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When you've become your planned '10-year self' and are running a company, you'll find that there is no up-side to giving a no-hire an honest reason for your decision and plenty of down-side for doing so. As an example here, the binary decision not to hire you as an employee has created such a grudge that, almost two years later, you're still bitter enough to compose a rant against the company -- even though you never set a foot inside the place!

How bad would your rant have been if you were told "you're just not strong in <certain knowledge you thought you had cased>" or "a colleague told us that you were exceptionally difficult to work with in high-pressure situations and often became bitter if you didn't get your way"? What would the up-side have been for the company telling you these things? Wouldn't your bad-mouthing have just become worse, with your rant here (and elsewhere?) even nastier?

Yes, it would be nice if we could all tell no-hires exactly what they need to work on, but it is a very rare person who would say "Thanks for the rejection! That's awesome feedback and I'll tell everyone how you've managed to make me a better developer!"

As an example here, the binary decision not to hire you as an employee has created such a grudge that, almost two years later, you're still bitter enough to compose a rant against the company -- even though you never set a foot inside the place!

Not such a grudge. I just thought I'd point out a discrepancy between image and reality. I have no idea if this reflects at all on Joel, and I'm sure that Fog Creek is a better place to work than 94% of all companies. The two Fog Creek programmers I've had substantial discussions with have impressed me.

How bad would your rant have been if you were told "you're just not strong in <certain knowledge you thought you had cased>"

I'd ask for advice and maybe the name of a textbook or open source project that I could learn from. I was unemployed at the time, and one great thing about being unemployed is that you have a lot of free time in which to learn things.

or "a colleague told us that you were exceptionally difficult to work with in high-pressure situations and often became bitter if you didn't get your way"?

That's excellent information (in the sense of being useful; it's obviously bad news). It means that you need to use someone else as a reference.

Joel received a question regarding this sort of feedback in an SO podcast.

He brought up a case where someone made it to an on-site interview, and it was noted that the guy repeatedly belittled the office assistant and sort of thumbed his nose at her. In this case, he would refuse to give advice to this individual because he wouldn't want to give him insight on how he could fake being a nice person well-enough to get a job somewhere else.

However, overall his general stance was that you're being compared to a large number of applicants. Even if you were qualified to get a job there normally, someone could've applied that happened to wipe the floor with everyone. Regardless, the odds of you reapplying aren't that high (though he notices it), so it's simply not worth the effort - if he noticed you stood out, he would've made the effort to continue. Whereas otherwise he could be driving business value elsewhere.

Honestly, I don't disagree with him.

He brought up a case where someone made it to an on-site interview, and it was noted that the guy repeatedly belittled the office assistant and sort of thumbed his nose at her.

You can take my word on this or not, but I'm not an asshole. I'm a decent guy whom he chose not to hire, probably for good reasons, but it would have been better to tell me what those reasons were, seeing as I was in a very tough spot (remember that recession thing?). Now I'll never work with Fog Creek in any capacity, never buy their products, and never recommend anyone to work there (although I wouldn't advise against it; I'm not vindictive).

Even if you were qualified to get a job there normally, someone could've applied that happened to wipe the floor with everyone.

Fair. I wouldn't have objected at all if he told me something to the effect of "someone else applied with more experience". That's the reality of a competitive market and I would have respected him for telling me that. Besides, if I don't get in because they're hiring these great people, then that's an incentive for me to re-apply in a few years when I am a stronger applicant and much more likely to succeed.

Regardless, the odds of you reapplying aren't that high (though he notices it), so it's simply not worth the effort - if he noticed you stood out, he would've made the effort to continue.

If he turned me down because he didn't see me as a fit for the job, or I didn't have the skills he was looking for, then that's perfectly reasonable and he could have said as much. On the other hand, if the reason he didn't take 5 minutes out of his day (or that of someone else who could do so) to explain his rationale was because he didn't think I am talented enough for doing so to be worth it, then his judgment of talent is worth less than dogshit.

Your last paragraph is way off reality. People will use your talent to judge whether you're worth considering for a job. People will use your perceived character to decide whether you are worth doing a favor such as helping you in your career. If your attitude of "I'm talented enough to deserve your time and advice" showed, that alone would be sufficient reason not to help you.

A little humility while asking for help goes a long way with most people. That means if someone chooses not to help you out you recognize that their world isn't centered around you and your problems, and don't hold it against them. Instead, be grateful if they do give you the gift of their time and advice.

