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I had similar experience with Uber last month. My recruiter scheduled an introductory phone call with me and then she forgot about it. The call was rescheduled
by mltony 8y ago
I had similar experience with Uber last month. My recruiter scheduled an introductory phone call with me and then she forgot about it. The call was rescheduled and then she forgot again. On the third time she did call me but never apologized or anything. Then she scheduled a technical phone screen for me a few days later. On that day my interviewer called me two hours earlier than the scheduled time - no time zone difference, just that recruiter communicated wrong time to him. As it happened, I was in the middle of my lunch and caught off guard. The interviewer wasn't happy, so I guessed I didn't pass that phone screen, but the recruiter didn't even bother telling that to me - she just ignored my emails and she never even gave me her phone number.
P.S. I was invited to 6 onsite interviews in other companies and in the end I've got all 6 very good offers. So, good riddance, Uber.
- kposehn 8y agoWow, that should not have happened. Can you let me know the name of the recruiter? You can email me at keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail Sorry you had a bad experience and I'm bummed we lost you :(
- knodi123 8y ago> keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...
- ikeboy 8y agoI put a unique email address in my hn profile at one point and got spam sent to it after a few months
- ramphastidae 8y agoI imagine it's still a thing, but spam filters have solved most of the problem.
- btown 8y agoLarge-scale spam is pretty well filtered these days. But smaller-scale (especially B2B) cold inquiries to curated lists of interested parties are still very much a thing. And sites like https://hunter.io/ https://hunter.io/ absolutely do use publicly available search results (including forums) to find which of many permutations might be someone's email address. They may not be sophisticated enough yet to use [dot] as part of those permutations, but it's only a matter of time.
- fgrante 8y agoFrançois from Hunter here. Hunter does indeed search the entire public web for professional email addresses, following search engines specifications like robots.txt. However, we do not try to reverse obfuscations as it is a clear sign the owner doesn't want the email address to be collected by automatic means. So even basic obfuscations like [dot] are enough to prevent the collection. We also let the email addresses owners modify or delete the data we index about them: https://hunter.io/claim https://hunter.io/claim.
- dewey 8y agoI doubt there’s an email scraper that hasn’t added logic to replace [at] with @ etc. - so most of these obfuscations are absolutely useless too.
- bauerd 8y agoI had my unobfuscated email in my HN profile for no more than 2 weeks, and received a couple of cold mails in turn (to this date, actually).
- kposehn 8y agoSadly yes - for major company emails at least.
- kwelstr 8y agoJust an aside, you can ignore the dot on your email, or add as many as you like. Google ignores periods on email addresses. Just google it... :D
- dgzl 8y agoAnother fun feature with Gmail is that you can add arbitrary text to the end of your email addresses. This can be helpful if you're interested in tracking the origins of where your received emails come from. For instance, if you sign up your address at a website and start recieving sketchy emails with a destination for myemail+thatwebsite[at]gmail, you can easily find out where the leakage occurred.
- setr 8y agoAren’t both of those things relatively standard for email in general
- callahad 8y agoPlus-based subaddresses are relatively common (sendmail supports them, Sieve has RFC 5233, etc), but dot-insensitivity is/was unique to gmail as far as I'm aware.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y agoUnless the spammer knows about this too and trims any +suffixes from the addresses.
- brianpgordon 8y agoFastMail thought of this and lets you use subdomains instead. So user@tag.domain gets delivered to your mailbox as user+tag@domain.
- xte 8y agoHem it's not a GMail specific feature but a common one (sub-addressing/plus addressing, RFC 5233) that skip inbox and drop messages in the +$name/tag dir/label... The GMail specific feature is adding dots as you want in your mail localpart so (foobar, f.oo.bar, f.o.o.b.a.r etc @gmail are the very same mailbox).
- jefftk 8y agoIt kind of sounds like you're from Uber, but you're not giving an @uber.com address?
- michaelmcdonald 8y agoA quick google of the name and you can see he is; however I agree: anyone could have that email address. If he's legit from Uber and wants correspondence about an Uber interaction he should be listing his @uber.com address.
- kposehn 8y agoI tend to not give out my Uber email as I get a ton of solicitations every day. Forum/web email scraping is still very much a real thing unfortunately.
- jgalentine007 8y agoI had a screen with Uber last month and had the opposite experience.
- kerng 8y agoYikes, couple of people I know interviewed recently at Uber also. They seemed to have good experiences and were surprised about quality of questions and culture. Offers, if true, seemed competitive, beating all others (2 out of 3 took the offer). But I guess if something goes bad, it goes really bad...
- gaius 8y agono time zone difference, just that recruiter communicated wrong time to him. As it happened, I was in the middle of my lunch and caught off guard. The interviewer wasn't happy That's a red flag too - a professional interviewer, once you had explained that you weren't expecting the call until the agreed time, would have apologised and called you back later. Done it a bunch of times myself. Everyone in the industry who's been around the block knows that recruiters are generally pretty flaky and wouldn't have held it against you. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with that individual anyway.
- jameshart 8y agoEven when I’m calling a phone candidate at the scheduled time, I make sure to ask if it’s still a good time, are they ready and in an environment where they’re comfortable doing the interview. At phone interview stage, candidates Are about to get their first real experience of interacting with your company, and if they’re any good you will be one of many phone interviews they are juggling to fit in around their current work and normal life. It is an appropriate time to be accommodating and understanding.
