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Comment by SaveClyde | Hacker News Reader

I recently had my onsite for Engineering Manager role at Stripe. Stripe interview process is lengthy, I met 14-15 people. There's a mini onsite (3 45 minute interviews) if you cleaer that one there will be a full day onsite which consists

1:1 Management Roleplay, Technical Roleplay, Technical Discussion, 3 behavioral interviews

there is a lot of overlap between mini onsite and full day onsite.

After meeting so many folks and spending so much time, the feedback you get is minimal. In my case the recruiter informed that everything was great but the team did not feel the spark.

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> the feedback you get is minimal

I've been in hiring roles for 15+ years and I've interviewed somewhere around 1000 candidates. I don't work at Stripe, but I can probably explain why you didn't get feedback.

Giving candidates feedback is really fraught. First, even honest feedback is unlikely to be satisfying. It's entirely possible that your recruiter told you exactly what the team's feedback was. "Your answers were fine, but we want better" or "... but candidate X was stronger" is super-common, but very unsatisfying. Second, while some candidates take feedback well, most don't. When I've been specific -- e.g. "your answers to questions about software architecture fell short" or "you didn't clearly demonstrate experience solving production issues" -- most candidates argue or get angry. People are really, really bad about taking criticism well. I've even had two candidates threaten to sue me, and one threaten violence. These are obviously outliers, but they do happen.

Finally, the upside is limited: to the company, what's the value of feedback? We've already decided you're not a fit, so what value is feedback to us? Especially if, as I've explained, you're unlikely to get much value from it either?

The best way to get feedback about your prospects as a job candidate isn't from someone a company you're interviewing with. Instead, ask someone you trust to conduct a mock interview with you and give you feedback. You'll be more to be able to listen if it's someone you know has your best interest in mind; they'll be more likely to give honest feedback if they know you'll take it well.

The hiring process isn't just about the candidates you make end up hiring. Everyone that comes in contact with it is going to form an impression of your company--positive or negative.

Clearly there's some kinds of feedback that is likely to leave a negative impression (see those that threatened violence!) but on the hand putting someone through days and days of interviews and then saying "we didn't feel a spark" also is going to leave a negative impression.

The rare interviews where I received concrete actionable feedback afterwords, even though it still stung I have a more positive impression than those where I got some pabulum (much less the ones that ghosted me).

Yep, 100%. Saying it's not use to the "company" says everything; you never really cared.

It's also short sided because you may burn all those candidates for life. Some of those candidates you didn't want to hire today might be excellent 5 years down the road.

>> What's the upside for the company?

That I'd apply with you again - if I enjoyed the process and the specific feedback either suggests to me that I didn't articulate well or I need to be better prepared. If the process is bad or you treat me like cattle or you provide no feedback, I don't know if the problem is you or me and I don't think I'd try to work for your company again.

I think for some glaring problems, feedback is helpful. But in a lot of cases, companies have no clue if they are really hiring the best candidate. It's a crap shoot whether they realize it or not.

But if you have 50 candidates that are all qualified for the job, you are basically just looking for random reasons to exclude candidates until you narrow it down to a few.

Not to minimize your frustration, but if you put yourself on the other side of the hiring table, I could see "spark" as a coded word for "soft skills." The good news is, it appears that because they spent a significant amount of time with you and they had that many interviewers involved, they were very seriously considering your offer.

An EM role is going to be less about your technical competency and more on things you talked to them about. If you think back to what you were asked and the stories you shared with the hiring folks, maybe try to reflect on your lessons and behaviors in your stories. Were you considering your organization's top line goals when you pushed your team into finishing a project. Were you considering your direct reports' own career goals. Were you displaying empathy and asked the right questions to understand some bigger meaning? It's hard man to see any of that on your own, I know, it sucks, but the recruiter is busy talking to 100s of people and if you aren't going to be a sure bet, they have to cut their ties and move on.

If I put myself on the other side of the hiring table, I would have the common decency to give someone at least a little bit of feedback if they gave up more than a full day of their time to wrestle themselves through our convoluted hiring process.

