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

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

#231

Post by btilly » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:25 PM UTC

dunpeal wrote: post #224

irq11 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”I've seen candidates with anything between 1 and 15 years of full time coding work on their resumes fail to answer basic fizz-buzz level coding questions.” I haven’t seen this. I have, however, seen lots of junior interviewers ask idiotic questions and wash candidates out for bad reasons, and then turn around and claim the candidate ”failed at fizzbuzz”, just to cover their own ass (or because they think TopCoder me…

> I have, however, seen lots of junior interviewers ask idiotic questions and wash candidates out for bad reasons Why are "juniors" interviewing candidates? Let alone juniors asking "idiotic questions", and having decision-making capacity? > then turn around and claim the candidate ”failed at fizzbuzz”, just to cover their own ass Coding questions are among the most quantifiable and objective questions there are. If…

Note that "junior interviewers" are not necessarily junior, just junior as interviewers. They may be good coders, but they don't know what is reasonable to expect for the role, or how to test for it.

Furthermore coding questions stop being quantifiable and objective as soon as you add in, "What feedback do you give, when, and how?" Two interviewers asking the same question of equivalent candidates can get very different results based on how stressed they make the candidate, what hints they offer, what followup questions they ask, how well they telegraph whether the candidate is on the right path, and so on.

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

#232

Post by PopeDotNinja » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:27 PM UTC

dunpeal wrote: post #223

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally don't care that much on how well a candidate can code, as measuring that is itself quite hard (in my opinion). What I like to interview for is someone who really likes to code. I look for things that demonstrate recent personal growth, ability to explain & teach something they do know, a tendency to avoid claiming they are good at anything, open mindedness on trying new things, etc. In my experience, som…

> In my experience, someone who really wants to code and shows a minimum viable capacity for doing so is the person I want to hire. My comment referred specifically to candidates with at least one year of full-time hands-on development experience under their belt. The typical candidate I interviewed had 3+ years of experience. If you want to code, then you should have ample opportunity to do so during a year or more…

> If you were working in a full-time programming position for over 3 years yet you can't write even a trivial amount of working code during the interview, then clearly you either lack the capacity or the will to develop your programming skills.

Genuine question... What kind of question(s) would I ask to get someone to demonstrate they can code? If my questions are effective, I'm fine. But if my questions stink, it'd be easy to overlook that fact that many excellent people wouldn't be able to answer them well.

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

#233

Post by EduardoBautista » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:28 PM UTC

silverlake wrote: post #225

btilly wrote: post #141

I believe that the article is fundamentally wrong. The bulk of the article is true. But companies are not lying when they say that legal risk is a reason not to send feedback. Triplebyte is in the unusual position of being able to say, "Everyone who has enough technical skill gets through the interview." And that fact is sufficient to defuse their risk. But real companies don't have the luxury of ignoring non-technic…

Facebook gives feedback. I interviewed twice and didn’t pass. They read the feedback report right off their screen to me. So that makes me question the legal liability reason. Facebook is a bigger target than most for lawsuits. I think it’s just uncomfortable to tell people why you didn’t hire them.

Not all companies can afford to have a legal team review feedback before it’s given.

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

#234

Post by DoofusOfDeath » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:30 PM UTC

irq11 wrote: post #197

dunpeal wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most engineering interviewees fail to advance because of cultural/personality/communication issues and not technical competence. Not my experience. At least when hiring for programming positions, the typical fatal issue is that the candidate's coding is weak. In my first role as a hiring manager, I didn't stress coding tests for candidates with long work history on their resume. Since then, I learned better. I've s…

”I've seen candidates with anything between 1 and 15 years of full time coding work on their resumes fail to answer basic fizz-buzz level coding questions.” I haven’t seen this. I have, however, seen lots of junior interviewers ask idiotic questions and wash candidates out for bad reasons, and then turn around and claim the candidate ”failed at fizzbuzz”, just to cover their own ass (or because they think TopCoder me…

> Me personally? I’ve never interviewed a senior person who couldn’t code at all. Not after the phone screen, anyway.

Not sure how common this is, but I've been one of those flame-outs. It was during a Google phone-screen.

I was given a very simple programming problem, and something in my brain just broke (figuratively).

In retrospect it was probably from being too tense because I was star-struck about the employer.

But on that one particular interview, I could barely have written printf("fizbuzz\n");

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

#235

Post by sdegutis » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:31 PM UTC

Retra wrote: post #228

sdegutis wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely correct. Companies can and should discriminate against anyone who wouldn't be a good culture fit for any number of reasons. I don't fault anyone who has ever refused to hire me for personal reasons. At the end of the day, a company is a group of people working together toward a common goal. Company is Latin for those you break bread with, and although companies aren't usually that close-knit (moder…

You are a team, but you should still attempt to be objective enough in your evaluation to determine whether a new person will allow you to be a functional team. But when you say "culture fit", the implication is that the team would prefer not to change at all, not that it would accept changing into a different-yet-comparably-productive team.

Maybe I used culture fit the wrong way. I just meant the ability to get along in non-trivial situations and communicate effectively. I've met people who I have so little in common with that we couldn't even share a joke in either direction, because the recipient just couldn't understand it at all. It was so difficult to accomplish even basic things because our experiences were so different that we didn't have common ground to work from. Not that a similar sense of humor is necessary, but having at least some commonality is necessary if you're going to be able to solve problems together.

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

#236

Post by joeax » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

herodotus wrote: post #122

joeax wrote: post #83

I'm going to go against the grain and say that interview feedback is overrated (at least for senior people). If you got offered the job, then there's your feedback. If not, the interviewing company isn't going to tell you any more than you could already discern yourself by playing back your answers and conversations with the interviewers. If you honestly feel you aced the interview, then other factors are in play - p…

I agree with you, except that the company should send out a rejection letter as soon as they can. If I were hiring, I would only send a non-generic response if the rejected candidate specifically asked me if I would be willing to give her or him constructive feedback, or otherwise indicate why they did not get the position.

What if they are not rejecting you? What if they like you as a candidate but decided to move forward with someone else (and it was a tough decision), and want to wait to see if that person will work out. It sucks, but it happens.

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

#237

Post by estebank » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

giancarlostoro wrote: post #222

dsajames wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good communication is a requirement of the job. If you can't communicate, you aren't likely to be efficient. Take some time to take classes and learn the language better. Try working in a Spanish-only environment as a pure English speaker and see how far you get. This doesn't mean "he has an accent", just that they couldn't understand it.

As a person who learned English as a second language and who has plenty of family who sometimes struggle with English I can't deny that it is harder to work with someone you cannot understand. Even if English is the only language they speak if I can't understand what they're saying I'm going to not be able to work with them. My relatives have indeed taken classes to improve their English skills. Its just something yo…

There're terrible accents that are hard to understand. I have one. I had interviews in the Bay Area while I was living in The Netherlands and I had mild trouble understanding Indian and Chinese interviewers. When I moved to the UK I would dread calling service support as all the call centers are in the north. I have an accent and many times when meeting someone new I need to repeat myself, as I have a very unusual accent.

In all of these cases the thing I noticed is that most of the problems with accents completely go away in less than a month. Accents are funny in that exposure is be enough for them to become a non-issue.

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

#238

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:32 PM UTC

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #211

scarface74 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone's going to deny me a promotion for linking a wikipedia page that answers a basic question and completely ignore my technical contributions, I absolutely do not trust that place has the best interests of its developers in mind and is likely driven more by politics than anything else. No place has the "best interest of its developers in mind". That's true for any industry. It's a lot easier to replace the on…

Why do I need to punch above my weight? So I can finally tell people 'no' when they try to take my time away with stuff that they can fix themselves? I think it's clear we have two very different motivating factors in careers. You want to climb the corporate ladder and get power and influence, and I'm content building things.

That's just the point I've been making "climbing the corporate ladder" is about gaining role power. Role power is the least effective method of getting things done in an organization.

I wanted to "build things" my entire career and was stymied by management and team leads who I couldn't convince to see my "vision", net ops and dev ops who made me go through mounds of red tape to get anything done and coworkers who had their own agendas and wanted to get noticed and get the prime projects just as much as I did. It led to a lot of frustration.

The best way to be able to "build things" the way you want is to have the influence to do so by getting people on your side through relationship building and getting people to trust your expertise.

I like to "build things" too and have no desire for management. But, the way to stand out and make more money than the average, heads down developer is to have soft skills.

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

#239

Post by smelendez » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:36 PM UTC

EduardoBautista wrote: post #233

silverlake wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook gives feedback. I interviewed twice and didn’t pass. They read the feedback report right off their screen to me. So that makes me question the legal liability reason. Facebook is a bigger target than most for lawsuits. I think it’s just uncomfortable to tell people why you didn’t hire them.

Not all companies can afford to have a legal team review feedback before it’s given.

Yeah, I think that's a big part of the difference.

Also, if somebody posts online complaining about their Facebook interview and the feedback they got, it's essentially going to be lost in the noise of other discussion of Facebook. If somebody posts their feedback from RandomStartup and says the interview was biased or otherwise bad, it could end up being in the first page of Google hits for the company, which would be a mess.

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

#240

Post by dunpeal » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:37 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #231

dunpeal wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have, however, seen lots of junior interviewers ask idiotic questions and wash candidates out for bad reasons Why are "juniors" interviewing candidates? Let alone juniors asking "idiotic questions", and having decision-making capacity? > then turn around and claim the candidate ”failed at fizzbuzz”, just to cover their own ass Coding questions are among the most quantifiable and objective questions there are. If…

Note that "junior interviewers" are not necessarily junior, just junior as interviewers. They may be good coders, but they don't know what is reasonable to expect for the role, or how to test for it. Furthermore coding questions stop being quantifiable and objective as soon as you add in, "What feedback do you give, when, and how?" Two interviewers asking the same question of equivalent candidates can get very differ…

> Note that "junior interviewers" are not necessarily junior, just junior as interviewers.

Sure, but these are highly correlated. If you've been working in startups for a few years, you will have some experience in both coding and interviewing coders.

Even most of the successful large companies are pretty good at cultivating interviewing skills among their employees.

> Furthermore coding questions stop being quantifiable and objective as soon as you add in, "What feedback do you give, when, and how?"

I would moderate that statement as "become less quantifiable and objective". They're still more objective than "tell me about the project you are most proud of" or (worst) "what is your biggest weakness?" (perfectionism, duh!).

You can also control many of these factors by standardizing interviewer behavior. For example, "no feedback of any kind until the candidate writes a working solution", or working off a predefined set of hints.