Isn’t having a reputation of providing good feedback useful? I interviewed for Intel’s rotation program and got rejected. When I asked why, they told me that my circuit knowledge was weak. This was back before logical effort was standard material in VLSI classes; I hadn’t seen it before, and ended up deriving an overly complicated and slightly wrong version to solve the question I got asked in the interview. After getting the feedback, I opened up the VLSI text the interviewer suggested and worked through the problems. From that point on, I aced all my circuit design interviews and even got circuit design job offers, even though my specialization was in a different area. Had I not gotten that feedback, I would have had no idea that the reason I was failing my VLSI interviews was because my course didn’t cover logical effort, and I wouldn’t have been able to find out by asking my classmates, because they were all in the same boat as I was.

Why was that useful for Intel? I told my friends about it; some of them, who were on the fence about interviewing at Intel, took an interview they might have otherwise turned down because they knew that, if nothing else, they would get useful feedback from the interview.