On a side note, this also reads as an interesting insight into human behavior and how to communicate in general. A wonderful article.
I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
351–360 of 426 posts
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Exactly this. And it’s often misconstrued as something else.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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. I am curious what kind of work this was, if you can share. I had a lot of difficulty in the past when working in situations where there was "life-experience" context to the problem space that was not shared by the whole team. But we had to get the job done so we worked around…
Sure, you try to make lemonade. That doesn’t mean it will be a success.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
We always get these kinds of responses when interview testing is mentioned. This isn't some high-level algorithm analysis on a whiteboard with a panel of examiners grilling you. This is a simple test of basic competence. It's like interviewing a candidate Formula 1 driver and asking them "so which bit's the brake pedal?" If they can't tell you that instantly then they shouldn't be applying for the position in the fir…
I don’t think I’ve ever been asked a “which is the brake pedal” level question in an onsite interview. Usually it’s more like I’m a mechanic being asked “how do you replace the water pump on a 1999 Saturn Ion, from memory, please.”
That's a benefit of the coding interview, actually. We don't ask you about that particular feature of some library from 10 years ago, which is basically a luck question: you either happen to know or you don't.
We ask you to code a simple task that you should be able to do in your favorite programming language.
Not entirely sure how the discussion of coding interviews veered towards obscure knowledge interviews - the former was expressly designed to supersede and eliminate the latter as one of its core goals!
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 quantifi…
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. I would put it the other way around. My experience is that most startups just put you in front of people and tell you to figure it out. Peopl…
> My experience is that most startups just put you in front of people and tell you to figure it out.
Some do, sure. And that's the difference between a startup and a regular company right there: that "figure it out" bit.
You'll mess up and fumble and come up with crazy ideas, 95% of which are worse than what the established companies are doing.
But you'll learn a ton along the way.
It's messy and inefficient but that's how startups are.
I personally learned a ton from hacking interviews at startups and all that "figuring it out".
Also, guess what? All these sacred "FAANG interviews" that seem to have come down from the sky, etched on tablets? They were developed by Microsoft back when it was a startup, then evolved by various SV companies at their startup stage, too.
The next great idea in interviewing also won't come from the thousands of engineers obediently marching to the tune of the same principles everyone is using, but from some startup trying something crazy and ambitious and miraculously getting it to work.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't ask people to do something they've maybe never done before and will never have to do on the job (write code with a marker on a whiteboard as seconds tick down). If you want a reasonable coding assessment, sit them down at a terminal and give them an hour (and an appropriately difficult problem). But literal whiteboard tests are a recipe for complete blackouts.
> If you want a reasonable coding assessment, sit them down at a terminal and give them an hour (and an appropriately difficult problem). I am doing just that. > But literal whiteboard tests are a recipe for complete blackouts. Not always. I've done a lot of whiteboard interviews too. It's a different way to discuss a problem, and one that people do use at work. Most design sessions happen with a colleague or two in…
It affects some people much more than others, it's not a uniform random occurrence, so a person with one blackout is more likely than most to have more than one. Some people are very anxious during interviews, and their frontal lobe basically shuts down, others love interviews. So it's very likely that many of the people you've interviewed who you thought "couldn't code" actually just couldn't code while you were watching them.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would have simply ignored that HR person and given honest but polite feedback.
You're willing to bet your own employment on that? We'd all love to live in a world of butterflies and sugar plums, but risking your own for that is silly don't you think?
Off topic, but I find it amusing that we all do in fact live in a world with both butterflies and sugar plums. They are both very cheap and plentiful as well.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#358Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just say he's no fit for the organization. Safe and at least partially fair for the candidates.
Interestingly, if they give concrete technical reasons why people weren't hired in most cases, then telling some people that they were "not a fit" could actually raise a red flag. Basically, it tells them that there was no technical reason not to hire them, which raises the question of whether it was something illegitimate.
This gets right to the heart of the issue, IMHO. Hiring has become such a litigation-prone process that companies are now incentivized to leak as little information as possible.
It's sad because nobody wins -- companies get sued for petty nothings, candidates who have been wronged have no recourse, and candidates aren't given the feedback they need to improve themselves.
Our startup isn't hiring yet, but I must confess this kind of thing has me worried...
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, if they give concrete technical reasons why people weren't hired in most cases, then telling some people that they were "not a fit" could actually raise a red flag. Basically, it tells them that there was no technical reason not to hire them, which raises the question of whether it was something illegitimate.
It may raise the question, but it’s not evidence, and it’s not actionable. No lawyer would ever take a case based on a lack of interview feedback, or “not a fit.”
No, but it might prompt someone to dig deeper. I think companies are starting to treat the hiring process as a security risk and are trying to minimize the attack-surface.
Re: I know why rejection emails suck – I write them
#360again decent article (though stating obvious) until last bracket which was whole point of posting it