I had similar experience with Uber last month. My recruiter scheduled an introductory phone call with me and then she forgot about it. The call was rescheduled and then she forgot again. On the third time she did call me but never apologized or anything. Then she scheduled a technical phone screen for me a few days later. On that day my interviewer called me two hours earlier than the scheduled time - no time zone difference, just that recruiter communicated wrong time to him. As it happened, I was in the middle of my lunch and caught off guard. The interviewer wasn't happy, so I guessed I didn't pass that phone screen, but the recruiter didn't even bother telling that to me - she just ignored my emails and she never even gave me her phone number.
P.S. I was invited to 6 onsite interviews in other companies and in the end I've got all 6 very good offers. So, good riddance, Uber.
It’s things like this, and the open optimizing for low false positives over low false negatives that makes me totally unsympathetic to claims that high tech companies can’t find sufficient workers and need a legislative solution. Reveled preferences don’t show a desperation for qualified workers.
Absolutely. And I think your notion of "optimizing for low false positives" is generous. I think most bad interviewers are optimized for a) employer convenience and b) feelings of power on the part of interviewers.
Part A is understandable in that the standard hiring process is optimized for the common case: scarce jobs and abundant, interchangeable workers. That gets you bulk resume submission, minimal human interaction, and indifferent, slipshod processes. Part B is just jackassery, but it gets you things like brainteaser interview questions, high-stress interviews, and a lot of biases smuggled in under things like "culture fit".
That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce. A few years back, I said, "Wait, we spend all this time optimizing our software for user experience; why don't we do the same for job applications?" I ended up with a significantly different process, one that was a little more work for us, but a way better applicant experience. I also shifted focus from finding flaws to looking to see people at their best, which is not only a better experience, but I think gets better people. I encourage everybody to apply their design thinking and user empathy skills to their own hiring process. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
I got an appointment with Goldman Sachs for a 30 minute screening interview with one of their analysts. The guy called me 25 minutes late and without introducing himself proceeded to give me a highly specific question about how options work and immediately tell me he only has 5 minutes because he has to go to another meeting.
Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...
I had a friend (super sharp guy, very very good in programming) long time ago - whenever he is bored, he'll schedule an interview with some company, clear the interview, and start negotiating the salary, just to see how much he could get. Once he gets an offer, he'll use that offer to drive up the offer from some other company that he interviewed with. Mind you, he had no intention of joining any of these companies, it was just a hobby/time-pass for him.
I used think he is a jerk for doing this, wasting everyone's time. After reading how companies treat the candidates, I am not so sure ...
FYI sometime's its not the company itself (I have no idea with Uber) but rather a third party's ineptitude. I just had a series of phone interviews scheduled with candidates through an external vendor and multiple times they forgot to provide the candidate's contact information before the interview. I'm sure that's not what they told the candidate when I wasn't able to call them.
Similar for me with Nest/Google. Got invited to an onsite and my recruiter went dark. This was after the screw ups with scheduling the for the multiple phone screens and online coding tests. What ended up happening was that I never got to the onsite because after I was invited and asked for times days and what city I would be flying out of for tickets I never got another reply and I tried to contact the recruiter multiple times after. Got nothing.
I had a member from the Uber team contact me directly via email by using a template they had prepared for everyone they contact. I knew because they used the wrong name. I declined to do anything with Uber, not just because they couldn’t put in a little effort to write directly to me on our first contact, but in part because of all the terrible media talk about Uber culture and treatment of employees.
Yikes, couple of people I know interviewed recently at Uber also. They seemed to have good experiences and were surprised about quality of questions and culture. Offers, if true, seemed competitive, beating all others (2 out of 3 took the offer).
But I guess if something goes bad, it goes really bad...
I was headhunted by someone for Uber's ATG. After reaching out she whiffed our web meeting and turned standoffish when I politely asked if she wanted to reschedule. Maybe I was part of the bycatch? Seemed like a very meat market kind of attitude to building a team.
no time zone difference, just that recruiter communicated wrong time to him. As it happened, I was in the middle of my lunch and caught off guard. The interviewer wasn't happy
That's a red flag too - a professional interviewer, once you had explained that you weren't expecting the call until the agreed time, would have apologised and called you back later. Done it a bunch of times myself. Everyone in the industry who's been around the block knows that recruiters are generally pretty flaky and wouldn't have held it against you. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with that individual anyway.
