tidepod12

That's what they said. From the article: "They said that I interviewed extremely well, but that they decided to go with another candidate."

Yea, it's weird reading this thread to me. I have a cordless Dyson vacuum and it is by far the best home vacuum I have ever used, both in terms of suction power (even compared to non-cordless ones) and in terms of other usability/features.

I addressed your "free work" comment in a separate subthread in response to your comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26096991

Ironic, because your initial comment was just repeating the same argument that someone made before you with no variation. If you wanted a different response, you should have tried coming up with a novel thought rather than one that was already stated two comments above.

Good night.

>Some company just expecting free work comes closer to the definition of "entitlement", in my opinion.

If you want a job, you have to put in work. That's just how it is. I too wish companies would just throw job offers at me without me having to put in any effort to get them, but I acknowledge that this just isn't realistic. There is a reasonable upper limit on how much work a company can expect from a candidate, but I do not think a 1 hour presentation is past that limit (and it depends on the job - if I'm interviewing for a warehouse worker job, then no it's not worth preparing a presentation for. but if it's a good job at a good company, then I begrudgingly accept that I've going to have to put in some extra effort). If the OP disagreed, they were free to decline to prepare the presentation and not continue the process. But if you read the OP, they weren't concerned about this "free work" and they actually said they were excited to give the presentation.

I also disagree with the idea in this thread that the company is trying to get "free work" out of the candidate in any way. It's not like the company is going to take your presentation on your random side project and go use it to try and sell services to customers or something. That's fantasy land. After your presentation, your PPT file is going into the recycle bin whether or not you got hired. Trust me, they don't want to sit through your random throwaway presentation either. They just want you to do it to see if you're a worthwhile hire, and then they want it to end. They aren't doing it for "the work".

> the fact that there was a recruiter involved makes it seem to me that they contacted him

Recruiters are involved in all hiring at the companies I've been at, even ones where the candidate applied. "Recruiter" is just the generic term for "HR person who is the point of contact for the candidate during the interview process".

It very much depends on what type of position the interview is for, IMO. If it's for a SWE position and the company is asking for a PowerPoint presentation about the SWE's background and past projects, that seems tangential at best and doesn't seem like the best use of interviewing time. But if by presentation we are talking "pull up some code you wrote and tell us what it does and why you coded it this way", I can understand that more for a SWE, and I think that would possibly be even better than a standard whiteboarding session (but it assumes that the candidate has some public code available they can talk about, and not everyone does).

OTOH, if it's for a position like a consultant or solutions engineer, which are positions where you are likely going to be giving PowerPoint presentations and training sessions to customers, then I think such a presentation during an interview is actually very useful, even though I personally hate doing them.

They didn't waste his time. OP put in work and in return the company gave them a chance to be hired. Once it was known that there was no longer a chance for them to be hired, the company told OP to stop putting in work for it.

If the company had known from the start that there was 0% chance of hiring OP, or if the company had allowed OP to give their presentation while already knowing that there was 0% chance that OP would be hired, that would be wasting their time. But that's not what they did.

You say "strung along", I say "they were willing to give OP a chance at the job even though OP was not fully qualified for it, and when it was decided that the role was no longer available to OP, they told OP that rather than having OP waste their time giving a pointless presentation that wouldn't have changed anything".

>I highly doubt that the HR went from 0 to a hire in <1 week. The hired candidate was obviously already in a more advanced stage of the interviewing process when the OP was asked to make a presentation.

That doesn't change anything. The company had no idea if the other candidate would pass the final interview or accept the offer until the very moment when they did, at which point they would have canceled OP's presentation. And that's what they did.

>They asked for a presentation knowing that there's a very high chance it will be meaningless.

So are you saying the better option would be for the company to say "well, there's a small chance we might hire you, but instead of giving you the opportunity we're just going to go ahead and reject you without even giving you the chance"? No, that's disrespectful.

>They didn't have the courtesy to sit through the presentation they asked for

Telling the candidate to waste their time giving the presentation that they already know won't change any outcome is disrespectful. If that had happened, we would all be here commenting about how the company is assholish for wasting OP's time by making them give a pointless presentation.

When they asked them to prepare the presentation, they likely had full intention to consider them for hiring. Then, another candidate filled the role, meaning the company no longer would be able to hire the author.

Informing them of this and cancelling the interview is the most respectful thing they could have done. It's certainly better than wasting the author's time by making them give the presentation even though the company then knew there was no longer a position they could offer.

I've worked at, hired at, and consulted at many companies. I've never once seen an HR department be incentivized to interview people just for the sake of interviewing. At my last two companies, recruiters are measured on the number of candidates that end up being extended an offer, and are negatively measured against the number of candidates that are rejected. If a recruiter is pulling in a large number of people that all get rejected, that's not due diligence, it's wasting everyone's time and is a signal that the recruiter is not very good at identifying suitable candidates.

Where you see condescension I see a recruiter being genuinely helpful by clearly laying out expectations for what will happen during the presentation and how it will go. Some of that stuff might seem obvious for some people, but my experience is that if you don't provide info like that, then you'll get people that show up completely unprepared, presenting the wrong info, unable to handle questions from the audience, etc. And I think letting that happen to someone is doing a bigger disservice to the candidate than possibly offending their ego by giving them too many directions.

