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Were there? The question clearly said, "build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client" and "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mut

by theamk 1y ago

Were there? The question clearly said, "build a minimal, terminal-inspired email client" and "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt". Candidate completely ignored that part and built a tool which is nothing like terminal email at all. Would any of their emails give a hiring manager idea that the candidate failed to understand the assignment in such a gross way? Email 1, "What kind of extra feature do you value highly" Interviewer thinks: "UX improvement could be VI-like megacommands, "pretty UI" must mean creative use of colors and font attributes, privacy-related must be encryption at rest... It's all good, we are happy to look at all of those!" Email 2, "A webapp with golang accessible online, deployed through AWS using ECS Fargate, with SSL (https), integrated with an email sender provider, with authentication through a login screen, with the ability to send emails through a form, and displaying incoming emails in the user interface." Interviewer thinks: "OK, that's a lot of implementation details.. Not sure why candidate feels the need to confirm that, but nothing in the list above will be graded as a negative. The important things we care about are that it's inspired by terminal apps like mutt, and that "it should feel fast and intuitive" and one can totally do that using technologies above" Without seeing the screenshots/mockups, how would one even guess that the candidate was so off?

josecodea 1y ago
> Interviewer thinks: "OK, that's a lot of implementation details.. Not sure why candidate feels the need to confirm that" Really? My email states explicitly why I want to confirm that: > I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion. Are you forgetting that the entire transaction implies a lot of work for the candidate? Are you forgetting that candidate is doing this to land a job? Do you think the candidate is writing a design document just for fun? Your subtext implies that I should have guessed the grading, which is quite mind-blowing. Remember, the instructions mention a web app as an option, the role is for a web-based company, and if my design document did not meet any of the key aspects they could have brought it up and rejected my proposal.
- theamk 1y ago
  If you read the assignment, you can see that the majority of tasks is about UI and user-facing features ("Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality", "Does not have to handle rich text messages, just plaintext", "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.", "It should feel fast and intuitive") The assignment had exactly 1 line about actual back-endy stuff: "Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real ..." Now, what did your email asked for? There was a whole bunch of things about back-endy stuff, and exactly 1 (one) sentence about the user-visible things, the thing they cared about the most: "The UI will be kept simple, showing pagination for sent and received emails. In addition to the requirements of the assessment, there will be a login screen and two accounts" So maybe you intended this to be a complete design document, but it actually was not. This is because it did not actually did contain any parts the interviewer cared about. And that's one of the reasons why you got no feedback - you could do _anything_ for the backend and they would likely still accepted that, they simply did not care if you used Pulumi or terraform or "start.sh" or "docker compose up" And no, you don't need to guess the grading, you just need to read the assignment carefully. What do they seem to want? What kinds of things do they mention a lot? What kind of things do they mention in passing?

by theamk 1y ago

josecodea 1y ago

> Interviewer thinks: "OK, that's a lot of implementation details.. Not sure why candidate feels the need to confirm that" Really? My email states explicitly why I want to confirm that: > I would like to know what kind of response I could expect from Kagi if I drive it to completion. Are you forgetting that the entire transaction implies a lot of work for the candidate? Are you forgetting that candidate is doing this to land a job? Do you think the candidate is writing a design document just for fun? Your subtext implies that I should have guessed the grading, which is quite mind-blowing. Remember, the instructions mention a web app as an option, the role is for a web-based company, and if my design document did not meet any of the key aspects they could have brought it up and rejected my proposal.

theamk 1y ago
If you read the assignment, you can see that the majority of tasks is about UI and user-facing features ("Should have basic email viewing + sending functionality", "Does not have to handle rich text messages, just plaintext", "take inspiration from existing terminal email tools like aerc, mutt, or even something like himalaya.", "It should feel fast and intuitive") The assignment had exactly 1 line about actual back-endy stuff: "Can use a fake backend (DB, in-memory, etc) or real ..." Now, what did your email asked for? There was a whole bunch of things about back-endy stuff, and exactly 1 (one) sentence about the user-visible things, the thing they cared about the most: "The UI will be kept simple, showing pagination for sent and received emails. In addition to the requirements of the assessment, there will be a login screen and two accounts" So maybe you intended this to be a complete design document, but it actually was not. This is because it did not actually did contain any parts the interviewer cared about. And that's one of the reasons why you got no feedback - you could do _anything_ for the backend and they would likely still accepted that, they simply did not care if you used Pulumi or terraform or "start.sh" or "docker compose up" And no, you don't need to guess the grading, you just need to read the assignment carefully. What do they seem to want? What kinds of things do they mention a lot? What kind of things do they mention in passing?