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No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

• simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  How would you know that no one has ever sued? It if happened (and I'd bet it did many times), it wouldn't be public knowledge.
  • pmiller2 7y ago
    > While researching this piece, I spoke to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches to see just how often a company’s constructive feedback (i.e. not “durrrr we didn’t hire you because you’re a woman”) to a rejected eng candidate has resulted in litigation. > Hey, guess what? IT’S ZERO! THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED. EVER. > As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get. It seems like this is the best possible methodology (Lexis Nexis + survey of labor lawyers) that one can ask for.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • bluGill 7y ago
    If it went to court it is public knowledge by the US constitution. If someone settled out of court that is not easy to find (as the article points out)
    • gruez 7y ago
      >If someone settled out of court that is not easy to find (as the article points out) Even if it was settled, surely the initial complaint would be public?
      • AmericanChopper 7y ago
        You don’t have to file any court documents to inform somebody that you believe they have wronged you, and that you believe you are entitled to compensation for the resulting damages. The civil court system is there to handle things if you can’t work it out among yourselves.
        • pmiller2 7y ago
          If you haven’t filed any documents, you haven’t sued anyone, either. I find it really hard to believe that every single case of an engineer suing over post-interview feedback has settled out of court, too.
          • wpietri 7y ago
            Definitely. The fact that there are no known cases at least demonstrates the risk is very low. Much less risky than the kinds of things people do all the time in interviews.
            • AmericanChopper 7y ago
              It could just as likely demonstrate that very few companies provide feedback to rejected candidates, or at least that when companies do, that they legally vet the feedback first (which would make you question the value and candidness of it). I have personally never heard of anybody giving or receiving it myself. So I’m not surprised that you would fail to find cases of disputes originating over it.
              • wpietri 7y ago
                I give it whenever asked. Last I was interviewed, I got it at about half the places I talked to. It's a very natural thing for people to ask about. And answering questions is also pretty natural. The notion that it happens approximately never strikes me as something that needs a lot more evidence than your personal experience.
  • three_seagrass 7y ago
    Yep, this is survivor bias. i.e. No ships ever sink if all you can see are the floating ones.
  • Impossible 7y ago
    From the article: As some of my lawyer contacts pointed out, a lot of cases get settled out of court, and that data is much harder to get. Anecdotally I've heard of and worked for companies that have been sued due to bias or perceived bias in the interview process. I have not heard of anyone suing or getting sued for feedback on technical interview performance, but in most cases there would be no basis for a candidate to sue. That said I think the feedback suggestions are really off base unless the person writing the feedback personally knows the candidate. All of the suggestions are in the vein of "you clearly don't know X, you should learn it", which is fine if a candidate is actually completely unfamiliar with a topic. But the more common case, especially with basic CS stuff like Big O notation as used in the example article, is the candidate is familiar and got it wrong due to nerves, being rusty or interview time pressure. The same goes with the suggestion to recommend or buy a book for the candidate. Unless you are completely sure the candidate does not own the book already this is a terrible idea. Imagine how demoralizing buying, or even recommending, the candidate a book that they already owned and studied pre-interview could be. I'm pro no feedback, but if the candidate absolutely insists I think feedback should be direct and based on the candidates interview performance, not perceived judgement of their skillset or knowledge (even if this is what most employers are trying to get from interviews). For example... "You reached a working brute-force solution but did not solve the problem optimally. Here is a link on leetcode or hackerrank and a geeks for geeks solution to help you practice the problem." "You did not come up with complete solutions to 2 out of 5 questions, even if given more time you were on the right track. Leetcode more and come back in 6 months" But no one is that direct with interview feedback because the same set of leetcode questions that everyone asks are "company trade secrets". The feedback suggestions I gave are also not particularly tactful, but they are more useful given the current state of most tech interview process. I've learned a lot more about becoming a good interviewee from Blind and Hackernews than from any employer feedback. Richard Geldreich also has good insight into how the process works for senior candidates, and some of the political games that happen during the interview process that make any feedback even more of a joke.
  • blaser-waffle 7y ago
    It does happen, and it is public knowledge: https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ Parsing out which ones specifically are about hiring is a little trickier, but they're in there.
• kcmastrpc 7y ago
  Perhaps if more people utilized glassdoor and talent steered clear, then we might see a positive change here. Until then, there is no incentive for employers to spend time formalizing and providing that feedback.
  • heavyset_go 7y ago
    Glassdoor is absolutely filled to the brim with reviews clearly written by HR, marketing firms or by current employees who were told to write reviews. If a review's only advice to management are: "Continue doing what you're doing!", "keep up the good work!" or "make sure our awesome culture isn't diluted as we grow!", then they're fake. If a review's only cons are reframing the cons left my legitimate reviewers as sour grapes by someone who can't handle fast-paced environments, startups, or responsibilities that aren't clearly defined, they're fake. But the biggest red flag is positive reviews left in succession over the period of a few days to a month. Much like Amazon reviews, it seems that the only reviews you can glean worthwhile information from are the bad reviews.
    • nobleach 7y ago
      In 2014, Glassdoor was a goldmine and it saved me from several very toxic companies. Once companies began to catch on, it became a cesspool of corporate cheerleaders softballing points to make their reviews sound convincing. Things like, "Sure, work/life balance could use some tweaking but, overall, it's not too bad". It's pretty easy to scope out the fake reviews.
    • AmericanChopper 7y ago
      It’s also filled with reviews from disgruntled former employees who write massively exaggerated reviews, or complete works of fiction. I also have no reason to believe that people don’t write poor reviews for their competitors. It’s an anonymous review system that has many incentives in place that competing with “write thoughtful, honest reviews for you employers” along with all the typical review system biases (like a strong selection bias).
      • 7y ago
• chadash 7y ago
  The key word in the title seems to be "engineer". I can't find a specific lawsuit relating to an engineer but there are plenty of lawsuits to be found. For example, https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/10-26-17.cfm https://www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/10-26-17.cfm When you do a google search for lawsuits related to hiring discrimination, you are far far more likely to find the cases that became publicized because they have merit. Journalists and other organizations don't tend to write headlines along the lines of "Google got sued by candidate for baseless claim of discrimination, but suit was quickly tossed out". It doesn't mean these lawsuits don't happen. In fact, it's a huge PITA to defend youself when someone accuses you of discrimination. Imagine an engineer who isn't very bright, but doesn't think that of themselves. So you tell them that they didn't do well, but they disagree. And then they sue on grounds of discrimination. Now, you have to prove that you don't discriminate, which can be pretty hard to do.
  • cogman10 7y ago
    It cuts both ways. Imagine you tell someone of a protected class "Hey, you did really well" and they don't get hired. What's worse, what if some non-minority gets hired. You've just opened yourself to a mess proving that the reason you didn't hire one vs the other was because of experience.
• kenhwang 7y ago
  One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only takes one bad candidate to make it not worth the effort.
  • leothekim 7y ago
    +1 on this. The company has nothing to gain in delivering more feedback other than a thumbs up/down, and a lot more to lose.
    • Nuzzerino 7y ago
      What are they losing in this case? I don't see how a company is actually harmed by someone complaining about an interview. Unless you're trying to attract people who subscribe to cancel culture, I don't see a problem.
      • kenhwang 7y ago
        Employee hours. Someone has to collect, document, sanitize, and explain the feedback. Then respond to the response to the feedback. In the time it takes our recruiter to provide feedback to a candidate, they could have sourced 20 more candidates. edit: I'll argue instant feedback is even more expensive and risky. It's not coordinated, potentially duplicative, may impact/contaminate later rounds, and may not be complete or representative of the interview as a whole. Engineers aren't known for being naturally HR/legal-compliant, and having multiple expensive engineers spend time doing things not in their typical skillset that's typically done by a single resource that specializes in said skillset doesn't sound cheaper at all.
        • mixmastamyk 7y ago
          The article recommends instant feedback, presumably much less costly.
