I'm so disappointed to read comments on this thread to the effect of "There's nothing in it for the company but risk".
I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company (well known in these parts) that I had tremendous respect for, only to get an email back with "sorry, not up to par. We need someone with more experience".
I asked them for a couple quick points on what I could have done better. I had zero intention of fighting them on it. No response
The whole experience made me feel very ill, especially after putting in as much effort as I did, and obviously I feel quite differently about that company now.
On the other hand, 5 years ago when looking for my first tech job, a virtually unknown startup that rejected me after a take home project and day long onsite gave me very thorough and specific feedback, encouragement, and even a bunch of reading suggestions. Even though I didn't get hired, I have very fond memories of that interview and reached out to them when I did land my first job to thank them again.
Did it have any tangible implications for their bottom line to give me that feedback? Not really. But they treated me with compassion rather than like garbage. I have never named and shamed the first company and never intend to, but I personally think there's more risk involved in habitually treating people like garbage than like human beings.
In Germany every single lawyer or HR responsible would tell you not to send any reason at all, just a generic response.
This has to do with how law is structured here: giving feedback gives an attack surface to candidates that could sue you for the feedback you gave (because they do not agree with it).
So this is it, companies do not do this because they're evil, they do this because nobody wants legal consequences.
While working at Adobe, an executive launched the "Red Box" innovation program (that eventually became https://kickbox.org/). The program itself is interesting, but what was MORE interesting is that he was able to pull it off - the whole thing is a legal minefield of epic proportions (1). Normally, if you go to the legal department and ask "can I do this", nobody in their right mind will answer "yes, but"... you'll get an immediate "no way, get out of here, you're crazy".
The trick is to ask legal "I'm doing this, how can I minimize our legal exposure". Not to ask "can we do this". The second question will invariably get you a "no" (if you thought to ask, there must be _some_ risk). The first question will get a lot of grumbling, but if you're in a high-enough position, will eventually lead to useful advice.
(1) The basic idea is that in the early stages, you need to prove traction/market interest for your idea. As such, it needs to show no signs that it's backed by Adobe - it's trivially easy to get a BizzFeudNews article about "Adobe launches ShitDraw Pro" or whatnot; it's very easy to get thousands of people curious & signing up. All this is much harder when you're a John Doe, and don't lean on the brand recognition, but on the intrinsic value of your idea/product.
However, this all means is that by design in the early stages you will have company employees, paying with company money, to "launch" services & get people to subscribe while hiding the true entity behind those services. No nefarious motivation behind it, but surely you can see the potential legal challenges.
> In Germany every single lawyer or HR responsible would tell you not to send any reason at all
I can't imagine that this makes any sense.
Let's say you give every interviewee feedback:
- 90% of candidates will be grateful
- 10% of candidates will not like the feedback and start to argue (at this point ignoring emails might make sense to avoid wasting time)
- 0.01% of candidates will actually sue you over it
The lawsuit will probably go nowhere, and in the worst case cost €10.000 in legal fees.
But all the good will from the other people must be worth something! Maybe one of all those people who you gave good feedback refers a friend, and they apply to your company. If you hire that person, you just saved 10.000€ that you don't have to pay a recruiter!
So either all these lawyers are giving bad advise, or maybe my numbers are wrong? I've never heard of a lawsuit where a candidate sued a company as a consequence of interview feedback that they got, so I assume that must be a very rare occurrence.
I don't understand this. If I select a candidate of three to offer a job, then as long as I'm not discriminating the others for things such as sexuality, gender, age, ect. then the person we feel is the best fit is just that. What we believe is the best candidate - no amount of arguing in a court is going to change that.
I work at a German company, we give very specific verbal feedback after every interview (I did it many times). Just because lawyers recommend against it does not mean you cannot do it.
I have never heard of something like this, and we're hiring people in Germany. Which leverage would a candidate have if you give him/her specific feedback regarding lack of knowledge in required areas?
Can you name one case where this actually happened?
The only practical way someone could sue you is through "Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (AGG)" if they can prove that you discriminated them based on their age, gender or ethnicity.
The way a friend of mine in Germany does it is to send a polite rejection by mail with an offer to discuss details over the phone. Leaves less actionable attack surface while still trying to give constructive feedback.
You probably wouldn't like the feedback. Most interviews these days are random because our field is obsessed with finding 10x megarockstar GTD superprogrammers. I can't think of a single field where interviews are such awful experiences.
