confident" and wanted another interview to try and convince the one holdout to give me a chance. In the second interview, they jumped right to the photo upload. Apparently, this is a feature the boss really wanted, but the team hadn't been able to provide it, and the team
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    leader thought if I knew how to do it, that would be an asset. This time, I explained the process that I had gone through to get this to work, that it involved a lot of trial- and-error to figure out the security issues, yadda yadda... essentially, I told them that this is dependent upon their specific server and website settings, so one size does
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    not fit all... it is hard to do, but it is doable. I kept my voice friendly and talked to them in a collaborative manner so they could see that I wasn't acting "superior". The guy still insisted it was impossible. I realized then that even if they hired me, this guy wasn't going to work with me. After the interview, I spoke to the
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    team leader and politely told him that I didn't believe this was a good fit for me, since it was obvious there were some members who didn't want to work with me, and I felt like my integrity was being called into question (duh... the dude pretty much called me a liar). He said he understood. Afterward, the recruiter told me that
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    they said I wasn't able to convince the holdout and weren't extending an offer. Other than giving them the actual code, how could I have convinced him? They could see the photos on the body shop's website, but this guy thought I was manually uploading dozens of photos, one by one, every day??? For 7 different body shops??? Seriously????
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    I think he was threatened by me being able to do something that he couldn't figure out and was just trying to save face... how do you deal with someone like that? Thanks for reading ②
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    Outside-Flamingo-240 3d ago • Perfectly confident, not rude at all. I'd say you dodged a bullet
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    damselfish_dysphoria • 3d ago You should start you own company and sell the solution back to them
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    lifeHopes21 ⚫3d ago In tech, if you are confident as a male, you are perceived as knowledgeable person but if the same is reflected by female, she is labeled as rude. I have been there many times and I don't give a damm about it. Always have your facts ready all the time and no need to bend under pressure
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    redpandarising 3d ago It shouldn't be on us to make ourselves small just because a mediocre man can't envisage a world in which a woman can do something he could not do. If you were a man, he might have accepted his place in the pecking order more easily but at the end of the day, the problem starts and ends with
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    that guy, not at what you said or how you said it. Dude is petty and a liability to his company. If the boys club protects him, that's on them.
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    kittysempai-meowme... 3d ago That guy knew it was going to make him look bad that he'd been saying this is impossible all along if you came in and proved that it wasn't. That's why he "held out" against you. I agree with all who said you dodged a bullet.
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    HelenGonne ⚫3d ago LOL, they literally told you, "You can't fire us, we quit!" That's all this was. They realized they weren't getting the prize, and they're unprofessional enough that they thought that this kind of childish rationalization was the way to handle it instead of replacing
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    handle it instead of replacing the problem employee and hiring the expert they needed to go to the next level. They shot their business in the foot -- that happens a lot with bigotry.
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    wittyish 2d ago This is the trap we so often find ourselves in. Assertive or aggressive? Reserved or frigid? Friendly or flirty? Bold or brash? At the end of the day, the only way to win is to not play their game. Stop giving their false dichotomies head space. Be you, be assured, and politely
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    you, be assured, and politely point out that their thinking is "too emotional."

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