        • eropple 7y ago
          They've only disrupted their day to talk to you, in many cases having done these increasingly-prevalent and always-bullshit 4+-hour "exercises", and they have way less time to be allocating than you do. That's all they've done. Their time isn't deserving of respect and it's just downright ridiculous to think that it's the decent thing to do to tell them something that might, just might, not make it a waste for them to have spent it. ...Or, you know. Don't be that guy. Candidate, candidate, candidate--depersonalizing language for depersonalized processes. How about person? These are people you're talking about. They matter more than your recruiter's cattle-call throughput, each and every one of them. Have some empathy, my dude. Or at least some enlightened self-interest, for someday will be your day in the barrel.
• Afton 7y ago
  I got verbal feedback exactly one time (at Microsoft) during my attempt to land a post-1-year of university internship. I had solved the algorithm in a few minutes, but when trying to code it up, I struggled a fair amount before figuring it out. The feedback I got was "You seem like a smart person, who hasn't done very much coding. That makes you a bad risk. Go practice programming and come back next year". It was incredibly valuable advice that I got no where else, and it resulted in me coming back to MS a couple of years later once I graduated (I'm not there anymore). I wish more people would give real, actionable feedback on interviews.
  • criddell 7y ago
    > You seem like a smart person, who hasn't done very much coding. That makes you a bad risk, Assuming Microsoft actually measures this stuff, that's kind of surprising to me. I've never placed much weight on being able to write a program on the spot.
    • bluesroo 7y ago
      While you may not, Microsoft's hiring process (as well as others) clearly do.
      • criddell 7y ago
        Right. And like I said, I assume they've measured it. I wonder what the risk difference is and what the nature of the ultimate failures are?
    • Afton 7y ago
      All my info is old on this point, but I doubt that there was company wide measurement here. This was an individual giving their own personal opinion/reasoning.
    • allovernow 7y ago
      >I've never placed much weight on being able to write a program on the spot. I don't disagree, and personally I hate in person coding exercises, but if you keep the question simple and allow the candidate to code in their native language, something fizz-buzz like will go a long way in weeding out the people who have languages on their resume but can't code. At our company we offer two simple coderpad tasks to be done in advance with no supervision or pressure - write a linked list in CPP and solve a simple puzzle in Python. You pay attention to the candidates who use templates, destructors, smart pointers, even if they make mistakes those are the ones you probably want to hire.
• anm89 7y ago
  Half joking answer: because no engineer has ever received interviewing feedback
  • kenhwang 7y ago
    I have a handful of times. They we're quite insightful and entertaining, though mostly not helpful since most of time they were commenting on things that just weren't meant to be. "It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not a weakness; that is ~life~ interviewing." Definitely a few times where I raised an eyebrow at obviously-not-HR-approved comments that made it through. Only benefit these companies got from providing feedback was some word-of-mouth to my friends to interview there.
  • usaar333 7y ago
    Really? I've rarely not gotten feedback on rejection - some companies outright issue it, though for most I have to ask. On accepts never because people worry about awkward future colleague relationships.
• manfredo 7y ago
  There's nothing in the company's interest to give feedback. It takes working time to compile this feedback and give it to the candidate. The candidate isn't going to interview at the company again until probably a year or more - if ever. And the company has a reputation risk if the candidate decides to revel this feedback and allege bias or ineffective interviewing.
  • codezero 7y ago
    The upside as others have mentioned is that good feedback means you may get to hire that person later (maybe not even at the same company, people remember you if you give good feedback, because it is so uncommon) I’ve seen this and done this as a hiring manager at multiple companies. If you are honest, clear, and direct, and your interview (key point) does a good job quantifying the candidate’s performance, and their expectations are well set before the interview, there’s little risk of a reputation hit. I’ve had folks push back or disagree, but it’s pretty rare and I’ve never been worried about someone dragging the company into a spat.
• rchaud 7y ago
  The hiring process is a black box for a reason. The HR department's role is to protect the company first, not the employees, and certainly not prospective employees. If feedback can be interpreted as being discriminatory, or reflective of bad company culture in general, well, word gets around. For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/likeable, or some combination of the three; the classic "there were many qualified candidates and we could only choose one" line in the rejection email. That doesn't help the interviewee beyond telling them that it's a numbers game, but that's the truth.
  • oceanghost 7y ago
    This. I have done hundreds of interviews, and I used to do a very easy, basic comp sci test. The last question I would ask was, "Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you." The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this. The worst answer I ever got was a guy who said the last album he bought was "Free Bird" (which is not an album), and was 40 years old at the time of that utterance. This person could honestly not think of one thing that excited him since then. He also ranted about Object Oriented Programming like it was a brand new thing. The best answer I ever got, was a gentleman who was not the strongest candidate but was clearly intelligent. His answer was, "I know this is not a recent author, but I love Bukowski." And he spoke at length about his novels and poetry, and even was aware that our office was only a few blocks from where one of the pivotal scenes in one of his novels was set, and that after the interview he had actually scheduled some time away from his job to go there. perfect answer In my report to HR, I mentioned that he probably needed to study a little but was quite intelligent, but had fantastic enthusiasm for literature and that he was very engaging. Of course, HR put an immediate stop to the thing with the reasoning that someone could say that their favorite book was the bible, and that could form the basis for a religious discrimination case. After that, I declined to do interviews anymore.
    • rchaud 7y ago
      This scenario of an interviewee answering with the name of a religious text is an interesting point; transparency in interviewing is a two-way street. In a way, I can understand why people get tripped up on the "casual/lifestyle" question. Interviewees may not think of it as a casual question, but rather another question to weed out the desirables from the undesirables. So people may censor themselves or their honest beliefs because they want the job. Which is a position I totally understand.
• nimbius 7y ago
  >Does the fear of getting sued even make sense? No. most job offers are liberally padded to seek a massively overqualified candidate in the unrealistic hope of attaining one that hasnt gone to work for a much nicer competitor, or in order to give the interviewer and HR ample reasons to reject an applicant that arent pertanent to their manner or person (which would get them sued.) the latter is also effective in ensuring jobs that require an outside posting will always favor an inside candidate, or a nepotist's ringer.
• draw_down 7y ago
  I think you could tell them a little something about why you decided not to make an offer. But this is riddled with problems, sadly. For example, candidates often take it as an invitation to a debate. You can agree with the feedback or not, but you're not going to talk your way into an offer. In sum, it's all downside with little upside. The lawsuit thing is a red herring, imo.
• maxcbc 7y ago
  I always get interview feedback, its the norm as a contractor. Even as a perm, I always got it if I wasn’t hired.
• nobleach 7y ago
  Got feedback, "you didn't really know anything about Ruby on Rails". I was a Rails developer at the time, but no questions were asked about Rails during the interview (asked me nothing but JavaScript). I mentioned that to the recruiter, but when a recruiter is calling you to tell you that you didn't get the job, that's not the time to lodge a protest. Since this was an internal recruiter for the company, I thanked him kindly for actually calling me instead of sending an email. That was a solid move in my opinion.
  • mbreedlove 7y ago
    I applied and interviewed for an Angular position a few years ago. I was interviewed by a consultant doing work for the company while they built up their engineering team. He absolutely grilled me about .NET intricacies, including some of my favorites, "Where is the .NET GAC stored on the filesystem?" and "Why is n-tier better than MVC?". Not surprising, they declined to move forward citing my inexperience working with .NET enterprise architecture. I could have told you them that from beginning and saved everyone a few hours.
    • flukus 7y ago
      .net + angular seems to be popular around here and I've been on the other side of that, knowing .net but rejected for not knowing angular (but plenty of experience with other frameworks). The only time I've received real feedback was for a ruby job with a small project interview. Apparently I wasn't doing TDD because the tests and fixes were in the same commit. At least that kind of feedback let's you know you've dodged a bullet.
• tstrimple 7y ago
  Ain't nobody got time for that. When I was hiring developers, I was conducting dozens of interviews based off of hundreds of applications. My goal is to hire people who can help me solve problems. Running an interview improvement service isn't something I have time for.
  • reaperducer 7y ago
    Ain't nobody got time for that. If a company doesn't have the time to treat human beings like human beings, it's not a good company for which to work.
  • eropple 7y ago
    This is a bad, bad take. You aren't "running an interview improvement service". You're being a decent human being to another human being. Being decent is important.
