11 ms·
Of course there is a flip side, if you interview 100 programmers in a small high tech town and piss off 99 of them by not even sending a 'no thanks' letter. An
by oiuytgyuio 16y ago
Of course there is a flip side, if you interview 100 programmers in a small high tech town and piss off 99 of them by not even sending a 'no thanks' letter.
And each of them tell all their friends that you are an a-hole, then when every potential hire in Cambridge/ NYC/ Stanford etc has heard that XYZ software are a-holes you are going to have one hell of a job hiring.
- catshirt 16y agofwiw, and this is certainly not my forte, i'd rather be an asshole than a defendant in a lawsuit like that
- oiuytgyuio 16y agoDepends who you are. If you're MSFT, IBM, etc then you don't even send a no thanks letter, you have nobody who isn't a certified HR person talk to a candidate and you don't allow any off the cuff remarks. The lawyer target cross section is too high. If you are a small startup in a high tech hub trying to attract people, and especially if you are in a market where the programers you reject might be future customers then you're risk is different. Companies often forget that the people they reject don't disappear. It used to be a big thing in merchant banks in the last boom to really grind and humiliate candidates - you aren't smart enough to work here etc. What they forgot is that those people went to work for companies that might need a merchant bank and that the victim is suddenly the customer.
- philwelch 16y agoMSFT will actually send a rejection letter. It's predictably dull.
- brk 16y agoI think this is largely an imagined scenario. Even in "small towns" the developer network is not so tight that you're going to have people trying to blacklist your company on the grounds of not getting a formal rejection notice. Plus, if the 1 developer you DO hire continuously tells people it's a great company working on cool stuff, that would outweigh the negative comments from the other 99.