All interviews could be simple Q&A sessions to make sure the person isn't a charlatan and then sell them on the position.
HR isn't a science, and it never will be. The FAANGs spend god knows how much time and money on it, and they admit that their interviews aren't better than a coin flip.
>The FAANGs spend god knows how much time and money on it, and they admit that their interviews aren't better than a coin flip.
I'm curious what this means. Whiteboard style interviews aren't perfect, but at the very least they demonstrate 1. You can communicate with another engineer on a technical problem (simply writing the code with no explanation isn't sufficient), and 2. You have the determination to study CS topics for a long enough time to be prepared for an interview.
Both of those skills should have at least some correlation with success at your job, certainly better than a coin flip.
>>I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company (well known in these parts) that I had tremendous respect for, only to get an email back with "sorry, not up to par. We need someone with more experience".
Looks like this is a common pattern with take home projects. I faced a very similar problem a few weeks back.
Though they called me for the interview. The general approach is to take some ones overnight deadline coding and code review it for a week. Then they dissect your code written in deadline duress like they are some masters of the universe. They also told me my code passed through their automated test suite, and then some programmers in their office reviewed it too.
And then after two rounds of interviews they rejected me because apparently 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' is not how real programmers find error count, but write python programs every single time they face such a problem.
In short these places with take home interviews generally tend to be people who are full of themselves. They are also a kind of workplace full self-congratulatory people who have fallen in love with their own legend.
Haven't had a single good experience with places that give take home tests.
> And then after two rounds of interviews they rejected me because apparently 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' is not how real programmers find error count, but write python programs every single time they face such a problem.
If they're dissecting it at that close a level, it's probably not a company you'd want to work for anyway. At least how I judge take home tests (for a simple backend CRUD app spec), I'm definitely not disqualifying based on surface level details like that. I don't even bother running it on my machine most of the time.
What I'm looking for that it doesn't have obvious SQL injections (I've seen this a depressing number of times), it has some semblance of unit/automated tests, API validation, error handling, database migrations, good naming, and the code isn't all jammed in to one or two files.
> because apparently 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' is not how real programmers find error count
I've been on the other end of that, where we were explicit that the goal of the exercise was to solve problem X with technology Y so that we could gauge the applicant's skill with Y. And yet, we'd still get submissions that used Z because it was way better at solving X than Y was. Well, yeah, we know that. That's not what we were trying to assess.
I'm not saying you did that. It just gave me flashbacks to those situations.
If someone actually told me they'd use 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' to find an error count, they'd have to be gigantic drama queens or asshole for me to not hire them for a position, I'd even look for a different one if it's not quite the right fit for the one they're interviewing for. That is textbook example efficiency.
I've just finished a job search, and the company I ended up going with (with the best offer, by far) was one of the only ones that didn't want a take-home project.
With several of the companies, I managed to (via either vowing silence to recruiters, or having an inside guy) get feedback on my projects. Nobody volunteered feedback willingly. And honestly, based on what feedback I did get, I see why they didn't want to offer it. It was an unscientific mess.
Generally:
* There was either no rubric or very basic rubric for scoring the assignment
* reviewer gut feel and comments were seemingly more important than the score (if present) anyway
* frequently, reviewers disagreed over whether a cool doodad was indeed cool or over/under engineered.
* frequently, there were "gotchas" where they were either expecting you to notice an "issue" with the prompt, or they gave a vague prompt and wanted you to fish around to discover specific non-obvious things they wanted to see.
Now obviously, it's not like any strategy for interviewing software people is all that great. But at least interviews take nearly an order of magnitude less time than projects, and also have some built-in feedback via facial/verbal cues and such. Instead of just shooting your project tarball into the abyss just to get a boolean back.
It is a modern equivalent of an unpaid internship.
I immediately discard such companies (if they don't budge). They have shown, from the get go, they're not respecting their engineers. Why would you work for such a company? You're never going to be treated as an equal there.
I prefer homework over whiteboard or any on-site coding challenges. I'm really bad under pressure.
But I only do homework after the on-site interview, so I know I really want to work there and they have some "skin in the game" too not just shotgunning random candidates that they never actually planning to hire.
Not if it saves the candidate time in commuting to/from interviews and spending time answering pointless boilerplate questions. ("Why did you leave your previous job", "where do you see yourself in five years", etc.)