    • blaser-waffle 7y ago
      Being decent is a prompt, if perfunctory, rejection without humiliation or insult. You're asking for something more.
      • eropple 7y ago
        No, I'm not. They've invested their time, which is significantly more limited than yours at any company that's at a scale to be hiring, in jumping through your hoops. The least a decent person does is provide them with why it was for nothing. And if your employer thinks you shouldn't be decent, quit.
  • Apocryphon 7y ago
    You would probably find it easier to hire if your company gained a better reputation with prospective applicants. Having the courteous culture to give feedback is the sort of differentiator that applicants would value.
  • justforyou 7y ago
• oxfordmale 7y ago
  Because it would take time to write up the feedback and it would have to be reviewed by HR to ensure it is not phrased in a way that in violation of local laws. This is a large investment for a candidate that is not going to work for your company and from a business point of view, this time is better spend else where.
  • downerending 7y ago
    Meh. I've been told in a few cases that I'm "too old", which is legally actionable in my country. But suing is time-consuming and rarely productive--I suspect most of us just let it slide.
• wpietri 7y ago
  I have given it and will continue to give it. Some people do initially react badly to it. Heck, I've reacted badly to it sometimes. But that doesn't mean that it isn't helpful in the long run. My responsibility isn't just to my employers. It's also to my profession and my society, and to the extent I can help well-meaning people to improve, I'm glad to do it.
  • techslave 7y ago
    if it’s a phone screen i always tell then right at the end how i’m going to score them. in person i don’t because they have other ones to get through. people here say no feedback because they had a bad experience once. meh. of course you’re going to get pushback some times. that’s part of it, not a thing to avoid at all costs.
• plake 7y ago
  Because giving good feedback is hard work, and candidates won't always take it well (even if they don't sue). If the employer has already decided not to hire you, there's just not that much in it for them. For what it's worth, as an interviewer I'm happy to give feedback in person, at the end of the interview, if the candidate asks for it. It's much easier to do when you're both in the same room, and asking e.g. "is there anything you think I could improve on?" makes a positive impression either way.
  • Nuzzerino 7y ago
    If it's hard work, then that's a symptom of the reasoning behind a no-hire not being sound to begin with. And there is plenty in it for them, as the candidate may want to apply a second time at a later point, having been made aware of and improved on the areas that were identified as needing improvement. They'll be more likely to re-apply to a company that gave the feedback than to a company that didn't.
    • kenhwang 7y ago
      It's hard work because then you'll have to explain and document the hiring proceedings, then sanitize it before sending out, with content that's actually actionable by the interviewee. What we put in internal candidate notes is very different than what should be sent out, and someone has to do that translation. There's also plenty of reasons a candidate didn't get hired that not really immediately correctable or not even their fault. For the latter, we do provide feedback/explanations and try to keep in touch in hopes they apply again in a couple of years. But 80% of the time we really just don't want to see the candidate again. I'd say 10% of the time, we see the candidate again, but so far, even on reappearance years later, they get the same feedback from completely different interviewing committees.
  • SubuSS 7y ago
    I haven't read the article, but it is off-point to say no-one sues. History has no effect on what someone will do tomorrow - exposure is what companies try to limit. The sueing angle kicks in when you do stuff like give feedback for folks who you think will take it well Vs keep it away from folks who give you a bad feeling or whatever. It is all exposure. Almost in all the companies I have been at, there has been a big push to keep the interview experience uniform for all candidates. So you can't have hugely different loops setup for the same level for different candidates for example. Fun fact: This is a main reason why as a company grows, you aren't able to get in with a wink and a nod anymore, even if you know 100% of the folks already there.
• valbaca 7y ago
  Why can't companies provide feedback iff the candidate agrees that the feedback is subject to NDA? Interview candidates already sign NDAs for the coding questions asked. Granted those NDAs are always ignored (based on coding interview sites) but the NDA would at least provide the "protection" that these companies want. Then the companies benefit from having candidates actually improving and potentially coming back hirable.
  • throwawaypa123 7y ago
    like a company is going to sue over this. social media and shame culture makes this silly to attempt.
• telotortium 7y ago
  Getting a 402 from an embedded https://plot.ly https://plot.ly graph right at the top of the article. Given that article about 402 I read here a few days ago, it's cool to see 402 in the wild for the first time.
  • fadifrancis 7y ago
    the 402 has been fixed! Take another read!
• solinent 7y ago
  It's not in their best interest time-wise, unless they seek to employ you afterwords. Strangely, I've always gotten feedback, or at least "we decided not to continue", which is better than nothing.
• scarejunba 7y ago
  I write a form letter. If someone asks for feedback, I give it to them. Nothing's ever happened to me, but one of my colleagues once had a guy get very angry and say that he had, in fact, solved the problem and yell at him and then go write this angry Glassdoor review. I guess I've got to thank this guy for any mild resistance to giving feedback that I have. The sad answer for why my feedback isn't great, though, is that I can't bring myself to care about someone who is so far outside my Dunbar number. At the point where we've decided not to work with this person, they're just some rando. It's like if someone walked up on the street and asked me for feedback. I mean, I try anyway, but I know I'm not doing the best job.
• PopeDotNinja 7y ago
  I used to give feedback. Until one day when I gave feedback to a desperate alcoholic. They showed drunk up in the lobby of the office demanding a 2nd chance & I had to explain what the heck was going on.
• taytus 7y ago
  Because it's pointless. A company didn't think you are a good fit. That's it. The criteria they used to evaluate that is totally different than the criteria other companies will use. What is the point of providing feedback for a data point that does not correlate with other interviews?
  • lbriner 7y ago
    That's not necessarily true. If the reason that the person is turned down is that they are massively over-reaching their experience then there is a good chance that they will experience the same rejection elsewhere. If they want to take that on board, it's up to them and it might well be helpful moving forwards. I will personally give people feedback if its tangible and reasonably objective but if someone just feels wrong, I think it is easier to say they were not a good fit and leave it at that.
• martius 7y ago
  I wonder if one has ever been successful in using the data access and protection laws (such as GDPR) to request access to his file and interview feedback.
  • dkersten 7y ago
    I’m not sure if it’s ever been tested, but I’ve been told that the company I work for does require notes and such to be recorded in a way to make this possible and the company lawyers have said that he’s a candidate can do GDPR data requests to get their interview data and that it must be honoured. So it’s my understanding, at least if it’s a company in the EU, that they just legally comply.
• Overtonwindow 7y ago
  Because America is a very litigious society and there will always be that ...one. Corporate protectionism will dictate to simply not say anything than take the risk.
• ledneb 7y ago
  I sometimes give feedback, but only if requested and, to be honest, only if the feedback request actually makes it through HR and to me. What feels like a lifetime ago I went for an interview at Monzo, I think it'd recently renamed from Mondo. I thoroughly enjoyed the process - a kind yet thorough and revealing interview format. I didn't get the job - but it's not an exaggeration to say their feedback and the process changed my career. If somebody from there spots this; thanks :) (and I'm still sad I didn't get to work with you!)
• supernova87a 7y ago
  Real, genuine, useful feedback takes time and effort to think about, summarize, and deliver in the right way. It takes thinking about what you observed about the person, when you observed it, and what you would like them to change to improve. Think about how long that takes to do correctly. We take the time and effort to do this for people we care about, and not those we're never going to see again (unless you're just letting off steam yelling at someone in traffic). That's why at work, if someone gives you feedback, you should value it as they see you as someone worth correcting / giving feedback to. If you're getting no feedback, you might start to worry that you're not someone worth taking the time to give feedback to. That's why companies and people don't bother giving feedback. Until you turn into someone they care about, what benefit would there be to them to spend resources to do this? And with uncertain reaction from the person (as pointed out by many stories here)? So that's why, if you really want meaningful feedback it's a challenge to find -- you have to pay someone to do it (which is hard, because casual acquaintances don't know your deeper job-related behavior or performance), someone close to you (which is hard, because it's not easy to give friends honesty), or someone who has the time and interest to do it (rare to find). Or you have to be in a company where this is part of the culture (rare).