Even when I’m calling a phone candidate at the scheduled time, I make sure to ask if it’s still a good time, are they ready and in an environment where they’re comfortable doing the interview. At phone interview stage, candidates Are about to get their first real experience of interacting with your company, and if they’re any good you will be one of many phone interviews they are juggling to fit in around their current work and normal life. It is an appropriate time to be accommodating and understanding.
What's interesting about these practices is that the _best_ candidates will have no patience for this and say "no thankyou" so they're not getting the cream of the crop. Everyone, even an obvious bad fit, should be treated respectfully and the interviewee's time and schedule should be honored.
I was able to read the article before it got hugged to death by HN.
That said, like many similar interview/hiring stories shared here, it reeks of single-sidedness. Specifically, there is not enough detail regarding your interactions with the interviewers to warrant calling this a horror story. The only points of interest in this piece, in my opinion, were that the interviewers were late and there was a clear communication issue (particularly when it came to scheduling the interviews).
Other than that, all we know is that you tripped up during some of your interviews. In those situations, based on your post, it was never really your fault, which is not the best attitude to have.
Finally, them saying that your engineering skills needed more work shouldn’t be insulting. Amazon hires tons of engineers and they are generally very technically competent. However good you think you are, there are millions who are just as good, and there are thousands who are better. Amazon can only hire so many people and this was likely their way of saying they simply had more candidates with more experience.
I know it is frustrating. I can say this because I have absolutely been in your shoes. (Dream job, all the way to the last stage, then no offer.) At the end of the day, we have to acknowledge the competitiveness of our field and use that to drive us to become better.
My understanding is that a lot of this abrasiveness on interview day (third interview for me as well) is mainly about judging response and culture fit. I found out a lot more a few months after my own similar experience with Amazon. I think MS's lot drops are far more egregious though.
The keys are not to let it phase you, stay positive and ask clarifying questions to give clear answers. It's often far more about personality than you may think.
I completely agree with your assessment. At least once a week I deal with people being late for meetings / interviews / whatever. Heck, sometimes it's me running late. That's just how life happens sometimes. Yes, in an interview situation, we all want to be treated well and for the interviewers to be prompt and positive. When they fall short, however, it's a far cry from a "horror story". Just my opinion.
This HN thread is a shocking reminder of how many people view corporate sadism as normal or even good. That kind of nonsense is what engineers should be shielded from, not the other way around. I prefer to keep my dignity, thanks.
Hey, at least it was Amazon. I had a similar experience interviewing for an _airline_ company a few years back. A recruiter contacted me, mentioned a job opening they had. You know how job postings list 20 different “requirements” but they don’t expect you to actually have all of them? I actually did have expert-level experience at every single item on their list. They phone-screened me, brought me onsite for three in-person back-to-back interviews (during normal working hours, so I had to take time off of my then-current job to go interview). They called back a few days later and said they wanted to bring me back onsite AGAIN for a full day of back-to-back interviews. So I took another PTO day, showed up and interviewed for 6 hours (9 different interviwers) - only to never get another call back.
A friend suggested a position at Github for an Elasticsearch Manager.
A couple weeks go by and I'm in the interview. It's all MySQL questions. And really specific questions too.
I ask them flat out what the position was for and they said "MySQL Engineer" ...
I replied with "I'm actually more of an Elasticsearch guy" and was told that they're ditching Elasticsearch.
So not only did they decide it was a good idea to slot me into a position from ES to MySQL but they also decided to bring me down from Engineering Manager to individual contributor...
This seems to happen quite a bit. Though not often.
Over the summer I interviewed for a large bank and was told they were modernizing their apps from HTML5 PhoneGap/Cordova to native code, maybe React Native. I was told point-blank by the recruiting company exclusively contracted to fill roles for this project that my profile would be a perfect fit, and I agreed.
