Ask HN: Can you request a copy of notes made during interviews you went through? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Can you request a copy of notes made during interviews you went through?

4 pointsb2000013 comments

I recently went through a bunch of interviews for FAANG positions and I’m wondering if CA law allows someone to request copies of notes made by interviewers regardless of any NDAs signed.

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Knee-jerk reaction reading this: "already a pain in the ass before even getting in the door".

Again, knee-jerk reaction.

What are you trying to accomplish? If you want the notes badly enough to try to resort to laws to force them to give them to you, you may get the notes, but that may be the last time you'll interact with that organization. You probably will not work with them ever again. Are a few scribbles of someone drawing boxes, circles, smileys, and maybe even dicks worth it?

If you're not after the notes, but want the notes in order to improve, then you may have a better chance of asking nicely for feedback to improve, or even asking nicely to get the very notes, who knows.

If that is the case, then we have an "XY Problem": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem

You want feedback to improve, (X), but you're asking on how to resort to CA law to request copies, (Y).

i’m not asking for advice on how to interview or how to improve, thanks. i am simply trying to figure out if there is a legal basis or not.

Undersrood. Then we're in the first case here where you're requesting the notes, or even the zeroth case where you want to know if it even has a legal basis, not necessarily acting on that basis.

I'm not a lawyer, but there are many here from some threads I've read.

I always do this after getting a rejection. They always give something vague like "you're awesome but too junior for us". A good time to request it is when they ask you to fill in a feedback survey.

If it's always vague, why bother asking?

There's normally a list of things I could have messed up, e.g. poor English, no visa, wrong time zone, sloppy code, too slow on a certain test, many other great applications, poor understanding of a framework, etc.

You can trace back a one sentence comment to the actual root cause. It's like debugging. And from that, you spot the pattern and optimize.

did they give you more than that vague reason and did your request go through legal?

You should be able to get a read on these things during the interview

i am not talking about asking the recruiter for a reason, but asking copies of ALL notes made by ALL employees, at ALL times of the entire process. basically everything.

What a ludicrous request.

You can request it, they don’t have to provide it

interested on hearing some lawyers opinions on this. hope they chime in.

it’s surprising how this very important issue relevant to all of us engineers gets very little attention here on HN.

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