CHAD VS. THE ALGORITHM

Every day, AI job screeners reject countless applicants for seemingly no good reason. Armed with a stellar résumé, some Python, and a white-hot feeling of injustice, one medical student decided to fight back.

- BY TODD FEATHERS TODD FEATHERS is a New York-based reporter covering algorithms, surveillance, and technology.

IT WAS MID-OCTOBER, peak leaf-peeping season in Hanover, New Hampshire, and Chad Markey was on a rare break between clinical rotations during his last year of medical school.

He should have been inhaling Green Mountain air and gossiping with his Dartmouth classmates about life after graduation. In a few months, they’d all be going their separate ways to start residency training at hospitals around the country.

Instead, Markey was alone in his apartment, deep down a rabbit hole, preparing to go to war.

He’d wake each morning, eat breakfast, open his laptop at the kitchen table or settle into the tan armchair with the good back support, and start coding. Some days, he wouldn’t notice the sun had gone down until one of his roommates came home and asked why the lights weren’t on.

For days, Markey had been scrolling through a Discord group about medical residency, a font of crowdsourced knowledge where students report back to their peers on every stage of the application and selection process. He’d watched as other students, lots of them, posted about the interview invitations they’d received.

Markey didn’t have any interview offers, only outright rejections. That seemed not just odd but wrong to the quiet-mannered 33-year-old from Houston, Texas, who speaks confidently about his accomplishments without bragging. He had good grades from an Ivy League medical school, author credits on articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association and The Lancet, a heart-wrenching personal statement, and glowing letters of recommendation. One professor wrote that they had “never met a medical student who is more skillful, talented, and appropriately situated in his pursuit of the field of medicine than Chad.”