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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

#321

Post by celdon25 »

fzeroracer wrote: post #258
kenhwang wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interviewing is a business transaction, not social services. They'll min-max their time just like you'll mix-max your compensation. I'll happily give advice, feedback, mock interviews, and other sorts of help on my own time in more appropriate environments. When it's company time, it's just business.

Sure, and as a business transaction, what do you think will happen if you treat potential business partners poorly? The answer is that they'll leave negative reviews, tell people to avoid your company or decimate any goodwill your company might have. I have in the past left scathing reviews on Glassdoor and was on some occasions the first one to drop my experience. Because after long projects or a company promising t…

I had someone ghost me right before a christmas holiday once, after the hiring manager (a VP) told me they'd for sure give me a call the next day. It was right before a major storm went through the area, and because I had waited for their call at home I had to drive 10 hours through the storm to see my folks as the storm had arrived the following day.

I naturally left a scathing review for that place, but Glassdoor removed it (of course).

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

#322

Post by snide »

bigiain wrote: post #285
hoka-one-one wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a guy at Qualcomm Austin tell me to read Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation by Muchnik. I read it and a few months later I was working for Qualcomm San Diego. I've thought about thanking him but I doubt he'd remember me, it was such a small comment.

Do it anyway. You know if someone you don't remember from an interaction ages ago emailed you to say "Hey, you probably don't remember this, but you once told me $thing, so I took $action, and now I've achieved $outcome. Thanks you for that, it really helped my career!", it'd make you feel great and would probably be the highlight of your day, right?

As an anecdote. I once received something like this (on Twitter of all places). It was a "you probably don't remember me but..." for someone I'd passed on a decade ago. It really touched me and made me sit down and reflect on my career. The person had gone on to have a successful career being creative. Which honestly, is all we can ever ask.

I remembered the person, but not anything about what I'd said that day. I assume it was just what I normally say. Having that last realization made me feel even better.

The easiest, most rewarding thing you can do daily in your life is appreciate the people around you. We all need that feedback.

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

#323

Post by xtracto »

nkingsy wrote: post #206
jscotto wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'd be happy to take a look at some code if you like. noahjkingsley//gmail

This has the implicit right answer: A job interview is the worst moment/place for feedback. There is just too much heart/animosity at stake on both sides.

I've been interviewing candidates for more than 15 years (for PhD /RA positions and then for Engineering) and every time I've given honest feedback, candidates just get into an argument on why they think the feedback does not apply to them...

It is just not worth it. If I want to know how am I at certain skills... I test myself in a less "charged" environment.

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

#324

Post by kamaal »

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…

>>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".

Looks like this is a common pattern with take home projects. I faced a very similar problem a few weeks back.

Though they called me for the interview. The general approach is to take some ones overnight deadline coding and code review it for a week. Then they dissect your code written in deadline duress like they are some masters of the universe. They also told me my code passed through their automated test suite, and then some programmers in their office reviewed it too.

And then after two rounds of interviews they rejected me because apparently 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' is not how real programmers find error count, but write python programs every single time they face such a problem.

In short these places with take home interviews generally tend to be people who are full of themselves. They are also a kind of workplace full self-congratulatory people who have fallen in love with their own legend.

Haven't had a single good experience with places that give take home tests.

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

#325

Post by ken »

kenhwang wrote: post #6

One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only takes one bad candidate to make it not worth the effort.

Does providing feedback make this effect worse, or better? How do we know? N=1 isn't exactly a significant sample size.

It used to be common knowledge that doctors should never say they're sorry, for the same reason (fear of lawsuit). Then research showed that apologizing actually reduced the number and severity of malpractice lawsuits.

I see plenty of people attacking tech company interview processes on social media already, without being provoked by honest feedback. I'm having trouble imagining how feedback could make a person more angry.

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

#326

Post by reificator »

kamaal wrote: post #324
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…

>>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". Looks like this is a common pattern with take home projects. I faced a very similar problem a few weeks back. Though they called me for the interview. The general approach is to take some ones overn…

> And then after two rounds of interviews they rejected me because apparently 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' is not how real programmers find error count, but write python programs every single time they face such a problem.

bulletsDodged += 1

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

#328

Post by xtracto »

Aeolun wrote: post #201
SubuSS wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't read the article, but it is off-point to say no-one sues. History has no effect on what someone will do tomorrow - exposure is what companies try to limit. The sueing angle kicks in when you do stuff like give feedback for folks who you think will take it well Vs keep it away from folks who give you a bad feeling or whatever. It is all exposure. Almost in all the companies I have been at, there has been a b…

If noone has sued about feedback in the past 10 years, over probably millions of interviews, it’s a fairly safe bet that nobody will sue in the next 10.

That is not how expected utility works... theres a probability of being sued a d there's an impact of the event of being sued or bad mouthed in social media... even if the probability is low, the negative expected utility (expected loss) is still high because of the impact value ... Not worth it.

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

#329

Post by zweep »

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…

By not naming and sharing the first company you’re doing the world a disservice. The powerful have convinced the world that being polite is more important than being truthful because politeness furthers the continuation of existing power structures.

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

#330

Post by rhinoceraptor »

kamaal wrote: post #324
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…

>>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". Looks like this is a common pattern with take home projects. I faced a very similar problem a few weeks back. Though they called me for the interview. The general approach is to take some ones overn…

If they're dissecting it at that close a level, it's probably not a company you'd want to work for anyway. At least how I judge take home tests (for a simple backend CRUD app spec), I'm definitely not disqualifying based on surface level details like that. I don't even bother running it on my machine most of the time.

What I'm looking for that it doesn't have obvious SQL injections (I've seen this a depressing number of times), it has some semblance of unit/automated tests, API validation, error handling, database migrations, good naming, and the code isn't all jammed in to one or two files.

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