• cj 7y ago
  A generic rejection is a lot less likely to piss off the candidate (which does happen). Not everyone is appreciative of feedback.
• valleyjo 7y ago
  I interviewed recently and didn’t get the job. I thought I did well enough so I wasn’t sure what went wrong. The recruiter told me exact detailed results for each interview including the hire / no hire outcome and why no hire for the no hire ones. While I was disappointed to not get the job, it really gave me a sense of peace to know what went wrong and what I can do to improve. I wish this was more common.
• jgwil2 7y ago
  A lot of the time hiring decisions are more or less arbitrary. It makes me sad how unsystematic the approach to hiring is, but it often comes down to one person that you talk to liking you enough after an hour of talking that they're willing to go to bat for you. The fact is there often is not any good feedback to give.
• amriksohata 7y ago
  Other than the risk of opening an appeals process, not necessarily legal but verbal via email tennis
• mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Accurate time-sensitive communication is very hard in my experience. I've heard thru the grapevine on a few interviews over the years, that often the interviewer gets the wrong impression on some subject. Due to the fact there are say ten+ candidates for a position, one wrong impression is often enough to torpedo your chances. For example, I'm good at what I do, but not the kind of person to brag about it (hah). In fact I instinctively tend to downplay things I've done as no big deal. In some sense true, but in an interview it's enough to lose the offer. Trying to correct this but it is not easy. Once I was referred to a position by a colleague, but didn't get it. Weeks later I heard, "not enough db experience." What? While I don't write SQL every day, I've used dbs consistently over decades, know the theories, etc. Sure, I might need to hit the manual for a week to get up to speed, but that is incredibly common and no hurdle whatsoever. So, post-interview feedback is good, but asking questions/feedback during the interview itself would have been a lot better. I wonder if (when there are so many candidates), interviewers don't want to revisit past assumptions and prefer to just get on to "the next one."
  • sickygnar 7y ago
    Bizarre. I had a similar experience. I was told "I didn't seem comfortable in language X". I'd been writing it for ~10 years, and have written a handful of native extensions, with lots of open source examples. It was strange and very, very upsetting. Triplebyte gave me this feedback. I won't be using their platform again (or any interviewing platform), but unfortunately, I'm sure they have sold my data and told everyone I suck. I had a bad day.
• itsdrewmiller 7y ago
  I think the article generalizes the author's experience with first line interviews of wholly unqualified people to all post-interview feedback, and definitely shouldn't. People who literally can't Fizz Buzz are not going to argue with you about how no they are actually great devs. People who are borderline candidates who didn't quite get there in a final interview on fuzzier attributes (too slow, spaghetti code, etc.) are a lot more likely to take feedback poorly. I tried giving post-full interview feedback for a while, but I stopped based on low cost/benefit.
• excerionsforte 7y ago
  It is funny for companies to expect candidates to spend time to give feedback about their hiring process, but to spend an iota of time to give candidates feedback about performance: Risky! Lawsuit! Rant! You've more chance of damage by rogue employees than a candidate that's looking at multiple companies.
• sys_64738 7y ago
  People are not very good at giving critical feedback. People are not very good at receiving critical feedback. In the middle you have lawyers who must protect the company from liability.
• nindalf 7y ago
  I think I've taken around 50 interviews in the last year or so. I always end the interview with "do you have any questions for me?" No one asks what they could have done better, but if they did I'd tell them.
  • rconti 7y ago
    I would have worded this as "given around 50 interviews" because "taken" sounds (to my ears) like you were the candidate, which I don't think is the case here. I would not ask an interviewer what I could have done better before I knew the outcome, because I'd prefer to be a confident candidate not second-guessing myself. But I'd like to know after the decision was made not to proceed. (or even if the decision was made to hire me!)
• SamReidHughes 7y ago
  For a lot of interviewees, particularly on phone screens, there is just no constructive feedback to give.
• aaron695 7y ago
  > While researching this piece, I spoke to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches to see just how often a company’s constructive feedback (i.e. not “durrrr we didn’t hire you because you’re a woman”) to a rejected eng candidate has resulted in litigation. It's not "durrrr" and this is why feedback is not given, this immaturity is why people get sued. Many non obvious statements can have implications about illegal discrimination. It is probably very rare, this is a quite valid point people get wrong. But benefits are also probably rare, so it equals out.
• deleted 7y ago
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• moopling 7y ago
  In the UK I've heard it said you can make a subject access request (SAR) for any information a company holds on you. This would include interview notes for example. I assume something similar applies in the rest of europe due to GDPR?
  • senderista 7y ago
    That would clearly have unintended consequences (like all discussion of a candidate happening in person or over the phone).
• _cairn 7y ago
  So many comments in the vein of "who has time to waste on candidates we aren't going to make an offer to?" - You are damaging your companies brand thinking this way. You want people who you reject to say to themselves "I can't wait to study up and interview here again, they said no, but I still want to work here!"
  • ggggtez 7y ago
    If you don't why you didn't get an offer, then you aren't worth the time to explain it. 95% of the time, you didn't give as strong answers as other candidates. The other 5% of the time, you came across as a jerk.
    • throwaway2048 7y ago
      You can find plenty of competent people to fill a position that you have no room to hire. Its also possible to give an accidentally weak interview. Treating people like disposable garbage because they didn't check the checkboxes the best is a great way to be a shitty manager and a shitty human being.
    • majormajor 7y ago
      Strongly disagree. Do you only ask candidates 1 question/only look for 1 attribute? And only hire for one level? Cause otherwise, they could've done great on 8 things but missed on another. Or they did well but not quite well enough for the seniority that was desired. I've gotten feedback like this in the past - "your technical answers were great, but we thought you were a bit too green collaboration- and project-ownership-wise" and it was super useful because in my head before that, it was the places where my technical question answers could've been even better that I'd been beating myself up over.
    • noitsnot 7y ago
      This is egregious and unempathetic.
  • LordFast 7y ago
    Ahh, refreshing to see that someone still remembers how to do company-building.
• duxup 7y ago
  On the topic of form letter rejections: I WISH I even got those... durring my last job hunt most of the time the company just goes dark and stops contacting me or doesn't respond. I say this and other recruiers tell me they're shocked and yet getting ghosted seemed to be the rule rather than exception durring that time. Maybe I'm such a bad canidae that they don't even want to bother with a form letter. Strangely one company who ghosted me contacted me recently about some opportunities. I told them I wasn't interested and about being ghosted previously. They didn't respond...
  • LordFast 7y ago
    Don't take it personally. As someone who's hired a lot of people, the unfortunate times when I "ghosted" people were mostly due to internal company problems, not candidate problems. Anecdotally, these were always situations when I wanted to pass someone but received weird resistance from other stakeholders and it ended up being a situation of stalemate. So, you could have faced similar things.
    • duxup 7y ago
      Yeah I experienced enough of it to where it just seems like it is how things work ;) Job hunting is / often is pretty brutal / stressful so I try to avoid taking anything personally.
    • ghettoimp 7y ago
      Definitely. At a very large company, I was involved in hiring something like programmers for a particular niche department. Over years we developed a good set of battle-tested questions, and had a clear process for evaluating candidates. But all of this feedback was just an input for management and HR. Regardless of how much we liked a candidate, only HR was trusted to communicate and negotiate with them. We later found out that candidates were routinely ghosted if the company had chosen not to hire them. We raised a stink about this, but ain't nobody got time to fight that fight. Anyway, the TLDR: especially with big organizations, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.
  • Kaze404 7y ago
• milesvp 7y ago
  My wife used to work with students to help them get through interviews, and one of her pieces of advice when interviewing is to ask near the end of the interview is if they have any concerns about them as a candidate. It gives the interviewer a chance to address the concerns and gives them a chance to get feedback to make future changes. I’m not sure how well this would work for a technical interview loop, since my wife was working with law students, and the interviews aren’t the same kind of technical, but it might sidestep/short circuit typical lack of feedback technical people complain about.
