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No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
421–430 of 646 posts
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#422Earlier 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.
> Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. The data I've seen suggests you're totally wrong about this. I work at a company in the recruiting space. My primary role is interviewing technical candidates, and we provide very detailed feedback to candidates of all levels, regardless of whether or not we move forward with them. People consistently tell us they love the feedback that…
I also have data on this. I previously worked for a marketplace company that had to vet freelance writers.
The application process was partially automated, with multiple human reviewers that provided detailed scoring on the applicant’s performance.
Initially, we provided a score breakdown to applicants, but we turned this off within a few weeks after a cascade of hostility.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#423One 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.
companies don’t have to follow candidates on social media to hear about getting badmouthed on social media, especially if it blows up.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#424Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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 tak…
I simply have to disagree. The amount of unqualified candidates that have a decent CV and are reasonable to talk to, but completely unable to correctly write a while loop is too damn high. That is what my whiteboard questions filter out. They're super easy stuff such as "I give you as input a list of integers, return the index of the first consecutive pair of numbers that when added is 42 - you can use any language or pseudocode". If they write it correctly, but not handle the obvious edge case with the end of the list, no pair existing, you can ask them about this. This is basic code review and discussion of a solution with a fellow developer - both very important.
You'd be shocked how many people that write years of relevant programming experience and fail that. Do we get some false negatives, probably. But it's a reasonable price to pay compared to hiring someone unqualified.
I think a big reason for this, is that you can teach yourself to be a developer, and all the millions of articles and videos on the topic mean you can get something done without understanding the fundamentals. I think this, for some, create a false sense of competency.
It's easier with say, structural engineers - if they have an exam and or relevant work experience, there is a pretty high chance that they're up for the job. And you wouldn't hire a junior engineers without a senior person overseeing and checking their work for grave mistakes.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#425Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Germany is not the US. Labor laws impose restrictions aside from banning discrimination against protected categories.
As one example: it is illegal to say anything negative in a letter of reference. See https://workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/74438/recommen...
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#426Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If someone says write a grep-like thing in Python so we can see how you write something like that in Python and someone else submits anything in Perl that's not an XY problem. It's a basic failure to meet clear requirements.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#427Earlier quoted context omitted.
Non paid take home projects... Huge red flag.
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…
I'd take the whiteboard interview any day of the week. The instant feedback you get and ability to show how I think and attack a problem is, I believe, far more valuable.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#428I'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 someone actually told me they'd use 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' to find an error count, they'd have to be gigantic drama queens or asshole for me to not hire them for a position, I'd even look for a different one if it's not quite the right fit for the one they're interviewing for. That is textbook example efficiency.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#429I 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…
> Microsoft has a policy that you can interview only once per year.
Wonder how long ago this policy was in place because when I interviewed last year I was able to interview with multiple teams.
Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback
#430Earlier 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…
I don't do unpaid take home projects that are expected to take more than an hour. Even if I "pass", now I work for a company that has already demonstrated a willingness to occupy my time. Ditto if the take-home project does not have clear acceptance criteria: that's how it will be to work there.
It's a real red flag.