They were likely willing to hire the author anyway, even without the experience. But they ended up finding someone that was better than the author.

>Can you explain why they might have gone with the above excuse rather than "we found someone better" or "we won't be moving forward"?

They did say "we found someone better". From the article: "They said that I interviewed extremely well, but that they decided to go with another candidate."

It's really hard to tell if the company was "wrong" here based on the available information. I'm tempted to say the company is, because I certainly have personal experience with companies that do shitty things during interviews, but I'm not so sure the presentation is an automatic indicator of that.

It's possible that the presentation was not meant to be a burden at all. I've done similar interview presentations in the past, and it only took me 2-3 hours to prepare for it because my job experience is in a field where giving hour-long presentations with only a day's notice is commonplace. 2-3 hours preparation is annoying, but it's about what I expect to spend preparing for any interview. If OP was interviewing for a Solutions Engineer or Consultant role, for example, then asking for a 1 hour presentation isn't that unreasonable and it's likely that the company would expect OP to be able to prepare for that without it being a burden.

OTOH, if it was for a software engineer role and they were requiring a presentation even though it has nothing to do with the job function, then yea that's absurd. But which is it? I can't tell from the OP.

>only to get turned down with an explanation that was known at the beginning. How many interviews does it take to come to that realization?

The explanation likely wasn't known at the beginning. The thing that changed was the other candidate, and the company almost certainly had no way of knowing if this other candidate was going to fill the role up until the moment they did, at which time (I'm assuming) is when the company cancelled OP's presentation. The company likely had full intention to hire OP until that point.

>It seems like this should be true, and I hope it is, but I have worked for companies that seem to interview just for the sake of feeling or appearing to move forward in filling a position. Maybe the recruiter or hiring manager is incentivized in that way? Some action, even if it's in the wrong direction, is perceived as better than no action at all.

That's opposite my experience as a hiring manager. If we're "iffy" on a candidate, we'll likely give another interview to see if the first interview was a fluke. But if it's already known off the bat that the candidate won't be hired, we certainly don't waste time interviewing them anyway. Interviewing someone that's already a "no" means wasting multiple peoples' entire day in interviews, meetings, debriefs for no progress. That's something I want to avoid as much as humanly possible, and although I'm sure it happens some places, it's definitely not incentivized at any of the companies I've worked at.

Companies don't just interview people for shits and giggles. It costs a lot of money and people-hours to interview someone. The notion that "they didn't even read the resume and had no intention of ever hiring this person" is silly - no company is going to waste the time and money to go through 3 interviews with a person unless they were at least willing to hear them out. They don't want to waste their own time any more than you want to waste yours.

The most likely thing that happened is that the company was willing to hire this person even without the requisite experience if the interviews had gone well, but then someone else also applied and they were a better fit. That's a shitty result for the OP, but I'm not sure the alternative is any better. Should the company just not have given OP a shot at all, reducing their chance to get that job to 0%? That's not beneficial for OP, either.

My guess is that it wasn't actually a deal-breaker, and if there were no other candidates or if the other candidate ended up not being a good fit, the company wanted to go ahead with the presentation to see if they would be a good fit even without that specific experience.

It's a complicated situation from both side. If you're the company, you have to anticipate that the other candidate might get another offer, or turn you down, or turn out to be a flop, so you want to interview other candidates at the same time to have a back-up plan. And that's a good thing for the article author too, because it gives them the chance to see if they're a fit for the job and could learn the required skills even if they don't have them now. And it's great if it works out... but shitty when it doesn't.

It's worth realizing that it's a losing situation for the company, too. It's not like they want to waste a bunch of time interviewing you for a job you're ultimately not going to be in any more than you want to waste time on it. But unfortunately "wasting a bunch of time interviewing" is just how job hunting/hiring works these days.

I don't think anyone would disagree with the statement that hiring is terribly, atrociously, and disastrously broken. It's been talked about ad nauseum. But I don't think I've ever seen (nor do I personally have) any practical solutions to improve it.

Hiring is a two-way hard problem. On the company's side, they have conflicting interests where they want to hire someone as quickly and cheaply (cheap as in not spending hundreds of man hours interviewing just to fill a role), but also want to do due diligence so that they hire the right person. On the candidate's side, they also have conflicting interests where they just want a job and don't want to spend multiple entire days doing interviews, but they also need to do their due diligence to make sure the job is actually something they want.

This almost necessitates spending a decent chunk of time with each other, but not too much. The balance that most big tech company's seem to go with is 6-7 hours total in interviews for each candidate (and then ~10+ additional hours for both the candidate and the company doing preparation/debriefs). I really don't know why or how this was the number arrived at, though. From my perspective as a candidate, even after 6-7 hours of interviews I often come away still knowing very little about what the job actually is. And from my perspective as an interviewer, I know that requiring so much time from internal employees serving as interviewers is draining and stressful. It seems like it ultimately comes out to a lose-lose, but for some reason it's still what big tech sticks with.