  • meej 7y ago
    I witnessed a candidate ask a question along these lines in a group interview and I found it extremely awkward, because there was huge potential for disagreement amongst the interviewers, and also because this group consisted of people who had a stake in the hire as future coworkers for the role, but were not members of the search committee making the final hire decision, we were just providing feedback to the search committee. One person answered no, but at least two of us in the room were no-hire on the candidate. This question and some of the others the candidate asked also struck me as inauthentic, they sounded like they came straight out of an interview skills book. So I would be cautious with implementing this advice... at minimum, reserve it for 1:1 interview contexts.
    • gowld 7y ago
      > group interview Off. That's not a good look.
      • steverb 7y ago
        On. I appreciate a company that isn't going to waste two days of my time with a succession of people asking the same questions over and over. Also, I want to meet my potential co-workers so I can decide if I want to work there.
      • meej 7y ago
        Don't ever interview at an academic library, then. It seems to be the only way we do interviews at mine, and I gather it's not an unusual practice in this field. That said, I have participated in group interviews when I still worked in the tech industry, and I have found I prefer it to 1:1 interviews. As an interviewer, it feels more conducive to behavioral interviewing, and more people get to weigh in on the hire. As an interviewee, I found it makes the interview more conversational and sets me more at ease. I wish it was more common.
• gaogao 7y ago
  I give feedback on successful coding screens usually.
• WalterBright 7y ago
  I suppose it is like getting turned down for a date. The other person will rarely be honest about why, and the reasons given (if any) are worthless.
  • aniham 7y ago
    I agree on both counts. In fact, the examples of constructive feedback the article provides seem fairly worthless. If your advice is that the candidate should try doing some problems on leetcode in order to be successful in your interview process, then that's something you'd ideally mention prior to the interview, as a suggestion on how they should prepare. I think FAANG do a really good job of preparing you for exactly what kinds of questions to expect as well as resources to study for them. That also generally reduces the need for feedback afterwards.
  • wendyshu 7y ago
    Generally no amount of new information will change someone's mind about a date but in hiring that may not be true.
  • downerending 7y ago
    This is the answer. What you can get out of an interview is a lot of information about the competence and culture of the company. Did the interview feel like a real attempt by good people to hire someone like you into a company you'd like to work for? If not, put them on your ban list and never look back.
• innocentoldguy 7y ago
  The only company I've ever receive constructive post-interview feedback from was a company in California that ships out patterns and materials for people to make their own clothes. They said my code wasn't something they could drop into their product. Of course, it wasn't! I intentionally wrote it so they couldn't use my interview for free labor. I've worked at two companies that did that and I find it highly unethical.
• ihodes 7y ago
  As an anecdote, the major consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain), all provide constructive interview feedback after interviews. They do this regardless of if the candidate is moving on to the next level of not. It's strange that other industries haven't followed suit.
  • filoleg 7y ago
    Noticed the same thing with some finance companies too (mostly those that are known to be tech-strong, however). Got some of the most detailed and useful feedback throughout my years of interviewing from those.
  • SilasX 7y ago
    That kinda blows a hole in the argument from risk aversion, since they're the definition of risk aversion.
  • sk5t 7y ago
    I interviewed with BCG in college and was unable to extract any interview feedback. Granted, that was some time ago.
  • safety-third 7y ago
    No industry's interviewing is as awful as ours. The mythical 10x programmer has ruined our interviews. All these companies have it in their heads that you either need a rubicks cube champion or someone with 15 years of Rust experience.
  • mdorazio 7y ago
    This must be a newish thing. Back when I interviewed with Bain in college the only feedback after multiple interview rounds and social events was "sorry, you weren't as strong as other candidates". McKinsey sent a blanket "no thanks" email.
• dingribanda 7y ago
  One company in particular, gave me fairly useful feedback. For a design question, I was going all over the place not taking hints from the interviewer. I did not realize that I was trying to cram everything into one hour. Anyways, I will consider them in the future. Usually other companies do not bother.
• HarryHirsch 7y ago
  Here's a story from a previous place of employment: they needed to hire a new lab technician. The two finalists were a young guy fresh out of school and an old dude with experience. Of course they chose the younger guy, they always do, malleability and a full head of hair always beat experience and competence. 6 months later they had to fire him because he was stealing equipment and selling it. It was an embarassment for the hiring manager, one that could have been predicted. If they had fed a story to the unsuccessful candidate and if word about the string of thefts had emerged, that guy would have gone from disappointed to absolutely ballistic, and he would have been right in telling everyone that the hiring manager was an ageist worthless piece of shit and that anyone who can should stay far away from that employer.
  • baron816 7y ago
    I think the article is targeted at employers who act in good faith and don’t discriminate.
    • HarryHirsch 7y ago
      Everyone thinks they are the good guys. I recently interviewed with a properly progressive woman, who went on to tell me that she doesn't have a good track record interacting with old dudes, and I have no reason to doubt her good faith.
  • jldugger 7y ago
    > one that could have been predicted. Early in my life I would get asked questions about this sort of thing when applying for jobs: "Dave wants to steal from the cash register. Should you encourage him?" It mystifies me that anyone would give the bad answers to these questions, especially those who steal lab equipment.
• Aeolun 7y ago
  To be honest, reading all the interviewing.io feedback makes it clear that I would never want to use it. It’s literally leetcode with interviews. I don’t think I could do anything with the feedback if it was something like: > ‘you didn’t say that the alghorithm you were using here was using the bayesian-green notation, and you should have used n+1 instead of n++’
  • LordFast 7y ago
    I think it's always been this way though in essence. I think it's actually better nowadays because more people are at least talking about the problem. "How willing are you to jump through all the hoops that I had to jump through, plus a couple more, in order to get this job?"
  • safety-third 7y ago
    People get rejected for reasons like that everyday. I have been part of several interviews where a co-interviewer would say something at least as stupid as that. This is the real problem with giving feedback in our industry's interviews. The interviews are usually random circuses.
  • anaphor 7y ago
    I can't believe nobody else pointed this out. And the 2-sum algorithm that one of the responses is clearly mentioning is something you would only know if you had seen the problem before, and it isn't something you would ever use unless you were writing some sort of obscure discrete optimization code.
• rendall 7y ago
  Companies who don't give feedback because they believe there is no upside are building a team that lacks empathy, with all that implies regarding technical debt and final product. If the company is successful, it is despite the team, not because of it. This is tantamount to a mathematical certainty. I will always reject an offer from any company that I know does not give feedback to their rejected candidates, and have done.
  • winrid 7y ago
    I think I've gotten turned down by at least a dozen companies. I never got feedback, except for one and it was pretty silly.
    • rendall 7y ago
      I've been on both sides, interviewer and interviewee. I always give feedback if asked, and endeavor to be scrupulously fair. My take is that it's all pretty arbitrary, at the end of the day. Most interviewers do not 1) spend time putting the candidate at ease, 2) ask the same interview questions across candidates for the same position, 3) really introspect about whether they are doing it well. Interviews are a notoriously terrible way to get a good grasp of how someone will do on the job, and most interviewers in my experience do not recognize that. The more an interviewer is convinced they are good at it, the more they really just suffer from Dunning-Kruger. No interviewer ever feels like they have failed when they reject a candidate, although it's very well possible that they did, and badly.
      • winrid 7y ago
        I agree. I was more or less pointing out that if I said no to every company that didn't give feedback I wouldn't have a job. :p
• roland35 7y ago
  I just went through interviews with several companies, and a few of the rejections I got was that I was either too senior or too junior for what they were looking for! I think they may have just been letting me down politely though. They must have known how much experience I had ahead of time!
  • techslave 7y ago
    they don’t. resumes are nonsense these days.
  • jugg1es 7y ago
    Don't be too harsh on your interviewers here. There are many cases where HR gets some vague idea of the open position and then forwards seemingly qualified resumes, which the recipients are then obligated to interview regardless of whether HR understood the need or not.