Call a spade a spade. Was it Blizzard? They're known in my parts for similar behavior. To the point that I've cautioned local and especially junior folks not to take their take homes too seriously. Even when/if they do pull you in after "passing" a take home, it's not like they take any effort to then talk to you about the literal work you just did for them.
I disagree that it's an automatic red flag. 8 hours? Yeah that's too long. But I would rather do a 2 hour take-home project than a 2 hour whiteboard coding interview.
Edit to add: as far as getting paid, nobody expects to get paid for an onsite interview so I wouldn't expect to get paid for a take home project either. As long as it takes the same amount of time that the coding portion of an onsite interview reasonably would, that is.
Honestly the non paid take home projects are much better. The three interviews I’ve done them for stand out as the best interview processes I’ve been a part of. They actually check for real software skills.
The time you spend on-site grinding leetcode with some Google engineer is non-paid as well, so let’s not pretend it’s really any different.
I see this a lot but it seems fairly naive to expect. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with refusing to do them, but to get paid? Has anyone in the history of the world been paid for an interview take home project? Curious how it was set up and what the rate was. Did you have to file taxes? Was it 1099?
I had one homework assignment where the API keys they provided didn’t work. I spent 2 days playing tag with the hiring manager just to get functional credentials.
I recently interviewed at Google and Facebook. They provided valuable feedback at every stage of the process. It gave me a good impression on the companies culture and the people who work there, and only makes me want to re-apply in the future.
I think not giving candidates any feedback has to do with companies being lazy than fear of being sued.
If you have 50 candidates do a takehome assignment, then you will need an engineer to do code review and write comments on everything. Whereas it's easier to execute the code and have an engineer glance at the code quality. Their time is better spent looking more deeply candidate's who move onto the next round. I'm not saying it's morally right, but it's just more time efficient for companies to do this and that's how the power dynamics unfortunately work.
> I asked them for a couple quick points on what I could have done better.
I feel your pain, but doing this gets them nothing and costs them effort.
It might also be harmful. If the advice is "we needed more experience in X", and your reaction to it was either not apply for jobs asking for X (because you are unlikely to get them), or to get more training in X then that would be wonderful outcome for both you and the company. But as someone who has hired people, the most likely outcome is you are training someone on how to lie better about their expertise in X.
That makes this a win for you, a lose for the company doing the hiring. In my experience that means it ain't going to happen.
I get how the interview experience can be inhumane and all, and I’ve been through my fair share of shitty interview experiences. But feeling disappointed about not getting feedback from your performance?
You’d need to assume interview feedback is constructive and relevant to your professional growth, interviewers are well-trained, interview processes are fair, and candidates receiving feedback are capable and willing to act positively on it. From my experience, having all of these factors be true isn’t all that common, and one of these factors is beyond the company’s control.
> "There's nothing in it for the company but risk".
The issues I have with this point of view is it's very short-sighted. Word travels. If people have a shitty selection experience when they apply to you they'll tell other people about it. That will impact your ability to hire the best talent. It's to companies' benefit to provide a good experience during the selection process, and that includes giving feedback.
Also, as far as the companies bottom line is concerned, having disgruntled rejected applicants can hurt their hiring reputation. Especially considering sites like Glassdoor
I've seen plenty of bad reviews on Glassdoor for companies providing no or vague feedback; usually the negativity of the review is in proportion to the amount of time the candidate invested and the level of feedback given.
I've also seen good reviews on Glassdoor from candidates who weren't hired but were given prompt and appropriate feedback.
I had a guy at Qualcomm Austin tell me to read Advanced Compiler Design and Implementation by Muchnik. I read it and a few months later I was working for Qualcomm San Diego. I've thought about thanking him but I doubt he'd remember me, it was such a small comment.
You know if someone you don't remember from an interaction ages ago emailed you to say "Hey, you probably don't remember this, but you once told me $thing, so I took $action, and now I've achieved $outcome. Thanks you for that, it really helped my career!", it'd make you feel great and would probably be the highlight of your day, right?
He doesn’t have to remember your name because your name is besides the point - it’s about him and what he did (for you) and not about you (the beneficiary). What you’re telling him is that something he did/does is good and helpful; one day when he asks himself “should I bother giving (such detailed) feedback?” he’ll have your anecdotal datapoint in mind to help him make his decision!
