369 karma · joined September 11, 2017
Calibre is king, set things right and you can just email books to your Kindle.
You ask a Leetcode question, and then assume the candidate is lying without even asking "have you seen this question before?".
I work for a FAANG company in a senior position and I know I will fail FAANG interviews w/o advanced prep.
They don't have to share anything at all, but I'm free to talk about the parts I've read.
Even if all my judgment is correct, that doesn't mean anything. We all did hot-headed stuff, fucked around and found out.
- My boss doesn't like me and excludes me. vs - I think my boss has a few favorites who get all the cool projects. Despite me being the best person as I had the most experience with technology X, my performance in good standing, and having showed interest in the project, I didn't get assigned to that project.
My point is clear, we are only reading one side of the story and I don't see an iota of maturity in the story he described. Therefore I also don't believe that his manager called everyone in the town to tell them not to hire him. We don't even know the feedback was sent out to his manager.
Maybe the other employers figured out on their own or maybe they asked his manager for a reference.
Similarly most everyone assumed that the manager went out of his way to talk shit about him. Managers don't go around and talk shit of their employees without getting prompted. If someone asks his manager "Hey I saw you worked with aroundtown, what was your experience like" you bet the answer is going to be crystal clear.
One guy saying "my boss sucked" isn't really feedback
- passive aggressive: This is a personal judgment. He was passive aggressive in what way? - excluded you from the team: How was he excluded? Was he not invited to events? Or did he not get good projects? If you are a temp with potential performance problems, it's normal that you don't get the cool projects. - code was awful: Again, is this a sentiment shared by other members of the team or is it just one junior engineer being super opinionated about something - long term maintainability: I don't think he was there for long - missing roadmap because poor design decisions: Again a junior opinion, running projects are complex with many different variables, you fail meeting deadlines for various reasons, there's never a single reason, and that reason is never "we had a bad piece of code written by one guy". I don't think OP has the historical context of that led to the that code.
When I hear all this feedback coming from a temp, all I hear is they weren't a team player, they don't know how to be diplomatic and most of the things they are saying are coming out of frustration and have no substance and is not actionable.
If someone is not meeting the expectations or underperforming and it's not a character problem. I'd be open to working with them if they did some growing somewhere else. If however, you have this kind of attitude of blame-shifting and finger pointing without any substance to back it up, no one will want to work with you.
Your boss was right in warning his friends.