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Comment by gwbas1c | Hacker News Reader

As a candidate, I've always preferred polite "thanks, but no thanks" responses in a timely manner. The other kind of feedback that I like is things like, "we need people with a different background / experience than you have."

IMO, judgement feedback (you screwed up how you handle your yak shaving, or I don't think we'll get along with each other) is too subjective to be constructive.

And, I get it. As someone who's interviewed a lot of candidates, my biggest fear is hiring someone who is either incompetent or difficult to get along with. Evaluating a candidate is so subjective that feedback beyond "your experience doesn't match our needs" is just flame bait, or worse.

To paraphrase Joel Spolsky: It's safer to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad employee.

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I feel that most of the time candidates just want to hear something that puts the situation out of their control, and therefore wasn't merit based.

It's always easier to hear "I'm breaking up with you because I'm moving for a new job and want to concentrate on my career" than "I'm breaking up with you because you're awkward around my friends and aren't interesting".

You really want to go through life thinking you’re competent at something?

Honest feedback hurts but it’s how you grow.

And if people cared at all about interviewees they’d give some semblance of honest feedback rather than “no thanks.”

I had to dig to get any type of feedback on my interviews, and even then it wasn't clear on what I needed to do to improve.

> what

It may be not your fault. Or, it might have been your lucky day, not getting that job. In any case, you need to make damn sure that you know your trade.

> And if people cared at all about interviewees they’d give some semblance of honest feedback rather than “no thanks.”

A former Apple architect once gave me "honest feedback" about the languages I work with. It was his opinion about industry direction, that 8 years later, was 100% wrong. (Although I don't think I was a good match for his startup.)

That's why I consider honest feedback flame bait.

If you get a piece of feedback from one person, you know what you would need to do differently to get hired by that person.

If you get similar pieces of feedback from 3 people, you now likely know what you need to do differently to get hired, period.

It’s not about getting specific, individual pieces of feedback. It’s about being able to triangulate toward what you need to do differently.

And maybe you get 3 pieces of feedback that are all completely contradictory. That tells you that what you need to do is keep trying.

That assumes there is no systematic bias. Which clearly there is.

Sure, there may be, and you will have proofs that it exists and may find a way, how to handle it.

>That assumes there is no systematic bias. Which clearly there is.

This is a non-helpful statement. Humans are bias machines. We function based on our collective experience or in some cases differed experience. Saying there is systemic bias doesn't really add anything other than saying exploit what ever bias you can find to your advantage.

And receiving that feedback helps you realize if there is any bias and adapt accordingly.

You take the advice with grain of salt. Still better than receiving no feedback. I don't think it is productive to think of it as flame bait.

> Still better than receiving no feedback

If he had said, "I need someone with more experience in language XXX," it would have been 100% true for his case, and 100% appropriate for me. I can read the market for technology.

Instead, he basically said, "you have a lot of experience in language YYY, which isn't going anywhere." That was quite subjective, as language YYY has significantly more use and investment since our conversation.

It also isn't really appropriate, because the job was in language XXX, not language YYY. Assuming he hired me, we'd have to agree that my learning curve in language XXX was appropriate for his needs in a developer. (He clearly needed someone who could hop in without much of a learning curve.)

(Remember, sometimes you hire the candidate and expect them to learn the stack on the job, other times you hire someone because they are already an expert in the stack.)

Debates on languages like this are really just pissing matches. IMO, dressing up the debate as "constructive feedback on my merit as a candidate" hurt his credibility in his leadership role.

Rejection is incredibly difficult to deal with. I suspect some people will say they are immune to it, but (anecdotal example) I've been rejected from hundreds of jobs over the past 3 years and every one hurts a little. I felt it never got easier to deal with rejection, but it got easier to interview and move on.

Perhaps it's not the rejection, but the energy in creating the next steps I need to take (more resumes, taking classes, new career, therapy, etc).

> rejected from hundreds of jobs

Sounds extreme. Were you applying to random jobs?

You're right, it was probably only around two hundred or so jobs I applied to with 50% response/rejection rate over the past 3 years.

Unfortunately, for many recent college graduates, it's not.

