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I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

triplebyte.com

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

#251

Post by mmt »

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?

Presumably with what's called a "reasonable accomodation". For example, interviewers always facing the candidate to facilitate lip-reading and allowing use of a speech synthesizer. Perhaps even paying for a sign-language interpreter (although, for eventual employment, that may well not be reasonable).

These are, of course, just examples from a complete non-expert, and there is a plethora of information on the Internet regarding accomodations, as well as what's considered reasonable (and how that's arrived at for each situation).

Even if a heavy-enough accent could be accomodated in a similar manner (which is debatable, at least), it's questionable if it's a disability under the law (philosophically/morally is yet another matter).

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

#252

Post by PopeDotNinja »

dunpeal wrote: post #243
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…

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…

> There are different approaches, but you can come up with any simple programming task.

My challenge internalizing this phrase is that I have a hard time latching onto the idea of simple. It's a highly subjective measurement. For example, if I ask an to implement FizzBuzz & they can't do it, to my satisfaction, are they a not worth hiring? I suppose it depends on what satisfies me. If my criteria for hire/no-hire is whether they wrote concurrent & streaming FizzBuzz, maybe my expectations are unrealistic. If I'm expecting someone to write FizzBuzz in as few characters as possible, am I going to flunk anyone who implements a verbose concurrent & streaming FizzBuzz? Is there a case where it makes sense to hire someone who implements Enterprise FizzBuzz? I may struggle myself with keeping things simple, so there's that to consider :)

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

#254

Post by jMyles »

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…

I was with you until you said that refraining from hiring someone because his accent was too difficult to understand. That's an insane reason - why pass on a good candidate for this reason? Can your company afford this?

If you are working closely with this person, it will be 3 months before his accent is sufficiently adjusted.

This is a stupid reason to pass.

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

#255

Post by shady-lady »

dunpeal wrote: post #229
irq11 wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”Why are "juniors" interviewing candidates?” I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but the average age of programmers these days is just slightly above “right out of undergrad”. If you wait for the senior people to interview everyone, you’re going to be waiting a while. ”Coding questions are among the most quantifiable and objective questions there are.” Bullshit. Coding questions feel objective, and programmers love…

OK, I suppose lack of seniors is a legitimate constraint. Still, interviewing is so important, that I typically give it a high priority. Even when I had only one other senior engineer, I made sure each candidate spent a long time with each of us. Typically, I'd go in with a junior developer, and he'd go in with some other junior developer. I'd even see the same candidate twice rather than have two juniors interview h…

> Coding questions ideally yield an answer that can compile and run and return correct output for at least some valid sets of input. That's about as objective as it gets.

Except for coding style (incl. naming convention), code organisation, test coverage, arch style, level of abstraction..plus a myriad of other things. I don't know anybody who treat the code in a coding question as a black box. It gets about as subjective as you can get when reviewing, with the (objectively) correct answer weighted the least.

Shit code that gets the right answer rates worse than code which ticks all the above subjective boxes but gets the answer wrong.

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

#256

Post by brandall10 »

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.

The fact that you interviewed twice implies you're a candidate they like, but for some reason or another you weren't strong enough.

If a company keeps the door open, it's certainly in their best interest to help you enter it sooner rather than later.

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

#257

Post by sidlls »

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…

> Coding questions are among the most quantifiable and objective questions there are.

Only in the most trivial cases (for statements, not necessarily solution). If you want to assess engineering ability, specific coding questions are a small, tiny sample of the space, and generally the more difficult the problem the less useful it is.

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

#258

Post by slg »

wildmusings wrote: post #158
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…

On the point of legal risk, I’m concerned by the authors naïveté in believing that as long as you’re not actually discriminating based on race/sex/religion, you won’t be accused of it. The more data you put out there, the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent, you will get dragged through the mud in the press and m…

>the more likely that someone will crunch it and find some statistical patterns that they will label “racism” or "sexism". Even if you’re innocent

The existence of that pattern by itself might be enough for a company to be guilty of discrimination. If a policy disproportionately harms a specific protected class and they can't show a legitimate business reason for that policy, it is illegal regardless of intent. It is called disparate impact.

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

#259

Post by matz1 »

jMyles wrote: post #254
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…

I was with you until you said that refraining from hiring someone because his accent was too difficult to understand. That's an insane reason - why pass on a good candidate for this reason? Can your company afford this? If you are working closely with this person, it will be 3 months before his accent is sufficiently adjusted. This is a stupid reason to pass.

of course the assumption is there are someone else with similar skill but has easier to understand accent, its no brainier which one to pick.

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

#260

Post by j2kun »

jMyles wrote: post #254
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…

I was with you until you said that refraining from hiring someone because his accent was too difficult to understand. That's an insane reason - why pass on a good candidate for this reason? Can your company afford this? If you are working closely with this person, it will be 3 months before his accent is sufficiently adjusted. This is a stupid reason to pass.

I've seen this a million times teaching students. They raise a shitstorm for two weeks because they can't understand their TA's accent. Then they learn and can understand them just fine.

The truth is it's part laziness and part racism.

That being said, there is reinforcing incentive to be a bad communicator when the people around you don't make the effort because of your accent.

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