No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback • Hacker News Board

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#361

Post by Iv » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:18 AM UTC

snide wrote: post #322

bigiain wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do it anyway. You know if someone you don't remember from an interaction ages ago emailed you to say "Hey, you probably don't remember this, but you once told me $thing, so I took $action, and now I've achieved $outcome. Thanks you for that, it really helped my career!", it'd make you feel great and would probably be the highlight of your day, right?

As an anecdote. I once received something like this (on Twitter of all places). It was a "you probably don't remember me but..." for someone I'd passed on a decade ago. It really touched me and made me sit down and reflect on my career. The person had gone on to have a successful career being creative. Which honestly, is all we can ever ask. I remembered the person, but not anything about what I'd said that day. I as…

Every word you speak, especially to the youth, is a seed. Handle them like they were going to land on fertile ground.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#362

Post by steverb » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:20 AM UTC

gowld wrote: post #277

meej wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I witnessed a candidate ask a question along these lines in a group interview and I found it extremely awkward, because there was huge potential for disagreement amongst the interviewers, and also because this group consisted of people who had a stake in the hire as future coworkers for the role, but were not members of the search committee making the final hire decision, we were just providing feedback to the search…

> group interview Off. That's not a good look.

On. I appreciate a company that isn't going to waste two days of my time with a succession of people asking the same questions over and over.

Also, I want to meet my potential co-workers so I can decide if I want to work there.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#363

Post by anon102010 » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:22 AM UTC

Hiring for a technical position.

Women's studies major with some recent more technical junior work experience (her technical role was vague).

Brought her in for an interview. Compared to others, not even close to what we needed (and didn't know what she didn't know).

She went out of her way to both explain to us what idiots we were for not hiring her and demanding detailed feedback on where she was weak and others were stronger, leaning heavily on the fact that we DO hire a diverse workforce. (It's diverse but qualified)

If you tell someone their women's studies major was one of a number of negatives when evaluating them against other candidates - what happens? She had a huge chip on her shoulder, and I'm male. It might make for a sympathetic case - "guy hiring women keeps her from job because of her women's studies major?" - especially if all the other context wasn't there.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#364

Post by pm24601 » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #11

The hiring process is a black box for a reason. The HR department's role is to protect the company first, not the employees, and certainly not prospective employees. If feedback can be interpreted as being discriminatory, or reflective of bad company culture in general, well, word gets around. For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/like…

> If feedback can be interpreted as being discriminatory, or reflective of bad company culture in general, well, word gets around.

If the feedback can be interpreted in such a way ....

then the rejection is discriminatory.

Pure and simple.

"Culture fit" reasons are code for bias.

"Culture":

* national origin

* age

* religion

* gender

* sexual orientation....

... all protected classes, yet covered with the "culture fit" excuse to protect a company from being accused (correctly) of discrimination.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#365

Post by ohwaitnvm » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:24 AM UTC

kenhwang wrote: post #6

One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only takes one bad candidate to make it not worth the effort.

My personal data point is that I received feedback that was negative on specifically my base level of concept understanding on one out of ~7 short sections I did for a company, and it made me skeptical that it was the actually the real reason.

It was a whiteboard session on how to manage scheduling and reporting progress/success/failure information for long-running jobs to a frontend UI... which is something I had been specifically doing at my previous company for a year, and have done many times in many ways before. I took some lessons about communication and focus from it, but in my mind it showed that either that section's interviewer was not very good at evaluating candidates, or some other reason was the real reason and they chose to voluntarily tell me something else as a cover instead.

I'm assuming the former, because I never asked nor expected a specific reason for rejection - no cover was necessary. Finding out just frustrated me further - I really wanted that job, and of course you can't go back saying "Maybe someone else should give that section? I think I'm really good, trust me, the guy you just rejected!"