Then I get into the interview, and it turns out I would be working on middleware to connect one set of APIs to another, entirely backend, and in a completely siloed department structure.. The interviewers were not sure how any of my front-end skills would be applicable. It was a waste of time on both sides.
I have to wonder why more places, when scheduling interviews, don't email prospective candidates directly before the interview and repeat again, verbatim, what job positions they're looking for and the titles of those positions and descriptions/expectations.
I mean, I might be unusual, but if I were to see a job posting before such an interview which very clearly doesn't match what I thought I was applying for, I'd reply and either cancel the interview or see if there were other positions available.
After all, not only am I wasting their time, but I could have been more productively interviewing at other companies during that time! :)
I went for an interview for Senior .NET Developer role at NineMSN in Australia once. Had full on 2 hour technical interview of .NET and SQL Server. Thought I didn pretty well cos the interview lasted so Long and they were happy with me. Towards the end I asked some questions. The last question was “so what would I be working on?”
Basically they said: “oh well our api is already written so you should be doing all the website integration work with the api” I asked on top of that meant I’ll be doing the .net work of the apis? “No just the HTML/css/JavaScript”... I didn’t accept the offer.
I interviewed recently with Citadel in London, they're one of them market maker financial companies with a bunch of tech and shiny offices. I was told we'd have a few interviews, and lunch in the middle (we started at 1pm). Apparently I didn't do well enough in the second interview (writing random Python algorithms on a laptop - in fairness, not a whiteboard), so after a while the guy doing the second interview walked out, left me alone for about 10 minutes (it's okay, their conference rooms have a nice view over the river!), and then my first interviewer came back and told me that unfortunately my next interviewer wasn't available. I asked what would happen next and they said they'd have to rearrange the whole thing and walked me out the building. It was obvious it didn't go well but I found it so pathetic that they didn't even tell me, lied about the next interviewer and then even pretended they were going to be back in touch to rearrange things.
I find it a useful experience though. Next time I'm talking with a recruiter and they mention Citadel I'll know they don't do their homework on checking how candidates are treated and I won't work with them.
I know nothing about Citadel, but it may be unfair to generalize from one experience. For example, that particular group may be bad but other groups may be fine and don't know about the bad group.
If you're feeling particularly bold, the ideal is to report that bad group to Citadel. Then, after sufficient time for an internal review, follow up and ask if anything has been done, and if not, then conclude your generalization.
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if our bayesian priors about the morality of financial institutions are correct, but it helps to empirically validate this and publish findings so that, over time, these institutions are validly, publicly shamed.
Is it common for employers to leave you sitting alone in a conference room during an interview with no explanation or instructions? This happened to me straight out of college and I didn't handle it well admittedly during a poor interview on my part, I was already incredibly anxious and frustrated from my poor performance and I just walked out and never looked back.
I feel like this is an actual interview tactic in some book somewhere although I can't imagine why.
That's the only time it's happened to me. It's fun to think that it was a tactic and I was supposed to either leave or do that one magic trick to wow them and change their mind :) but more likely I think the second guy just decided it was a no but was too awkward to say, so panicked and went to find the first guy to ask him to tell me.
This happened to me I think every time I was interviewed. But this was only being left for a short time between interviews (but maybe I was told that some next step would happen in a few minutes). Waiting time depends from place to place. Eg at a small company in a glass walled room where whoever was to interview me next could see me from their desk, the waiting times were shorter.
I sympathise with feeling anxious about it but I suppose the only thing to do about that is to hope you won’t get long waiting times or to go to a lot of interviews and come to expect it.
I doubt it is a tactic as it doesn’t reflect well on the company. Are they looking for someone who won’t mind if their colleagues are late for a meeting?
Being dishonest is the way out of tricky situations where one's feelings get hurt. This is okay, if the interviewee doesn't have right skills. What if the interviewee is extremely good and yet can't perform in that interview? Then, one can follow your foot steps.
> Lunch break. I was given a "lunch buddy" and told this was not an interview. I am not sure whether it was taken into account or not.
Ha! At least you got a lunch. Here is my experience with AWS:
* They forgot to call for the 1st phone interview. I stood around like an idiot for 45 minutes waiting. Had to call them eventually. They apologized and rescheduled. Ok whatever, bigco, mistakes happen.
