I know why rejection emails suck – I write them • Hacker News Board

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#11

Post by hunterjrj » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:24 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #3

At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.

This happened to me. Several rounds of interviews with a well known colored-hat company, then... nothing. No response to follow-ups either.

What was especially frustrating to me was that up to that point, the tone of both the conversations and email exchanges was very positive and cordial. I would have expected a "Thanks, but no thanks" follow-up at least, especially considering I was an internal referral from a Sr. Mgr. But... nothing. Made my reconsider my view of that particular company.

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#12

Post by dbcurtis » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #3

At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.

I’ve had that. But not from anyone I cared about after going through the interview. Unsurprisingly.

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#13

Post by Harj » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:25 PM UTC

I used to write rejection emails for companies at the end of YC interview days. It always sucked, especially when it was borderline decision (which it often was) but PG made doing these well an important part of internal YC culture. We couldn't leave until they were finished and each one was reviewed by another partner before sending.

In hindsight I'm glad we did this. In the years since I've had multiple people tell me the rejection was a positive turning point and the only honest feedback they'd received.

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#14

Post by dep_b » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:26 PM UTC

Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail.

There are tons of companies that give you a generic email after you completed an IQ test, a questionary, open questions and of course the 8hours+ homework. That's just perverse.

"Try again in three months"

Why? I wouldn't do anything different.

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#15

Post by PascLeRasc » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:28 PM UTC

nosseo wrote: post #5

Insanity wrote: post #3

At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.

I get why companies don't do honest rejection letters, but this there's no excuse for whatsoever.

It'd be nice to have some kind of public list where we could report companies that ghost, to warn other engineers to stay away.

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#16

Post by thaumasiotes » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:31 PM UTC

dep_b wrote: post #14

Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail. There are tons of companies that give you a generic email after you completed an IQ test, a questionary, open questions and of course the 8hours+ homew…

> "Try again in three months"

> Why? I wouldn't do anything different.

But they will. The interview process is stochastic; exactly the same performance from you will lead to different results on different attempts.

> Getting rejected at Triplebyte was actually a pretty good investment time wise. Guess the whole thing costed me three hours in total and I got quite a list of things to improve and how. It was clear it was tailored towards the interview not just a larger generic mail.

For another perspective, here's the entire feedback I got when they rejected my application:

> This was a tough decision and one that we were on the fence about. We really appreciate you taking the time to work on the take home project. We're aware this requires a substantial time commitment and we are really grateful that you invested the time in completing it. We thought you wrote a great, very full featured regular expression matcher. It was especially impressive how much you dug into the academics behind regular languages.

> However we made the decision because we felt that while going through the project together during the interview, we didn't see the fluency of programming when adding to it that we had hoped for. While we specifically designed the take home project track to help overcome the difficulties of coding under time pressure with someone watching, we do still need to see a certain level of programming during the interview. This didn't seem to be the case here, where making changes to the project seemed to be slower and more difficult than we'd have liked.

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#17

Post by lexicality » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:32 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #3

At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.

Yeah, I was referred to a company and went through the full interview process, ended with a cheerful sounding "talk to you soon" and then zip. No messages and no replies to my emails.

It took my friend there a week to find out that I'd been rejected.

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#18

Post by pvarangot » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #3

At least you get a response even if it is a rejection letter. I have heard - not experienced - that sometimes you just don't hear back from the company at all, which seems worse to me.

I had this happen on hires I was responsible for, but on "continuously open positions" or when the position is left vacant and the headcount repurposed to another position.

I didn't find a useful or correct way to inform all the potential candidates about that change. That happened two times and I only sent the more generic e-mail we send for rejection telling the people that had had at least one face to face to apply for other positions if they were still interested in the company.

For the easier case of filling the headcount up with someone and not wanting the rest it's easier to send a rejection e-mail, it's just not what always happens with every job opening.

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#19

Post by account2 » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:33 PM UTC

nosseo wrote: post #2

Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I wa…

>Every few months, I check that all our recommended resources are still up-to-date, available, and free.

What are your recommended resources for technical improvements in coding interviews?

Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

#20

Post by icelancer » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 6:35 PM UTC

thaumasiotes wrote: post #7

mikepurvis wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't giving detailed feedback a liability nightmare? Everything I've ever heard on this is to say as little as possible. It's certainly great as a candidate to get detailed feedback (would have really appreciated it back in the day as a co-op student), but I just wonder if the concerns over it have any merit or are overblown.

This is called out early in the post: > The number one reason companies cite for not sending feedback is legal risk. Interestingly, I don’t think this is true. Companies put themselves at legal risk if they are rejecting candidates for illegitimate reasons, like race, gender, or a disability. If they send feedback which tells candidates, truthfully, that they were rejected because they didn’t get very far on the codi…

Right, the liability is not "we are going to send a letter that says you're too old/you're a woman" or something blatant like that, the liability is that a very well-meaning person sends a thoughtful rejection letter and it can be inferred in the language - true or not, and this is the kicker - that there is discrimination going on.

You are doing a nice thing by being detailed, but you are basically introducing nearly unbounded downside for the upside of being nice. Most companies don't find much value in this calculus. It doesn't make it the right thing to do, but it is understandable.