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Comment by hyperpape | Hacker News Reader

Some people are getting side-tracked asking if this is a common problem. I think that's a distraction: the right number of rescinded offers to engineers and other individual contributors is 0.[0]

If the actual number of candidates affected is small, then it would be cheap to make it right for them. You could find a team that can take the engineer (we're not interchangeable parts, but Stripe is a big company), and/or offer monetary compensation for the opportunity cost.

[0] I'll reserve judgment about higher level management. I don't know if the norms and circumstances are different. Obviously this also excludes failed background checks, candidates being dishonest, etc, etc.

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In the case of failed background checks, the solution is actually quite simple - tell the candidate it's an offer contingent upon the background check.

But you're right - rescinding job offers is an absolutely vile business practice. Imagine resigning from your job after accepting an offer from Stripe, and then they just change their minds. Gross.

Every offer letter I've ever received has language to the effect that it's contingent on a number of things, including a background check.

Right. That's why I won't sign a job offer until the background checks are done. Not that there's anything of concern: every one has come back clean as can be, but I just don't like to take any chances.

Companies usually fuss about it, but I insist, and among quite a few orgs over the past 25 years I've never had one pass because I refused to sign prior to background check.

I made this mistake with my last move. Everything 100% done, contract signed, put in notice etc. Then a couple of days later they want a background check. Sure, I have no history, but what if I had? Or what if someone with the same name had?

Lesson learned.

I've never received such a thing.

The employer would only need that verbiage in an offer letter if they had failed to perform all reference, credit, criminal, etc. checks prior to sending you the letter.

Companies don't "fail" to perform background checks prior to making offers. In some jurisdictions (e.g. California), it's illegal to perform a background check prior to making an offer.

https://www.dfeh.ca.gov/fair-chance-act/

https://www.nelp.org/campaign/ensuring-fair-chance-to-work/

This is interesting! My involvement in background screening began and ended before this law was enacted. The CA law is probably good at preventing outright, unfair elimination of candidates because of criminal history.

I think one key thing in that California law is the notion of the “conditional job offer.” This law doesn’t effect the dynamics of the offer letters we were discussing at all. If you make an offer and there are still conditions pending, you’re obligated to let the candidate know. I cannot imagine CA is doing that differently.

I get your point, though, that doing the criminal portion of the background check after extending the offer is now not just normal, but mandatory, in CA.

Not a lawyer, but promissory estoppel may apply

In Japan, a written job offer is almost as good as a job contract, so if the company decides to rescind it, you’ve got legal grounds to sue them. I assumed that something similar should exist in the US and I am relieved to hear that might actually be the case.

Not really - the U.S. (except Montana) makes work at-will, where either side can terminate the work immediately without cause (although it can't be for reasons discriminatory of a protected class like race, religion, etc). You might be able to get damages for misrepresentation at most, but you'd have to show they never intended to hire you in the first place, or perhaps on the basis they allegedly didn't clarify that the offer is contingent on a background check.

It's really not the case. Job contracts in the United States are rare unless you are approaching or in the C-suite. Employment law is typically enforced at the state level; all states practice some form of 'at-will' employment meaning an employer can dismiss an employee for any reason as long as it's not illegal (e.g. discrimination). States like California and New York might require a bit more paperwork but it's nothing like employee protections and job contracts elsewhere in the world.

Never worked in the states so I'm not sure if things are different there, and I guess I'm misunderstanding something here, but are you saying that there are no contracts between most employers and employees?

There must be something that both are signing right? With pay rate, hours and benefits written down.

No, job contracts are pretty rare. At-will employment, where both parties can end employment on zero notice with zero reason (legal discrimination aside), is the norm in the US. Some states (CA being the usual example) have more employee protections, but AFAIK do not require contracts.

Typically, for a white-collar job, you'd interview and receive a job offer contingent on background check and verifying previous employment. That offer would have a salary and start date and that's about it. HR might hand you a benefits package at the same time.

