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Ask HN: Can you request a copy of notes made during interviews you went through?
I recently went through a bunch of interviews for FAANG positions and I’m wondering if CA law allows someone to request copies of notes made by interviewers regardless of any NDAs signed.
- Jugurtha 5y agoKnee-jerk reaction reading this: "already a pain in the ass before even getting in the door". Again, knee-jerk reaction. What are you trying to accomplish? If you want the notes badly enough to try to resort to laws to force them to give them to you, you may get the notes, but that may be the last time you'll interact with that organization. You probably will not work with them ever again. Are a few scribbles of someone drawing boxes, circles, smileys, and maybe even dicks worth it? If you're not after the notes, but want the notes in order to improve, then you may have a better chance of asking nicely for feedback to improve, or even asking nicely to get the very notes, who knows. If that is the case, then we have an "XY Problem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem You want feedback to improve, (X), but you're asking on how to resort to CA law to request copies, (Y).
- b20000 5y agoi’m not asking for advice on how to interview or how to improve, thanks. i am simply trying to figure out if there is a legal basis or not.
- Jugurtha 5y agoUndersrood. Then we're in the first case here where you're requesting the notes, or even the zeroth case where you want to know if it even has a legal basis, not necessarily acting on that basis. I'm not a lawyer, but there are many here from some threads I've read.
- yuppie_scum 5y agoYou can request it, they don’t have to provide it
- b20000 5y agointerested on hearing some lawyers opinions on this. hope they chime in.
- muzani 5y agoI always do this after getting a rejection. They always give something vague like "you're awesome but too junior for us". A good time to request it is when they ask you to fill in a feedback survey.
- b20000 5y agoi am not talking about asking the recruiter for a reason, but asking copies of ALL notes made by ALL employees, at ALL times of the entire process. basically everything.
- Jxl180 5y agoWhat a ludicrous request.
- Minor49er 5y agoIf it's always vague, why bother asking?
- muzani 5y agoThere's normally a list of things I could have messed up, e.g. poor English, no visa, wrong time zone, sloppy code, too slow on a certain test, many other great applications, poor understanding of a framework, etc. You can trace back a one sentence comment to the actual root cause. It's like debugging. And from that, you spot the pattern and optimize.
- b20000 5y agoit’s surprising how this very important issue relevant to all of us engineers gets very little attention here on HN.