• thrwaway5556 7y ago
  There's no real affordance for engineers to sue or censure the process. I once did some interviewing with a broken wrist that dragged on me two ways: 1) I basically couldn't speed-code at all. Typing was inhibited for sure, but the friction point threw off my whole thought process. 2) Whiteboard coding was easier, but due to swelling, I usually had to have my arm atop my head or hold it in weird positions. So by law companies are supposed to provide an accommodation, and what I often asked for was to minimize or skip keyboard-based coding since the injury clearly prejudiced my completion time. Did companies oblige? A couple did, but several, including one who you could say was doing a "hiring spree" did not. At said company, I was shoved a laptop to code upon, which I told them I couldn't use without hurting my wrist, but the recruiter was like "IDK." After that interviewer I had a lot of swelling and the next guy was outright mean and made fun of me for having to raise my hand. At the end of that interview, I asked him "what are you looking for in candidates?" and he said "people who can complete their jobs on time" and gestured towards my arm. So, what could one do here, file an EEOC complaint? Write bad reviews? EEOC complaints get basically zero consideration without tons of documented evidence, and if you lose your initial complaint then lawyers usually will decline to take up your case. I did write the recruiters and agency who connected me with this company and guess what? Nothing happened; the agency continues to make money feeding this company candidates. So to be clear, candidates have in reality zero leverage individually. Even in egregious cases like these.
  • rendall 7y ago
    Gah, what a terrible company. I'm sorry you went through that.
  • LordFast 7y ago
    Yeesh. Sorry you had to experience anything remotely close to that. The industry is shifting AFAICT. Callousness seems to be in and empathy seems to be out. Unfortunately though I think the same thing happened to pretty much every industry that came before software as well. Hope you found something good so that you don't have to waste time with shitty people anymore.
  • senderista 7y ago
    Name and shame since you're on a throwaway.
• cheez 7y ago
  I implore all of you to stop wasting your life interviewing. Spend your time more productively.
  • minimaxir 7y ago
    Generally, people don't interview for fun.
    • cheez 7y ago
      That's right. Sacrifice a little.
  • Infinitesimus 7y ago
    What do you recommend? Starting your own company only works for a small subset of ppl ofc so I'm assuming you mean something else
    • cheez 7y ago
      How much do you need to be free? https://sivers.org/richand https://sivers.org/richand
      • Dylan16807 7y ago
        Being a full-time musician is a job too, with the equivalent of interviewing. If someone prefers software, let them. And you can't quit your job to live minimally if you have zero or less net worth. Expenses only go so low. Saying it's "easy to be free" is massively condescending to every person that struggles to get over the poverty line. Not everyone can just "get" gigs whenever they want.
        • cheez 7y ago
          Buddy I have has been homeless, in jail, never finished school, etc, etc, etc and this year he hopes to break the 7 figure income mark after more than a decade of mid-six figure income. No trust fund. No connections. No leg up. Yes you can do it. Excuses galore though.
• vector_spaces 7y ago
  I'm so disappointed to read comments on this thread to the effect of "There's nothing in it for the company but risk". I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company (well known in these parts) that I had tremendous respect for, only to get an email back with "sorry, not up to par. We need someone with more experience". I asked them for a couple quick points on what I could have done better. I had zero intention of fighting them on it. No response The whole experience made me feel very ill, especially after putting in as much effort as I did, and obviously I feel quite differently about that company now. On the other hand, 5 years ago when looking for my first tech job, a virtually unknown startup that rejected me after a take home project and day long onsite gave me very thorough and specific feedback, encouragement, and even a bunch of reading suggestions. Even though I didn't get hired, I have very fond memories of that interview and reached out to them when I did land my first job to thank them again. Did it have any tangible implications for their bottom line to give me that feedback? Not really. But they treated me with compassion rather than like garbage. I have never named and shamed the first company and never intend to, but I personally think there's more risk involved in habitually treating people like garbage than like human beings.
  • Nursie 7y ago
    > I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company This is why I don't do such things. Want 8 hours of my time? Pay me.
  • 0x445442 7y ago
    Non paid take home projects... Huge red flag.
    • reading-at-work 7y ago
      I disagree that it's an automatic red flag. 8 hours? Yeah that's too long. But I would rather do a 2 hour take-home project than a 2 hour whiteboard coding interview. Edit to add: as far as getting paid, nobody expects to get paid for an onsite interview so I wouldn't expect to get paid for a take home project either. As long as it takes the same amount of time that the coding portion of an onsite interview reasonably would, that is.
• lala26in 7y ago
  Feedback can improve the process for companies in future too as candidates will update their mental models on how to prepare and perform in interviews. If the takehome programming didn't work, tell them which test cases didn't work. If it worked but the coding didn't meet a criteria, tell them that. If they passed but are behind in competition, tell them what made others case better. Same goes with onsite interviews too. Feedback helps!
• jimbob45 7y ago
  One hour coding test. Two one hour phone interviews. 5 hour interview with EA Tiburon. Generic rejection two weeks later. Never again. Are we cool on naming and shaming or should I save that for reddit?
  • tomglynch 7y ago
    We are cool with it.
  • WrtCdEvrydy 7y ago
    > EA Tiburon :thats_a_name_i_havent_heard_in_a_while:
• bastawhiz 7y ago
  I think the comments that feedback is hard to write are very surprising. Do you not have to write notes about why you are rejecting or approving a candidate? I have never been in a role where interviews are ended with a simple boolean of whether the candidate passed or not. Every company should be keeping detailed notes on the reasons a candidate did well or poorly, even just to be able to compare if the candidate applies again in the future (or makes a claim that they were treated unfairly). Candidates should be rejected or hired for documented, justifiable reasons. Additionally, in a medium to large org, it's impossible to evaluate the efficacy of interviewers if there are no notes. If the recruiting team can't look at the output of an interview and say "Huh, X keeps rejecting candidates because they use tabs instead of spaces in their Python code," how is the company supposed to maintain any hiring bar? The effort to write comments in a way that can be shared externally should not be a huge amount of extra effort. Even if feedback is only shared on request, it should not take a monumental effort to distill some high-level bullet points from interview notes.
• riazrizvi 7y ago
  You generally don't get technical interview performance feedback because technical interviews are constrained by the interviewer to put themselves in a technically confident light against the candidate. The interview is as much a crapshoot for the interviewer, because they might be less/more/similarly skilled to the candidate, but they absolutely cannot reveal themselves to be less skilled because they would undermine their status if the candidate gets hired. So interviewers stick to the same random technical question that they feel very confident of, answers to it are studied. The myth is that this posed problem is a general test of skill for the candidate, but the primary motivation is for the interviewer to maintain the appearance of professional dominance. Hence the technical discussion is kept to a narrow problem domain. Obviously there is a spectrum here, and it's more true when the interviewer feels insecure. Only when the interviewer is very skilled/confident relative to the candidate do people go off script and give advice. I confess this is how I have seen it from both sides of the interview, I'm no saint either.
  • JshWright 7y ago
    My favorite interview question is a real life issue I faced where a short sighted database design wound biting us in a pretty serious way. It's a good technical problem to talk through, and provides a lot of useful information about the candidate, but it's also an excuse to set very clear expectations that I'm not looking for the "right" answer (in real life it took half a dozen smart people a couple hours to come up with a right-ish answer). I try to use it early in the interview, and I find it sets a helpful tone, avoiding a lot of that posturing you describe.
    • cheez 7y ago
      Ah so a good interview question for a candidate is something that YOU have experience in. Does that seem odd? Do you think you would be an expert in something the candidate had experience in? Probably not. Should you find out how they speak about something THEY are experts in? Probably. But like the OP said, tech interviews are about posturing so that the interviewer feels better about themselves.
      • 7y ago
• gowld 7y ago
  About ~10 years ago, before the Facebook IPO, Facebook was famous for recruiting alumni from other AANG companies, who re-did their old projects at Facebook. For a few years, everyone from industry who interviewed at Facebook got a vibe of "wow, this is like my old company but you fixed the crap that annoyed me!" One of those things they fixed was that they gave feedback on interviews. The tale of the tape says that this strategy worked very well for Facebook hiring and business growth.
