I'm going to say it because it seems no one else is. I apologize ahead of time for my brutal honesty.
You need to consider the possibility that you're not as competent as you believe yourself to be. Dunning-Kruger[0] is real, and your post doesn't demonstrate the self-awareness the best developers seem to possess.
Your writing is sprinkled with emoticons and rife with reduplicated punctuation, both of which (especially the exclamation points) are common signs of immaturity. Reading this diatribe--and assuming your 50 emails were written similarly--I am forced to accept one of two conclusions: either you're not aware that your writing is unprofessional, or you're aware that it's unprofessional and unconcerned. Either option does not reflect well on you. To put it bluntly, if I received an email from you in this style, I would archive it without response, assuming it was from someone who lacked the requisite introspective capability I expect from the people I want to work with.
I found it particularly telling that you claim that all five of your phone screens went "very well" but marveled that only three companies tried to set up an onsite interview with you. Unless both the two companies that stopped at the phone screen simultaneously filled the position immediately after your phone screen, you really need to recognize that at least those two phone screens did not go well. I do interviews at a large Internet company, and one of my goals--one of the goals that I've been trained to seek--is to ensure that the candidate, no matter how bad, walks away from the interview feeling good about himself/herself and the company. If you're doing really poorly in an interview, I'll toss you some easier questions than I normally give, because I have all the information I need, and I don't want you to have a negative experience with my company. You may have felt good about the phone screens, but the most likely explanation for the two companies that didn't bring you onsite is that you didn't actually do well enough to justify additional interviews. These people want to hire someone, and if you were someone they wanted to hire, they certainly would have continued to interview you.
I think your experiment was less valid than you think it was because you're less competent than you think you are.
EDIT: I should add that whatever the case, whether I'm right or wrong about you, the best response to the situation you're in is to seek to improve yourself, not to embark on a quixotic venture to change others. Read CS theory books, create and modify open source projects, solve fun programming puzzles: sharpen your skills and--no matter what your level of competency--your prospects will improve.
While we're waxing psychological, I should also point out the Just World bias[1]. Sometimes, capable people have difficulty getting jobs they're qualified for due to reasons outside their control. And having been on both sides of the table, I can say that identifying good developers is hardly a precise science (I mean, you're judging him based on emoticons and whether you see any token modesty), and many if not most people who are genuinely great at software development are terrible at demonstrating it.
Also, you need to consider the possibility that the author doesn't show any signs of self-reflection because he/she is so frustrated. I've spent 3 months looking for a job all the while seeing people complaining about how hard it is to find developers, and it is incredibly frustrating.
* Sometimes, capable people have difficulty getting jobs they're qualified for due to reasons outside their control.*.
This and some people just suck at the interview process. Ive been praised in the past for the quality of teams I've built. I think I'm good at hiring. That being said a few times when ive been an interviewer (not the hiring manager) I've tried to talk people out of hiring people who ended up being rockstars. I've also had other managers try to talk me out of hiring some folks I've been sold on who ended up being rockstars themselves.
Point being that hiring is a very inexact science. Sometimes when the bar is set high qualified people slip through the cracks. It's a hiring "cost". Sometimes you just do the best you can with an inexact science.
For what it's worth, more recent studies can only reproduce Dunning-Kruger for simple tasks, for difficult tasks the unskilled have a far more realistic view of their abilities than the highly skilled:
http:/www.chicagocdr.org/cdrpubs/pdf_index/cdr_560.pdf
You said you found the writing style immature, but have you considered the job ads of the companies OP might have applied to? "Xbox's PS3 Nerf guns Starcraft/Rock band competitions !!!".. How mature is that?
I am not talking about the 20% interviews where it didn't workout, but the other 80% where there was no reply, I am sure many of those job ads won't classify as "Mature" in your view. Some of the best programmers i know can't write even proper English sentences, since its not their first language. Do you think they are any less able to do the job? And does it disqualify from expecting even a reply to their application?
I completely agree with all your arguments except for one , writing proper English is really a skill that a developer need to have.
On this post http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CollegeAdvice.html
the first advice that Joe gives to the college student is Learn to Communicate and he has some good arguments for it.
I too am not a native English speaker by the way.
I think it really depends on the company you are hiring for. At my present one, personality is absolutely as important as skill, so if you sound like a pretentious snob we probably won't be interested in you. At my last company (a fortune 500), if you sounded like the OP, we definitely wouldn't get back to you.