Sometime on or before the first day of employment, you'd be asked to sign NDAs, confirm legal eligibly to work, and similar paperwork, but almost never a contract.

Senior leaders often have contracts because their terms are more complicated - golden parachutes, etc.

Contracts are generally only for contracted (i.e. non-employee( work. A self-employed consultant, programmer, designer, etc. will have a contract definining the terms of the engagement.

Employment is "at-will" in most states. Employers are obligated to pay for work performed, but you can be terminated at any time (and you can quit at any time).

Some high-level jobs will also have a written contract but it's not normal for a typical salaried or hourly position, unless there is a union involved.

By job contracts I believe he's referring to "contract employment" which refers to employment in which you are guaranteed work over some time frame. "At will employment" refers to when you or your employer can terminate your job at any time.

I'm very confident that most people have to a sign a piece of paper listing their pay etc on them before beginning their job.

I don't think I've ever had to do that. Do you also need to sign off on raises or pay cuts?

For contract employment unless the contract stipulates a raise structure or something else which allows them to change your pay, they can't do that without you signing off on it.

For at will employment they can change your pay at any time. You're also free to leave at any time of course.

I've never signed a piece of paper with my pay before starting in the us, and I've worked several jobs here. For a few, I've not received a "formal" offer letter, just had discussions with the recruiter.

In general, you can work entirely without exchanging anything more than words and giving the employer a W-9.

> Job contracts in the United States are rare

Most people don't sign a contract between employer and employee in the US? So you don't even have any kind of confidentially agreement?

Confidentiality agreements are relatively common, but outside of that there is no written contract. Generally speaking, US jobs fall under a legal category here called "at-will" employment, which makes it easy for either party to end the relationship at any time. Personally, I've worked a variety of jobs and never signed a written contract for any of them. In a few, I've not received a formal offer letter.

Office jobs often do have an NDA, but otherwise a lot of trades and hourly positions don't opt for one. The retaliation for leaking sensitive info is either suing for leaking trade secrets (which is rare), or just firing them on the spot.

There are very few worker protections in the US. We're mostly a "right to work" nation, which is doublespeak for "workers have few, if any, rights."

Also not a lawyer but my understanding is that the damages you can collect even if you win a judgment are only a fraction of the damages a layperson would identify, e.g., you generally wouldn't get anything for quitting your previous job or ending your lease (though you might get closing costs if you sell a house).

In most companies with apparently functioning HR, you don't get a written offer until after the reference/bg check clears. Your verbal is what gets you to provide those reference/bg check authorizations.

This is like HR 101

Both of the companies I've worked at have given me an offer prior to a background check, and included a clause that the offer could be terminated if I failed it.

Out of curiousity, what (besides criminal activity) would cause a candidate to fail a background check done by a software company?

Lying about job history. I almost failed my last one because I accidentally filled out the wrong dates for an internship.

If the job involves handling money (CFO’s office, especially A/P and A/R). Security guard and such.

Otherwise I think that they are an unwarranted intrusion, but our HR and Legal say otherwise.

Thanks for the reply, but I'm not quite sure I understand (or maybe I'm just being thick this morning). Are you saying that if you had a previous job handling money you're automatically disqualified, or are you only suggesting that if you handled money and they report something was amiss you won't pass?

I believe they're saying that you should only need to be given a background check if you're handling money. Not that past money handling is a disqualifier

That’s what I meant. Having experience in A/R is something you’d want when hiring for that position. But if the person had an embezzlement conviction I think you’d want to know!

BTW another thing about people who handle the money is that they are required to go on vacation.

Smoking pot.

I don't agree. All of my written offers have been before bg check clears. I've always signed the offer and background check paperwork in the same set of paperwork.

I'm not going to say that never happens, but it's never been the case for any of the jobs I've had. The contract I've signed commonly states words to the effect of "subject to passing background checks".