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#366

Post by kamaal » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:26 AM UTC

kstrauser wrote: post #354

kamaal wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company (well known in these parts) that I had tremendous respect for, only to get an email back with "sorry, not up to par. We need someone with more experience". Looks like this is a common pattern with take home projects. I faced a very similar problem a few weeks back. Though they called me for the interview. The general approach is to take some ones overn…

> because apparently 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' is not how real programmers find error count I've been on the other end of that, where we were explicit that the goal of the exercise was to solve problem X with technology Y so that we could gauge the applicant's skill with Y. And yet, we'd still get submissions that used Z because it was way better at solving X than Y was. Well, yeah, we know that. That's…

Well I don't know what is being tested here. grep is a fairly old utility, which might have bugs which I don't deny. But these utilities have been debugged to complete stability by now.

Besides grep itself was built on work done by other people before.

https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...

GNU grep uses the well-known Boyer-Moore algorithm, which looks first for the final letter of the target string, and uses a lookup table to tell it how far ahead it can skip in the input whenever it finds a non-matching character.

If the idea here is to test if the candidate can come with the Boyer-Moore algorithm in an hour then I doubt something like that is even possible. Things like that are not invented by some one in an hour, the original inventors themselves likely spent a life time studying and working on problems to produce anything novel.

On the other hand memorizing other people's work, which they themselves took years work in discovery, in the current of Google look-up-able knowledge, literally proves nothing. It's the exact opposite of a person capability to produce things.

The whole idea of a take home test is to demonstrate capability. If submitting a working project under a tough deadline doesn't pass that test, then Im not sure what the hiring panels are even trying to do here.

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#367

Post by WrtCdEvrydy » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

jimbob45 wrote: post #252

One hour coding test. Two one hour phone interviews. 5 hour interview with EA Tiburon. Generic rejection two weeks later. Never again. Are we cool on naming and shaming or should I save that for reddit?

> EA Tiburon

:thats_a_name_i_havent_heard_in_a_while:

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#368

Post by foolfoolz » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

anon102010 wrote: post #363

Hiring for a technical position. Women's studies major with some recent more technical junior work experience (her technical role was vague). Brought her in for an interview. Compared to others, not even close to what we needed (and didn't know what she didn't know). She went out of her way to both explain to us what idiots we were for not hiring her and demanding detailed feedback on where she was weak and others we…

you would be wrong. it does not sound like her women’s study major was any problem. but her lack of technical skills made would not prepare her for the job. this is exactly the kind of feedback that can screw you over

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#369

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:30 AM UTC

bigiain wrote: post #285

hoka-one-one wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a guy at Qualcomm Austin tell me to read Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation by Muchnik. I read it and a few months later I was working for Qualcomm San Diego. I've thought about thanking him but I doubt he'd remember me, it was such a small comment.

Do it anyway. You know if someone you don't remember from an interaction ages ago emailed you to say "Hey, you probably don't remember this, but you once told me $thing, so I took $action, and now I've achieved $outcome. Thanks you for that, it really helped my career!", it'd make you feel great and would probably be the highlight of your day, right?

[deleted]

Re: No engineer has ever sued because of constructive post-interview feedback

#370

Post by cheez » Fri, Feb 07, 2020, 4:34 AM UTC

JshWright wrote: post #291

riazrizvi wrote: post #261

You generally don't get technical interview performance feedback because technical interviews are constrained by the interviewer to put themselves in a technically confident light against the candidate. The interview is as much a crapshoot for the interviewer, because they might be less/more/similarly skilled to the candidate, but they absolutely cannot reveal themselves to be less skilled because they would undermin…

My favorite interview question is a real life issue I faced where a short sighted database design wound biting us in a pretty serious way. It's a good technical problem to talk through, and provides a lot of useful information about the candidate, but it's also an excuse to set very clear expectations that I'm not looking for the "right" answer (in real life it took half a dozen smart people a couple hours to come up…

Ah so a good interview question for a candidate is something that YOU have experience in.

Does that seem odd?

Do you think you would be an expert in something the candidate had experience in? Probably not. Should you find out how they speak about something THEY are experts in? Probably.

But like the OP said, tech interviews are about posturing so that the interviewer feels better about themselves.