- habosa 8y agoMy girlfriend had the same experience with Uber. They scheduled and forgot 3 times in a row. By the 4th she wasn't interested.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 8y agoFYI sometime's its not the company itself (I have no idea with Uber) but rather a third party's ineptitude. I just had a series of phone interviews scheduled with candidates through an external vendor and multiple times they forgot to provide the candidate's contact information before the interview. I'm sure that's not what they told the candidate when I wasn't able to call them.
- beams_of_light 8y agoGiven the company's history of misogyny, I'd say she lucked out.
- akudha 8y agoI had a friend (super sharp guy, very very good in programming) long time ago - whenever he is bored, he'll schedule an interview with some company, clear the interview, and start negotiating the salary, just to see how much he could get. Once he gets an offer, he'll use that offer to drive up the offer from some other company that he interviewed with. Mind you, he had no intention of joining any of these companies, it was just a hobby/time-pass for him. I used think he is a jerk for doing this, wasting everyone's time. After reading how companies treat the candidates, I am not so sure ...
- hedvig 8y agoOnly the guys at the top are allowed to operate things like a business. For the people in the business itself, they are not allowed to operate like that silly
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoI had a member from the Uber team contact me directly via email by using a template they had prepared for everyone they contact. I knew because they used the wrong name. I declined to do anything with Uber, not just because they couldn’t put in a little effort to write directly to me on our first contact, but in part because of all the terrible media talk about Uber culture and treatment of employees.
- lmilcin 8y agoI got an appointment with Goldman Sachs for a 30 minute screening interview with one of their analysts. The guy called me 25 minutes late and without introducing himself proceeded to give me a highly specific question about how options work and immediately tell me he only has 5 minutes because he has to go to another meeting.
- samstave 8y agoAnd thats not even the top reason why you should avoid goldman sachs like the cancer.
- _bear 8y agoWhy, then? Curious.. I'm about to accept an offer next week...
- jason_slack 8y agoActually could I reach out to you about the Goldman interview process?
- samstave 8y agoJust one of many examples https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/former-goldman-sachs-bankers-charged-multibillion-dollar-money-laundering-scandal-n929916 https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/former-goldma...
- toss1 8y agoNot OP, but * Does the phrase 'vampire squid' ring a bell? * How about MDB1? culture
- osullivj 8y agoThey have a special term for staff that haven't spent their entire career at GS: "lateral hire". A friend joined as a lateral hire, and was only really accepted as an equal when he voluntarily gave up his five days paternity leave for his first born to bail out a project in crisis. Work life balance doesn't exist at GS. If you're happy to give your whole self to GS, work evenings and weekends and socialise with colleagues, you can do very well in terms of career progression and pay. If you want a life outside work, GS may not be for you.
- b3b0p 8y agoSimilar for me with Nest/Google. Got invited to an onsite and my recruiter went dark. This was after the screw ups with scheduling the for the multiple phone screens and online coding tests. What ended up happening was that I never got to the onsite because after I was invited and asked for times days and what city I would be flying out of for tickets I never got another reply and I tried to contact the recruiter multiple times after. Got nothing.
- bradleyjg 8y agoIt’s things like this, and the open optimizing for low false positives over low false negatives that makes me totally unsympathetic to claims that high tech companies can’t find sufficient workers and need a legislative solution. Reveled preferences don’t show a desperation for qualified workers.
- wpietri 8y agoAbsolutely. And I think your notion of "optimizing for low false positives" is generous. I think most bad interviewers are optimized for a) employer convenience and b) feelings of power on the part of interviewers. Part A is understandable in that the standard hiring process is optimized for the common case: scarce jobs and abundant, interchangeable workers. That gets you bulk resume submission, minimal human interaction, and indifferent, slipshod processes. Part B is just jackassery, but it gets you things like brainteaser interview questions, high-stress interviews, and a lot of biases smuggled in under things like "culture fit". That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce. A few years back, I said, "Wait, we spend all this time optimizing our software for user experience; why don't we do the same for job applications?" I ended up with a significantly different process, one that was a little more work for us, but a way better applicant experience. I also shifted focus from finding flaws to looking to see people at their best, which is not only a better experience, but I think gets better people. I encourage everybody to apply their design thinking and user empathy skills to their own hiring process. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
- curtis 8y ago> That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce. The thing that is not scarce from the recruiters' view is applicants or maybe even resumes. This is because anyone looking for a job can easily, due to the magic of the internet, apply at dozens or even hundreds of jobs. And applicants don't even have to apply for jobs any more. If you're on LinkedIn, they can come looking for you, and again, due to the magic of the internet, there are plenty of possible people to consider for a job. So instead of artificial scarcity we have artificial abundance. This problem seems to be analogous to the online dating problem. Technology has made one part of the problem far too easy and this causes big problems in other parts of the pipeline.
- foobarbazetc 8y agoYou dodged a bullet there. Fate.
- rustcharm 8y agoWhat's interesting about these practices is that the _best_ candidates will have no patience for this and say "no thankyou" so they're not getting the cream of the crop. Everyone, even an obvious bad fit, should be treated respectfully and the interviewee's time and schedule should be honored.
- grizzles 8y agoI was headhunted by someone for Uber's ATG. After reaching out she whiffed our web meeting and turned standoffish when I politely asked if she wanted to reschedule. Maybe I was part of the bycatch? Seemed like a very meat market kind of attitude to building a team.