* Rescheduled phone interview goes awesome. I was excited. Was told about the Leadership Principles and to make sure learn and parrot them back during the onsite interview. Ok, a little strange. Got the "I think might be joining a cult" thought in the back of my head.
* Interview day. Show up. Turns out future manager, that is the main person I should have been talking to, wasn't even there.
* Got questions like "what was the worst thing that happened to you?". They probably wanted me to parrot the leadership principles back at them. But of course, what better question to make the person feel terrible than making them remember all the bad experiences in their life.
* Nobody asked much about my resume. I had successfully shipped products, could talk in detail about Linux kernel internals, distributed systems. But instead I was live-compiling "invert the binary tree" type problems at the whiteboard.
* Lunch comes. I am thinking, well at least I'll get to meet some of the future team members. But nobody shows up. After 30 min I started to walk around the hallways hoping someone would stop me and ask me what am I doing there. I even had a snarky reply ready to go.
* After that I did get a bit snarky and refused to parrot back the leadership principles. Was that the bar-raiser who I was talking back to? Could be. Were they the ones that failed my interview or was it the manager that never showed up that vetoed me? I'll never know.
* But that's not all. There is more. The HR person I talked to before the interview was swearing they'd get back to me within 3 days. They didn't. Three weeks later I called them back, not because I was curious about the result much, I had accepted an offer by then, I just wanted to see what the excuse would be.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. Then it seemed like a terrible waste of time then but now it's a story I really enjoy sharing. It's just so fun. It's incredible the amount of dysfunction and awfulness that resulted from interfacing with that company.
Wow. That "what's the worst thing that ever happened to you" question should make their legal team's skin crawl.
What if the answer was about being bullied for sexual orientation (and in the process disclosing information that could bias an interview) or about dealing with a medical condition?
> Interview day. Show up. Turns out future manager, that is the main person I should have been talking to, wasn't even there.
What do people recommend doing in this situation? Walk away? Reschedule? Insist on explanation? Or is it feasible they would make a decision without the manager interview.
Interviews are a two way street and you are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you.
Should you ever have a truly terrible experience in interview, first tell them that you are going to have to call a halt so as to not waste any more time.
Then inform them that you are very sorry, but unfortunately they have managed to fail the interview process and should the chance to employ you come around again, could they please not reapply.
Then walk away.
I have only done this once, while being told about the extra unpaid hours I would have to put in because of 'culture'.
It was more than worth it though, as I got to see a shade of maroon that I was previously unaware was even within the gamut of normal human skin tones.
Keep in mind that there could be a very good explanation for such a no-show, like death of a family member.
But if the company has no second thought about wasting time of candidates then I would stop asking myself how to "get in" and instead ask myself if they really need me.
Call me spoiled, but I'm not going to jump through hoops (like more than three interviews) and accept abuse just for the honour to serve. I am not a slave, and if my skills have some value then I will eventually find a company that actually needs them.
This must be the norm for Amazon. I interviewed for a position a couple of years ago in their networking division, and was interviewed by an individual in Dublin (I was applying for a position in Seattle) who was not only not the hiring manager, but didn't seem to care for interviewing me at all. Obviously, it went nowhere.
My experience with Facebook. I've been referred by a friend and got a fast response from US. Since I am not in US they told me they are going to switch to EMEA dept. for the rest of interview. Then guy emails me from EMEA saying that he got my case and if he's not in touch soon I should remind myself to him... Actually the first one said that too.
WHAT? I should send him an email in case he forgot about me?
Anyway, he forgot. Obviously. After some time (2 weeks or so) I send him an email. Auto-response comes back "I am on vacation, contact Alice instead." Well, so I'm emailing Alice and asking what's going on, etc. Another auto-response "I am on vacation, contact Bob instead." I got really irritated by that point. So I contact Bob, and auto-response comes back "I have too many meetings today, I can't respond today." And that was it.