• deleted 7y ago
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• ComputerGuru 7y ago
  I am in a somewhat unique position of interviewing and hiring for two completely different industries. Whether it’s true or not that no engineer has sued for constructive post-interview feedback, it’s unfortunately absolutely not possible to make the same claim for teachers/adjunct faculty. That said and for both industries, it’s usually pretty clear who’s the litigious type (heck, they oftentimes go out of their way to make sure you know) and who’s not, and I feel like if someone came to interview in earnest and put an honest effort, they at least deserve some return of the gesture. But my time is worth something too, so I only bother if the person is within an order of magnitude of the skill set we are looking for (or clearly has the potential to be). If they can’t write a proper conditional statement, they’re not going to benefit from an explanation of how their code will also run into a pathological edge case in the GC.
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• jsd1982 7y ago
  I was once asked in a web development interview how to asynchronously fetch a resource. I answered something to the effect of "you just add a `true` parameter in the xhr.open() call somewhere, probably the second or third parameter" without being too specific about it since I did not have it memorized. The interviewer did not accept this response and after every rebuttal of mine he just responded with "no" each time without elaboration or clarification. He eventually gave up trying to coax me toward his accepted answer, apparently thinking he had outwitted me, and revealed to me that the correct answer he was looking for was to use "dollar q". I asked for a clarification on what he meant by "dollar q" but he was unable to clarify. It was only after the interview was over that I realized he was referencing angularjs and its built-in "$q" service that handles asynchronous fetching. I had not used angularjs before this interview (still haven't) and nowhere during the interview was angularjs mentioned by name. The question was also in no way leading to an answer assuming usage of angularjs either. I'm left to conclude that he thought angularjs was synonymous with web development and that "dollar q" was the one and only way to fetch resources asynchronously. TL;DR: how confident are we in these interviewer evaluation scores? Do we always presume superior competency of interviewers over interviewees?
  • cheez 7y ago
    Interviews are a waste of time. We need to refuse to do them.
  • downerending 7y ago
    Ha. As far as I know, in their first HR screen, Google still asks a question that requires a wrong answer. The answer depends on the cache characteristics of the CPU and (shock) these have changed over the years.
• barrkel 7y ago
  Some people are fucking nuts. That's all it takes.
  • deleted 7y ago
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• tracerbulletx 7y ago
  I wonder if a good middle ground between the two opinions expressed here would be to have an interview rubric with clear descriptions of each metric. So that receiving the feedback is more like getting results of a test back. Less prone to individual nuances of specific wording and still gives some directional guidance to the candidate for improvement.
• anon102010 7y ago
  Hiring for a technical position. Women's studies major with some recent more technical junior work experience (her technical role was vague). Brought her in for an interview. Compared to others, not even close to what we needed (and didn't know what she didn't know). She went out of her way to both explain to us what idiots we were for not hiring her and demanding detailed feedback on where she was weak and others were stronger, leaning heavily on the fact that we DO hire a diverse workforce. (It's diverse but qualified) If you tell someone their women's studies major was one of a number of negatives when evaluating them against other candidates - what happens? She had a huge chip on her shoulder, and I'm male. It might make for a sympathetic case - "guy hiring women keeps her from job because of her women's studies major?" - especially if all the other context wasn't there.
  • foolfoolz 7y ago
    you would be wrong. it does not sound like her women’s study major was any problem. but her lack of technical skills made would not prepare her for the job. this is exactly the kind of feedback that can screw you over
  • Can_Not 7y ago
    Why would you mention her major instead of mentioning that other candidates had more relevant skills? It seems to me that you're grinding an axe for that women's study degree instead of giving her useful feedback.
  • PopeDotNinja 7y ago
    Don't reject someone because of their college degree. That is irrelevant. Reject someone because they don't know their stuff.
• etxm 7y ago
  Is there another industry besides software that expects 6-8 hour interviews and multi hour take home exams?
• exabrial 7y ago
  Remember to thank your Lawmaker friends as to why we can't do this. In other parts of life, all of us would gladly do this to benefit a person when it doesn't directly benefit us. But threatened with civil fines and ultimately jail time, most of us choose the sensible 'ghost em' route.
  • astura 7y ago
    No, not in dating, the term "ghosting" came from dating. Friendships, too, doesn't come with honest actionable feedback, you know if you get invited back you "passed," but if you didn't get invited back there's no feedback mechanism. People aren't afraid of of "lawsuits" so much (that's a red herring).
• pfarnsworth 7y ago
  To be fair to Google, I once got some decent feedback from one of the recruiters. I did fairly well, and made it through to the hiring committee. The recruiter told me that although I did well, my scores weren't home runs and that he's seen people with my scores have about a 50/50 chance of getting in. If I had other offers on the table, he suggested I take those instead and maybe reconsider Google in the future. I took that to heart and took the other job. Of course, the next time I interviewed at Google a few years later, I absolutely bombed it so badly, I talked to the recruiter midway and told them I wanted to end things early and left after 3 interviews.
• Johnny555 7y ago
  they’re rarely told why they got the outcome that they did. Well then it makes sense that no one has been sued or otherwise retaliated against for something that rarely happens. My company once gave honest feedback to a candidate that kept asking for it - he used glassdoor to detail everything that was wrong with our evaluation of him and the entire interview process.
• mathattack 7y ago
  For better or worse people don’t give feedback because they don’t want candidates arguing with them. Picking candidates is very subjective in the end. I’ve become professional contacts with many folks I’ve interviewed and dinged. Doesn’t need to be negative.
• theshadowmonkey 7y ago
  Giving feedback is bad for the companies initially as a lot of biases are exposed when the feedback is reviewed. As in some engineer thinks something a candidate doesnt know makes him dumb. Just because the engineer has worked a lot on that problem and the candidate never saw it. In the longer term, I think its good as even constructing the feedback makes you look at your biases in an objective way and evaluate candidates better. I wish every company I interviewed for would give me feedback.
• ddispaltro 7y ago
  This reminds of restaurants throwing out food because the risk of giving it away is too great, but as far as I know no one has ever gotten in trouble because of it.
• Yhippa 7y ago
  Honestly, I'd even take a rejection letter at this point. A lot of places have gotten into the business of not letting you know if you got rejected.
• TwoNineFive 7y ago
  It's an advert for their product.
• SanderMak 7y ago
  At my current company we do a full Pull Request review of the take-home assignment. After the interview, the review comments are shared with the candidate. We're based in Europe, so that might make a difference in terms of expectations around litigation.
• scarlac 7y ago
  At a former job we ended technical interviews with the question: "So, how do you think you did?". It allowed candidates to raise points and what they'd want to do different. Some candidates used the chance to ask for feedback at which point I could choose to agree with the candidate or elaborate on solutions. It avoids some of the defensive stances candidates may take when given feedback (because they go first) although it doesn't tell a candidate how they did badly if they weren't already slightly aware.
• mbesto 7y ago
  > While researching this piece, I spoke to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches to see just how often a company’s constructive feedback (i.e. not “durrrr we didn’t hire you because you’re a woman”) to a rejected eng candidate has resulted in litigation. This is confirmation bias at its finest. 1. "speaking to a few labor lawyers and ran some Lexis Nexis searches" is hardly what I would call conclusive. 2. Companies have been generally instructed not to give feedback in the last few decades, so yes the chances of it happening are now quite low. 3. People don't sue for "they gave me constructive feedback", they use constructive feedback as evidence for some other more legitimate legal reason. 4. Many of these cases get settled (no employer wants to fight them), so you won't find them in public records. The point isn't that people get sued for providing feedback, it's that the feedback can be used as evidence to build a case. Look, NO ONE in an org wants to be the person that brought on a lawsuit to the company, so even if orgs don't want to do it, an individual person doesn't want to be that person even if the risk is technically low.
  • user1980 7y ago
    I agree. I'm instantly skeptical of any "X has never occurred" claim: Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Let's see some Taleb-esque "skin in the game": Not just the author's toothless footnote, but a cash bounty.
