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Comment by mltony | Hacker News Reader

I had similar experience with Uber last month. My recruiter scheduled an introductory phone call with me and then she forgot about it. The call was rescheduled and then she forgot again. On the third time she did call me but never apologized or anything. Then she scheduled a technical phone screen for me a few days later. On that day my interviewer called me two hours earlier than the scheduled time - no time zone difference, just that recruiter communicated wrong time to him. As it happened, I was in the middle of my lunch and caught off guard. The interviewer wasn't happy, so I guessed I didn't pass that phone screen, but the recruiter didn't even bother telling that to me - she just ignored my emails and she never even gave me her phone number. P.S. I was invited to 6 onsite interviews in other companies and in the end I've got all 6 very good offers. So, good riddance, Uber.

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It’s things like this, and the open optimizing for low false positives over low false negatives that makes me totally unsympathetic to claims that high tech companies can’t find sufficient workers and need a legislative solution. Reveled preferences don’t show a desperation for qualified workers.

Absolutely. And I think your notion of "optimizing for low false positives" is generous. I think most bad interviewers are optimized for a) employer convenience and b) feelings of power on the part of interviewers.

Part A is understandable in that the standard hiring process is optimized for the common case: scarce jobs and abundant, interchangeable workers. That gets you bulk resume submission, minimal human interaction, and indifferent, slipshod processes. Part B is just jackassery, but it gets you things like brainteaser interview questions, high-stress interviews, and a lot of biases smuggled in under things like "culture fit".

That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce. A few years back, I said, "Wait, we spend all this time optimizing our software for user experience; why don't we do the same for job applications?" I ended up with a significantly different process, one that was a little more work for us, but a way better applicant experience. I also shifted focus from finding flaws to looking to see people at their best, which is not only a better experience, but I think gets better people. I encourage everybody to apply their design thinking and user empathy skills to their own hiring process. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

> That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce.

The thing that is not scarce from the recruiters' view is applicants or maybe even resumes. This is because anyone looking for a job can easily, due to the magic of the internet, apply at dozens or even hundreds of jobs. And applicants don't even have to apply for jobs any more. If you're on LinkedIn, they can come looking for you, and again, due to the magic of the internet, there are plenty of possible people to consider for a job.

So instead of artificial scarcity we have artificial abundance.

This problem seems to be analogous to the online dating problem. Technology has made one part of the problem far too easy and this causes big problems in other parts of the pipeline.

That’s fine for the first stage of the funnel. I send in a resume and hear nothing back no harm, no foul.

But by the time a candidate is past a phone screen that’s a validated lead. A company that was really desperate to hire wouldn’t treat validated leads so poorly. That they do means that they aren’t and we should disregard self-serving claims to the contrary.

> But by the time a candidate is passed a phone screen that’s a validated lead. A company that was really desperate to hire wouldn’t treat validated leads so poorly.

They certainly shouldn't treat validated leads poorly, but we've seen ample evidence that they often do. Part of the problem may be (I'm less sure about this part) is that it is essentially the same people -- and same organization -- managing the overall hiring process through all stages of the funnel. They start with a shotgun process and they keep using a shotgun process in later stages when they absolutely shouldn't be.

It's better if you've got a prospective hiring manager inside the company that wants to hire you and is keeping an eye on the overall process -- this is what often happens whey you're recruited by employee referral. However, this just isn't an option at places like Google (and I think Facebook and Amazon as well) where you get hired into a global pool rather than hired into a specific team.

Yes, exactly. Ease of applying is one of the things sustaining the problem. It makes companies feel overwhelmed with resume spam.

A few years back when I was hiring at Code for America, I redid things so that it was harder for the lazy applicant but easier for the serious one. I asked people to send me something resume-like (LinkedIn was fine), but to skip the cover letter and instead write a short answer to 1 of 5 questions: http://williampietri.com/writing/2015/slightly-less-awful-hi...

It was great. Anybody who did that got a call back from me, usually within 24 hours, just to chat a bit about what we each were looking for. Starting from that made it much easier for me to treat each person like an actual person.

> ... to claims that high tech companies can’t find sufficient workers ...

Does anyone claim that? I thought "high tech companies" have just enough candidates even with this kind of bad practices.

Yes, their executives often testify before Congress about how there’s a shortage of STEM workers for them to hire and Something Needs to Be Done.

I got an appointment with Goldman Sachs for a 30 minute screening interview with one of their analysts. The guy called me 25 minutes late and without introducing himself proceeded to give me a highly specific question about how options work and immediately tell me he only has 5 minutes because he has to go to another meeting.

And thats not even the top reason why you should avoid goldman sachs like the cancer.

Why, then? Curious.. I'm about to accept an offer next week...

Actually could I reach out to you about the Goldman interview process?

