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Ask HN: Interviewing, what did I do wrong?

24 pointsfilm4247 comments

I submitted an application to a company for a software engineering internship, and was contacted by one of their recruiters.

I was interviewed by him on the phone, then scheduled for a technical phone interview, which I passed.

I was then invited on site for 3 1-hour technical interviews, which I passed.

Then I was invited back for a 30-min interview with the head of engineering. He asked me a few questions about scalability of platforms, my favorite platforms, my preference for front-end vs backend, and then asked how much I make per hour at my current job (which is $2/hr more than glass door says their interns make). We finished the meeting, he shook my hand, and 3 days later, I got a no-reply@company.com email stating I had been denied.

What did I do wrong? I'm honestly baffled.

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I can't tell you what/if you did anything wrong. There's just too many factors, some of which a highly subjective ("cultural fit"). I did interviews for my company too and usually we would optimize our process highly to get no false positives, even if that meant we had a few false negatives. So again it's hard to say.

But what really bothers me is that you got a reply from a no-reply address. What the actual fuck. You were there for an on-site interview, this is not the situation where you send people automated no-reply-click-this-link mails.

If their HR doesn't have the time to send a short personal mail (or an automated one from a HR address that doesn't look like it's automated) that might be a red flag on how they treat their employees anyways.

You can try asking them, we at my company were usually happy to tell candidates that didn't pass, why they didn't pass. But we also didn't blow off people with a no-reply mail that were far enough into the process to have been onsite.

The only advice I can give you is to move on and do the next interview. Don't let this get to you.

> But what really bothers me is that you got a reply from a no-reply address. What the actual fuck. You were there for an on-site interview, this is not the situation where you send people automated no-reply-click-this-link mails.

Yah. Three years ago, When I was fresh out of school, I interviewed at a very popular startup. The interview went reasonably well, with the team lead asking me questions like when I would be able to join and so on. I had a great rapport with their HR guy too. It was kind of harsh to casually get a reject from a automated no reply email.

Two years later. The same guy, the lead of the team randomly emails me telling me I have a "great profile" and if I would like to grab coffee with him. I was amused to find out when I met him in person that he had no idea that I had come there previously. And all the assorted bullshit that went through. To be frank, I never seriously considered the offer the second time around. (I have a policy of never trying the fish if there is a cockroach running around in the floor of the restaurant. )

It is not fucking hard to send a personal email to someone who came all the way for face time with your company. In fact, it says a lot about your company's culture and attention to the little things.

Sometimes it's not a good idea to give too much feedback, if any at all.

I used to automatically provide feedback of why a candidate did not pass the interview, then I had a few sour encounters where the candidate just did not react professionally. For example, one candidate bemoaned the emphasis on CS fundamentals in our interview. In that case, the candidate was coming in from a mostly front-end webdev background, but our tech stack extends far below the typical webdev "full stack", where knowledge of OS/Networking/Compiler fundamentals is helpful in everyday design decisions. As a small team, we bias towards generalists for now, so while the person might be a great fit for his skillset in another organization, it just wasn't a great fit for us at that time. I tried to explain this, but I received a wall of text complaint email back. I had taken an hour out of my day to write immediate and specific feedback about his interview, and all I got was pushback. This is probably why HR stands between engineers and candidates.

For some reason your "I had taken an hour out of my day" comment really bothers me.

The guy you interviewed probably spent ~4 hours preparing for the interview and then all of the time in the actual interview.

Let's say he takes 7 hours out of his life to interview for your place. The least he deserves is a legit reason why he was declined because your company still benefits from not hiring him. You get to refine your interview process based on real feedback.

The interviewee's time is just as valuable as yours. A wall of text complaint sounds pretty good. There's probably a lot of good feedback in there unless it happened to be filled with insults and other garbage in which case you should have been able to figure this out quickly and then not replied.

If you give a reason, there's a small chance that you may have to defend that reason legally. Therefore, it's best to not give a specific reason. It's harsh, but protection of the business is more of a priority than potentially hurting someone's feelings by not giving a reason.

It's true. Sometimes giving your reasoning about things just leads to the other person trying to point out why your reasons are wrong. Rather than taking it as information they can use to improve their chances with other jobs, it's like they think it's an argument that, if they could win it, would lead to them being hired anyway.

> Sometimes it's not a good idea to give too much feedback, if any at all.

Sure. But a form letter from the HR person saying you are not a good fit is way better than your application has been rejected blah blah blah. Tech, especially Data Science is a small fucking place. Making enemies is incredibly bad. I know that I would go out of my way to strongly recommend that any of my friends who are ever rarely in the job market to not look at that company, or the tech lead.