Vindictive probably isn't the right word for it, but you seem to feel excessively upset about this, given how many comments you've written on the subject.

It seems like you convinced yourself you were naturally entitled to work there, and are having a hard time dealing with the cognitive dissonance of not even getting an in-office interview. Even wanting to be told why you weren't hired seems to imply a sense of entitlement on your part. To be fair, Joel spends a lot of words in his blog trying to make programmers feel entitled to special treatment (because then we'll apply to work at his awesome company which pampers us). So I can understand the emotions involved here, I just think you need to be a little more critical about how you're responding to this.

Getting turned down by a company with 32 employees and yet hundreds of applicants for each open position is to be expected, frankly. At those scales, I don't think they can afford the time it takes to tell everyone why they were rejected.

Many companies are reluctant to say anything about why they didn't choose you because there is no upside and potential legal downside for them. I don't know what top 100 Putnam is or DE Shaw or how picky you are but I'm sure you are great.

I am not going to sue them. Why would I waste a year of my life chasing a lawsuit that I can't win, having no legal leg to stand on, over a decision they have every right to make?

However, the "black box" behavior of companies is pretty unprofessional. It makes the job search process a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

Just because you don't like a specific policy doesn't make it unprofessional. Employers have no duty to job applicants to help them through the qualification process.

"Employers have no duty to [X]" does not imply "[X] is not unprofessional". No one has any legal duty to be professional.

Joel doesn't know you're not going to sue him. Lots of people file frivolous lawsuits against companies, in the hope of a settlement even if the lawsuit has no merit (it takes a lot of time and money to defend against frivolous suits). It makes no sense for him to expose himself to that sort of risk.

All of your replies here suffer from the same logical flaw and many people have pointed it out. Fog Creek has a policy of not divulging their reasons for denying an applicant a certain position. Joel has given his arguments about why that is sound, so I will not bother to repeat them. You keep assuming that Fog Creek should know that it would be safe to make an exception in your case and getting offended that they choose not to. The fact is you should not be an exception.

To make this as clear as possible, suppose you were trying to get pain killers without a prescription. No matter how obvious it is you're not a junkie and are in pain, it would not be appropriate for the pharmacy to sell you the medicine based on their subjective judgment. It may not matter in this instance, but it would undermine the whole system.

The reason why I respond is because it has been frustrating for me to read your replies on this thread because this gap in reasoning has made all of your comments sound very personal. Anybody can sympathize with the frustration around being denied a job, but your story says nothing about Joel's management approach.

It's hard to be sure you would have no leg to stand on. It would be an emotionally charged conversation, and misinterpretation would be likely. If the hiring manager, for instance, said anything about a legally protected characteristic (like age or marital status, for example), it could be easily construed as illegal discrimination. One could make the communication written to avoid certain types of misunderstanding, but then you'd give the lawyers an actual document to play with.

There is no upside. Remember that the hiring manager can be sued personally, not just the business.

Finally, consider another factor. Most of the time there are several qualified candidates and one may stand out. That does not mean the others were bad, just that one candidate clicked. It is of negative value to say "Nothing personal, but we really hit it off with Mr. Foobar and not you." Silence is actually better than pronouncing an under-informed judgement on someone based on a series of half-hour interviews.

No, just because they didn't tell you why they rejected your application does not mean they are uncool.

It just means you have rather unreasonable expectations of what other people should do for you.

No, just because they didn't tell you why they rejected your application does not mean they are uncool.

It's different from how Joel presents his philosophy of business. For a person, it would be hypocrisy. For a company, it's more accurately described as inconsistency (because there's no evidence whatsoever that Joel had anything to do with HR's decision not to inform me). Which is probably inevitable when a large number of people are involved (moving parts -> inconsistency). I wouldn't hold this against any specific individual. I'm sure most of the individual people at FC are great.

How does your experience "differ" from how Joel presents his "philosophy of business"? Please be specific. Joel has touched on this specific topic in podcasts before (i.e. why he wouldn't provide feedback to a job applicant), so I don't see how this differs from what he has preached before. If anything, your experience fits in rather perfectly with how he claims to run his business.

He presents himself as some sort of enlightened manager. Yet when he's on the spot with a chance to prove it, he slinks back into the traditional "neither confirm nor deny" stance of old-style corporations.

He was within his rights not to give a reason. Not saying otherwise. I'm just saying I'll never work with him or his company in the future. Although he'll probably never have any use of this "bridge", he gained nothing by burning it.