Thank him! Even if a lot of time has passed. Better late than never totally applies here.
If he didn't remember you before, he'll remember you after. I've given thousands of semi strangers advice in various forms. I remember the two or three who followed up with me and said, "thank you for your advice, I followed it and have since reached my goal," and have kept in touch with them. It makes you feel really good to hear that.
Someone once did do this to me on the off chance I would remember it. I did remember it. And the memory of it is now one of the proudest things I look back on in my professional life.
By not naming and sharing the first company you’re doing the world a disservice. The powerful have convinced the world that being polite is more important than being truthful because politeness furthers the continuation of existing power structures.
One time we gave feedback on request and the candidate contested the feedback, then went out on a social media rampage. So yeah, we stopped after that. It only takes one bad candidate to make it not worth the effort.
Hot take: you could hire someone who did absolutely well in the interview, and they could find a few weeks into the job that they loathe everyone, and go on a social media rampage.
What I’m getting at is, there will always be bad apples, or people who react in a way that damages your organization. But not providing useful feedback to people who ask for it simply because one person went crazy is punishing a lot more people because of that one. Who knows if all of their negative karma ends up being worse in the grand scheme of things?
I personally avoid applying to places that other engineers tell me to avoid because I trust their opinion more than I trust a company selling me the highlight reel in an interview. If a trusted engineer said he got a rejection in an interview, asked for feedback, and none was given, I’d avoid that place too.
This is a tried and true practice in dating, and it translates well to hiring, which is basically the same thing.
Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. They want to get in a fight with you.
Edit: I don't remember ghosting anyone personally in either setting, but it's happened to me plenty. Getting upset about it just means you're new to the experience.
In our case, it's not an iron-clad no feedback allowed policy. We're just much more careful about giving it, approval is given on a case-by-case basis.
A good typical whiteboard interview naturally includes hints, feedback, and collaboration. After several hours of it, we have a very good idea of how well they may respond to feedback from members of our organization.
Honestly, I love giving feedback. I love helping candidates be better at interviewing. Bad interviews are painful to the interviewer too. I'm out of a small market so people and word gets around.
If it really isn't their fault they didn't get the job, we try to make that very very clear. It really sucks when we have to pass up on someone who absolutely killed the interview because someone else did better.
The harsh reality is, many people that don't pass on the interview are people we do not want in the industry. The good ones we give every hint and help we can.
There's also more tactical ways of extracting feedback from companies rather than directly asking for it. We can't tell you about how you did well after rejection, but we can talk about what our expectations are during the interview; put two and two together. I've noticed the good candidates that are serious about improving their interviewing do it, and from the company side, it's a strong signal they're not trying to contest a decision.
Food for thought, when was the last time you gave a company feedback on their interview process? I've traded feedback for feedback quite successfully many times when I was interviewing.
> If a trusted engineer said he got a rejection in an interview, asked for feedback, and none was given, I’d avoid that place too.
So, your employer does give feedback to candidates on request? It must be difficult for you to find places that are acceptable to you to work, since very few companies typically give feedback. Or do your friends just not usually ask for feedback and as a result that clause on your criteria never trips (i.e. the company wouldn't have given feedback, but since your friend didn't ask, you don't strike it off your list)?
I think a big part of it is also most companies hiring decisions are a lot more subjective than they’d like to admit. I suspect in many cases the interviewers aren’t able to provide specific feedback that won’t immediately sound strange.
Hot take: you could hire someone who did absolutely well in the interview, and they could find a few weeks into the job that they loathe everyone, and go on a social media rampage.
Nearly every company has a policy regarding social media usage with regard to company-related content. If the negative comments get back to the company, that individual will likely face consequences. The "no interviewee feedback" is just another part of a communications policy.
I get what you are saying, but sometimes there may not be any useful feedback to give. Lets say you just don't like the candidate personally or think they aren't a good culture fit, feedback might be hard to give without just hurting someone's feelings.
Social media rampage after an interview is a bad look for anyone. Tell your friends about it sure if they're thinking about going in but no reason to burn a bridge.
I disagree with this. I've had two companies contact me and offer legitimate feedback after interviews, and I always left feeling happy and with good feelings about them.
