Interesting article! This is pretty timely for me as someone hiring engineers right now. I've been in her shoes before, and know both sides of the table. For th

Interesting article! This is pretty timely for me as someone hiring engineers right now. I've been in her shoes before, and know both sides of the table. For those reading this and identifying with the situation, allow me to challenge in good faith the commentary in this post. I'd summarize the overall tone of the post as this: "I'm working hard to grow my career. I want to find the best place and role to help me do that. Please approach your side of the conversation as prepared and excited as I am, otherwise don't waste my time in getting there." For a young engineer, this is simple and to the point. It's also wrong. First, it attempts to minimize exposure to failure based on perceived value. The thing with failure is that you can choose to learn from it or ignore it. Trying to determine what failures are valuable beforehand is folly. Soak it up and become knowledgeable. I learned things early that frustrated the hell out of me, and figured out the lesson much later. Second, hiring decisions include lots of legal situations. Here's the truth: you'll never really know why someone really didn't want to hire you. When you hear lots of glowing things but you're not hired....there's a big issue somewhere. If you want feedback to be useful, you must look for trends, which means multiple attempts (and failures.) Third, don't take the title literally as "startups". These are all personal interactions, and organization size or makeup isn't a useful filter here. I doubt the author intended this post to be limited to just small companies, though.