Employees doing the evaluation are usually separated from that communication. They probably wrote down fairly detailed notes each into an interview management system and talked about it in a 30m meeting.

But it's up to the recruiting dept to deliver the news / feedback, and because it's a large legal liability trap to actually give feedback and since the recruiters don't have the technical background to understand the feedback in the first place, usually tell candidates not much at all. On top of that, most recruitment departments are bad at most companies because of structural issues in being a recruiter in a first place.

To really solve this, you need to remove the legal liability trap. The industry works around it with backchannel communication of the feedback, but that usually means you have to know people on the team interviewing you.

>> everything was great but the team did not feel the spark.

That's a really poor response. I can understand that many of us would have that same implicit gut feeling, but recruitment, and especially supposedly exemplar recruiters like Stripe, have an obligation to articulate their reasons for decisions in a much more grounded framework.

When I say obligation I mean primarily to their internal stakeholders (to candidates would be nice, but let's be realistic here); the team's primary objective is to define & put process around finding, assessing and hiring people, not optimize for efficiently applying bias and "gut feeling" quickly to large pools of people.

It's unfortunate, but it's rare for any company to give direct feedback when passing on a candidate. It creates legal exposure for very little benefit to the company since they've already decided not to invest further. As a candidate, I hate getting rejections with no feedback, but I understand.

Wow!

I wonder how much of interview overhead it would be for Sr Enggrs and Managers. Multiple rounds of interviews like this is overkill.

No kidding. When I hear about long grueling hiring processes like this, I wonder what the hiring company is finding out in the 8th hour of interviews that they didn't in the 7th. Or in the case of one job my sister applied to: the 8th interview!

In this case, maybe that one person, at the end of a long day, who didn't feel the spark?

Maybe to get internal buyin?

It's not so easy to flip the bozo-bit and write someone off if you were involved with the interview process to hire someone.

Roleplay?

I can't imagine doing that in an interview, especially with people I don't know... is it as embarrassingly cringey as it sounds?

Yes, it was cringey. In both the role plays the actors were either fresh out of college with 1 or 2 years experience at Stripe and I am not sure if they were really calibrated to do the leadership interviews.

I had a similar experience at Stripe and it was the low point in an otherwise (what I felt) great interview.

I was interviewing for a forward-deployed/field engineer role and they expected me in an hour to come up with a nuanced strategy, down to SOAP vs REST with timelines and specific commitments, on how I'd do a large-scale payment integration with a partner. The interview was a disaster. Not only was it clear that my interviewer had little real-world experience in the sort of environment we were roleplaying (with internal politics, tons of legacy, teams of varying quality and type of skills, etc) but it seemed they were looking for something really specific I just couldn't grasp.

It went horribly and I didn't get an offer. So maybe a counterpoint to an otherwise great company with great process. To their credit, they said they didn't really have a bar for this (newish) role. But still, it was amateurish and all-around bad.

Maybe I'm wrong about this but it seems odd for a company to hire externally for engineering manager except in extremely rare cases? From experience in a few companies I can't think of people who were hired directly to that role (e.g. a people manager of engineers). I basically only see external ICs and senior engineering leader hires and internal promotion of engineers to engineering managers.

I think it's tricky to hire managers externally, because it's a hard skill to measure -- you can't really manage on a whiteboard. But, side-grading ICs to management isn't always ideal, so you should be open to hiring managers externally.

In my experience, when you start with a team of great engineers who all love to build it's surprisingly rare that one of them wants to stop building and start managing. I'd actually say most of the time, by which I mean more than 50% of the time, an engineering manager is hired rather than promoted. Obviously this is anecdotal.

Hiring externally for any role at any company is very normal (e.g., FANG companies hire external EMs all the time).

>internal promotion of engineers to engineering managers

That assumes you have ICs who want to and have the skills to go into management. Promoting people for the sake of filling a chair leads to really bad dynamics.

Moreover, newly promoted managers lack experience and if all you have is the blind leading he blind then it tends to create issues. You need some seasoned people in the mix to provide guidance.

Same here experiences here. Found it to be super frustrating.

This is what happens when you start to overpay your HRs

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