Also, to look at it from other point of you. I once interviewed at another startup where the guy gave me cold harsh feedback as to why I was not the right fit. I still respect him for doing that. It was not the right fit for me. But, I would heartily recommend the place to anyone else who I think would be the right fit.

I agree the no-reply@company.com was weird. Btw, I'm not sure if it was a cultural fit, because I interviewed with 8 people up until the meeting with the head of engineering, and all gave me the thumbs up.

Maybe I was just not prepared enough for my conversation with the head of engineering. Still though, I would love to know why.

Thank you for your advice, I feel that's really all I can do. Still, it's hard to not let this get to me.

> it's hard to not let this get to me.

I have not had something like this happen to me, but I am sure it will get easier after another round of interviews with another company. You will almost forget about this experience after you land a good opportunity, other than for the anecdotal value :-)

> it's hard to not let this get to me.

Don't let it bother you and just think of it as another story to tell[1]. If the no-reply bothers you, then they probably have a lot of other habits in how they treat people that would really bother you if you had got the job. Its the canary in the mine. Don't think of it as getting rejected, think of it as dodging a bullet.

1) my most wtf? story is getting rejected for an internship because the area code of the high school and college I went to was the same. Told me that over the phone. I did at least point out the whole state is one area code.

"But what really bothers me is that you got a reply from a no-reply address."

That would have bothered me too. But it could have been even worse. I've read plenty of accounts of how job candidates didn't get any reply at all after having interviewed for a position. Being busy doesn't exempt a company from the obligation to exercise common decency.

A few months ago I went to two on-site interviews with a company that a friend (who works there) referred me to. They were the ones to call me up asking for an interview. The second interview was a coding one, which I did pretty well at. I never even heard back from them.

Tbh, thinking about it now; I dont think I would want to work at a company that doesn't have the courtesy to reply to someone they approached to come and interview with them. Particularly someone who was referred there by one of their employees.

At a small company, there's never an excuse to not send a personal email to a candidate.

> But what really bothers me is that you got a reply from a no-reply address.

I've had interviews where you go from frequent emails and phone-calls, everything looks like it is going wonderfully, and then you hear nothing. Silence. Even when you try to chase things up after a few days.

Having no reply is deeply frustrating, although after a few days I guess you learn to take the hint.

> what really bothers me is that you got a reply from a no-reply address

I had pretty much the opposite rejection experience. I had interviewed on-site with Stripe, but for some reason was turned down. A week or so later I got a thank you card signed by all the people who had interviewed me. (Actually, the reason I applied was because of a handwritten card in response to the first Capture-the-Flag.)

You're actually lucky that you even got a rejection. I have a friend who has interviewed at quite a few companies that are talked about in high regard by people in the tech industry and after his interview, he hasn't heard back at all.

I know him he is skilled and certainly worthy of serious consideration....so it has been surprising seeing how many have rejected him after an interview without a courtesy email.

You either weren't good enough or weren't a good fit. I've had situations where I interviewed at jobs where I'm asked "What type of work will make you love coming to work and also what is your ultimate career goal". If your answer isn't exactly what they are looking for, you might not be "as good of a fit as they want".

This is actually a good thing because they are saving you a lot of time by getting you to work on something you like, rather than something might not know you don't like.

With that said, I expect that the tech hiring process will be unrecognizable a few years from now.

A no-reply@ email address? This seriously happened? You dodged a bullet.

If you reject candidates from a no-reply@ email address, there is nothing I or anybody else can ever do to help you in any way ever again. You are beyond help. You've found perhaps the one thing you could do worse than simply going dark on candidates you reject.

From my years behind the hiring line...this is what probably happened:

While you did OK, you did not ace the 3-1 hour technical interviews, or they thought that you didn't make a strong enough impression in <insert important area for the job/company> - the follow up interview was probably intended to gauge those areas, and you failed to meet their standard.

Don't feel too bad about it, people flunk out of interviews all the time - even if they would be perfect for the job - most places now adopt quite a strict hiring policy because a bad hire is worse for the business than a no hire.

You could try and get feedback form the company but I wouldn't hold your breath. Simply try again with another.

Hard to say. Some places need 3 x 1 hr to figure out if a person has the chops. Other places can just figure it out. IMHO, it does seem unnecessary and could point to the area of difficulty, but some places are just goofy that way. For sure the bottom line is: Use the experience to improve yourself, shake off the negativity and move on.

