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

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

#241

Post by Apocryphon »

komali2 wrote: post #203
dickjocke wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why can't this be on the scale of 3 or 5 years? I'm reminded of the Maya Angelou quote: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel." I don't remember 99.9% of what recruiters have said to me, but I do remember the two companies (Hulu and LinkedIn) that made me feel like crap and jerked me around. It was 2 years ago and I'm…

> Why can't it be on the scale of 3 to 5 years Where I work is an agency, so essentially a collection of already experienced designers, engineers, etc that need to be building quality products pretty much day 1. Any of our time we aren't billing to clients is just coming out of our cut. It's a somewhat ruthless calculation, but we already skim billed time to do things like give ourselves 20% freetime to work on libre…

Sounds like your firm is in a specific niche of consultancy that is atypical compared to the majority of non-hourly billed companies.

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

#242

Post by kenhwang »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #209
Thriptic wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They gain the goodwill of a prospective employee who might cycle back and be a great fit later on in their career (and who has more skills then). It's also about what they don't lose, which is not only me but potentially other prospective candidates. Know what happens when someone mentions they are considering applying to a place that never got back to me? I tell them don't apply there, they waste your time / they do…

And providing feedback is very likely to hurt your reputation. One major company did give me feedback, and I've made fun of them endlessly for it - they explained that the manager loved me, I did great on systems design and architecture, but I couldn't pass the hiring committee because I didn't do well enough on tree traversal tricks.

I still give Google shit for the feedback they gave me. Good feedback is incredibly hard to do well.

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

#243

Post by AmericanChopper »

pmiller2 wrote: post #210
AmericanChopper wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Using the commonly understood definition of a word is not nitpicking.

So you think the phrase “I’m worried I’ll get sued” would commonly be understood to mean “I’m worried that formal legal proceedings will be initiated against me, but I’m not at all worried that legal proceedings might be threatened in an attempt to leverage me into a settlement”?

If somebody hired lawyers to negotiate with another party to pay them damages, under threat of a lawsuit, I’d say that would commonly be described as “suing” or “getting sued”.

If an employer says “I don’t provide feedback to candidates for risk of getting sued over it”, they are absolutely referring to the risk associated with providing that candidate said feedback. Which includes both lawsuits and out of court settlements. So regardless of what you think the common usage is, that’s certainly how it’s used in this situation. Otherwise you could just tell said employers “you never have to worry about getting sued, because you can just pay the settlement lol...”.

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

#244

Post by winrid »

rendall wrote: post #230
winrid wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 notori…

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

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

#245

Post by jldugger »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #172

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…

> 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.

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

#246

Post by vector_spaces »

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.

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

#247

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

na85 wrote: post #231
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And providing feedback is very likely to hurt your reputation. One major company did give me feedback, and I've made fun of them endlessly for it - they explained that the manager loved me, I did great on systems design and architecture, but I couldn't pass the hiring committee because I didn't do well enough on tree traversal tricks.

That company's problem is their shit-tier hiring process, not the fact that they give feedback.

Every hiring process under the sun has a large, vocal group of people who think it's shit-tier. (Some people like me are equal opportunity haters - I've never seen a process that didn't have stupid flaws.) If you give feedback, eventually the group for your hiring process is going to find you.

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

#249

Post by LordFast »

Aeolun wrote: post #186

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++’

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?"

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

#250

Post by lala26in »

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!

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