Now, the funny part. After couple of weeks I got an automated email asking me to participate in interview survey to share my experience. Oh, boy! I'm glad you've asked, guys! So I describe the situation, ask them did they got a bad day or they treat all their candidates like that, and was it a joke or they just disregard people on a daily basis? After I submitted, the next day email comes. "Sorry, we've already have someone else for the job, bla bla bla."
Facebook in Seattle has an open head count. Which means lots of recruiting attempts. I finally got them to blacklist me locally, because I was getting 3-4 recruitment contacts a month, and had been for ages and was getting somewhat tired of it. I have absolutely zero interest in working at Facebook, for a number of reasons.
Some of their recruiters were beyond ridiculous when it comes to persistent. My "favourite" interaction with them, only marginally paraphrased:
Recruiter: "Hi, I saw your impressive work history on LinkedIn and would like to talk to you about a job opportunity at Facebook" (probably the only thing "impressive" in my work history at the time was AWS?)
Me: "Thank you for contacting me, but I'm not interested in working at Facebook"
Note: This was sent direct to my personal email address, not through LinkedIn. It happens to be an email address associated with both my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, presumably something Facebook recruiters could get at? Most of their recruitment attempts have come via email instead of LinkedIn, and reference my work history on LinkedIn.
< a few days pass >
R: "Hi, just reaching out to you again to see if you've had a chance to rethink about the role at Facebook"
M: "I'm not changing my mind. I'm not interested in working at Facebook"
< a few days pass >
R: "Hi, we have a recruitment open day coming up on $date, there will be food and drinks and a chance to speak with people who already work at Facebook. It's an ideal chance to see if there is any work you might find interesting here"
M: "I'm really, really not interested. Stop contacting me"
< $day-2 >
R: "Just thought I'd send a quick reminder that the open day is coming up in a couple of days. Hope to see you there"
M: "No, you won't. I'm not attending. Please stop contacting me"
< $day >
R: "Hi, I'm looking forward to meeting you today at the open day"
By this stage I'm half tempted to turn up just so I could punch the recruiter.
M: "You won't. I'm not attending. STOP CONTACTING ME"
< $day+1 >
R: "I'm sorry, I appear to have missed you at the open day. I was wondering if maybe I could schedule a time to speak to you about engineering opportunities here at Facebook"
M: "STOP CONTACTING ME"
At which point I went through my email backlog, marked every email as spam, and put in an auto-junk rule for any further communication from that recruiter.
It’s appalling how one-sided many orgs see the interview process. Instead of treating the candidate as a partner - someone to work together in making a decision - the candidate might as well be a box of staplers to them.
The candidate is barely a human being to these mega corps. They freely dispose of the candidates time without any consideration beyond what the hiring team needs.
An interview CAN be as much about helping the candidate find what’s best for them. Heck where I work we actively talk and promote other options where someone might be happier. We make referrals for people. When it’s not a good fit we try to give them feedback and genuinely want them to succeed.
> It’s appalling how one-sided many orgs see the interview process. Instead of treating the candidate as a partner - someone to work together in making a decision - the candidate might as well be a box of staplers to them
With maybe 1 in 5 on-site interview candidates making it, and the amount of interviewing individuals at Amazon do, it can often get to the point where it's really hard to see interviewees as people. I tried really hard, especially as one of the more limited-pool of systems engineers (I specifically put myself out there for other teams to leverage, so that systems engineers didn't end up with a full dev loop). The number of interview loops done is only exasperated by Amazon's inability to hold on to engineers for more than a few years. One team I dealt with regularly would lose a sizeable chunk of their syseng staff every 9 months or so.
I can't even begin to imagine how hard it gets for the bar-raisers, who might interview 4-5 candidates a week or more.
I've found it actually works to throw a little temper tantrum, Go right to the most senior person and just lay into them in a manner they cannot defend, because they are clearly treating people unfairly, taking advantage of the unbalanced recruiting situation. That's how I got my first C-Suite (reporting to the board, not the CEO) Senior Director position.
Any company that interviews as much as these do is going to have a process that resembles sausage making, and the candidates are the ingredients. It's all about volume, not quality.
