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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

#351

Post by privateSFacct »

jcims wrote: post #282
0x445442 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non paid take home projects... Huge red flag.

I see this a lot but it seems fairly naive to expect. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with refusing to do them, but to get paid? Has anyone in the history of the world been paid for an interview take home project? Curious how it was set up and what the rate was. Did you have to file taxes? Was it 1099?

I got paid as a consultant a lot for short term offsite projects -> then they want to hire you. So the random gigs can sometimes be a take home interview. I liked it because if I didn't enjoy working somewhere I could tell them I was busy with my other projects and we'd end on good terms.

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

#352

Post by jnwatson »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #330
kamaal wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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…

Database migrations? Migrate from what? Most take homes are de novo, so have nothing to migrate from.

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

#353

Post by privateSFacct »

vonseel wrote: post #305
Apocryphon wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hiring bias litigation is common and expensive in other states.

The advice you will get on HR side is because no binding arb. agreement is in place you are exposed to full litigation efforts including attorney fees.

These can involve disparate effect or implicit bias - which can be difficult to defend against.

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

#354

Post by kstrauser »

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…

> because apparently 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' is not how real programmers find error count

I've been on the other end of that, where we were explicit that the goal of the exercise was to solve problem X with technology Y so that we could gauge the applicant's skill with Y. And yet, we'd still get submissions that used Z because it was way better at solving X than Y was. Well, yeah, we know that. That's not what we were trying to assess.

I'm not saying you did that. It just gave me flashbacks to those situations.

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

#355

Post by pm24601 »

jcims wrote: post #282
0x445442 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non paid take home projects... Huge red flag.

I see this a lot but it seems fairly naive to expect. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with refusing to do them, but to get paid? Has anyone in the history of the world been paid for an interview take home project? Curious how it was set up and what the rate was. Did you have to file taxes? Was it 1099?

Yes. I had one company pony up $500. I was blown away.

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

#356

Post by ironmagma »

yibg wrote: post #168
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.

This is only one side of the equation. What’s the cost of not providing the feedback? Either similar negative feedback on social media, which is maybe less intense but more numerous, or the negative feeling the candidate gets from the experience, which can impede future applications or applications from friends. I don’t know which way it tips, but looking at just the potential damage of providing feedback seems insuf…

The cost is that you further the misery of the application experience for candidates. Keep in mind for every candidate you interview, they may have applied for anywhere between 10 to 100 other jobs. If you were in their position, you would want to have a way to improve for the next interview too.

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

#357

Post by kamaal »

dlandis wrote: post #316
reading-at-work wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it's an automatic red flag. 8 hours? Yeah that's too long. But I would rather do a 2 hour take-home project than a 2 hour whiteboard coding interview. Edit to add: as far as getting paid, nobody expects to get paid for an onsite interview so I wouldn't expect to get paid for a take home project either. As long as it takes the same amount of time that the coding portion of an onsite interview reasonabl…

Do any of the take-home projects actually only require 2 hours though? Maybe some of them have a recommended time around there, but isn't it basically required to spend longer?

This is one more problem, programmers are really bad at estimating time required for completion. When it comes to these things programmers designing the interview tend under estimate the effort required to finish the projects.

What makes this whole thing complicated is how they go about measuring quality, extensibility, or if they measure feature completion.

Most companies that give you a take home assignment also get you onsite for one or two sessions of code review and feature addition.

If you don't take into account quality or extensibility you fail in the next rounds.

By no means are these 2 hour projects. Most of these projects take at least a few days to do well.

In some cases the person designing the questions just overshoots the measurement. I've heard sometimes they ask you do come up with a feature loaded contacts iOS app in like a weekend.

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

#358

Post by kstrauser »

topkai22 wrote: post #333
reading-at-work wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree that it's an automatic red flag. 8 hours? Yeah that's too long. But I would rather do a 2 hour take-home project than a 2 hour whiteboard coding interview. Edit to add: as far as getting paid, nobody expects to get paid for an onsite interview so I wouldn't expect to get paid for a take home project either. As long as it takes the same amount of time that the coding portion of an onsite interview reasonabl…

The difference between a take home project and an on site interview is that a take home costs the hiring company nothing, whereas an on site costs them hours of engineer time. With that being true, they can make a lot more candidates do take home tests then on sites for the same cost, meaning it’s a lot less efficient use of a candidates time.

Having been on the hiring side of that, we spent way more time coming up with and testing the take home project than our applicants ever spent on it. Among other things, we'd beta test a proposed "challenge" on each other to see how well it worked out in real life before springing it on candidate.

It would have been a lot cheaper not to have the take home project, but we decided it was worthwhile anyway.

(Disclosure: our project looked a lot like a story you'd be asked to work on in your first week with us. There was none of that "hiring for a Python backend engineer; here's a Scala data engineering project" nonsense.)

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

#359

Post by pm24601 »

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.

The best feedback is completely fact based.

> Most candidates finish the coding section in 40 minutes. You took 60 minutes.

> In the system design part of the interview, the candidates we hire talk about SLA requirements.

Facts. No interpretations.

I am not even telling the person what they should do.

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

#360

Post by erikpukinskis »

Tainnor wrote: post #63
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…

I find that reply a bit puzzling. It was an internship, how bad of a risk could that have been?

It’s actually kind of a bit risk for the applicant, which makes it a big risk for the interviewer if you have half a heart.

If you get fired four weeks in to your internship, because no amount of coaching from the senior employees is worth the investment by the company.... that’s a tough situation to be in. It’s pretty late at that point to start looking for another internship for the summer.

And if you’re the kid’s supervisor... that’s not a fun conversation to have.

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