Joel mentions in the linked article that Fog Creek now has 32 employees. Given the hundreds of applicants he alludes to for every open position and the fact that he spends several days a week focusing on his blog I'd say the odds are good that he didn't personally reject you.

Most companies don't call back. You can just assume that they had at least one candidate in the pipeline who was a better fit in terms of culture, location, salary expectations, or skills.

Joel mentions in the linked article that Fog Creek now has 32 employees. Given the hundreds of applicants he alludes to for every open position and the fact that he spends several days a week focusing on his blog I'd say the odds are good that he didn't personally reject you.

Oh, I'm sure of that, but it reflects badly on his company that, when a talented applicant-- someone you'd not want to piss off if you have any future-sight whatsoever-- wanted to know what he could do to make future applications more successful, they wouldn't even help me out in the slightest.

"someone you'd not want to piss off if you have any future-sight whatsoever"

All joking aside.....from reading your posts, something seems a bit off about you. You seem to be introspective, but it really seems you have some deep seeded issues, maybe you should talk to someone about it?

I think I know where he's coming from. Being unemployed when you just get out of college sucks in a big way, because you feel like you never got a chance. Partly because we hvaven't really had a chance yet, and because interview skills don't always correlate with job performace and interviews have a random component, people in my subgroup really would appreciate feedback, though I realize why that's imposssible. The parent poster is merely expressing a sentiment from my age group. Joel is really more of an innocent bystander that got caught in a generic rant.

I try to stay more upbeat about it though and work on a portfolio in the meantime so I'll get a competitive edge. Maybe you'll even see a startup by me in the near future ;-)

At 22, I'm also part of "this age group."

If being unemployed just out of college is such a problem for the young man (and that's not unreasonable), he should drop the attitude of "I'm pretty particular about what kind of work I want to be doing, and that makes me a poor fit for most jobs". If he doesn't want to work or only wants a very specific job and can't get it, that's reasonable. Just don't complain about it. Otherwise, this young man who believes himself highly qualified should take a job that's reasonably satisfactory as opposed to perfect until the "Worst Recession Ever" is over. There are a lot of people out there who'd kill to be in his position.

I don't disagree with you at all. I was just trying to explain what I think his motivations are from a more neutral perspective to promote cross-segment understanding.

Feedback is not impossible. I don't know where this lawsuit paranoia is coming from. If someone is a decent programmer and has a good resume, he's not going to launch a frivolous lawsuit about not getting hired. I wanted to know so I could be more successful in future applications; that's all. I wanted to move on. Suing someone would accomplish the exact opposite.

I'd just been laid off and my ex-boss was a friend of Joel's, which is why I said it was unprofessional not to inform me of the reason; declining to do so casts aspersion onto my ex-boss (although I checked my own references and he wasn't saying anything negative).

Dude, plenty of people launch lawsuits at the drop of a hat. Even if they are something like 1 in 100 people, a lawsuit is _expensive_. The cost benefit analysis just doesn't pan out. If I were in charge, I'd do the same thing. Protecting your own people far outweighs a questionably existent responsibility to someone you don't know. It really is nothing personal. The way to beat the system is with volume and constantly making yourself more competitive.

Who says that an "enlightened manager" is one who opens his company up to potential litigation by providing honest feedback to any rejected job applicant that wants it?

There's not a whole lot of people who are going to like what a potential employer has to say about them if they have been rejected. They have no way of gauging how someone will react and there is virtually zero benefit to providing any feedback whatsoever. This has nothing to do with management style; it's just common sense.

Who says that an "enlightened manager" is one who opens his company up to potential litigation by providing honest feedback to any rejected job applicant that wants it?

Potential litigation? Given that (1) I would have absolutely no legal leg to stand on, and (2) I'd rather get another job and advance my career than spend a year suing someone, blackballing myself in the process: why would I possibly do that? If that thought even went through anyone's mind, I'm insulted, because I'd have to be an idiot to try to pull that off.

If your legal strategy, regarding someone who has absolutely no incentive (and plenty of counterincentives) to sue you, comes before your humanity, there's something wrong.

They have no way of gauging how someone will react and there is virtually zero benefit to providing any feedback whatsoever.

There's no benefit to helping out someone who applied to work at your company and might be doing something of interest to you in the future? Really?