I'm interested in which particular comments you think demonstrate a lack of tact, and how you would improve them to be more tactful, if you have the time.
This one. The tactful thing would be to first accept the possibility you may at times come off as a bit conceited before asking for evidence and advice.
So in general I totally agree with you. The issue is the communication style conveyed in the post above is no way similar to the communication style conveyed in to email and resume. My email was much more professional.
The demand for inconvenient truths is always lower than the demand for reassuring lies. My tone is as polite as I could make it while making the points that I believe needed to be made.
I thought you'd made a typo. A "tome" is a heavy book, not a lengthy diatribe. The book could be a lengthy diatribe, but it could also be an annotated edition of The Odyssey. I suppose you could have called a long comment a "tome" out of playfulness, but it wasn't the clearest choice of words.
So the "Full Version" is apparently not what your email said. That wasn't clear until the above comment.
In the "Full Version", if I was a hiring authority, which I am not (although I have been in past lives), there isn't enough there to warrant a second look. Did you have a cover letter? How many pages were in your resume? What projects have you done?
In what you have shared here, we see only keywords and some snark. Keywords don't cut it with real hiring managers.
If that's your natural communication style, your "more professional" style is probably drone-ish and fake. The probe most active on that first contact with an applicant is the honesty one, and it's pretty easy to trip when you're not in your natural voice.
That actually explains my interviewing experience pretty well. Every job that I've been hired for I was sure that the interview did not go all that well.
Man, I'm struggling with this at the moment. Either the places I've contacted are finding other people better than me (significantly), or I just suck. Auto-reply emails (if that) don't really tell me much unfortunately.
I do interviews at a large Internet company, and one of my goals--one of the goals that I've been trained to seek--is to ensure that the candidate, no matter how bad, walks away from the interview feeling good about himself/herself and the company. If you're doing really poorly in an interview, I'll toss you some easier questions than I normally give, because I have all the information I need, and I don't want you to have a negative experience with my company.
This may be a common attitude, but I hope you're aware that it is quite inconsiderate to the person in the long run. Yes, it is painful to tell people they suck. It may be terrible to do it during the phone interviewing process. But have you at least considered following up with a brief email telling the person that the interview actually didn't go that well?
Yes, this is a potential minefield. But if you never give people this type of feedback, how are they going to improve?
You need to consider the possibility that you're not as competent as you believe yourself to be. Dunning-Kruger[0] is real, and your post doesn't demonstrate the self-awareness the best developers seem to possess.
Your writing is sprinkled with emoticons and rife with reduplicated punctuation, both of which (especially the exclamation points) are common signs of immaturity. Reading this diatribe--and assuming your 50 emails were written similarly--I am forced to accept one of two conclusions: either you're not aware that your writing is unprofessional, or you're aware that it's unprofessional and unconcerned. Either option does not reflect well on you. To put it bluntly, if I received an email from you in this style, I would archive it without response, assuming it was from someone who lacked the requisite introspective capability I expect from the people I want to work with.
I found it particularly telling that you claim that all five of your phone screens went "very well" but marveled that only three companies tried to set up an onsite interview with you. Unless both the two companies that stopped at the phone screen simultaneously filled the position immediately after your phone screen, you really need to recognize that at least those two phone screens did not go well. I do interviews at a large Internet company, and one of my goals--one of the goals that I've been trained to seek--is to ensure that the candidate, no matter how bad, walks away from the interview feeling good about himself/herself and the company. If you're doing really poorly in an interview, I'll toss you some easier questions than I normally give, because I have all the information I need, and I don't want you to have a negative experience with my company. You may have felt good about the phone screens, but the most likely explanation for the two companies that didn't bring you onsite is that you didn't actually do well enough to justify additional interviews. These people want to hire someone, and if you were someone they wanted to hire, they certainly would have continued to interview you.
I think your experiment was less valid than you think it was because you're less competent than you think you are.
EDIT: I should add that whatever the case, whether I'm right or wrong about you, the best response to the situation you're in is to seek to improve yourself, not to embark on a quixotic venture to change others. Read CS theory books, create and modify open source projects, solve fun programming puzzles: sharpen your skills and--no matter what your level of competency--your prospects will improve.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect