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

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

#241

Post by dmurray » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:42 PM UTC

btilly wrote: post #227

mrkurt wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're way overblowing this, but it's possible you know more than I do. What makes you think "either willfully or accidentally mis-interpreting rejection feedback" is a meaningful threat to any company? Have there been cases where companies were wrongfully sued for such a thing that I'm not aware of? And have they gone out of business as a result? I've read an awful lot of employment case coverage and don't r…

Given how few companies give interview feedback, I would predicted very little in the way of lawsuits involving that. People can't "willfully or accidentally mis-interpret" what you don't say. The real question is, "If people gave interview feedback, would they get sued for it?" I think so. Doubly so if the feedback was at odds with the candidate's self-image or if it is written. (It is a lot easier to file a lawsuit…

HR departments say so because if no one ever gives interview feedback, no one will ever get sued for giving the "wrong" feedback. They are like the legal department in that they will never look to help a company actively gain a competitive advantage, and certainly never to do the decent thing by people outside the company's management.

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

#242

Post by combatentropy » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:44 PM UTC

almostdeadguy wrote: post #218

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.

This goes both ways, and frankly it is racist to say you can't be bothered to try to understand someone's accent. I've worked with asian immigrants who learned english on the job, it's really not that hard to work with someone with a non-American accent. And if the DSA in your name stands for what I think it does, you should know better.

It's not racist, because language does not arise from race. Many races can speak one language, and one race can speak many languages. Someone who is racist will be so no matter the accent or language. Language arises from culture. So it might be said that the person is being culturist, if that's a word.

However, I don't see what proof you have that the person is motivated by culturism, when there is a more likely reason, that it's too much work, and he doesn't believe it's his job. It's not my job to teach you English any more that it is to teach you Python. If you don't show up to work knowing both English and Python, it's not my job to train you. I'm talking about severe accents. I have worked with people from another country and had no trouble understanding what they said, and yet another person from the same country, I have no idea what he just said! If you are working on a project with that person, that's bad! If the project involves banking, medicine, or rocket ships, it can be dangerous.

And I'm not being hypocritical. I would not expect to land a job in Spain, even though I can speak Spanish somewhat, because I cannot speak it well enough to work together with Spaniards full time.

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

#243

Post by dunpeal » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:45 PM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #232

dunpeal wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There are different approaches, but you can come up with any simple programming task. Doubts are fine, so just run them through some of your existing engineers, especially those you think are really good. If people you consider excellent engineers fail them, then it's back to the drawing board.

That's an exercise I do for hiring in general. For example, every time a hiring process change is proposed, I run it through my existing engineers, and make sure I would have hired them by this process.

For example, in a place that was starting to get a lot of great candidates, someone proposed tightening the education requirements of the preliminary screen. I quickly observed that would have disqualified one of my best performers, who didn't have a CS degree at all. The proposition was therefore struck down.

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

#244

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:46 PM UTC

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #232

dunpeal wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why ask any questions? Sit them down to a simplified version of a real world class your company is working on with corresponding unit tests and tell them to make the tests pass. That was one of my favorite type of interviews and I've used it before.

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

#245

Post by AngeloAnolin » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:47 PM UTC

I would really rate a company that provides honest and truthful feedback a notch on top of the others as this shows some form of the culture that they have in their organization.

You can do an automated response to 95% of the rejected ones, and for the rest which made the cut past the initial stage of applying, having a more human-centric approach on providing response is the way to go.

The good words that would come out vouching for the company I think is enough reason that hiring organizations should take the effort to provide a meaningful response to some applicants.

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

#246

Post by dunpeal » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:49 PM UTC

DoofusOfDeath wrote: post #234

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…

> 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.…

If it's any comfort: everyone performs worse under the stress of an interview. This is widely recognized by hiring employers, and accounted for in the interview evaluation.

For example, if I test-run a new question, and it takes my engineers 20 minutes to solve it, I will add 30-50% handicap for stress. I.E. if a candidate manages to solve it within 30 minutes, that's roughly equivalent.

Unfortunately, there's no way to account for someone having a complete blackout such as you describe.

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

#247

Post by PopeDotNinja » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:51 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #244

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why ask any questions? Sit them down to a simplified version of a real world class your company is working on with corresponding unit tests and tell them to make the tests pass. That was one of my favorite type of interviews and I've used it before.

I do like practical exercises.

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

#248

Post by extesy » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:52 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 for everybody, apparently. They didn't respond when I asked for feedback after my interview.

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

#249

Post by btilly » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 10:58 PM UTC

mrkurt wrote: post #219

btilly wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion as someone present, this standard was met. (1) Programmers need to be able to communicate about what they did, what they need to do, and how things are designed. (2) Interviewers kept on saying things like, "I managed to pick out enough of the right words that he probably answered me, but I wasn't sure." None of us cared that he had an accent - we hired plenty of people with accents. We cared that we co…

How would you have handled a deaf candidate in the same position?

That decision would have been up to HR and the executive team. I was neither.

Speaking personally, if the company hired an interpreter, I would have been OK with it. If the company insisted on having all design meetings in a chat room, I would think that crazy. Most people's typing speed is a small fraction of their speaking speed.

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

#250

Post by andrewprock » Mon, Aug 27, 2018, 11:00 PM UTC

In my experience, most of the feedback I've gotten has been trite and superficial. It's not surprising, since most interview processes are not designed to measure quality but rather to measure interest.

I once got feedback that I wasn't technically qualified, and when I asked how they knew that, they said that I hadn't spent enough time on leetcode studying the answers.