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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

#381

Post by orangecat »

oceanghost wrote: post #61
rchaud wrote: post #11

The hiring process is a black box for a reason. The HR department's role is to protect the company first, not the employees, and certainly not prospective employees. If feedback can be interpreted as being discriminatory, or reflective of bad company culture in general, well, word gets around. For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/like…

This. I have done hundreds of interviews, and I used to do a very easy, basic comp sci test. The last question I would ask was, "Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you." The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this. The worst ans…

The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.

Not surprised at all. You know your motivation; they don't. It probably causes lots of candidates to mildly panic as they try to decide what they can say that won't make them come across as too weird/boring/old/etc.

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

#382

Post by safety-third »

ihodes wrote: post #153

As an anecdote, the major consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain), all provide constructive interview feedback after interviews. They do this regardless of if the candidate is moving on to the next level of not. It's strange that other industries haven't followed suit.

No industry's interviewing is as awful as ours. The mythical 10x programmer has ruined our interviews. All these companies have it in their heads that you either need a rubicks cube champion or someone with 15 years of Rust experience.

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

#383

Post by pfarnsworth »

To be fair to Google, I once got some decent feedback from one of the recruiters. I did fairly well, and made it through to the hiring committee. The recruiter told me that although I did well, my scores weren't home runs and that he's seen people with my scores have about a 50/50 chance of getting in. If I had other offers on the table, he suggested I take those instead and maybe reconsider Google in the future. I took that to heart and took the other job.

Of course, the next time I interviewed at Google a few years later, I absolutely bombed it so badly, I talked to the recruiter midway and told them I wanted to end things early and left after 3 interviews.

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

#384

Post by mdorazio »

Thriptic wrote: post #176
vosper wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what exactly did these companies gain? They didn't hire you now, but might be able to hire you in the future because you would maybe apply again (assuming you get passed the "we already didn't hire this person" filter)? With all the risk, that doesn't seem like much of a payoff to the company, to me. (Though I am glad you got feedback you considered valuable, and I think it's cool that the companies did that)

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…

Reputation only matters if your candidate pipeline isn't full enough. For example, Google is notorious for their awful hiring gauntlet, but people still line up around the block to work for them. If your pipeline is fine, reputation and goodwill from people you rejected are worthless.

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

#385

Post by kamaal »

kstrauser wrote: post #358
topkai22 wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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:…

You spent that much time over several dev sprints/cycles/months/whatever. Meticulously designing the expected output and quality expectations(yet not sharing any of that in the spec supplied to the candidate). All that automated testing, manual code review checklist was designed after spending that many man hours worth effort to arrive at. You have the benefit of hindsight, and insights from the process that refined over that much time. Plus you have inputs from several candidates you failed your test.

Yet now the candidate has no luxury of that, and has to guess the assumptions required to not just produce all the features, but also the quality metrics the project will be measured against. All in the deadline given by you. And he is at day 1, and that's all the day they have.

This is really like expecting some one to fix a problem in a day, what the other person spent months solving.

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

#386

Post by atomicnumber3 »

5cott0 wrote: post #338
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…

Interview homework is in many cases more of a disrespectful waste of candidates time than fresh grad whiteboard hazing rituals.

I've just finished a job search, and the company I ended up going with (with the best offer, by far) was one of the only ones that didn't want a take-home project.

With several of the companies, I managed to (via either vowing silence to recruiters, or having an inside guy) get feedback on my projects. Nobody volunteered feedback willingly. And honestly, based on what feedback I did get, I see why they didn't want to offer it. It was an unscientific mess.

Generally:

* There was either no rubric or very basic rubric for scoring the assignment * reviewer gut feel and comments were seemingly more important than the score (if present) anyway * frequently, reviewers disagreed over whether a cool doodad was indeed cool or over/under engineered. * frequently, there were "gotchas" where they were either expecting you to notice an "issue" with the prompt, or they gave a vague prompt and wanted you to fish around to discover specific non-obvious things they wanted to see.

Now obviously, it's not like any strategy for interviewing software people is all that great. But at least interviews take nearly an order of magnitude less time than projects, and also have some built-in feedback via facial/verbal cues and such. Instead of just shooting your project tarball into the abyss just to get a boolean back.

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

#387

Post by Johnny555 »

they’re rarely told why they got the outcome that they did.

Well then it makes sense that no one has been sued or otherwise retaliated against for something that rarely happens.

My company once gave honest feedback to a candidate that kept asking for it - he used glassdoor to detail everything that was wrong with our evaluation of him and the entire interview process.

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

#388

Post by reificator »

somebodythere wrote: post #371
reificator wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Real programmers would write bulletsDodged++;

https://doc.rust-lang.org/1.2.0/complement-design-faq.html#w...?

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

#389

Post by bagacrap »

cheez wrote: post #370
JshWright wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite interview question is a real life issue I faced where a short sighted database design wound biting us in a pretty serious way. It's a good technical problem to talk through, and provides a lot of useful information about the candidate, but it's also an excuse to set very clear expectations that I'm not looking for the "right" answer (in real life it took half a dozen smart people a couple hours to come up…

Ah so a good interview question for a candidate is something that YOU have experience in. Does that seem odd? Do you think you would be an expert in something the candidate had experience in? Probably not. Should you find out how they speak about something THEY are experts in? Probably. But like the OP said, tech interviews are about posturing so that the interviewer feels better about themselves.

does that seem odd? Not at all! How can anyone evaluate a someone else's performance in a domain if they don't know the domain? You ask the question many times over so you can judge performance relative to others. Yes, the interviewer should be familiar with the topic of the interview.

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

#390

Post by etxm »

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…

Coding “challenges” are absurd.

The gotchas are ridiculous.

If an interviewer googled the question - why do I need to know the answer?

I recently had an interview and I spent _literally_ over an hour trying to figure out the algorithm or a mathematical function to solve it and I finally got to the point that I gave up.

I asked the person what algorithm they used to solve it and they said “brute force” and were expecting nested loops that under real world load would have been O(n^2).

I definitely don’t consider myself an algorithm expert, but my feedback was, and I shit you not, that I didn’t know ruby. I’ve been developing in ruby since 2006.

Anecdotes and all. Our industry’s interview process is flawed AF.

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