Potential litigation? Given that (1) I would have absolutely no legal leg to stand on, and (2) I'd rather get another job and advance my career than spend a year suing someone, blackballing myself in the process: why would I possibly do that? If that thought even went through anyone's mind, I'm insulted, because I'd have to be an idiot to try to pull that off.

All of your suppositions assume that the potential employer knows and understands all of your motivations! They don't. Maybe you're a wonderful, stand-up guy. But maybe you're not. They have no way of knowing for sure. So it's only natural for them to assume that some applicants may give them grief if they provide an "honest answer" as to why that particular applicant was not hired. Whether or not you, specifically would cause them grief is totally and completely irrelevant unless, perhaps, they have an explicit reason to believe that you, specifically wouldn't cause them grief. Can you provide any reason that you, specifically should be treated differently than all other applicants who they interview, including the ones who would cause them grief if they were told exactly why they were not hired?

On the topic of litigation, even if you didn't have a leg to stand on legally (which may or may not be true), even launching a frivolous legal claim against them can be annoying and costly to them. They still have to grab a lawyer to advise them on the matter and they still have to defend themselves against anything you may or may not bring forward, frivolous or not.

There's no benefit to helping out someone who applied to work at your company and might be doing something of interest to you in the future? Really?

Really! Fog Creek undoubtedly receives a veritable plethora of job applications. The chances that you specifically will be of great interest to them in the future outside the scope of being employed with their company is slim as a matter of probability, assuming that you don't already have some kind of working relationship with their company. If you do already have a working relationship with Fog Creek, you should take this issue up with them directly instead of on Hacker News.

I can kind of see his point. Joel seems to be running his business in a very open way, with lots of details about hiring and such being blogged about publicly and in his magazine column. It would be a bit of a disconnect to get closer in as interviewee, just to see the traditional corporate walls come up. It doesn't surprise me though.

Exactly. Nowhere am I saying that Fog Creek is worse than J. Random Big-Box Corporation. I'm just saying that, based on one anecdote during 2008, reports of it being markedly better seem to be overstated.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but is it possible that they thought so negatively of you that they didn't want to violate the old "if you have nothing good to say, then say nothing" rule? Your response here in the thread does not paint you in a very good light. We recently hired this bright young intern. Only he second-guesses every decision and he's becoming more of a burden than a help. My gut's telling me that you might be one of those kinds of people.

I'm playing devil's advocate here, but is it possible that they thought so negatively of you that they didn't want to violate the old "if you have nothing good to say, then say nothing" rule?

I'm not asking for anyone to say anything "good" or "bad". There is no good or bad. There's the truth, and I'm asking for the basic courtesy of telling it straight. And yes, you can say "you came off as arrogant in your phone interview". I'm an adult; I can handle it.

Perhaps you can handle that sort of criticism, but most people cannot, and it would not behoove them to guess to which category you belong.

I think there is a deeper unreasonableness. What would a truly scientific hiring process look like? What might a large organisation, such as the British Civil Service do to make sure that it hires the right people?

One idea is to score candidates on many measures (100?) and make use guessed weights to guide initial hiring decisions. A decade later the organisation can compare the initial assessments against the hires subsequent progress up the organisation. This leads to a re-assessment of the weights.

Notice that the new weights were computed from the poputation of hires, not the population of candidates, and the hires were chosen using the old weights. The new weights are causing the organisation to hire people that it would have rejected in the past and it has no solid data on how those people would have performed in the organisation - it didn't hire them! There are other problems. The whole approach has too many parameters to calibrate it reliably from the data available. The linearity implicit in a weighted sum is implausible, a more sophisticated model with the number of variables squared or cubed is clearly required. The time scale on which the success of the hiring decisions becomes apparent is long, decades. It is the time scale on which things change. So the new scientific weights might be no better than rebooting the whole process with new, guessed weights.

My point is that organisations don't have substantial reasons for their hiring decisions. They have a process because they are forced to chose, and they consequently have procedural reasons for their hiring decisions.

A small organisation, such as Fog Creek, that has scientifically trained personnel, may be well aware that it hires the wrong people. Those in charge know that they hire the wrong people and that they cannot fix the problem. They also know that business is competitive, they only have to do better than their competitors, and since the problem is pretty much impossible, their competitors cannot fix it either.

The serious answer to the hiring question is "We don't know how to chose. We make wild guesses and then pretend that we have good reasons for them so that we don't feel too bad afterwards. The whole topic is really embarrassing. You shouldn't have asked."