Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I know why rejection emails suck – I write them

triplebyte.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 426 posts

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

#281

Post by mgkimsal »

reversecs wrote: post #274
j2kun wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am conflicted about the use of racism in this context. Accent varies by ethnicity and ethnicity is a proxy for race, so they are disadvantaged by their race. But if a student had a ta of the same race but no accent it would be fine. Or if the ta was white but had a bad accent the complaining would continue but it wouldn't be considered racism.

Don't be confused - it's not racist. It's "accentist" perhaps. I'm "white" and there've been plenty of "white" folks who I can't understand due to their accent. In some cases, I would not be able to work with them. It was nothing to do with 'race', everything to do with their ability to communicate in a way I could understand. If there are two people of equal technical ability, and one I (and the team) can understand without hesitation, and one who has trouble communicating, because of an accent, and they're both white, and we choose the one without the accent... are we racist? No.

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

#282

Post by HillaryBriss »

duxup wrote: post #186

I WISH I could get rejection emails. I'll talk to a recruiter at a company, exchange emails, even meet them .... 99.9% of the time if they're not offering I get NOTHING. They just don't respond. I don't care that they're not hiring me, I'd just like some feedback. FEEDBACK PLEASE, anything that really matters that I can improve on or such. It is to the point that even automated rejection letters seem nicer than the u…

I was once told by a recruiter that she absolutely guaran-damn-teed that she would call me after the interview process and let me know the employer's decision. Guaran-damn-teed.

After my in-person interview, about a month passed with no contact from her. I figured I didn't get the job. But I wanted to call her anyway, just because. She said, "Oh, I thought I sent you an email about it. Yeah, they don't want you."

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

#283

Post by tptacek »

btilly wrote: post #249
mrkurt wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually that decision would not have been up to HR and the executive team, would it? In the United States, that decision was made for you at least 28 years ago, right?

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

#284

Post by jacobolus »

j2kun wrote: post #260
jMyles wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> it's part laziness and part racism

This is not a fair summary. I have several friends (especially online, who I communicate with via asynchronous email/chat) who are technically competent and lovely people.... but who I would not ever want to have as an in-person lecturer/teacher, because their accents are extremely difficult for me to follow. In spoken communication one or both of us have to constantly repeat ourselves, idioms differ between us and sometimes intended meaning is severely misunderstood, and overall communication is slow and difficult on both sides. In some cases my friend speaks English as a second or third language and feels awkward/uncomfortable speaking English face to face at normal conversational speed.

In a classroom setting, there is usually some technically difficult material to be learning, and often a course is structured so that the first concepts taught are essential building blocks on which the rest of the course relies. Trying to simultaneously decipher a thick accent and learn demanding technical material will put a student behind their peers who are taught by someone easy to comprehend, and might make the course dramatically more difficult.

It is neither “racism” nor “laziness” to want a teacher who is a fluent speaker of a form of speech you can easily understand. Just simple pragmatism.

> I've seen this a million times teaching students.

If most of your students are complaining about your accent, is it really a fair to conclude that they are all just lazy racists? Maybe you could work harder on developing an accent comprehensible to natives in the place where you are teaching.

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

#285

Post by kaizendad »

When I was getting my MBA, about years ago, I suggested to our career placement folks that they work up a legal agreement with the companies who recruited with us, indemnifying them against any EEOC suits if they shared detailed feedback with us (most large companies go directly to business schools to hire on a yearly basis). They asked a half-dozen companies, and no company's legal team thought they could be confident such a document would stick. Pity, as, at that stage, we all had a lot of interviews to take, and a lot of support in getting new interviews.

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

#286

Post by dbt00 »

PopsiclePete wrote: post #220
mrkurt wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Can't understand their accent" _is_ discriminatory. Please don't ever recommend against a candidate for that. Companies are definitely taking the easy way out. The reality is that most of them don't have a good hiring process, aren't consistent about hiring decisions, and tend to choose based on factors that have nothing to do with the job they're hiring for.

>"Can't understand their accent" _is_ discriminatory. Please don't ever recommend against a candidate for that. Sorry, I disagree. A team is more than just a bunch of automatons punching the keyboard. If I can't understand what you're telling me, if you can't communicate your ideas, if nobody can understand what you're saying, if everything needs to be explained multiple times, and/or slowly, it becomes exhausting to…

If someone can't communicate their knowledge and skills that's one problem, and a very common one with or without an accent barrier.

If someone can communicate their ideas and do the job and you don't want to hire them to avoid having to actually expend effort in communicating, that's a different problem, and it's not theirs.

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

#287

Post by jldugger »

mgkimsal wrote: post #281
reversecs wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am conflicted about the use of racism in this context. Accent varies by ethnicity and ethnicity is a proxy for race, so they are disadvantaged by their race. But if a student had a ta of the same race but no accent it would be fine. Or if the ta was white but had a bad accent the complaining would continue but it wouldn't be considered racism.

Don't be confused - it's not racist. It's "accentist" perhaps. I'm "white" and there've been plenty of "white" folks who I can't understand due to their accent. In some cases, I would not be able to work with them. It was nothing to do with 'race', everything to do with their ability to communicate in a way I could understand. If there are two people of equal technical ability, and one I (and the team) can understand…

Fortunately, EEOC considers national origin equally important to protect, and 'accentist' is likely adjacent enough that your lawyers will not support you going there.

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

#288

Post by jldugger »

dunpeal wrote: post #185
jorblumesea wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most engineering interviewees fail to advance because of cultural/personality/communication issues and not technical competence. The amount of people I've washed out of the interview process because they've gone on some rant about windows vs linux, political ideology or just came off as unable to communicate in general. This is also the hardest to communicate as it is something inherent to the candidate. It's not per…

> 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.

Like, how? I used to hire undergraduate student sysadmins / coders, and we had zero candidates fail fizz buzz. None! The worst we saw were people who maybe had an awkward solution to the problem, typically because of unfamiliarity with the modulus operator.

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

#289

Post by dbt00 »

tptacek wrote: post #114
michaelt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not just have candidates accomplish the thing you're assessing with an actual relational database? My employer interviews like this, and I can tell you one reason it's not very common: It's a pain in the ass. After all, it'd be unfair to judge someone on a platform they weren't familiar with - so now you gotta maintain a fleet of laptops with a really wide range of tools. And these have to sorta float outside the…

It is harder to build a work-sample regimen than to just send candidates to interviewers, sure. But then, the point of Triplebyte is that they're eating all that work for you. Regarding "fleets of laptops" and environments and all that jazz: these seem like unforced obstacles. Just have the candidates use their own machines. Here's a crazy idea: have them use their own offices/couches, too. Regarding security practic…

> Just have the candidates use their own machines

I agree with you generally, but you'd better have loaner machines ready. Not every candidate currently has a working, dev-capable laptop. Economic bias. (Hell, my current laptop is only 70% functional because I can't decide if I want to repair or replace it.)

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

#290

Post by bradleyjg »

irq11 wrote: post #226
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…

”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…

> Coding questions feel objective, and programmers love to pretend they’re objective, but like any other human evaluation process, they’re subjective. It’s not like you automatically get the job if you get the answer right.

> Unless you’re verifying that your team is generating consistent, reproducible outcomes, I can pretty much guarantee that they’re not.

It seems as though there are a fair number of things like this, where people sort-of play act science but don’t bother with the rigor. I guess it’s a type of cargo culting.

Post reply on HN