It's a numbers game. You need to be pursuing 5-10 job leads at any one time. You can be the perfect fit for the job, but it doesn't matter. Companies will turn you down for reasons which they will never be able to admit to and you will have to learn to turn companies down for certain reasons (which also you probably shouldn't say publicly). Remember, offices range from laid back, low pay, and easy to work with to psychopathic coked up management trying to ethnically cleanse all the people not of their country of origin (and brag about it later). Also, the hardest thing to do, and the most mature, is to always consider it was your fault whether not the right skills or not enough practice. It may turn out not to be, but you have to consider it.

> It's a numbers game. You need to be pursuing 5-10 job leads at any one time

It's funny, I don't mean to suggest this is totally untrue, but opposite to the advice I give (albeit based on a sample size of five). The two best jobs by far were those I got (1) by volunteering for a while until they (unexpectedly) offered me a job or (2) by picking one company I'd love to work for, and persistently trying until they made an offer. Admittedly, those were both with small companies (under 100 employees).

I think going for quality or quantity can both work.

You said you "passed" the previous interviews before the last meeting. It is unlikely the interviewers share the "passed " assessment. We interview a lot and often run the candidates through multiple interviews and tests, before making a go no-go decision. Your decision is likely the cumulative of the multiple interviews. Don't feel bad about it, life's short, move on, There are plenty of companies hiring for software engineers.

He said he was "invited back" for the last interview. Its highly unlikely (and downright stupid) of them to invite someone back without first making a preliminary decision whether its worth their time (and his) to do so.

I should have specified, after each interview segment, I received a, "I received positive feedback from your interviewers, let's now schedule...", email.

But still, I think your point is valid. Thank you for your kind response.

You may not have done anything wrong. It's possible that you made a great impression and were a good fit for the job, but they had another candidate who had just a slight edge over you in some particular area. Don't let this discourage you.

Not unlike the VCs who reject applicants, you may have been great, but others may have been more great.

Further, there might have been non-technical issues at play which are harder to understand/reason about, such as communication issues, confidence issues (both over and under confident), or issues with a perception about how much you cared about their particular product.

All of the latter elements are fuzzy and not worth thinking too deeply about, if you get rejected for those, then you are lucky you didn't end up working there, as it would not have been a good fit for either of you.

I have heard people come out of interviews with negatives as fickle as "they didn't make eye contact."

This doesn't mean that the person was rejected for that reason, but if you are adding up all the reasons not to hire someone, and the sentiment was decidedly negative, then it's going to mean the company will not make the investment in hiring that person.

> I have heard people come out of interviews with negatives as fickle as "they didn't make eye contact."

Lack of eye contact is often considered to be a trait of poor communication. Do you mean to suggest that poor communication is not a valid reason for choosing not to hire someone?

It's superstition. The entire interview process is, to be honest. Whenever anyone studies how potential candidates are rated, compared to how they actually end up performing on the job, it turns out there are two things that have significant predictive power: an IQ test (illegal in some jurisdictions), and a test of skills that will be required on the job (e.g. for a programmer, asking the candidate to write some code). Nothing else has predictive power significantly better than random chance. You might as well choose candidates based on their star sign.

I have ADD, I am conscious of my lack of eye contact, but I am actually a great communicator.

All of human behavior occupies a wide spectrum. It's probably OK to say that on average, people who avoid eye contact may be bad communicators, but it's not universally true and to use that signal as an indication of a person's quality is cheating. If you need someone to make eye contact for you to feel like communication is good, the problem is with how you feel, not with the actual communication.

There are a wide variety of engineering jobs and some of them require regular communication with people who might not know you and who are therefore are more likely to misinterpet things like lack of eye contact. Tech leads, developer relations, etc.

People who are not good communicators and people who don't seem like good communicators, to the people being communicated to, are at a disadvantage for these jobs, at least until we eliminate miscommunication from human interaction (which I most sincerely hope someone, somewhere, is working on...)

If the candidate is rejected for poor communication the reason given should be "poor communication; eg did not make eye contact".

It's worth remembering that many people with Asperger's do not have a diagnosis, or would not consider declaring their diagnosis at interview. It might be worth while for interviewers to gently ask - in the spirit of making reasonable adjustments - about that.

But, really, we know that interviewing is a hopelessly broken recruitment method.

I wouldn't frame the question as "what did you do wrong". As other people in this thread have pointed out you may have dodged a bullet. It could very well be that this company is in the "wrong".

A better question to ask is what can you do to make yourself more attractive and increase the probability of closing the deal with the next company. Think like a salesman.

The fact that you told him you currently make close to what their interns make jumps out at me. Perhaps you think that would make you more attractive, but it may have had the opposite effect.

The head of engineering may have been told by his team that you have a lot of expertise, skill and potential and then all of a sudden he finds out you get paid at an intern level. He is going to ask himself what am I missing? If you are so good why doesn't anybody else value you at that level. People want to have a good feeling in their gut when they make a big purchase and a large previous salary gap may have unsettled that.

A better head of engineering wouldn't we swayed by previous salary, but the truth of the matter is a lot of decision makers are not perfectly rational.

My advice to you is to google strategies for dealing with the "what is your current salary" question and be better prepared for that situation.

Interviewing is completely different than in school.

When doing Math or Computer homework, you usually are given a clear reason why your grade was marked down.

When interviewing for a job, they will never tell you why they rejected you. For legal reasons, it is risky to tell you. They will always give something vague like "not qualified" or "bad cultural fit" or "other applicants were better", even if that isn't the real reason.

Also, it's normal to apply to a lot of jobs with a low acceptance rate. If employers interview 20 people for each position, (and they don't select better than random) then you'll get an offer for 5% of your interviews.

Here's my best guess given what you wrote. The company felt that you were good enough to be an intern there. They also had other candidates that they thought would be better. They only take n interns a year. That started from the best candidates and worked there way down until they got n yeses.

Once you graduate this will be less of a problem. Most big companies are always hiring. If they like you they'll make an offer. This can still be a problem at smaller companies though. If they only have one or two positions to fill they'll usually tend to be pickier.

5 months ago, I did - no b.s. - 15 hours of interview process with a big tech company. I was so good in the interviews that I (very, very politely) was putting on a clinic for their devs. No word for a week, then I get an email from HR saying they are passing on me with no reason given...after 15 hours of process. A couple weeks later I did an interview with a company I wouldn't have considered because I was so discouraged...ending up liking the team a lot, got hired and 3 months in, it's the best job I've ever had so far.

Do not take this personally. Companies make mistakes in the interviewing process and reject great people all the time. I have seen some absolutely amazing programmers with the chops to work anywhere look for jobs. There is always at least one company that rejects them. It's their loss.

Do not assume that you did something wrong. The mistake could be on their part. You made it through all of those technical interviews, so you will be able to find work somewhere!

Companies should give feedback to candidates whom they deny positions.

1. What questions were answered incorrectly/mistakenly/insufficiently? 2. Code review on code quizzes, if they're expected.

Unfortunately humanity (including hiring managers) is extremely fickle so the reason could have been as simple as "You reminded one of them of someone who bullied them in high-school, so they lied and said you weren't qualified." IMO, about a good 30% of the time when something goes wrong it's literally as stupid as this. Don't blame yourself if you were nice, not arrogant, and qualified. Just blame random chance, because that's the truest reason that exists.

It could be nothing to do with you. They are not looking at just you as a candidate, but several others at the same time. When interviewing, hiring managers look at a few factors including technical knowledge/competence, cultural fit and budget. You may fit all the requirements, but another candidate could have made a better overall impression.

It doesn't hurt to call the recruiter to get some feedback.

you mentioned questions on scalability et al, answers to those questions are very subjective. I went through a similar experience at one of the biggest tech giants out there ... went something like this - i was in the final face to face interviews and did well in all of those IMHO. It was a big interview day at the company and lot of candidates flew in all over the globe. So all interviews done, we went for lunch in the cafeteria, and before I started I was called for another round of interviews (and couple of other guys were called too). To be honest I hate lunch interviews, I think its cruel! But anyways, I was asked about design and scalability etc. and that was the last interview that day. After a few days I get a rejection email from the HR folks. I was in the same boat as you are today ...

Just checking but are you non-white or non-male or some other protected class?

Nope. I'm about as un-ethnic as it gets.

It might be the human resource people if big company. Human resource people wanted people with high achievement + specialty and cheap cost. My Advise,just find other company.. don't blame yourself for it.

This is an important question. You did nothing wrong, they'd like to hire you, but there was just something about you that made them hesitate. And because they have a ton of candidates for very few jobs, that hesitation means moving on. But it's NO knock on you - it's just some tiny thing that they probably should have ignored, but because they're focused on making a decision, they'll use any excuse to eliminate you. Don't think another second about it.

No matter how long it's been, interviewing is still a very subjective field. It is frustrating, no doubt, to not know what you did wrong but that's what subjectivity brings.

geekam - (this question is in the wrong thread, but I can't seem to comment in the older threads, sorry) - can you tell me anything (via email) about the dentist who threatened you and the fellow yelper with a lawsuit - even just the name of the state or the size of chain of practices? I'm using gmail with address todoso253. I believe there are some dentists who do this serially.

I responded to you. Please check your email.

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