It's not extreme at all. Companies are treating it as a numbers game, which is part of what the article is about. The flipside of the coin is that candidates are forced into treating it as a numbers game too.

For example: As a candidate you might submit a resume and get an automated "Thank you, we'll be in touch". There's a large variety of reasons why you might face a very low probability that someone will indeed be in touch that have nothing to do with you.

The most common is that you're just too late in the process. They might already have dozens of viable candidates in later stages. They are being economical about their interviewers' time, thinking: Well, the probability that all of those later-stage candidates will end up getting terminated is low, so we're not doing first-round interviews for now. But they are not being economical about expectations created in candidates' minds about the likelihood of getting an offer. They've simply defined the process to say: We pull the advertising after the role has been filled, because there is always the chance that we will have to go back to candidates in earlier rounds.

There might be even more extreme cases. Not saying that this is particularly common, but imagine a company has decided they need a diversity hire, say hiring a woman to an all-male tech team. All applications by men may be dead on arrival. They may not want to send out rejection letters so as not to establish the pattern.

Or the role may have already been filled and there may simply be clerical error or clerical laziness to blame about why the advertising hasn't been pulled yet.

So, from a candidate's point of view: "We will be in touch" means almost nothing. Having come across a job ad means less than nothing. Your calculation is simply going to be: I get one human contact out of every ten times I submit a resume. I get one firm offer out of every ten times I get a human contact. I'm shooting for three firm offers to choose from. So that means I have to submit my resume 300 times. Consequently you can't afford to be all too picky. You just submit to everything that could even remotely be a match. You only start putting real brain power into thinking about whether you actually want to work there in later stages of the process.

It's a sad state of affairs, but it's just the world we live in now.

Sounds like me on Tinder. There is no use thinking to much before first contact anyway. I have to spam and see what happens.

Luckely my experience in job searching has not involved ghosting or spamming. Is that an US thing? Or is "job dating" less parallell in smaller cities or countries?

It's only a "numbers game" if you treat it as such by "shot-gunning" your applications. Much better to exercise your professional network (in the flesh or online).

The whole point of web-based application process is to weed out as many candidates as possible. If you can skip that step and first make contact with a human, the odds are much better and it's less work and stress for everyone.

I am on my 7th or 8th job now and have only applied to probably 12 in my entire life.

Tailoring resumes to specific postings, and trying to find someone at the company you have some sort of connection with, are both pretty damn important unless, as you say, you're shot-gunning an identical resume to every company within 50 miles.

...there are plenty of situations that will render your social network useless, for example most of your network might be academics and you might have decided to leave academia. Most of your network might be in companies doing onsite-only in a geographical area you've moved away from. Most of your network might be less-well-paid than you. (So: the jobs you would want to apply for are with hiring managers that your friends don't know and have no influence over and if they did, they would use the opportunity for themselves rather than someone else). -- In my experience, networking just doesn't work as well as business school ideology would have you believe it does for various reasons that I'm going to try to sum up by quoting a Groucho Marx joke: "I'd never join a club that would have someone like me for a member."

This year alone I’ve applied to over 800 C# or .Net related positions and have yet to get any offer. It’s incredibly difficult for some of us unfortunately. Precisely 886 if anyone was interested

I do wonder if you're spreading yourself too thin and not focusing on nailing one or two jobs you're really interested in by applying to so many places. I get that it's a numbers game so I truly understand and salute the effort, but I wonder if being rejected from hundreds of jobs is pointing out that something needs to be adjusted. I recently spent a few months finding a job and landed one I'm really happy with. I'm happy to provide feedback and advice if you're interested. Contact details in my profile.

How popular is .NET in your market? Have you considered learning other technologies to enhance your skillset?

I would recommend that you attend local user group meetings and talk to people. Weak social connections are an excellent source of referrals.

Are having trouble getting interviews, getting offers, or both?

I agree that rejection is always tough. I spent a year manoeuvring to be made redundant from a job I wanted to leave (e.g. told my boss I wanted to go, made sure everything I did was covered by other people). And still, when they did finally let me go, the rejection did hurt quite a bit.

Isn't rejection good in the long run? For me it gives clarity especially if there is feedback and it motivated me to try harder and care less.

It's not better than not getting rejected, no.

To be rejected from hundreds of jobs suggest you should reevaluate how you approach the entire problem.

At the very basic level you should understand what are the expectations of the employer and whether you can fill those expectations. Try to find and talk to people at those positions you are applying to. Try to understand where you fall short.

I don't have hard numbers, but anecdotally, I know two people for whom this is simply not true at all. It took them months to find jobs, and they sincerely wanted to know why they were being rejected. If you are told "we didn't hire you, because you don't have skill X", or "you don't have any experience with Y", then you can focus on getting better at that thing. It was extremely frustrating for them to be told "We found a better candidate", or more commonly, getting no response at all.

The problem is, often, there isn't a skill or experience that is the reason. I literally just went through this.

I interviewed for a position that I am way qualified for. I check every box, in terms of skills and abilities and experience. I'm essentially doing the job right now, just with a different title.

And I was passed over for a less qualified, less experienced candidate. The reason I was given, as I dove through the organization (it's where I work now) to ask for feedback to improve myself professionally, was that there wasn't really anything I can get better at, it was just 'fit'.

I was able to ask probing questions to get to the root of that, and it turns out that, outside of the folks I work with daily, people outside of my division don't necessarily know my leadership abilities. But tell me, how would you even go about quantifying that for an external candidate, other than saying the, very safe, 'we found a better candidate'?

Easier? Yes. Helpful? Not IMHO. I spent my first 20 years on this earth incapable of processing critique, regardless of merit. It was incredibly difficult to get out of that. But once you realize that rejection or critique is just input, you can learn from it. It's obviously not always helpful, but the majority of the time it sure is (YMMV).

You can categorize some cases into these:

1) Someone has observed something you do that you're unaware of, and could work on.

2) Someone has misinterpreted something you do, and now you know they have, but can be glad they told you so you know where they stand, and/or clear the confusion by explaining what really happened.

3) Someone doesn't like something you do, but you are already aware of you doing it, but think your way is better, for reasons X, Y and Z, and if you feel like it you can explain that.

4) Someone who has more experience than you recognizes a behavior from their earlier selves, and points this out so that you get a head start at learning their lesson.

Regardless of the merit of the feedback, you can't process it and deal (or not deal) with it until you hear it.

If you can step away from yourself and just observe and reflect, there are so many things you can learn that I wish I could imprint on a younger me. But at least I'm trying to catch up as a 30-something now.

> “It's safer to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad employee.”

After a decade of building teams in machine learning, I regard this as one of those hallowed mythical pieces of wisdom that is just totally wrong.

It dramatically over-estimates both the chances and costs of hiring a bad employee, while discounting the huge, huge opportunity cost of not hiring rare, exceptional candidates.

I’d much rather spend a year or two managing someone out as a result of actually trying to hire exceptional people than living with mediocre hires who memorized the right fizzbuzz HackerRank crap and said all the right Team Player catch phrases to get hired.

How large is your company?

The policies in question have worked well for me doing team building in 4 companies, 3 were medium/large ecommerce companies (~1000-8000 employees), one was a 40 person start-up.

A large company can afford bad hires. You can shuffle them around or find something they can do.

A small company can not afford that luxury so they have to be more careful in their hiring. A bad hire completely distracts a small team.

Why is simply letting the bad employee go not mentioned as an option?

We had a new hire that didn't work out at a place I used to work at. Fired after 3 months. No hard feelings, he took it well and found a good job a few weeks later. Everyone is happy.

> Fired after 3 months.

Which means you probably went 6 months or more without a role properly filled.

On a small team that's a huge dent. For half a year.

Not to mention the time spent in the hiring process itself, which you now get to repeat.

That’s one of the things. The other is some people are more litigious than others. When that happens, even though they don’t have a case, it can result in distractions —gags, evidence gathering, being called as witness, etc. On occasion companies will rather settle and get the distraction over with than go to court because it drains a small team who are now weary when hiring.

I mean, if you keep a guy who can't do the job, you still end up without a role properly filled.

You can’t have it both ways though. If you have a more selective process than the one that hires-then-fires-after-3-months, you’re _already_ going more than 6 months without filling the role, because by being risk averse to hiring “bad” candidates, you’re passing on good candidates.

So either you pay the cost by trying more people more quickly, or you pay the cost desperately waiting and waiting because you’re so confident your interviewing filter is tuned correctly and that you know better regarding who to hire.

(In a small company, the process of hiring is often quite poor because it’s idiosyncratically controlled by the early employees and founders, and usually reinforces their cultural views and their biases of interviewing, so having a restrictive filter is even more harmful to small companies.)

Google for example does not hire when they think it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the hire is a good one. They rather let a good candidate pass.

This should prove that numbers speak towards the idea that bad hires are very costly. Google's policy is also not to give feedback. 50 percent of their hires had to apply more than once.

I would say large companies do not need that exceptional candidate since they have so many great ones already. Exceptional won't make a difference unless it is executive role or something like that.

> 50 percent of their hires had to apply more than once.

That's one of the reasons why I pass when a Google recruiter comes why way.

(The other is that I don't want to move. I'm no longer a bachelor who can move on the drop of a hat, moving is way to disruptive to my family.)

> “ This should prove that numbers speak towards the idea that bad hires are very costly.”

Why? I do not agree that Google’s hiring practices have anything to do with “bad hire” costs.

Why do you assume the quoted phrase implies some ridiculous fizzbuzz HackerRank memorization-based hiring process? I agree with Spolsky that generally it's safer to err on the side of false negatives when hiring. I guess the exception would be if truly skilled people in your industry are extremely rare, so you essentially have no choice but to deal with false positives if you want to be able to hire at all.

But none of that has anything to do with the screening process itself, and it's certainly not advocating screening based on bullshit.

The screening process is what generates the true/false positives & true/false negatives.

Any policy about the relative importance of true/false positives vs negatives is a policy about screening processes.

Most managers don't want an employee who will be best for the company, they want an employee who will be best for the manager. Easy to get along with, not too likely to cause extra work, etc.

"The last time I came across a difficult problem and overcame it was ..."

"The thing I enjoyed working on the most was ..."

"In five years time, I see myself ..."

"If I could choose to be any animal, I would be a ..."

Interviewed with two fairly large "startups" in SF recently. Both just ghosted after the interview. I actually don't need the feedback, I realized something I had not prepared well for, but a "No thank you" after taking a day of would have been nice.

VC funded companies are often the worst when it comes to hiring because they are overcapitalised yet time sensitive - employees are more like contractors when they're brought on to address a short term issue without any real guarantee over a longer term than 18 months

My worst interview was where the interviewer started yelling at me.

After the interview the recruiter sent me an email and told me that he wouldn't work with me anymore as I was hostile during the interview.

It was insanely bizarre. It was like being found guilty without ever even being given a trial or being told there was a trial.

Sounds like you had a bad recruiter setting you up with bad interviews. You can throw a pebble and hit five recruiters so no need to stick with a dud anyways.

I had something similar. I was given an extensive exam to take before the interview, and it consisted of weird things like 200 arithmetic problems in 15 minutes, picking the best synonym for 100 words in 5 minutes, etc. Things not humanly possible without immense preparation for that precise test.

The interviewer comes in and starts berating me for not finishing and how I must’ve gone to a bad school, must not be smart, etc. Then he goes on and on about how I’m clearly not suited for the job and his young assistant is sitting beside him laughing.

It was a crazy interview. I mentally gave up after a few minutes because the guy was clearly fucking with me and didn’t want me, so I started giving smart ass responses since there was no reason to let myself get beat up.

I get a call a few hours later telling me I can start any time. I told the recruiter to tell the company that the interviewer was a dick (in nicer words) and I’d pass.

Worse than no feedback is opposite feedback. Don’t play mental games with people.

I interviewed at twitter for a job working with their infra team. They had an Atlanta data center and they were interviewing me for that role to be remote out of Atlanta. I had to fly to SF to interview via video calls with the team in Atlanta because the manager was in SF. He told me he would prefer someone local in SF over lunch so I knew I was just filler.

After lunch interview was with a xoogler and everyone earlier warned me it would be a “google interview”. So he struts in and asks what I know about number theory. I say nothing and he tells me he was a math major and proceeded to ask math proof questions and push on the math side of things the whole time. Weirdly instead of asking how to make a Cartesian product in SQL he had this round about way of describing baseball players and teams and generating a report of games played.

So as it went on I gave up. He asked me toward the end how many prime numbers there are... I answered “optimus prime”. He looked at me and asked if I seriously wanted him to write down “optimus prime” for my answer and I swear on my life I looked at him and said “yep. Autobots roll out”.

>I looked at him and said “yep. Autobots roll out”

Man I've been steady on the job hunt and I have to say I needed a funny story like this. Thank you.

I'd like to think there is a good follow up but my guess is you got ghosted.

This may sound shocking, but I did not get the job ;)

hahahahahahahah :D

I don't think it's possible to have a finite number of primes though? But it's a programming interview, so really, who gives a shit?!

Yes, it's not possible to have finite primes. Take all the primes from 2 to N, multiply them together, and add one to get a prime. If there's always another prime, there's infinite primes!

You don't always get a prime. For example, 4! = 2 * 3 * 4 = 24, 24 + 1 = 25, 25 is not prime. The point is that N! + 1 is not divisible by any number from 2 to N (always leaves a remainder of 1), so either it is prime, or it is divisible by something larger than N!, therefore larger than N. In the case of 25, it is divisible by 5 (> 4).

The parent said to multiply _only the primes_ from 2 to N, and then add one not factorial plus one.

In your example it would be (2 * 3) + 1 = 7, prime.

Oh, sorry, didn't realize that. It still doesn't work, though, as the example of 2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 * 13 + 1 = 59 * 509 shows.

It's a little bit more subtle. Assume that there is a finite number of primes, and P is the set of all primes p0, p1, p2... pn. If you multiply all these together and add 1, you have a number Q that's not divisible by any number in P. So P cannot be the set of all primes.

Right, but if you were testing N=13 as the highest prime, then (2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 * 13) + 1 must either be prime itself, i.e. have no prime factors, or must have a prime factor greater than 13. And in either case, a prime greater than 13 exists - in your example, 59.

This is Euclid's proof [1] and it's some 2300 years old.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_theorem

I won't do 1:1 interviews any more. I want witnesses.

Would you be willing to share the details?

I don't interview much, but one of my first interviews out of school was in style of good cop, bad cop. The "nice guy" even had a black eye, IIRC.

I was distraught by it, but then I talked to a friend and he told me - well, maybe they were looking for someone to handle stress really well, and it's not you.

Looking back, I think it was utterly bizarre (for a programming job, anyway). But, hey, to each his own.

There is another type of feedback that I as a candidate would find helpful, and that I would have liked to give candidates, but didn't due to corporate policy.

Something along the lines of: "To pay you as much money as you requested, we'd have to categorize you as a [Senior/Prinicipal] developer, but your skills/experience only put you at [Junior/Professional]".

If, as a candidate I had received this kind of feedback from two or three companies in one vertical, I would know that I have the choice between getting payed less and switching to a different vertical that pays better.

What exactly was the policy that caused this? In my (luckily very limited) job searching experience, the salary is something that gets negotiated. I ask for something on the high side, they offer something on the low side. Repeat until you end somewhere reasonable. The only thing I can imagine causing someone to not be hired on salary without them knowing the reason is if there's no negotiation.

Right.

It's better to offer the candidate what the company is prepared to offer, both in terms of position and compensation. Let the candidate decline. At least some candidates will like the company enough to try working their way back up.

Though I'm sure acceptance rate is in some KPI, so there could be some bureaucratic nonsense involved.

That's a cultural thing in the company I work for (or maybe broader in Germany, dunno), where some people think that if they start to negotiate, they might lowball candidates, and then they leave after half a year or so.

We try to hire more long term (we aim for 5+ years retention), dunno if that's related, or if there is any evidence to back this procedure.

I find it a bit weird myself, which is why as a candidate I'd like to know about it :-)

As an employee I found a nice hack around that. The employer made an offer and I made a counter offer, the employer said he couldn't meet it and I explicitly told him it was negotiable. He thought about it for a couple days and found a way to hack his system to give me more and I got something around the middle of our offers. We both ended up happy in the end, I'm still there.

As an interviewer, candidates occasionally ask me "How did I do? Where could I improve?" when I ask them "Do you have any questions for me?" at the end of the interview.

I usually say (and I happen to be in a country that is not very litigious) "While I can't tell you how you did in this interview -- we have to go through HR's process first -- I could offer you some general advice based on my experience", and would give some positive suggestions based on what I've observed. E.g. "try to read up more on how technology X works under the hood" or "when faced with a complex problem, it's okay to take time to think it through or ask questions", or "your communication skills are good, but you can be even better if you lead with the answer and have the lengthy explanation follow the answer" etc.

I'm wondering whether this is a good practice?

I find it odd to reject someone that way, unless the expectation and range are way off.

Normally, the good interviews begin with some kind of high-level salary discussion with HR or the recruiter. Typically, the recruiter (or HR rep) casually asks what I make in my current job. In one case, I accepted an interview where I'd get a small paycut. (Some things are worth taking a lower salary.)

As long as it's not in a phone call. That's a huge waste of time just to be told that they're passing. Google insisted on a call. It's just annoying.

A phone call is considered more respectful than an email. It may waste time, but signs of respect often do.

Wasting time is the feature. The fact that it wastes the caller's time as well is the reason that it works as a sign of respect.

It's not particularly respectful when it's a rejection. Especially when YOU have to find time on your calendar to make the call (which you already know is a rejection) just to schedule a five minutes "we can't tell you why, but you can apply again in a year" BS

No way man.

Being terminated by phone or in person is respectful compared to email. Being rejected by phone for something that for most times is going to not be successful, that's just twisting the knife.

At the moment I don't know how to respond to call requests when it's not successful. I fear that saying: "Hey if this is a rejection, I would prefer to just get an email. I understand."

Like it or not, a phone call is considered more respectful. Respectful doesn't mean easy, pleasant, or efficient. And the standards for respect are not set by any one person; they've evolved over a long time.

God I hate those things! I much prefer a simple, mannered email to a fraught phone call. I've gotten to the point of explicitly requesting that from recruiters if I sense that's the way it's going.

I don't care if it wastes the caller's time as a misplaced (and insincere) gesture of respect. They've wasted enough of my time at this point and don't deserve any more.

I think a phone call is not only more respectful but the recruiter actually can say things that she may not want to put in writing.

I've got two such calls from FAANGs and I'm glad they told me I did great in such and such interview but fell short in this other one, apply again etc (even if it may not have been true). Better than the boilerplate emails.

I would rather get subjective feedback than none at all. But I understand that some people can not take criticism or feedback so everyone has to lose out on it.

I love judgemental feedback, because then I can return it in kind.

That's probably why they don't offer it and why the interviews that do have become more exam like vs reciprocal. That a big tradeoff to make. I am not sure of the full implications but we do see issues with teaching to the test as well as examination driven cultures in traditional schooling. These test driven processes do not translate into economic success as you'd expect.

More or less why I refuse to waste my time interviewing. I'd rather spend that time increasing my independent earning potential

I think the idea of only hiring the best is misguided. I’ve hired dozens of people, and I’ve yet to hire a “bad” one. So, either I’m really good at picking the good ones, or there is a low bad candidates per non-bad candidate ratio.

Now, not every one became awesome. But, there are places for even the non-best developers to be productive. Good management is putting best employees on critical systems and others in supporting roles.

> Now, not every one became awesome. But, there are places for even the non-best developers to be productive. Good management is putting best employees on critical systems and others in supporting roles.

But how many did you reject because your other reports said no?

It's safer to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad employee.

Hence the byzantine process interviewing has become. Like most of what Joel says it’s flattering to the audience but just not true. Pretty much every company in the universe operates a 3-month probationary period. The risk of a bad hire in the real world is well mitigated. Also true in the real world, it is better to do this than waste months of time looking for the perfect candidate when you could easily get someone decent on board in mere weeks.

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