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Comment by warent | Hacker News Reader

This is not the feedback I've received, and I conducted like nearly 1000 interviews with Karat. On average we actually heard from people that Karat was their best experience by far, and that we made them feel like we were treating them as worthy individuals.

Even people who got declined usually still left feeling quite positive, because we would turn the obviously-failed interview into, basically, a free hour coaching / teaching session for them to succeed next time.

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My experience was the same as tedvim above - it was utterly dehumanizing and there's no way I want that either for myself or for the people I hire. The interviewers were smug little shits who didn't take feedback to ask questions relevant to the position.

Further - you guys lurk all over HN commenting like this every time there's an interview thread. It's submarining and it's gross.

The rules at Karat may be that giving any kind of help pretty much automatically disqualifies the candidate, so technically they're better off giving you no help at all in the hopes you make as much progress on your own rather than ruining your interview by giving you help prematurely.

Yep pretty much this. I was a contract interviewer with Karat for a few years and taught people how to conduct interviews. There's a graded scale of assistance, anything more than gentle prompting to re-read your code or the error output starts counting against you. If I have to point out a block of code or even a line, then that's getting to the point that most clients will pass you over when they review your interview, so the rules are we don't give that stuff proactively.

I used the "may" word as I wasn't sure it's something we are meant to be disclosing, but now that the cat is out of the bag you are indeed 100% correct and this matches my experience.

One thing I didn't appreciate with these rules from a candidate perspective (and encouraged my decision not to continue my onboarding with Karat), there seems to be no way to learn from the process. I actually bombed my practice interview (and knew it would happen even before the interview) but the interviewer was very reluctant (due to the above rules) to actually solve the problem with me, where as a conventional non-Karat failed interview would at least give me the solution in the end and I'd at least learn something.

"not trying to sell me a product" indeed.

Presumably it depends on the interviewer. And tbf it seems like warent is the only person here defending them.

Still I don't know if I would trust hiring to unknown potentially awful interviewers.

Their people pop up in every hiring thread on HN, it isn't just warent and it isn't the first time.

There is nothing to gain from giving negative feedback. If Karat succeeds in becoming the gatekeeper for interviews it would be a really bad idea to get on their bad side.

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