I applied to one company and got a response back which was effectively "we really like you as a candidate, but it doesn't seem like you would be the right fit for this job / it doesn't seem like the interests you expressed in your interviews [which they correctly restated] matched up well with the duties we would have you perform. We will likely have jobs opening up which would align with what you like and you will be on the shortlist of candidates if you apply for those". Was it truthful? Who knows, but it left me feeling happy about how things went and I would consider applying there again.
Similarly, earlier on in my career after taking a few CS classes I applied for a different job, and the response was effectively "You are smart but you don't have the skills we require yet which are [x, y, z]. Come back when you do". What they said was true and I appreciated the feedback.
Contrast that with the myriad companies I applied to and never heard a response back from or didn't get a response back for many months from. I will never apply to these places again because it is clear that they don't respect prospective employees enough to even send a perfunctory email. Boiler plate rejections aren't as irritating but they are definitely still irritating. If you don't provide reasons for not hiring then employees will construct their own reasons, and they may not be true and / or favorable towards your company.
If a candidate has given my company their time and energy to interview with us I think we owe them a chance to understand why we didn't hire them. We're not obliged to but, if requested, offering feedback is quite clearly beneficial. There's an obvious benefit for the candidate and the subsequent companies they interview with. There's also an indirect benefit to my company - if everyone else behaves like this it means that we'd be much more likely to find our next hire.
I suppose if you're thinking exclusively about a short-term benefit to the company alone without considering the impact to the candidate, the wider ecosystem and culture in general then it wouldn't make sense to take the risk.
If you want the candidate to be more likely to reapply feedback would help.
In fairness I received feedback I didn't get the position because I was too chatty from a hr person who told me to act more chatty because qualified candidates on paper were failing for being too quiet. I kinda wished they didn't provide feedback because I have an opinion on the internal culture that would make me avoid them in the future.
I've always considered it just a professional courtesy, within reason. Just like it would be nice, but not required, for an applicant to say why they turned down a job offer. It can help us understand what's lacking to determine whether or not it's worth improving upon.
In my experience, they often like to give feedback on subsequent interviews about the past interviews. Google has some pretty detailed feedback on a interview I did years ago, which they were happy to reveal over the phone on a subsequent onsite invitation.
What are they losing in this case? I don't see how a company is actually harmed by someone complaining about an interview. Unless you're trying to attract people who subscribe to cancel culture, I don't see a problem.
You have it exactly right. Companies are protecting themselves from more than just legal action - Glassdoor reviews have a huge influence on how candidates view your company (especially true for startups).
I once left a bad review on Glassdoor after a truly awful interview experience for a startup. The next day they called me up and threatened legal action.
Edit: Just for context on the interview—they had me do a take home assignment in Django, which I had never worked in. Was desperate, so I learned Django and completed it in a week. Went onsite and their whole office was a one tiny, dated swelteringly hot room. The interview was mostly around a bunch of basic syntax stuff, and had me implement merge sort. Didn’t hear from them at all for a month so I wrote on Glassdoor about it.
I think this is the main problem. People just don’t take rejection well, or it’s taken too personally.
Sometimes it’s no one’s fault and it’s simply a bad fit.
And of course like you say, people aren’t taught how to evaluate feedback and they may actually contest what is a courtesy in an adversarial manner and thus make things so much worse.
Does providing feedback make this effect worse, or better? How do we know? N=1 isn't exactly a significant sample size.
It used to be common knowledge that doctors should never say they're sorry, for the same reason (fear of lawsuit). Then research showed that apologizing actually reduced the number and severity of malpractice lawsuits.
I see plenty of people attacking tech company interview processes on social media already, without being provoked by honest feedback. I'm having trouble imagining how feedback could make a person more angry.
Engineers can't even go through a code review without getting butt hurt. And that's when you're on the same team with mostly the same goal.
Usually the blowback to the company hits marketing/legal/HR. Gathering and delivering feedback takes work. It's really politically expensive to explain why you're going out of your way to do work to cause other departments to do work for the sake of tech community altruism, especially right after it just burnt you. Giving career advice to strangers after an interview isn't the norm in any other field.
I don't really care if the candidate tries to sue the company. I don't work in legal, that's mostly not my problem. But if legal doesn't want to deal with it and ends up being a pain in my ass, yeah, I'm dropping the practice.
My personal data point is that I received feedback that was negative on specifically my base level of concept understanding on one out of ~7 short sections I did for a company, and it made me skeptical that it was the actually the real reason.
It was a whiteboard session on how to manage scheduling and reporting progress/success/failure information for long-running jobs to a frontend UI... which is something I had been specifically doing at my previous company for a year, and have done many times in many ways before. I took some lessons about communication and focus from it, but in my mind it showed that either that section's interviewer was not very good at evaluating candidates, or some other reason was the real reason and they chose to voluntarily tell me something else as a cover instead.
I'm assuming the former, because I never asked nor expected a specific reason for rejection - no cover was necessary. Finding out just frustrated me further - I really wanted that job, and of course you can't go back saying "Maybe someone else should give that section? I think I'm really good, trust me, the guy you just rejected!"
This is only one side of the equation. What’s the cost of not providing the feedback? Either similar negative feedback on social media, which is maybe less intense but more numerous, or the negative feeling the candidate gets from the experience, which can impede future applications or applications from friends.
I don’t know which way it tips, but looking at just the potential damage of providing feedback seems insufficient.
The cost is that you further the misery of the application experience for candidates. Keep in mind for every candidate you interview, they may have applied for anywhere between 10 to 100 other jobs. If you were in their position, you would want to have a way to improve for the next interview too.
Fear of the occasional keyboard ninja is not a rational reason for giving every single job applicant a worse experience.
Not to mention that generally they end up looking worse than you do, and you've probably done the rest of us a favour by outing them as an asshole (I'm assuming you were respectful and constructive in the feedback that you gave).
The challenge isn't figuring out how you or I personally would deliver feedback, given time to plan it out and a good set of feedback to deliver. The challenge is establishing a process that ensures everyone at the company will always do it, even when the real reason is something like "meh I'm not sure the candidate quite clears our bar".
I am not afraid of getting sued, but experience makes me afraid of getting dragged into an argument about my conclusions and judgement, the last thing I need when managing a hiring process. I do still provide feedback when it is politely requested, though.
Sympathies. On the flip, side, though, if the interview process was horrible, and the company doesn't provide some sort of mitigating feedback on what happened, I tend to assume the worst. And yeah, I don't necessarily keep it a secret.
It goes both ways. I have had a couple of interviews go south and have no interest in continuing the conversation even in a constructive way. Best to say thank you for your time and move on.
Anyway, the way to avoid negative reactions and defensiveness from candidates is to practice giving feedback in a way that’s constructive. We’ll cover this next.
I appreciate what you're saying, and I realize that social media is a cesspool, but isn't your stance condescending toward candidates that you do want to hire?
Surely a reasonable person with good critical thinking skills can look at one of those "rampages" and recognize it for what it is.
A more charitable (and probably likely) scenario is that the company monitors mentions of its brand name on social media and saw public posts by the candidate, or the candidate tagged/posted to their social channels.
I got verbal feedback exactly one time (at Microsoft) during my attempt to land a post-1-year of university internship. I had solved the algorithm in a few minutes, but when trying to code it up, I struggled a fair amount before figuring it out. The feedback I got was "You seem like a smart person, who hasn't done very much coding. That makes you a bad risk. Go practice programming and come back next year". It was incredibly valuable advice that I got no where else, and it resulted in me coming back to MS a couple of years later once I graduated (I'm not there anymore).
I wish more people would give real, actionable feedback on interviews.
> You seem like a smart person, who hasn't done very much coding. That makes you a bad risk,
Assuming Microsoft actually measures this stuff, that's kind of surprising to me. I've never placed much weight on being able to write a program on the spot.
>I've never placed much weight on being able to write a program on the spot.
I don't disagree, and personally I hate in person coding exercises, but if you keep the question simple and allow the candidate to code in their native language, something fizz-buzz like will go a long way in weeding out the people who have languages on their resume but can't code.
At our company we offer two simple coderpad tasks to be done in advance with no supervision or pressure - write a linked list in CPP and solve a simple puzzle in Python. You pay attention to the candidates who use templates, destructors, smart pointers, even if they make mistakes those are the ones you probably want to hire.
It's been awhile since I last interviewed at Microsoft, but the only coding I did was on a whiteboard.
The best part about it? I was already a full time employee at Microsoft. I just wanted to switch teams. I still had to do a full interview loop with the team and well... I didn't get the job.
Yeah, the space of things I can do quickly on the spot from practice, and the space of things I can get really good at after a few hours of re-calibrating, research, and trial and error are worlds apart. If I were hiring, I'd 100% look for people who can self-teach above all other technical qualifications (above and beyond whatever the basic competency level for the position is).
All my info is old on this point, but I doubt that there was company wide measurement here. This was an individual giving their own personal opinion/reasoning.
It's possible the other guy being interviewed seemed like a smart person and had no trouble with the code. If they had to hire one, they hired the one that was less risky.
Oddly, I had the exact opposite experience interviewing at Microsoft.
I blazed through all the questions the manager asked, and the manager told me I was the most talented person he'd ever interviewed and would definitely get the job, and then I didn't get the job, and got no further feedback. It was the most confusing interview process I'd ever been in.
I sent him to ask him if there was some sort of mistake, and he didn't even reply directly, just sent me back a message through the recruiter saying no, it wasn't a mistake.
Yeah, big company, lots of variation in the interview process. Ultimately, the hiring manager has final authority, but if someone came out strong against you for some reason, they might be loathe to override. But it does sound like a strange experience. Just consider it an anti-loop. (https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/03/get-that-job-at-goo...)
Luke Hohmann, author of The Journey of the Software Professional, advises to give such feedback. I've endeavored to do so.
FWIW, though I've been insulted and hazed and ghosted many times, I've yet to be given constructive criticism.
A few times I've been told why I didn't "pass". One guy was upset that I didn't favor aspects (a la Spring). Another was disappointed by my answer for how to resolve a hypothetical impasse ("try both").
That sort of thing.
Job interviewing is just dating. I accept that most people can't articulate why it's a "No." But I can't abide by the tortured rationalizations of poorly socialized geeks and accompanying general purpose meanness used to mask their own inadequacies.
Said more kindly, most people, and especially geeks, shouldn't be allowed to conduct interviews unsupervised. It's a teachable professional skill like any other. Asking the unprepared and unsuited is just cruel to all parties.
I find I'm much more comfortable giving feedback to new college graduates. Often times there is glaring weaknesses they can work on improving to get the best job possible.
It’s actually kind of a bit risk for the applicant, which makes it a big risk for the interviewer if you have half a heart.
If you get fired four weeks in to your internship, because no amount of coaching from the senior employees is worth the investment by the company.... that’s a tough situation to be in. It’s pretty late at that point to start looking for another internship for the summer.
And if you’re the kid’s supervisor... that’s not a fun conversation to have.
Oddly, I had a slightly opposite reaction to a similar experience. But, to be fair, it was mostly because of red tape.
I interviewed at Microsoft, got feedback something like, "you did pretty good, but you dont understand low level code enough for this team, you could do great somewhere else at the company."
Microsoft has a policy that you can interview only once per year. I didn't get to pick the team I interviewed for, and apparently they only interview for their own team.
So, I was basically told that I was good enough, but because of HR, I won't be hired.
That, for me, felt significantly worse than "sorry but you didn't get the job" generic feedback would have been.
If an interviewer googled the question - why do I need to know the answer?
I recently had an interview and I spent _literally_ over an hour trying to figure out the algorithm or a mathematical function to solve it and I finally got to the point that I gave up.
I asked the person what algorithm they used to solve it and they said “brute force” and were expecting nested loops that under real world load would have been O(n^2).
I definitely don’t consider myself an algorithm expert, but my feedback was, and I shit you not, that I didn’t know ruby. I’ve been developing in ruby since 2006.
Anecdotes and all. Our industry’s interview process is flawed AF.
Same here, but from IBM--and it's burnished my impression of the company ever since. It was polite, actionable and a nice recognition that I had /also/ given up an entire day for their interview.
So many comments in the vein of "who has time to waste on candidates we aren't going to make an offer to?" - You are damaging your companies brand thinking this way. You want people who you reject to say to themselves "I can't wait to study up and interview here again, they said no, but I still want to work here!"
I agree that being helpful and giving feedback to candidates you don't hire can be beneficial to the company and to the interviewer. However, I would argue an even stronger reason is that it is good to help other people grow, even if it doesn't directly benefit you.
If on the way to work you see someone trip and they can't get up, you should offer them help even if doing so will make you late for an important meeting.
Surely if a rejection was for a reason that a couple weeks of study could "fix," it wasn't worth a rejection, right? Are hirers out there really being THAT picky?