Just one of many examples

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/former-goldma...

Not OP, but * Does the phrase 'vampire squid' ring a bell?

* How about MDB1?

culture

They have a special term for staff that haven't spent their entire career at GS: "lateral hire". A friend joined as a lateral hire, and was only really accepted as an equal when he voluntarily gave up his five days paternity leave for his first born to bail out a project in crisis. Work life balance doesn't exist at GS. If you're happy to give your whole self to GS, work evenings and weekends and socialise with colleagues, you can do very well in terms of career progression and pay. If you want a life outside work, GS may not be for you.

> Why?

Goldman's seems to have become the pantomime villain of Wall Street. Some of it's justified, most of it's not.

> I'm about to accept an offer next week

Speaking as someone who has never worked at GS, congratulations.

Wow, that should not have happened. Can you let me know the name of the recruiter? You can email me at keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail

Sorry you had a bad experience and I'm bummed we lost you :(

> keith [dot] posehn [at] gmail

Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...

I put a unique email address in my hn profile at one point and got spam sent to it after a few months

I imagine it's still a thing, but spam filters have solved most of the problem.

Large-scale spam is pretty well filtered these days. But smaller-scale (especially B2B) cold inquiries to curated lists of interested parties are still very much a thing. And sites like https://hunter.io/ absolutely do use publicly available search results (including forums) to find which of many permutations might be someone's email address. They may not be sophisticated enough yet to use [dot] as part of those permutations, but it's only a matter of time.

François from Hunter here.

Hunter does indeed search the entire public web for professional email addresses, following search engines specifications like robots.txt.

However, we do not try to reverse obfuscations as it is a clear sign the owner doesn't want the email address to be collected by automatic means. So even basic obfuscations like [dot] are enough to prevent the collection.

We also let the email addresses owners modify or delete the data we index about them: https://hunter.io/claim.

I doubt there’s an email scraper that hasn’t added logic to replace [at] with @ etc. - so most of these obfuscations are absolutely useless too.

I had my unobfuscated email in my HN profile for no more than 2 weeks, and received a couple of cold mails in turn (to this date, actually).

Sadly yes - for major company emails at least.

Just an aside, you can ignore the dot on your email, or add as many as you like. Google ignores periods on email addresses. Just google it... :D

Another fun feature with Gmail is that you can add arbitrary text to the end of your email addresses.

This can be helpful if you're interested in tracking the origins of where your received emails come from. For instance, if you sign up your address at a website and start recieving sketchy emails with a destination for myemail+thatwebsite[at]gmail, you can easily find out where the leakage occurred.

Aren’t both of those things relatively standard for email in general

Plus-based subaddresses are relatively common (sendmail supports them, Sieve has RFC 5233, etc), but dot-insensitivity is/was unique to gmail as far as I'm aware.

Unless the spammer knows about this too and trims any +suffixes from the addresses.

FastMail thought of this and lets you use subdomains instead. So user@tag.domain gets delivered to your mailbox as user+tag@domain.

Hem it's not a GMail specific feature but a common one (sub-addressing/plus addressing, RFC 5233) that skip inbox and drop messages in the +$name/tag dir/label...

The GMail specific feature is adding dots as you want in your mail localpart so (foobar, f.oo.bar, f.o.o.b.a.r etc @gmail are the very same mailbox).

Ok, that I did not know. Thanks!

Ahem. There's someone with whom I apparently share both first name, last name and, against our will, the gmail email address.

So apparently my email address is lastname.firstname@gmail.com (firstname.lastname@gmail.com was already taken) and this guy has lastnamefirstname@gmail.com.

How cool that GMail ignores dots in the middle, right ?

Sometimes I wonder if he is receiving my emails, because I often receive his emails. I tried and forwarded him his email, GMail was stupid enough to deliver them back to my inbox.

The "ignore the dots in the middle" is truly a major google brain fart.

This is to say... Like, Just, be aware of this.

That is not correct, likely this other person incorrectly gave out your email accidentally.

Indeed this must be the case. I share the same given and family name with several folks in the US and I get their mistaken emails all the time.

Wait, what ? How could that not have triggered a test somewhere at Google ? Did they just implement the dot thing after they already created both addresses ?

I'm going to chime in here since everyone downvoted the OP. My guess is he got the Gmail account early. This was a known bug early with Gmail. They fixed the signups, but it seems there were some issues that continued if you had already gotten an email address that collided prior to the"fix".

I created an account for my daughter that had this issue and it was really messed up; we can see emails sent and received by another person which included a bunch of personal information; job application conversations, flight details, etc...

We ended up just switching our daughter to a new address, but if we had a more malicious nature; this is a big security issue.

Indeed, I created my account when it was invite-based. That must be like more than ten years ago.

Thanks you for understanding.