Readit News
Part A is understandable in that the standard hiring process is optimized for the common case: scarce jobs and abundant, interchangeable workers. That gets you bulk resume submission, minimal human interaction, and indifferent, slipshod processes. Part B is just jackassery, but it gets you things like brainteaser interview questions, high-stress interviews, and a lot of biases smuggled in under things like "culture fit".
That makes very little sense for software jobs, where it's the workers that are scarce. A few years back, I said, "Wait, we spend all this time optimizing our software for user experience; why don't we do the same for job applications?" I ended up with a significantly different process, one that was a little more work for us, but a way better applicant experience. I also shifted focus from finding flaws to looking to see people at their best, which is not only a better experience, but I think gets better people. I encourage everybody to apply their design thinking and user empathy skills to their own hiring process. You'll be pleasantly surprised.
Does anyone claim that? I thought "high tech companies" have just enough candidates even with this kind of bad practices.
Sorry you had a bad experience and I'm bummed we lost you :(
Off-topic side question - is web robots scraping forums for parseable email addresses still a thing? I'm pretty free with my gmail address, and I haven't had a problem with spam making it to my inbox, but maybe I'm an edge case...
I used think he is a jerk for doing this, wasting everyone's time. After reading how companies treat the candidates, I am not so sure ...
That's a red flag too - a professional interviewer, once you had explained that you weren't expecting the call until the agreed time, would have apologised and called you back later. Done it a bunch of times myself. Everyone in the industry who's been around the block knows that recruiters are generally pretty flaky and wouldn't have held it against you. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed working with that individual anyway.
That said, like many similar interview/hiring stories shared here, it reeks of single-sidedness. Specifically, there is not enough detail regarding your interactions with the interviewers to warrant calling this a horror story. The only points of interest in this piece, in my opinion, were that the interviewers were late and there was a clear communication issue (particularly when it came to scheduling the interviews).
Other than that, all we know is that you tripped up during some of your interviews. In those situations, based on your post, it was never really your fault, which is not the best attitude to have.
Finally, them saying that your engineering skills needed more work shouldn’t be insulting. Amazon hires tons of engineers and they are generally very technically competent. However good you think you are, there are millions who are just as good, and there are thousands who are better. Amazon can only hire so many people and this was likely their way of saying they simply had more candidates with more experience.
I know it is frustrating. I can say this because I have absolutely been in your shoes. (Dream job, all the way to the last stage, then no offer.) At the end of the day, we have to acknowledge the competitiveness of our field and use that to drive us to become better.
The keys are not to let it phase you, stay positive and ask clarifying questions to give clear answers. It's often far more about personality than you may think.
Honestly, I just need to know that they can code to the level expected, work together, and aren’t completely looney.
The whole process outlined in the post was needlessly disrespectful of the candidate and his time.
I wouldn't excuse a Godless megacorp like Amazon with this awful scarcity mindset. It is poison.
In the end, I do feel it's often more about personality and culture than anything technical, once you get past the pre-screen technical interviews.
A couple weeks go by and I'm in the interview. It's all MySQL questions. And really specific questions too.
I ask them flat out what the position was for and they said "MySQL Engineer" ...
I replied with "I'm actually more of an Elasticsearch guy" and was told that they're ditching Elasticsearch.
So not only did they decide it was a good idea to slot me into a position from ES to MySQL but they also decided to bring me down from Engineering Manager to individual contributor...
Over the summer I interviewed for a large bank and was told they were modernizing their apps from HTML5 PhoneGap/Cordova to native code, maybe React Native. I was told point-blank by the recruiting company exclusively contracted to fill roles for this project that my profile would be a perfect fit, and I agreed.
Then I get into the interview, and it turns out I would be working on middleware to connect one set of APIs to another, entirely backend, and in a completely siloed department structure.. The interviewers were not sure how any of my front-end skills would be applicable. It was a waste of time on both sides.
I have to wonder why more places, when scheduling interviews, don't email prospective candidates directly before the interview and repeat again, verbatim, what job positions they're looking for and the titles of those positions and descriptions/expectations.
I mean, I might be unusual, but if I were to see a job posting before such an interview which very clearly doesn't match what I thought I was applying for, I'd reply and either cancel the interview or see if there were other positions available.