I don’t know: we don’t do the background check until the employee has said they want the job (by signing a conditional offer) precisely to avoid doing unnecessary background checks. It’s not a cost issue, but a moral one (fairness). When they sign the offer they explicitly agree to a background check.

Obviously they’d be foolish to give notice until the check comes back clean but it’s typically a same day thing.

Never had a problem with a background check that didn’t come up in a reference check anyway. Personally I don’t even care about them except for people who handle money, and would rather only do them for those jobs.

I think there's a difference between bg check and references. Most companies I have talked to, don't extend offers till they verified references. But the bg checks happen after you sign an offer and there is a clause in the contract that if the checks come out to be bad, the offer can be rescinded. bg checks usually are just a check on criminal history and whether your past work experience is what you say it is. References are usually about whether their estimation of you and your skills match up with people who know you better.

That's not at all true

I like the google approach for more senior roles - you interview for 2+ months, get approved, and only then do you actually start to look for an actual role at the company. They invert the job/approval process.

I like the concept, but the amount of uncompensated time candidates have to give to the company is excessive and a lot of non-Google companies couldn't get away with it.

Yes, I had the smug joy of getting to tell my Google recruiter to f off back in 2014 because of a number of red flags in their interviewing process, very early in my career. I don't regret it at all, and actually my decision to simply take a short-term research internship at a DoE lab instead (and surprisingly) opened a number of doors in the startup world for me that I wouldn't have even known exist otherwise.

In my case one major red flag was "having to fly somewhere before I have an official offer", and I can only imagine the new zoomer crowd leans much more in that direction. FANG doesn't respect your time or effort at all, they think you should be honored just to be in their presence. That shit doesn't fly anymore.

Had somewhat similar experience... 2014/2015 maybe. Unsolicited call out to me, asking me to interview. I had a couple of questions - one of which included salary range. I was being expected to go take days off and fly to them, but they wouldn't give me even a basic range. Nothing. I declined to go further.

I told someone who then said "well... that's not the way you get a job!" And I said "but... I didn't want a job. They called me. They wanted a worker, but wouldn't do me the courtesy of basic information before I was to drop whatever I was doing and come running to them on their timetable".

On-site interviews are done by most companies. They require you to fly if you don't live in the area. This isn't a red flag for most people.

It's unheard of in the startup world. I don't even know anyone outside of the startup world anymore so I can't speak to whatever FANG and the remaining crumbling enterprise companies are still doing at this late hour.

Getting a free all-expenses-paid weekend in Mountain View is a perk to a lot of people

If I weren't busy with the familoids at home I'd love a free plane trip and fancy hotel stay. Er, in non-pandemic times at least

It can be nice but at the end of the day can be a massive inconvenience to people with dependents. Single parents, unless they have a good support network, might find it especially difficult.

I think the point is that many people _are_ busy with familoids. I took them up on this offer early in my career when I had less "adult" responsibilities, but as those tend to increase it makes this increasingly hard to deal with.

> If I weren't busy with the familoids at home

That + never ending pandemic + etc

But also, it's really shitty to fly somewhere only to get rejected. Been there, done that.

The length of Google's hiring process is absolutely screwing them in this market. Seems like they don't really feel like competing for hot candidates anymore.

Google told me recently that their process typically takes 6-8 weeks! They are absolutely losing candidates but they must have enough applicants to still be ok.

I think it matches that Google salaries are trending relatively downwards compared to the competition. They only want people who are Google obsessed.

That sounds awful. By the time you've accepted the offer and started at Google, you have very little leverage to ensure you end up on a team/project that you like. I would never accept an offer without knowing what I'd be working on.

It gives awesome cover to slackers though. "Yeah I don't think I was put on an appropriate team..."

I can vouch this is a terrible process. Unless you interview ONLY at Google, you almost always won't work there. When you are actively looking, you usually want all your interviews to be close to each other (within weeks) to evaluate offers and make the best decision.

