301–310 of 374 posts
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The HR handbooks say that for good reason. Telling a candidate why they were rejected means they'll argue with you, or worse, file a lawsuit.
I'm not convinced they'd prevail in court. Seems like one of those truthisms about American litigiousness that wouldn't bear out in practice.
One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection . That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in th…
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These are all likely enough to contribute, but there's one big one. If you don't say anything at all, the applicant has nothing to go on for a lawsuit against you. If you say anything, and the applicant is a malicious litigant, you just became a potential paycheck via settlement. If you're hiring a dozen people a year, you can probably ignore this. If you're hiring hundreds or thousands, and thus many times that numb…
I hear this about lawsuits a lot, but it doesn't really track for me. If a hiring manager says, "we decided to pass on you because you didn't go in depth as much as we hoped on how you would handle latency," why does that open the company up to a lawsuit anymore than no answer? I could see if the feedback was "we wanted someone who better fit the culture," but giving a specific answer on a core hiring criteria doesn'…
I always tell people why they didn't pass the interview, or why we didn't select them. Usually in a reasonably detailed way.
A plurality of individuals have tried to argue with me, that I didn't understand them (which, if true, could be a communication issue and thus: still an issue). Some try to litigate the issue (not in a court of law, but to say things like "but you didn't say that on the ad" (knowing how TCP works shouldn't be on an ad), or "I can learn" etc). A minority of those will go out of their way to hound me on social media.
My "HR" person doesn't get any of that because she gives no reason.
I'll continue to do it, because I think it's the right thing to do: but there are people in the world who disincentivise it. And after all; you're rejecting someone for a reason, so there is a higher probability that you will interface with someone who is as described: as they might not be finding work and thus circulating more and you are rejecting them for a reason... which could be related to attitude.
Dear Author, the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated. You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or sever…
Thanks! I normally don't publish sappy essays like this, but I wanted to try sharing a common experience of rejection with a loud call for optimism and self-growth. I'm still learning how to be an authentic/vulnerable person, and I may have missed the mark I like myself now. I really do. But sometimes that old self-doubt comes roaring back and I have to beat it down with a stick. You're totally right -- internet stra…
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I have done about 75 coding interviews for big tech companies. I have told a fair number of people (around 10) that I would be submitting a no-hire, but then I went on to coach them for another 15 minutes on how they could improve. I never once heard from anyone on the subject and all the people I told were actually grateful 1) that they wouldn't be left wondering and 2) how they could pass the next one. I'd want som…
All it takes is 1 candidate with an axe to grind and I guarantee you'll never give feedback again.
Why is Anthropic hiring developers? Amodei said that AI will be generating all the code by the end of the year.
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I'm a computer engineer, EMT, and firefighter. I have scooped up brain matter from hot asphalt and run into burning buildings (without even getting paid for it). People ask me how I can do this. I dunno. Training and experience I guess. Doesn't bother me. But the idea of standing on a stage pretending to be someone else fills me with sheer terror. Even worse would be trying out for that job 100 times and getting reje…
It's all a matter of perspective. My uncle once brought his kids to see a big show I was in, and afterwards said just what you did. I looked at him, genuinely surprised, and said something like "dude, you're a surgeon. If I screw up at work 2,000 people laugh at me, and forget about it five minutes later; if you screw up at work, someone dies . You really think I should be the one feeling nervous?" You're right about…
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My career long experience with these types of interviews is you get hired by the company that, when they interview you, you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions you’ve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason. The content of the actual work I’ve done at these companies and how the work is done, is completely different to these interviews and I’d have done equally well a…
And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug: * to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate). * AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview * Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes…