Hacker News Reader

Comment by OliverGilan | Hacker News Reader

I applied for a new grad position two months ago, did the coding challenge and passed all test cases with clean code and time to spare and haven't heard a peep from them since. It's a shame considering how I only hear good things about the company and the recruiting process but almost all the big companies I've applied to have at least had the decency to let me know they aren't moving forward

View on HN

I think it's like most companies, really hard to get attention unless:

- You have a referral

- You went to MIT, Stanford, Caltech, CMU, Cal

- You're coming from FAANG or similar

The frontdoor is a waste of time.

Even with the above odds are against you, but at least you have someone to ask about progress/move things along for you.

I don't know about "most companies." Maybe most really big tech companies, places that are constantly getting crazy amounts of applications. And if you're living in a heavily populated city.

I live in a place with a fairly small population, and I got offers at 3/3 programming jobs I've applied for since my first in 2017.

Yeah - you're right.

I should have said 'most bay area software companies' and even that could probably be qualified by 'competitive' or 'famous'.

I applied for the new grad position too a couple months back, having a previous FAANG internship and starting (and selling) my own startup during college. Never heard back or even got the coding challenge. I’ve used Stripe in my own projects a few times and have also heard good things so I’m bummed too.

When I was an undergrad I applied to Stripe several times with a FANG on my resume as well without any responses.

Two reasons for that are:

1) I went to a state school (NC State)

2) The FANG in question was Amazon, which I don't think they "count". I have friends that applied when they decided to leave Amazon and they didn't get interviews either.

If your FAANG was Amazon I'm guessing you're in the same boat.

Haha, you guessed it. I wish I knew how much my school would matter when I applied to colleges, and that Amazon isn’t as well respected as I hoped. Unfortunately Microsoft gave me a LeetCode hard for my internship interview and google auto declined me so I didn’t have a chance at them. Not sure what was up with that either.

I knew how much school mattered I just couldn’t get into a better one save UNC. Shame, really.

what an amazing industry we work in! denying top talent every day because people aren't motivated enough to check emails, make phone calls, click buttons to schedule things.

Stripe likely has pick of the cream for open positions. It has been public knowledge for a while that they're a rocket ship, and that attracts top talent by definition (in addition to sharks and wolves [0] I'd presume).

[0] https://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/06/great-story-from-s...

Overwhelmed or not, ghosting after coding challenge/technical interview is unacceptable.

Correct. Never responding after an application? Par for the course. But asking someone to complete a coding challenge or even an interview and then ghosting is downright unprofessional and should be unacceptable.

Totally agree. From what we can see in this thread, when a recruiter / hiring manager / HR department makes it a regular practice to ghost interviewed candidates, it has a significant effect on the company's reputation - that they lack common decency and respect. It does not seem worth it for whatever time/effort they might have saved by such behavior. To put it another way, it seems it'd be worth spending time and effort to improve the process and experience, to improve such a reputation.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com