• epicgiga 7y ago
  This is caused simply and merely by the absurd infringement of freedom of association that prevails nowadays. The fact is, you're never ever ever going to stop racists and sexists from not hiring people outside their race and sex because of your laws. All that will happen is precisely this: absurd levels of secrecy, which hurt those weakest in society: those just trying to get a job so they can afford to eat and not sleep under a bridge. Even if they literally say "we don't want to hire you because you're white, and we want to hire an asian", at least you now know it wasn't because of your skills, so you don't lose confidence, and instead know it was just because they were racist assholes. Under the current regime, they're still racist assholes, but you'll never know. What we need is a bonfire of 90% of the statutes on the books, which will never happen, so this treatment of candidates will continue, while our respective countries wait for others to overtake them. What we need is a massive renovation, resurgence, and uptake of unions, across the board, not only to remove these matters from statutes and move them into contracts (forced fair by force of numbers), but to enforce an organic defence of workers, everything from a war against noncompetes and similar oppression, through to clauses like "you'll tell our members specifically why you rejected them on interviews, or else you'll really really regret it...".
  • dang 7y ago
    Please stop using HN for ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    • epicgiga 7y ago
      Alright, but at the same time, HN is letting through fundamentally political articles, such as the "How ‘big law’ makes big money" one, which isn't even tangentially related to tech. When HN does so, and concurrently says that's not OK material because it baits flames, how are we supposed to know the limits of our public participation as commenters, with those conflicting messages? If an article is technical, people will tend to respond technically; if the article is political (in this case, at its root: industrial relations), people will tend to respond politically.
• cousin_it 7y ago
  If the interview task is objective (come up with an algorithm for this problem and derive its big-O complexity), then feedback is less required, because the candidate knows exactly what skills they should improve. Unfortunately, many people today think objective interview tasks are "brain teasers", "toy problems", "instead ask me how I can add value to business" and so on.
• imvetri 7y ago
  Correct me if I misunderstood. When developers get rejected by a company after an interview process, he can sue the company?
• reallydontask 7y ago
  Interestingly the only time I've had any meaningful feedback is when I've gone thru an agency and the feedback was given to me post interview by the recruiter. The feedback was fair and accurate and extremely unlikely to be made up by the recruiter given the content. I suppose that at once removed they could be more willing to provide feedback as they can always claim that it was the recruiter
• timwaagh 7y ago
  Personally I'd rather not know, unless I do. Process of receiving feedback can be awful. In a hiring role (done that too) I'd rather save people the embarrassment of a dressing-down. I wouldn't want for them to bear more resentment towards the company than necessary.
  • sobani 7y ago
    If you equate constructive feedback with a dressing down, I can only feel sad for you. "We noticed you used an unsorted list, where a dictionary/map would've been a natural fit. Based on this we don't feel confident that you have the mastery of algorithms that we require for this job. We suggest you take time to brush up on your algorithms by reading the first volume of The Art of Computer Programming by Donald Knuth or the first three chapters of Algoritms by Robert Sedgewick. We believe this will also help you in your future career at other companies. We wish you good luck in you job search." If someone gets mad by that, that says a lot about their character and how much you never want to have them in your team. Also other people will either know their character and discount their opinion or will not, which means they will self-select themselves out of your candidate pool, which I see as a positive.
• otabdeveloper4 7y ago
  > No engineer has ever sued a company because of constructive post-interview feedback. So why don’t employers do it? Because there's only risk and zero benefit in it for the employer. Note: the risk isn't mythical 'lawsuits', the risk is in bad PR that disgruntled rejected candidates generate. Even if one in 10 get offended and start spreading shit-talk on the Internet, that 10% is still too much. Without a post-interview explanation, there is no ammunition for internet discussion.
• samastur 7y ago
  I bet ones view on this really depends on personal experiences both as an interviewee and an interviewer. I work for a small start-up and recently went through hiring another developer to our team. I know how awful it is as a candidate to get little or no feedback of what is happening, so my goal was for our process to be more humane. At first I answered all rejected submissions with a reason why that happened. There was rarely just one, but I would pick those were they clearly did not meet one of few inflexible requirements. Because of a huge volume applications, vast majority of which poorly matching our requirements, that was almost all I was doing for the first few days, having difficulties finding time to move successful ones further, let alone do any other kind of work. I also quickly learned that many applicants see these feedbacks as an invitation to argue with often the only way to end it is by just not responding any longer. So, I stopped doing this and resigned myself to sending generic rejection promptly unless I was asked for feedback explicitly. In my opinion candidates still quickly learn where they are at and have opportunity to learn more which is better than with most companies. Few asked and I send feedback to all of them, but since I am not paid to persuade candidates that my decision is the right one for my company, these feedbacks admittedly were not as detailed as they would have been without that previous experience. I am not happy with how the whole thing transpired, but I am comfortable with my decisions even though many here are telling "me" how I failed as a human being because I did not spend more of my off-clock time providing detailed feedback to people who mostly seemed to have keyword match our job ad and skipped reading it.
• lgregg 7y ago
  I interviewed at a startup here in NYC. It was one of my very first interviews as I interviewed for my first job. In the final thank you email thread I asked: Hi [redacted], I really appreciated the speed of this entire process. I must admit, I'm bummed but understand; I also really do appreciate the feedback, both positive and negative. If you have any specifics on where I was specifically lacking, I would appreciate knowing but if Tempest's policy limits you from going much deeper, I understand that too. I wish you the best at building your team; You'll find the person you're looking for. :) Till next time! Best, lgregg So, I then got direct actionable feedback. They’re not long explanations (I.e. on X you should have considered Y) but we’re very specific and super helpful. I now have told this story many times and pointed people to try that company. I think startups are more inclined to do this than companies after their Series C.
• irishcoffee 7y ago
  I had the most amusing realization at work the other day: most software engineers “hate” how their coworkers write software. I took it a step further and realized I hate software I wrote a year ago. Giving objective feedback should be a cherished skill.
• wendyshu 7y ago
  Sounds like managers are risk averse because they'll get the blame if something goes wrong but not the credit if it goes right. But I don't think the risk has to be so big. By the end of an interview process, candidates I talk to already know where I think they should improve because that's part of the back and forth discussion in the interview itself. I also like to actually get to know the person a little bit which helps me judge how they'll respond. I'm also not afraid to make an offer on the low side instead of rejecting outright, etc.
• afinlayson 7y ago
  When people ask me how they did, I try to frame it more general, like instead of here's what you should do better, here's what I would do if I were interviewing that would allow me to be more impactful. I've always got good responses. And I've been told I'm in the clear legally. The industry is too small to treat people like you will never run into them again. There are many reasons why someone might not be right for the role today, but will be a rockstar tomorrow.
• lunias 7y ago
  I think it's common courtesy to offer some feedback in exchange for the amount of time that these interviews often take. It's the consolation prize that helps you have a better chance of winning the real prize next time. I've only been turned down once after interviewing so I don't have a lot of data on who does and who does not provide feedback. The time that I was turned down, I spent a day working on a programming assessment and 6 hours on-site interviewing with 4-5 different groups of people. I felt like everything went really well. I left and heard in a week or so that they were "pursuing other candidates". I asked about feedback, they said they don't give it. Cool, then where's the ~$600 for my time? It's a Fortune 500 company (in the top 50). I'll never interview there again and I'll recommend to everyone that I know to vote with their talent and stay away from big, soulless companies that have forgone basic respect.
• KwisatzHaderack 7y ago
  The article and many of these comments assume that hiring decisions are made entirely based on talent. But hiring decisions are equally if not more influenced on the vague and often problematic "culture-fit". If the company is being completely honest, half the time, the feedback would sound like "You're a talented engineer but you're not a great culture fit", which can open the company up to litigation. Especially if the culture-fit reasons are specifically based on demographics.
• brailsafe 7y ago
  It really seems like there needs to be a widely adopted social protocol for engineers to basically say "Hey, if you're expecting this much from me, I expect a reciprocal amount from you at stages 1,2,3,4 etc.." I interviewed last year at a company that had me do some homework first, then a first long interview where they went through that work—refreshing because almost no companies do—which went well, then a 2nd and 3rd interview. Felt pretty locked in, didn't get it. Ton of time wasted no doubt, but at least it felt balanced.
• techslave 7y ago
  because none has ever received it!
• throwaway345036 7y ago
  Using a throwaway for obvious reasons. I just got rejected by Netlify after a coding assignment, but the last thing in the rejection email was an offer to set up a call to discuss feedback on the assignment and interviews. Other startups, take note. (The rest of their hiring process was equally impressive--no hard feelings at all.)