How would you rate your experience?
Survey culture under late capitalism
How would you rate your experience?
Last year I was unemployed for an excruciating seven months, long enough for both my unemployment benefits and my will to live to run out. There were moments of hope, of course—recruiters who invited me to interview for jobs that actually sounded interesting to me and related to my skills and experience and future career goals. But mostly there were middling interviews where someone ten years younger than me read a series of textbook interview questions, barely lifting their eyes from the word doc no doubt obscuring my face in its little Zoom box, all for a job that listed a salary that would be a step back from my previous jobs, but still a step up from unemployment.
Of course, by the time someone was asking me about my biggest flaw without looking me in even the approximate eye, I had already been through an introductory phone call with the recruiter, and been asked to complete a time-intensive “test assignment” for the role, so it’s not surprising that at this point in the interview process I was always more invested than the person interviewing me, even for jobs I didn’t particularly want.
A few weeks after one of these dispiriting interviews, I received an automated email thorough Greenhouse with the now irritatingly common subject line: “We want to know what you think.” The body of the email assured me that the company I had interviewed with “takes care to ensure that its recruiting process is well-run and candidates have a great experience,” and requested that I fill out a candidate survey about my time as a contender for this role which, apparently, had come to an end. This was not the first time I’d received a candidate experience survey, but it was the first that served as my one and only signal that I didn’t get the gig.
Because I had little else to do in my 6th month of unemployment, I completed their 5-point survey at the end of which was a comment box asking me to “include any suggestions I have for improving future candidate experiences.”
“Well, “ I typed furiously. “Since I haven’t heard back from the recruiter or anyone I interviewed with, I guess receiving this survey means I didn’t get the job. So my recommendation is to let people know they didn’t make the cut before asking them to do yet another little free task for your benefit.”
Got ‘em, I thought, hitting submit as steam puffed out of my ears.
The idea of a candidate survey is especially insulting in this age of job hunting, when every job interview is a 15-step process with multiple hour-long interviews, at least one free work assignment to complete, and sometimes even an entire day in the office meeting everyone who works at the entire company, including the janitor, to see if you’re “a good culture fit.”
Where do employers get the nerve? Probably from the ever expanding roster of online retailers and hoteliers and airlines and salons and movie theaters who send a daily barrage of emails nudging their customers to complete a review of their new product/recent visit/online experience that will then be published on the company’s website or app or on any number of review aggregators like Yelp or, now, Glassdoor.
If you spend less time deleting emails than I do, you might forget how everything seems to be getting a little worse. Slowly at first, then all at once—a symptom of the enshittification at least partly facilitated by private equity gutting American institutions large and small.
In his book on worrying upswing in private equity investment, Plunder, Brendan Ballou, dissects how private equity is leeching value from American companies, saddling them with debt and diminishing their products and services to the point of bankruptcy, all for the sake of stakeholders’ investment portfolios. So yes, the sweaters you’re paying $100 now are worse than the ones you bought for $30 in the aughts, and yes, it has become all but impossible to keep a job long term in a layoff-heavy economy. It’s frustrating. Maybe you’d like to vent your feelings in our customer survey? If you feel you’ve voiced your displeasure in the customer review blackhole, maybe you’ll be less likely to object in a more public forum.
We’re supposed to give some credit to the retailers who allow negative reviews to filter to the top of their customer reviews section, or who take the time to respond to them. It would be easy enough to delete them or bury them under positive notes about an item’s durability and stylish design. But the negative reviews serve a purpose too. Tell me you don’t read the negative reviews first to see if what’s wrong with this product you know you’re going to end up buying anyway is a flaw you can handle or not? The flawed product you know is better than the flawed product you don’t.
Not only do product reviews serve as content–sweet, sweet content—for a website, they also boost numbers—numbers of people who have been convinced to buy this product before you and who, if you do buy this product, will understand your pain when the purchase proves imprudent. You may be getting duped into buying poor quality goods, but you are doing it within the safety of numbers.
I’ll admit I find myself using the sheer number of reviews, not just their average value, when trying to determine if some gadget on Amazon made by an unknown brand is a legitimate good or a warehouse scam. If I get scammed by counterfeit goods on Jeff Bezos’ internet, I will at least be in good company.
When I took my daily plague walks around my Brooklyn neighborhood during the pandemic, I was always glad to see other people, even if from afar. I couldn’t understand why so many of my neighbors fled to the suburbs then—heading instead to planned communities where you could go months without encountering another human being outside of their cars and living rooms. It was safety in numbers that gave me a feeling of security then, even when proximity to others heightened risk.
Numbers are the difference between downtown Brooklyn and downtown Los Angeles. Both areas have their share of distressed people who might make one feel unsafe but rarely mean harm. In Brooklyn, full sidewalks give us the security to reconsider the knee jerk reactions we might have to someone behaving outside of the norm. We know that in the unlikely situation where a man screaming at the clouds might threaten us in any way, there will be other people to engage for help.
I had the opposite experience on a recent trip to L.A., walking between my hotel and the Broad Museum. L.A. struggles or refuses to house its residents just as New York City does. But in L.A. on a gray Sunday afternoon, there is nothing else to distract. The restaurants, where there are any, are closed on the weekend, and a pedestrian is walking uphill both ways between the few middling restaurants shoved into the ground floor of tourist destinations. With no one else on the sidewalks, one starts to imagine how quickly a bad situation could escalate.
The same numbers game makes us feel safer buying a blender made by a company whose name is just a series of all-caps letters, and it makes you feel, if not hopeful, understood, as you frantically easy-apply to jobs you don’t even want. Look at all the other people struggling at your side—and hopefully applying for different roles. You could say the numbers are a panacea against despair, but the numbers are just us, producing false hope for ourselves, adding false legitimacy to the institutions and their works as they are dismantled before us with with one hand, the other open palm-up before us for any money we’ve managed to earn.
Who’s reading the survey responses? Do you imagine somewhere a pencil-pusher is logging your displeasure and elevating your comments to the boss upstairs? The pencil pusher has been laid off and the boss has been strong-armed by shareholders into pissing off the consumers as much as they need to to turn a profit under the weight of late-stage capitalism. Reject the survey culture, refuse to become a number in their tally. But when you do feel the need to scream into the void, the “additional comments” section of an automated survey is as good a place as any.
Recommendations
Speaking of Tig, her latest special, Hello Again. No explanation necessary.
Grief is for People, the first memoir by one of my all-time faves, Sloane Crosley. Can grief be funny? Well, it can be funny-adjacent at least.
If I haven’t already mentioned it before, What Went Wrong, a podcast about everything that went wrong during the production of your most and least favorite movies of all time. They also do great interviews with below-the-line talent, the most recent of which includes a Bradley Whitford anecdote that proves he’s exactly as funny and charming as you would expect.
I am probably the last person on the planet to discover the Search Engine podcast, but if you are even further behind me, start with their two-part series investigating why there are so many chicken bones on the street. (Real ones Dog owners know.)
All the costumes in Palm Royale, a show with a stacked cast that may or may not end up being good. It’s hard to judge the quality of something that’s just so wonderful to look at.
And finally, the outtakes from Orson Welles’ champagne commercials.
Enshitification. I try to focus on what’s going right, eg the sun rose today, my digestive system still works etc. So here’s my take.
What floats upward while our society spins round the toilet, going down, down, down? Wee particles of poo that get trapped in our beards and go up our noses!