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Comment by alefnula | Hacker News Reader

My biggest bone to pick with this interview process (I was also interviewed, passed the interview and then trained to do interviews) is that the calibration is all over the place.

If you're lucky, you'll get an interviewer who thinks that if you can solve a case insensitive palindrome, it means you should be hired with strong confidence.

But if you're unlucky, you'll end up with a person who will squeeze the last ounce of blood out of you, and even if you solve 99% of the questions correctly, he will still think you're low confident or even a no-hire because you missed that one edge case...

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What I have seen is that many interviewers are actually subjective. I've had interviews which I passed and then to be told I was rejected without explanation. I knew I failed though because 1 of the interviewers didn't like me. This interview process is really a facade to not get sued. 9/10 of the team may like you, but it only takes 1. And from my experience, its usually the ones with lower EQ that make face-value assumptions about a person they are interviewing. You have no recourse to fight for your role because of the power dynamics of the interview process. They will simply say they don't want to hire false positives.

Is the alternative that the bosses pushes ahead and hires people that have objections? Then the team risks losing a known good member who quits for spite, for a maybe good new hire.

I think respecting a red flag of any member of a team to stop a hire is a good practice.

That assumes all interviewers are a) good members and b) good interviewers.

I have encountered my fair share of bad interviewers. You don't even need to take my word, go on Blind and read all the horror stories from both the interviewer and interviewee.

I think the statement to be too generalized and doesn't address the power dynamics of the interview process. You assume they are good judges of character from a 60 minute interview.

Not sure which FAANG does 10 interviews but anecdotally I've seen people get hired with 2 out of the 5 ratings being negative (i.e. no-hire).

Depending on where you live you likely have a legal right to the interviewer's written feedback. I've never tried it (US) but I've heard of many other people (US) that were successful but you probably need to know w/e relevant law it is as I assume by default you won't get it.

> Depending on where you live you likely have a legal right to the interviewer's written feedback.

That's a sure fire way to get blacklist from a company. No US company likes to deal with high maintenance candidates/ employees. The risk is too high to just move on and let it go. The best course of action is usually to come back in 6 months to a year and interview with another team.

>many interviewers are actually subjective

all interviewers are subjective - it's part and parcel of the process...which is why you need to excise the trivia questions from the process

Even with the training I had received at FAANG, there's still (and will always be) a level of subjectivity. I've seen colleagues hire candidates that didn't meet the "bar" but because the interviewer really "liked" that person, they went to bat for the candidate. Ironically that same interviewer would click "no hire" despite the candidate meeting the bar, all because the interviewee every-so-slightly rubbed them the wrong way.

Yegge called this the anti-loop - http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goog... - back in 2008 hah. Still holds true.

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