I thought the dots didn’t make a difference for gmail

You should be able to receive emails at last.nam.e.fir.stn.ame@gmail.com too

Try it

I have a similar email address, and I get emails for three or four people with the same name as me. I get wedding invitations, tax documents, job application responses, even a grad school application response once!

I can only assume there are small differences in the actual addresses and the senders are careless when typing in the "to" field.

Downvoting this comment, wich usually pops up whenever somebody talks about the dots in hn, won't make the problem disappear. I too receive emails for someone who created an account with my namesurname but with a dot.

That's not possible. As has already been discussed in this thread, you cannot create another email that is the same but with dots. Google will consider it a duplicate and tell you the address is already taken.

Apparently there is an individual that has a similar name to me. I recently received an email involving a Swiss bank transfer of 750 million dollars.

Hei, it's me, your friendly and personal Nigerian prince!

No, you're just experiencing this: https://xkcd.com/1279/

Yep - I just default to it generally, but I know I can just get rid of it. Force of habit :P

It kind of sounds like you're from Uber, but you're not giving an @uber.com address?

A quick google of the name and you can see he is; however I agree: anyone could have that email address. If he's legit from Uber and wants correspondence about an Uber interaction he should be listing his @uber.com address.

I tend to not give out my Uber email as I get a ton of solicitations every day. Forum/web email scraping is still very much a real thing unfortunately.

My girlfriend had the same experience with Uber. They scheduled and forgot 3 times in a row. By the 4th she wasn't interested.

FYI sometime's its not the company itself (I have no idea with Uber) but rather a third party's ineptitude. I just had a series of phone interviews scheduled with candidates through an external vendor and multiple times they forgot to provide the candidate's contact information before the interview. I'm sure that's not what they told the candidate when I wasn't able to call them.

Given the company's history of misogyny, I'd say she lucked out.

I had a friend (super sharp guy, very very good in programming) long time ago - whenever he is bored, he'll schedule an interview with some company, clear the interview, and start negotiating the salary, just to see how much he could get. Once he gets an offer, he'll use that offer to drive up the offer from some other company that he interviewed with. Mind you, he had no intention of joining any of these companies, it was just a hobby/time-pass for him.

I used think he is a jerk for doing this, wasting everyone's time. After reading how companies treat the candidates, I am not so sure ...

Only the guys at the top are allowed to operate things like a business. For the people in the business itself, they are not allowed to operate like that silly

Similar for me with Nest/Google. Got invited to an onsite and my recruiter went dark. This was after the screw ups with scheduling the for the multiple phone screens and online coding tests. What ended up happening was that I never got to the onsite because after I was invited and asked for times days and what city I would be flying out of for tickets I never got another reply and I tried to contact the recruiter multiple times after. Got nothing.

Don't Google fly remote candidates to the office? I assumed that was standard procedure at BigCorps (it is at mine).

Yes, after you pass online screens and pair/coding exercises.

I had a member from the Uber team contact me directly via email by using a template they had prepared for everyone they contact. I knew because they used the wrong name. I declined to do anything with Uber, not just because they couldn’t put in a little effort to write directly to me on our first contact, but in part because of all the terrible media talk about Uber culture and treatment of employees.

Yikes, couple of people I know interviewed recently at Uber also. They seemed to have good experiences and were surprised about quality of questions and culture. Offers, if true, seemed competitive, beating all others (2 out of 3 took the offer). But I guess if something goes bad, it goes really bad...

I was headhunted by someone for Uber's ATG. After reaching out she whiffed our web meeting and turned standoffish when I politely asked if she wanted to reschedule. Maybe I was part of the bycatch? Seemed like a very meat market kind of attitude to building a team.

I had a screen with Uber last month and had the opposite experience.

You dodged a bullet there. Fate.

no time zone difference, just that recruiter communicated wrong time to him. As it happened, I was in the middle of my lunch and caught off guard. The interviewer wasn't happy

That's a red flag too - a professional interviewer, once you had explained that you weren't expecting the call until the agreed time, would have apologised and called you back later. Done it a bunch of times myself. Everyone in the industry who's been around the block knows that recruiters are generally pretty flaky and wouldn't have held it against you. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with that individual anyway.

Even when I’m calling a phone candidate at the scheduled time, I make sure to ask if it’s still a good time, are they ready and in an environment where they’re comfortable doing the interview. At phone interview stage, candidates Are about to get their first real experience of interacting with your company, and if they’re any good you will be one of many phone interviews they are juggling to fit in around their current work and normal life. It is an appropriate time to be accommodating and understanding.

What's interesting about these practices is that the _best_ candidates will have no patience for this and say "no thankyou" so they're not getting the cream of the crop. Everyone, even an obvious bad fit, should be treated respectfully and the interviewee's time and schedule should be honored.

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