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

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

#361

Post by AmericanChopper » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 7:21 AM UTC

jorblumesea wrote: post #177

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…

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…

We took a punt on somebody who was technically very good, but a total culture misfit recently. In his first two months, one person demanded transfer from his team, and another quit. He’s not a bad guy, just painfully socially awkward. He’s the comic store guy from the simpsons, on steroids.

It was a good lesson for us, because it confirmed what we always kinda knew. Doesn’t matter if you’re good at writing code, we need to get along to do good work, and hiring somebody people can’t stand being around is a terrible idea.

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

#362

Post by Cthulhu_ » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 7:27 AM UTC

marvy wrote: post #334

hm10 wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well that sucks for the person if they were rejected because of their accent and no feedback was given. All that hard work in preparing for interviews and you don't even know for sure why they didn't pick you.

I partly agree and yet... surely the candidate noticed that communicating was difficult?

If they're never getting the feedback that they're hard to follow, maybe they don't?

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

#363

Post by bitshepherd » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 7:27 AM UTC

dunpeal wrote: post #354

pmiller2 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My last 'coding interview' consisted of a debugging a broken live VM, with a Java app waiting at the end of the rainbow.

The job was for working on bare metal provisioning using yaml and Python, but I could 'use your favorite programming language'.

Before you think this was some third-rate body snatcher, it's a more well-known name that you've heard of.

They still ghosted me, after telling me what an 'amazing' job I did.

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

#364

Post by ummonk » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 7:27 AM UTC

bglazer wrote: post #306

bsder wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They can't code because you are looking figuratively over their shoulder---the clock is ticking next to a hundred grand in a suitcase. There is a difference between me asking you how to optimize a graph algorithm (good luck--I probably couldn't do that on the fly with references in front of me) vs giving me a basic FizzBuzz. If I let you pick your language for your FizzBuzz, you need to demonstrate at least some of…

To be totally honest, I always find these stats about some x% > 50% failure to program at all totally unbelievable. What do these people do all day, if not design and build software? Yet they're apparently completely unable to write code? How is that possible? I understand that there is always a certain amount of slack and underperformance but any workforce would be completely paralyzed by 70% completely incompetent…

The set of interviewees for a software engineering position is not really a representative sample of workers in the industry. Particularly at a company that doesn't have big name recognition, you're going to end up disproportionately getting job applications from the bottom sections of tech talent.

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

#365

Post by AmericanChopper » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 7:29 AM UTC

dunpeal wrote: post #354

pmiller2 wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We ask people to implement a relatively simple algorithm, that’s particularly practical, in the language of their choice. Then we change the parameters and ask them to make it more efficient.

It’s centered around solving a reasonably common place problem, and doesn’t require anything fancy to solve. It’s more of a test in how they programmatically solve problems over anything else. If somebody struggles with it, then they haven’t been bamboozled by some acedemic algorithm problem, they’ve just shown that they’re not going to be able to write clean code unsupervised.

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

#366

Post by dunpeal » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 7:37 AM UTC

bitshepherd wrote: post #363

dunpeal wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My last 'coding interview' consisted of a debugging a broken live VM, with a Java app waiting at the end of the rainbow. The job was for working on bare metal provisioning using yaml and Python, but I could 'use your favorite programming language'. Before you think this was some third-rate body snatcher, it's a more well-known name that you've heard of. They still ghosted me, after telling me what an 'amazing' job I…

Sounds awful. I'd be interested to know what startup it was. But it's no secret that some of the well-known names do tend to drop the ball on hiring and various other aspects of operations.

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

#367

Post by sametmax » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 8:19 AM 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.

If you don't get a paper trail, you can't sue. Oral feedback is pretty hard to use in court.

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

#368

Post by msiyer » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 8:20 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #238

FLUX-YOU wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

What you say makes complete sense. It is correct as per my observations. However, one big issue is that sociopaths (manipulators, idea\effort-appropriators...) have an edge. Also, such people accumulate and ruin workplace.

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

#369

Post by pmiller2 » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 8:21 AM UTC

AmericanChopper wrote: post #365

dunpeal wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

We ask people to implement a relatively simple algorithm, that’s particularly practical, in the language of their choice. Then we change the parameters and ask them to make it more efficient. It’s centered around solving a reasonably common place problem, and doesn’t require anything fancy to solve. It’s more of a test in how they programmatically solve problems over anything else. If somebody struggles with it, then…

I’m actually on the job hunt right now. If your company is in the Bay Area, I wouldn’t mind an email.

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

#370

Post by ericdykstra » Tue, Aug 28, 2018, 8:36 AM UTC

hm10 wrote: post #305

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…

Well that sucks for the person if they were rejected because of their accent and no feedback was given. All that hard work in preparing for interviews and you don't even know for sure why they didn't pick you.

This is a small part of why anti-discrimination laws are harmful. Companies can't be honest because they need to cover for potential discrimination lawsuits.

If you go a step further, a truly racist company is never going to hire someone of a race they look down on, but they can't put anything on a job description about it, so they just end up wasting a minority's time.