Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

blog.interviewing.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 646 posts

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

#411

Post by noitsnot »

Aeolun wrote: post #190
elliotec wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly disagree. I really can't think of a case where I would want to interview the same person twice. That said, I'm happy to provide feedback if they ask, and when it comes to interviewing, I personally appreciate feedback ONLY when I ask.

Lol, yeah, like when I applied again at the same company after 3 years and they rejected me out of hand before even giving me a chance at an interview because they rejected me before. Obviously my skills and experience are still exactly the same, so this makes perfect sense. I don’t know, but I personally think this is a terrible signal.

Minds are made up. I interviewed with the same company in the beginning of my career then again 3-4 years later. I realized they probably didn't know how to interview a dev and were more interested in someone amazing with clients and charming. I would have been prepared to bullshit my five year plan better on the second go-around.

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

#412

Post by [deleted] »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #386
5cott0 wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

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

#413

Post by nhumrich »

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…

Oddly, I had a slightly opposite reaction to a similar experience. But, to be fair, it was mostly because of red tape. I interviewed at Microsoft, got feedback something like, "you did pretty good, but you dont understand low level code enough for this team, you could do great somewhere else at the company." Microsoft has a policy that you can interview only once per year. I didn't get to pick the team I interviewed for, and apparently they only interview for their own team. So, I was basically told that I was good enough, but because of HR, I won't be hired. That, for me, felt significantly worse than "sorry but you didn't get the job" generic feedback would have been.

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

#414

Post by safety-third »

indecisive_user wrote: post #407
safety-third wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You probably wouldn't like the feedback. Most interviews these days are random because our field is obsessed with finding 10x megarockstar GTD superprogrammers. I can't think of a single field where interviews are such awful experiences. All interviews could be simple Q&A sessions to make sure the person isn't a charlatan and then sell them on the position. HR isn't a science, and it never will be. The FAANGs spend g…

>The FAANGs spend god knows how much time and money on it, and they admit that their interviews aren't better than a coin flip. I'm curious what this means. Whiteboard style interviews aren't perfect, but at the very least they demonstrate 1. You can communicate with another engineer on a technical problem (simply writing the code with no explanation isn't sufficient), and 2. You have the determination to study CS to…

I can't find the article because its hidden behind Google's previously admitted coin flip, brain teasers.

An interview only has one question to answer: How long will it take this person to do what I need? Everything after that is you trying to sell the company to the candidate. After you do the interviews, you pick the person who needs the least ramp time.

Quietly staring at a person writing on a whiteboard while taking notes isn't communication. It isn't normal. It tests nothing except the candidate's whiteboard interview technique. You test their communication ability... by communicating with them. Have a conversation.

Testing someone's determination to do useless studying for your ridiculous company is pointless. I am not here to get you to join my cult. I am here to pay you to do things. That's it. Unless your job is to design and review algorithms, I don't care if you can draw depth first search on a whiteboard blindfolded.

There are a million ways to figure out how long it will take to get a person up to speed. I make a list of the skills needed for a position. I write down an approximate time to learn each one. In each interview, I figure out what skills the person has by discussing that skill. That's it.

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

#415

Post by jodrellblank »

Iv wrote: post #361
snide wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 as…

Every word you speak, especially to the youth, is a seed. Handle them like they were going to land on fertile ground.

Is this, "grind them up so they won't be competing with you for sunlight" or "don't shit on them, it will only help them grow stronger"?

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

#416

Post by dominotw »

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.

> then went out on a social media rampage

you monitor candidates social media post interview? quite disturbing trend if so.

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

#417

Post by hvidgaard »

iagooar wrote: post #395
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…

In Germany every single lawyer or HR responsible would tell you not to send any reason at all, just a generic response. This has to do with how law is structured here: giving feedback gives an attack surface to candidates that could sue you for the feedback you gave (because they do not agree with it). So this is it, companies do not do this because they're evil, they do this because nobody wants legal consequences.

I don't understand this. If I select a candidate of three to offer a job, then as long as I'm not discriminating the others for things such as sexuality, gender, age, ect. then the person we feel is the best fit is just that. What we believe is the best candidate - no amount of arguing in a court is going to change that.

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

#418

Post by kamaal »

kstrauser wrote: post #405
ethanwillis wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you know that Z is the best way to solve X then why would you ask them to solve X with Y? Why not give them a problem to solve that Y is best suited for? It sounds like you got multiple solutions that used the best tool Z, but yet you reward people for being fine with using an inferior tool. That's not exactly the pool of applicants I'd want to bias my search towards. Edit: I just want to add that I don't mean to…

Well, in the parent case X might have been "count the unique lines in a file", Y might have been Python because they were interviewing for a Python job, and Z might have been "cat | sort | uniq". What the interviewer wants to know in this example is whether the author understands Python and file IO and data structures. Sure, you'd use the Unix pipeline in a production setting because it's better tested and faster. Bu…

Seems like you have a XY problem. You want people who know Python's standard library, but you think having them implement grep is the way to go about it.

This is the classic XY problem.

http://xyproblem.info/

If your requirements are to hire some one that can write functional test cases against the Python's standard library. Just ask them to do that.

It's as simple as that.

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

#419

Post by dustincoates »

dominotw wrote: post #416
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.

> then went out on a social media rampage you monitor candidates social media post interview? quite disturbing trend if so.

A more charitable (and probably likely) scenario is that the company monitors mentions of its brand name on social media and saw public posts by the candidate, or the candidate tagged/posted to their social channels.

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

#420

Post by komali2 »

Apocryphon wrote: post #241
komali2 wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Sure I guess, but I can see a startup thinking the same way.
Post reply on HN