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Comment by threeseed | Hacker News Reader

People need to stop expecting feedback.

Hiring a candidate is like going on a date. It's a mix of background, personality, appearance, communication skills, confidence etc. And like a date each interviewer's opinion of you will be different.

And so asking feedback (a) is pointless since it may force you to change things that don't need changing, (b) clearly demonstrates you weren't the right candidate which may hurt further chances and (c) may be counterproductive since the interviewer may lie or be uniquely identifying faults that others don't find.

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Feedback is extremely valuable. But you should take it with a grain of salt. If you are rejected several times, with feedback, and some of that feedback happens to overlap? Definitely something to consider fixing.

Sorry but this is the real world.

If you want feedback go see a therapist or career coach or talk to friends, family, mentors, previous coworkers etc. Don't expect a hiring manager to do this for you. As someone who has interviewed hundreds it would actually make me resent you because if you can't show the initiative or take the responsibility to improve yourself then I made the right decision not to hire you.

Worst of all I and many others would feel uncomfortable giving personality advice (if that was the issue) and would just lie and give some other reason. It's human nature and would just throw you off course and wouldn't help anyone.

Isn't asking for feedback in a real-world scenario (not a fake one like having your friends interview you) precisely the kind of thing one would do if he or she is interested in improving him or herself?

Where do you work? I'd like to place it in my "don't work for these assholes" file.

> As someone who has interviewed hundreds it would actually make me resent you because if you can't show the initiative or take the responsibility to improve yourself

How do they know what to improve if you won't tell them what needs improvement (in your eyes)?

Giving feedback is the recruiter's job; a hiring manager doesn't have the overhead. It's simple for a credible recruiter to share a couple of sentences to the candidate.

Clearly your strengths lie in organization, communication, and technology, not in carefully interacting with other people (as in Sales, Marketing, Recruiting).

Delegate this to the recruiter so the candidate doesn't get a bad impression of the company they just attempted to join.

Feel free to resent me, you've already said no anyway. I will resent you and your company for that, as well. However as far as I'm concerned you might as well not exist once I walk out of that door. But before I do that, I will try to use you for my own benefit. Luckily, most people I've met turn out to not actually be dicks like yourself and it works out great.

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