After all, not only am I wasting their time, but I could have been more productively interviewing at other companies during that time! :)
Basically they said: “oh well our api is already written so you should be doing all the website integration work with the api” I asked on top of that meant I’ll be doing the .net work of the apis? “No just the HTML/css/JavaScript”... I didn’t accept the offer.
That happens all the time. Chances are if they aren't reaching out to you it's a bait and switch opening.
Easy way to discriminate is whether you'll have your budget or not.
Yep. Though it's usually easier for them to just go with the bullshit line, "We can't afford to pay someone with your level of experience."
Translation: We don't hire people over 30, but we don't want to get hit with a federal lawsuit.
I find it a useful experience though. Next time I'm talking with a recruiter and they mention Citadel I'll know they don't do their homework on checking how candidates are treated and I won't work with them.
If you're feeling particularly bold, the ideal is to report that bad group to Citadel. Then, after sufficient time for an internal review, follow up and ask if anything has been done, and if not, then conclude your generalization.
With that said, I wouldn't be surprised if our bayesian priors about the morality of financial institutions are correct, but it helps to empirically validate this and publish findings so that, over time, these institutions are validly, publicly shamed.
I feel like this is an actual interview tactic in some book somewhere although I can't imagine why.
I sympathise with feeling anxious about it but I suppose the only thing to do about that is to hope you won’t get long waiting times or to go to a lot of interviews and come to expect it.
I doubt it is a tactic as it doesn’t reflect well on the company. Are they looking for someone who won’t mind if their colleagues are late for a meeting?
Ha! At least you got a lunch. Here is my experience with AWS:
* They forgot to call for the 1st phone interview. I stood around like an idiot for 45 minutes waiting. Had to call them eventually. They apologized and rescheduled. Ok whatever, bigco, mistakes happen.
* Rescheduled phone interview goes awesome. I was excited. Was told about the Leadership Principles and to make sure learn and parrot them back during the onsite interview. Ok, a little strange. Got the "I think might be joining a cult" thought in the back of my head.
* Interview day. Show up. Turns out future manager, that is the main person I should have been talking to, wasn't even there.
* Got questions like "what was the worst thing that happened to you?". They probably wanted me to parrot the leadership principles back at them. But of course, what better question to make the person feel terrible than making them remember all the bad experiences in their life.
* Nobody asked much about my resume. I had successfully shipped products, could talk in detail about Linux kernel internals, distributed systems. But instead I was live-compiling "invert the binary tree" type problems at the whiteboard.
* Lunch comes. I am thinking, well at least I'll get to meet some of the future team members. But nobody shows up. After 30 min I started to walk around the hallways hoping someone would stop me and ask me what am I doing there. I even had a snarky reply ready to go.
* After that I did get a bit snarky and refused to parrot back the leadership principles. Was that the bar-raiser who I was talking back to? Could be. Were they the ones that failed my interview or was it the manager that never showed up that vetoed me? I'll never know.
* But that's not all. There is more. The HR person I talked to before the interview was swearing they'd get back to me within 3 days. They didn't. Three weeks later I called them back, not because I was curious about the result much, I had accepted an offer by then, I just wanted to see what the excuse would be.
Was it worth it? Absolutely. Then it seemed like a terrible waste of time then but now it's a story I really enjoy sharing. It's just so fun. It's incredible the amount of dysfunction and awfulness that resulted from interfacing with that company.
What if the answer was about being bullied for sexual orientation (and in the process disclosing information that could bias an interview) or about dealing with a medical condition?
That's such a stupid question for an interview.
What do people recommend doing in this situation? Walk away? Reschedule? Insist on explanation? Or is it feasible they would make a decision without the manager interview.
Should you ever have a truly terrible experience in interview, first tell them that you are going to have to call a halt so as to not waste any more time.
Then inform them that you are very sorry, but unfortunately they have managed to fail the interview process and should the chance to employ you come around again, could they please not reapply.
Then walk away.
I have only done this once, while being told about the extra unpaid hours I would have to put in because of 'culture'.
It was more than worth it though, as I got to see a shade of maroon that I was previously unaware was even within the gamut of normal human skin tones.