The regulations, such as FINRA Rule 2111, were not in place until the early 2010s. FINRA/SEC implemented stricter requirements for the verification I mentioned in my first comment, but over the past ~5-7 years the brokerages have relaxed them. So yes, it is new relative to your experience in 2010.

>If there was wrongdoing, the SEC would be all over it.

Like this? https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/robinhood-reportedly-facing-...

>all tobacco companies just because the users are too stupid to read the giant warning labels

Like this? https://www.publichealthlawcenter.org/topics/commercial-toba...

In our society, we hold companies responsible for being poor citizens. And "our users are stupid" is not a valid justification for being a poor citizen, whether you like that or not.

And company's need to take more responsibility for their own actions as well, instead of blaming their users for being stupid. Predatory and aggressive behavior isn't made acceptable just because the person you preyed on was foolish.

The minimum age for gambling in many states is 21. So yes, if this 20 year old student walked into a casino and gambled away all his money, it would be the casino's fault for allowing that to happen.

Brokers are required by law to "protect" traders from financially harming themselves by restricting the trades that can be made until the trader verifies that they know what they are doing. Some brokers will go as far as to personally call you up and give you an on-the-spot quiz about how options work before letting you trade them, for example.

Many brokers seem to have gotten very lax about this in recent years, and even Schwab/Ameritrade allowed me to trade options without verifying anything. My guess is that the recent Robinhhood/GME fiasco is going to see FINRA cracking down hard and reinstating some strict verification procedures.

>The conclusion here is that RH is a toy broker following the mantra of move fast and breaks things.

I personally see them at the Juul of the finance world. They're intentionally targeting young inexperienced people and telling them "just download this app and you'll be rich! all your friends are doing it, don't miss out!"

>You have to go out of your way to trade options (they're disabled by default), and the only way you can get options enabled in Robinhood as a college freshman is to straight up lie on the application.

If all it took was a lie on an application for Robinhood to grant someone the ability to use extremely risky trading strategies, that's still Robinhood's fault. Robinhood isn't absolved of responsibility just because the student did something dishonest.

Given the fact he was 20 years old, his options application should have automatically been under a heightened degree of scrutiny, if not immediately rejected. That it wasn't indicates Robinhood is not responsibly implementing KYC controls, which is a huge deal.

The ITU does have jurisdiction. Since SpaceX (and Amazon) are US companies, they work with the FCC, who then works with the ITU on behalf of SpaceX/Amazon.

In 2017 SpaceX was granted a window to "lock down" its proposed slots for 9 years to prevent others from taking those slots, and that was years before they even had a single satellite flying. I don't see why Amazon shouldn't be given the same treatment.

Secondary comment: SpaceX's behavior in this instance is not unlike every other ISP in America engaging in anti-competitive behavior to keep newcomers out. Remember when Google Fiber was rolling out and tried to use fiber/utility poles in a way that allowed ISPs to share public utility poles? But then ATT pitched a fit [1, 2] saying "actually we don't want Google Fiber to do that because it could possibly harm our business in some unspecified and vague way", basically killing the expansion of Fiber [3]? And who suffered? All of us unlucky Americans who are now stuck with exorbitant prices for ridiculous internet plans from ATT because we don't have any other options.

We already have an absolutely terrible oligopoly of wired ISPs, do we really want to start down this path of allowing the same to happen for space-based internet, too?

1: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160923/06590635601/att-s...

2: https://www.slashgear.com/att-files-lawsuit-to-hinder-google...

3: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/7/18215743/google-fiber-leav...

I don't see how this addresses any of the concerns brought up in the article. This entire spat is because SpaceX got approval from the FCC to deploy their system in a specific way, and Amazon acknowledged that and designed their system in a way to not interfere with SpaceX. Now SpaceX is coming and saying they want to change their system in a way to interfere with Amazon.

Forget the names of the companies and their leaders for a second. We have a shared public resource, like a pond. Company A showed up and says "I am going to set up shop on this side of the pond, and we will leave the rest of the pond open for other people to use." Company B then says "okay, we are going to set up shop on the other side of the pond so we don't interfere with each other." Company A then says "no, we actually want to use that side of the pond, too. too bad for you".

In what universe is Company A in the right here, and why does it matter who gets there first? It's clearly anti-competitive practice on the part of Company A trying to shut out Company B, and the only people who will suffer from it are the general public.

>Software development and security are basically the same thing.

There is an entire universe worth of knowledge in the security space that has nothing to do with software development. I'd agree that 98% of the security world is "bullshit", but one of the reasons every company has such awful security is specifically because too many people think "software development" == "security", and this narrow mindedness means they end up failing to accomplish any of the security pillars that have nothing to do with software development.

There is a lot of overlap specifically with secure development and software development, but saying "software development and security are basically the same thing" is naive. I like to compare it to a company's legal team: if you're going to court over a technical topic, you definitely want some people on your legal team that have software experience and you definitely want your general counsel to be technically educated, but that doesn't mean you're just going to take a software developer and make them your general counsel. You still need an actual lawyer, because there is an entire universe of law-related knowledge that you need that a software developer doesn't know.