It's extremely unhelpful if one company is still in the "screening" phase because they take months to progress, while others are already extending offers. The options then are that you wait and risk letting go of other offers, let go of Google, or join a new company and leave within months. All of these options look terrible to me.

The other option is that you strategically queue up those Google interviews well in advance of all others. I did that and they still managed to keep dragging their feet when I wrapped up the rest. Oh well.

Wait, what? You get 'approved' to look for an actual job?

The hiring committee approves your 'packet' and agrees you should be hired for a particular job family and level within that family.

Then the recruiter will help connect you with teams that have open head count. If there's a mutual fit, the company will make a formal offer.

So, in the initial interview rounds you're not interviewed by the teams with open head count? Seems inefficient to me. How long does it normally take to find a team with a 'mutual fit'?

It's done that way to align incentives. The hiring manager's incentive is always to fill a role; if they didn't have more work than they can do, they wouldn't have open headcount. This biases them toward hiring fast and lowering the bar - not so much that they can't work with the person, but enough to overlook minor red flags in the interest of filling the position. In other words, the inefficiency is a feature, not a bug: the company doesn't want to hire fast if it means sacrificing quality.

It also has the added benefit of improving internal cooperation, trust, and mobility. Many big companies suffer from the attitude of "Oh, those doofuses in department X can't be trusted to get anything done right". [1] When you have a common hiring process, you know that everybody in the company passed the same bar you and your teammates did, and your baseline assumption should be that they're as competent. And similarly, transfers get pretty easy because everybody has already passed a common hiring bar, so you know that the candidate is already qualified technically, you just need to judge if they're a good fit for your team.

Time to find a mutual fit can vary a lot. It was really quick (like a couple days) my first time around, because I was early enough in my career to be pretty adaptable, had a very in-demand skillset (Javascript), and had multiple teams - Search, GMail, Docs - all vying for me. It was a lot slower (month+) my second time around, because I interviewed in April 2020 as the world was falling apart from COVID and teams kept disappearing as they got canceled or their headcount got cut.

[1] https://i.insider.com/50a25c45eab8ea8c41000000?width=589&for...

I initially thought like this as well, but after second thought I'd like if all large corps did this. It eliminates "Bro-Hires", and sets certain standard for all employees.

Of course it doesn't make any sense for small companies.

My process with Google a couple of years back took something like 2 months before I bowed out. It included fun activities such as a hiring manager change, a re-interview of a slot, a down-level, and a resulting request to re-interview for things that weren't required at the higher level. Meanwhile Facebook went from first interview to offer in 2 weeks.

Can confirm that this is how it worked out for me just a few weeks ago. Interviewed for SWE II for a day, was told that feedback was trending positive, and spent ~4 hours of personal time prepping for and participating in fit calls.

Then got and excited call from my recruiter and was told I'd get an offer and that there was a match for one of the teams I interviewed for. The catch? Downleveled to SWE I, despite saying earlier in the process that I would not take it for career development and salary range reasons.

They were willing to set up another round of interviews to get more data, but at some point you just have to call it. End-to-end, this took around a month and a half. This was with my positive references allowing me to skip the phone screen.

I've had positive experiences interviewing with Microsoft and Amazon, no experience with other big tech.

I recently did this and it took ~1 month with me doing around 15 calls with various teams. I think I was atypically slow and most people find a team within 5 calls or so. The really unfortunate part is that you don't get any offer numbers until after this is done. That means lots of people will go through with the team matching even if they aren't really planning to go through with Google just to get offer numbers.

This is about maintaining quality. At a large company it’s easy for one manager to lower the bar, or have the bar fall out of entropy.

Several companies fight this with a standard interviewing pipeline, of course most candidates will be displeased if they spend 1 month interviewing and then get dropped into a random team.

I think they do so to avoid culture split - giving individual team hiring decision from the get go can create culture bias, people would only give opportunity to people they "like" or that match the current culture, leading to inbreeding of sort.

Just look at what was happening at Cisco with caste based hiring.