But if the company has no second thought about wasting time of candidates then I would stop asking myself how to "get in" and instead ask myself if they really need me.
Call me spoiled, but I'm not going to jump through hoops (like more than three interviews) and accept abuse just for the honour to serve. I am not a slave, and if my skills have some value then I will eventually find a company that actually needs them.
WHAT? I should send him an email in case he forgot about me?
Anyway, he forgot. Obviously. After some time (2 weeks or so) I send him an email. Auto-response comes back "I am on vacation, contact Alice instead." Well, so I'm emailing Alice and asking what's going on, etc. Another auto-response "I am on vacation, contact Bob instead." I got really irritated by that point. So I contact Bob, and auto-response comes back "I have too many meetings today, I can't respond today." And that was it.
Now, the funny part. After couple of weeks I got an automated email asking me to participate in interview survey to share my experience. Oh, boy! I'm glad you've asked, guys! So I describe the situation, ask them did they got a bad day or they treat all their candidates like that, and was it a joke or they just disregard people on a daily basis? After I submitted, the next day email comes. "Sorry, we've already have someone else for the job, bla bla bla."
Really?
Some of their recruiters were beyond ridiculous when it comes to persistent. My "favourite" interaction with them, only marginally paraphrased:
Recruiter: "Hi, I saw your impressive work history on LinkedIn and would like to talk to you about a job opportunity at Facebook" (probably the only thing "impressive" in my work history at the time was AWS?)
Me: "Thank you for contacting me, but I'm not interested in working at Facebook"
Note: This was sent direct to my personal email address, not through LinkedIn. It happens to be an email address associated with both my Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, presumably something Facebook recruiters could get at? Most of their recruitment attempts have come via email instead of LinkedIn, and reference my work history on LinkedIn.
< a few days pass >
R: "Hi, just reaching out to you again to see if you've had a chance to rethink about the role at Facebook"
M: "I'm not changing my mind. I'm not interested in working at Facebook"
< a few days pass >
R: "Hi, we have a recruitment open day coming up on $date, there will be food and drinks and a chance to speak with people who already work at Facebook. It's an ideal chance to see if there is any work you might find interesting here"
M: "I'm really, really not interested. Stop contacting me"
< $day-2 >
R: "Just thought I'd send a quick reminder that the open day is coming up in a couple of days. Hope to see you there"
M: "No, you won't. I'm not attending. Please stop contacting me"
< $day >
R: "Hi, I'm looking forward to meeting you today at the open day" By this stage I'm half tempted to turn up just so I could punch the recruiter.
M: "You won't. I'm not attending. STOP CONTACTING ME"
< $day+1 >
R: "I'm sorry, I appear to have missed you at the open day. I was wondering if maybe I could schedule a time to speak to you about engineering opportunities here at Facebook"
M: "STOP CONTACTING ME"
At which point I went through my email backlog, marked every email as spam, and put in an auto-junk rule for any further communication from that recruiter.
The candidate is barely a human being to these mega corps. They freely dispose of the candidates time without any consideration beyond what the hiring team needs.
An interview CAN be as much about helping the candidate find what’s best for them. Heck where I work we actively talk and promote other options where someone might be happier. We make referrals for people. When it’s not a good fit we try to give them feedback and genuinely want them to succeed.
Ugh
With maybe 1 in 5 on-site interview candidates making it, and the amount of interviewing individuals at Amazon do, it can often get to the point where it's really hard to see interviewees as people. I tried really hard, especially as one of the more limited-pool of systems engineers (I specifically put myself out there for other teams to leverage, so that systems engineers didn't end up with a full dev loop). The number of interview loops done is only exasperated by Amazon's inability to hold on to engineers for more than a few years. One team I dealt with regularly would lose a sizeable chunk of their syseng staff every 9 months or so.
I can't even begin to imagine how hard it gets for the bar-raisers, who might interview 4-5 candidates a week or more.
There is a reason companies refer to employees as “resources” these days. Well at least they’re honest.
You can't beat the corporate system because the corporations are not the cause, only the effect of the slime that gets in and raises to the top.