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

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).

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.

That’s getting a little bit nit-picky over the definition of “sue”. In this context the risk people are talking about is that a candidate will make some sort of legal claim against them. Whether that claim ends up in court really only changes the potential impact of that risk. Especially considering most HR related legal complaints end up with an out of court settlement (even a lot of the frivolous ones), because the cost of litigation (including potential reputations damages) usually outweighs the cost settlement.

There’s no legal definition of “sue”. You can’t go to court and file “suing documents”. If you define “sue” as to make a legal claim against somebody, then it’s immaterial whether they do that via a letter from a lawyer, or by serving them documents to appear in court.

I left a poor review for an employer only one time in the 10 years or so I've been on Glassdoor (there were only a couple other reviews). And almost immediately after, there were about 20 or 30 5 star reviews posted in a short amount of time. The company only had about that many employees, which proves that the CEO (or someone at the top) either told everyone to write a good review, or some of them were fake, both clearly 'incentivized' by any sane definition of the term. I reported this to Glassdoor and they refused to do anything about it, and I even had the report escalated and re-reviewed, without any effect.

Same here, but from IBM--and it's burnished my impression of the company ever since. It was polite, actionable and a nice recognition that I had /also/ given up an entire day for their interview.