A shocking job application form at Cognizant featuring insanely outdated, offensive terminology has Reddit devs facepalming. Here is the full drama.
Job hunting in the tech industry is already a soul-crushing grind, but sometimes it just turns into straight-up dark comedy. Imagine typing out your shiny resume, only to bump into an application form that looks like it was drafted during the Stone Age.
This wild story just blew up on r/recruitinghell, a subreddit dedicated to developers and job seekers venting about absolute trash recruitment processes.
A fellow dev was applying for a role at Cognizant (if you've been around the outsourcing/consulting block, you know the name). Everything seemed perfectly normal until they hit the "Race/Ethnicity" dropdown. Instead of the standard, modern options like Asian, Caucasian, or Hispanic, the system spat out some absolutely cursed terminology.
OP didn't screenshot the whole thing, but casually dropped a sarcastic nuke: "Surprised they didn't say 'red' for the last one. jfc."
The craziest part? The subreddit mods actually jumped in, verified the source, and confirmed the form is 100% real. Yikes is an understatement.
The community is utterly mind-blown and the comment section is a warzone. Here are the main takeaways from the outrage:
N7Valor shared a pretty awkward realization: "First time I would have been described as a 'Yellow' person." Cringe levels are off the charts, guys.igotabeefpastry nailed it: "‘Miscegenation’ has to be one of the ugliest words in our language. Major yikes!!" Another user pointed out that using this vocabulary feels exactly "1 step away from just using slurs."So, what's C4F's take on this? A bug like this doesn't just magically spawn from the void.
Chances are, some dev or BA blindly copy-pasted a garbage database schema from the 1900s, or integrated a dusty legacy system without actually reviewing the payloads. Alternatively, some HR rep handed down an ancient PDF spec sheet, and a dev just hardcoded the dropdown without a second thought.
Here's the survival lesson for all you keyboard warriors: When you're building out forms, designing DB tables, or mapping 3rd-party data, read the damn fields. If you spot vocabulary that looks sketchy, discriminatory, or just flat-out wrong, flag it immediately. Don't be that dev who just puts on noise-canceling headphones and codes whatever is on the Jira ticket. Because when the company gets dragged on Reddit or Twitter, you bet your ass the dev team will feel the heat too.
Source: Reddit