In my case it took about a week. I had a few phone calls with hiring managers over 2, then requested a follow-up with one manager which took another day or two to set up. Then once I gave the recruiter my preference, she got back to me the next day to let me know that it lined up with a manager who reciprocated

The time can vary. In my case (for a product manager role) it took a few weeks. But I was in China so there were only a couple of options.

You're not interviewed by teams with open headcount. I never met my interviewers again.

The philosophy at Google is that the hiring bar is high enough that anyone who passes it should theoretically be able to fill any open position at their level. This is somewhat less true for higher levels, but it is also much harder to pass the bar at those levels. There are typically a lot of unfilled positions, because there just aren't enough people who pass the hiring bar (so there is plenty of demand for people).

You don't really expect any new hire SWE to be able to do the job on day 1 - Google has so much bespoke internal technology that it takes months to become productive. So the fit conversations aren't really just another round of interviews - they are more of a "mutual fit" assessment (interests and background). Often it's more of a sales pitch ("here's why you should join our team").

> They invert the job/approval process.

Do any of the other FAANGs (MAGMAs??) do the same now?

Meta usually doesn't even bother finding you a team before hiring you, at least at L5 (senior) level... they hire based on a standardized interview process, you start with a 6 week bootcamp to get familiar with their systems, and then you have two weeks to find a team. There are a few cases where you're hired for a specific team and skip the 2 week team-matching period, but this is the general pattern.

So wait, you basically start on a 8 week contract? Is that how that works?

Not a contract, in most cases, you're hired into the company rather than a specific team. To be clear it's not just two weeks to find a team, you spend the entire length of bootcamp (6-10 weeks) evaluating teams (you evaluating them, not the other way) to pick one. I preferred that much more to Google's approach, where passing the interview loop leads to the tedious team selection process - before an offer is extended.

And to answer a question from a neighboring comment, it's exceedingly rare for a match to not happen. There are way more teams with open headcount than candidates looking, so teams and managers go out of their way to woo the incoming folks. I don't know exactly what happens if one spends two months fruitlessly, presumably somebody from the bootcamp program would have a long conversation with them about their general fit at the company.

> you evaluating them, not the other way

Ehhhh...you say that, but it definitely goes both ways. It's not meant to, but hiring managers at Meta absolutely do evaluate the bootcampers who reach out to join, especially for more popular teams.

Sure, I believe it happens in pockets, though it's very clearly spelled out company policy that this process is not a second interview. But people are people and supply/demand rules apply here as well. It also more often took took the form of who a hiring manager might reach out to vs not. As a hiring manager, I and my peers engaged in good faith AFAIK with bootcampers that reached out directly. Given the many openings in our growing teams, doing otherwise would've been foolhardy.

Ah, this is much more reasonable. I interpreted it as another whittling of people where they would hire a pile House MD style and see which ones are actually desired.

No, you start with a fulltime offer, it's just called "bootcamp". It's our way of doing all the HR stuff (paperwork, medical, legal, etc) + you taking some courses on areas you're interested in specific to fb + you exploring teams and finding one that you will work at.

And if you don't get a match in those two weeks?

It's not a strict two weeks, and the process is much more about being pursued than finding a team. For example, a typical bootcamper in NYC will hear from 40+ teams.

Is that still the case? I left earlier this year, but they had instituted a max on the number of reachouts a team/manager can make to minimize the "spray and pray" tactics and bootcamper overload.

Definitely still the case. There are so many teams looking for people, anyone with a pulse gets spammed.

Anecdotal, but my experience at Microsoft and Amazon is that you interview with the team who has open headcount, and (simplifying here) the manager you would be reporting to makes the decision on whether to offer you a specific position on a specific team.

It's like this for all levels of SWE as well based on my experience

This 100%. If I was spending days of my time on a company only to be treated poorly, I should not be a statistic.

This is also why honest feedback for rejections should be required (by law? probably not. maybe by social pressure) so candidates know that the decision wasn't just a fluke

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