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

blog.interviewing.io

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

#301

Post by tedunangst »

jscotto wrote: post #191
nkingsy wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tried and true practice in dating, and it translates well to hiring, which is basically the same thing. Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. They want to get in a fight with you. Edit: I don't remember ghosting anyone personally in either setting, but it's happened to me plenty. Getting upset about it just means you're new to the experience.

Honestly as someone who is looking for a junior role this could not be further from the truth. I just want to know how to improve so I can stop being unhappy at my current job and get a new one.

This could be true, and people probably believe it, but my experience stepping in towards the end of an interview and guiding candidates towards the solution was nearly always immediate counter arguments. "I was going to do that next!"

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

#302

Post by rongenre »

cheez wrote: post #197

I implore all of you to stop wasting your life interviewing. Spend your time more productively.

Standard software advice (including the famous Netflix document) is to interview every couple years.

It also give you data points on your market worth, which is highly valuable even if you don't switch jobs.

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

#303

Post by vonseel »

nkingsy wrote: post #170
ddelt wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hot take: you could hire someone who did absolutely well in the interview, and they could find a few weeks into the job that they loathe everyone, and go on a social media rampage. What I’m getting at is, there will always be bad apples, or people who react in a way that damages your organization. But not providing useful feedback to people who ask for it simply because one person went crazy is punishing a lot more p…

This is a tried and true practice in dating, and it translates well to hiring, which is basically the same thing. Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. They want to get in a fight with you. Edit: I don't remember ghosting anyone personally in either setting, but it's happened to me plenty. Getting upset about it just means you're new to the experience.

“They want to get in a fight with you.”

They want to explain themselves. There is a difference. What you consider an argument or fight is just a Hail Mary, almost an involuntary recovery attempt, for some.

Accepting feedback without trying to dig your way out of a hole or justify your actions is a sign of maturity.

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

#304

Post by scruple »

vector_spaces wrote: post #246

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 ze…

Call a spade a spade. Was it Blizzard? They're known in my parts for similar behavior. To the point that I've cautioned local and especially junior folks not to take their take homes too seriously. Even when/if they do pull you in after "passing" a take home, it's not like they take any effort to then talk to you about the literal work you just did for them.

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

#305

Post by vonseel »

Apocryphon wrote: post #187
nkingsy wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a tried and true practice in dating, and it translates well to hiring, which is basically the same thing. Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. They want to get in a fight with you. Edit: I don't remember ghosting anyone personally in either setting, but it's happened to me plenty. Getting upset about it just means you're new to the experience.

Then maybe there can be a system that provides a disclaimer where they waive all ability to sue or otherwise get into a fight with you.

What right does someone have to sue before they’ve been hired, anyways, unless it’s on a discrimination basis (in which this case, it is clearly not)?

Here in Texas, at least, that sort of thing does not seem like something that would ever be a real legal risk. This is a right-to-work state; I figured it’s pretty hard to get sued here.

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

#306

Post by ghettoimp »

LordFast wrote: post #139
duxup wrote: post #121

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…

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.

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.

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

#308

Post by jsd1982 »

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?

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

#309

Post by gbrown »

criddell wrote: post #32
Afton wrote: post #7

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 in…

> 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.

Yeah, the space of things I can do quickly on the spot from practice, and the space of things I can get really good at after a few hours of re-calibrating, research, and trial and error are worlds apart. If I were hiring, I'd 100% look for people who can self-teach above all other technical qualifications (above and beyond whatever the basic competency level for the position is).

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

#310

Post by cheez »

Infinitesimus wrote: post #220
cheez wrote: post #197

I implore all of you to stop wasting your life interviewing. Spend your time more productively.

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

How much do you need to be free? https://sivers.org/richand
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