I'm going through resumes right now and rejecting people if I think they need a year or more experience under their belt than what they're presenting. If it's because they know react and not vue, that's not reject worthy at all...
Why can't this be on the scale of 3 or 5 years? I'm reminded of the Maya Angelou quote: "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."
I don't remember 99.9% of what recruiters have said to me, but I do remember the two companies (Hulu and LinkedIn) that made me feel like crap and jerked me around. It was 2 years ago and I'm sure most of the people who were a part of that are gone, but I still kind of have that grudge.
Hiring is definitely more art than science. I’d argue that now one has really figured out how to do it well.
Some companies do actually hire people fresh out of college/coding boot camp, and for those people, some feedback and a few weeks studying might make a world of difference.
This is so true! The best interview I ever had was at Netflix. They sent a takehome and we actually discussed it in the interview. I got a ton of useful feedback on my code which made me feel I was getting something worthwhile for my time. In the end, I didn't get the offer but was told why (not enough experience building UI's which were a large part of the position) but I was stoked as it was advice I could choose to work on or not.
> I can't wait to study up and interview here again
If the decision to reject was purely objective then sure, but isn't a big part of it if not most of it subjective? And even when the reasons could be objective, I imagine people are deciding in part through gut-feeling and might not be able to articulate the reasons for rejection in an objective enough manner. That's why I imagine people are inclined to fight when given the reasons for rejection.
I mostly disagree. I really can't think of a case where I would want to interview the same person twice. That said, I'm happy to provide feedback if they ask, and when it comes to interviewing, I personally appreciate feedback ONLY when I ask.
I've definitely interviewed green candidates and would be very happy to interview them again in a few years. (This is going to be more true in companies with more selective hiring bars)
Regardless, brand matters as well. You want candidates to have good experiences even if they are rejected as they will talk to peers about company x
Lol, yeah, like when I applied again at the same company after 3 years and they rejected me out of hand before even giving me a chance at an interview because they rejected me before.
Obviously my skills and experience are still exactly the same, so this makes perfect sense.
I don’t know, but I personally think this is a terrible signal.
Do you only ask candidates 1 question/only look for 1 attribute? And only hire for one level? Cause otherwise, they could've done great on 8 things but missed on another. Or they did well but not quite well enough for the seniority that was desired. I've gotten feedback like this in the past - "your technical answers were great, but we thought you were a bit too green collaboration- and project-ownership-wise" and it was super useful because in my head before that, it was the places where my technical question answers could've been even better that I'd been beating myself up over.
You can find plenty of competent people to fill a position that you have no room to hire. Its also possible to give an accidentally weak interview.
Treating people like disposable garbage because they didn't check the checkboxes the best is a great way to be a shitty manager and a shitty human being.
The hiring process is a black box for a reason. The HR department's role is to protect the company first, not the employees, and certainly not prospective employees. If feedback can be interpreted as being discriminatory, or reflective of bad company culture in general, well, word gets around.
For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/likeable, or some combination of the three; the classic "there were many qualified candidates and we could only choose one" line in the rejection email.
That doesn't help the interviewee beyond telling them that it's a numbers game, but that's the truth.
After the interview is done and the answer is a solid NO, as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you. Any iota of effort we put towards you is essentially wasted effort, even if very minor.
What changes that discussion further is that there is a small, but still quite real, possibility of lawsuit, social media rant (as another comment mentioned), or even a disgruntled applicant shooting up the place.
(I believe Pres. William McKinley was shot by a disgruntled would-be bureaucrat who didn't get a job...)
A perfunctory if generic rejection is a safer choice. Short-list candidates who made it to a 3rd interview, or folks who we reached out and headhunted (but didn't choose) may be a different story, but those are rare edge cases.
In a vacuum that might be true, but software engineers know other software engineers, and there are plenty of forums for discussing hiring experiences, including HN. If a company systematically treats people they don't intend to go further with like crap, their reputation with other candidates will suffer. You'd like failed candidates to not talk shit about your company when their friend considers applying.
> as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you
I think this could be phrased as "we have the choice to have no business relationship with you." But it's not a good idea to straight up cut off candidates. We've had plenty of cases where we just didn't think we had the capacity to help a candidate get up to speed and thought if they worked somewhere else that could provide that to them then we could hire them 6 months to a year down the line. It's not the standard, but it's happened before.
You have a business relationship with everyone you have a relationship with - you're a business. You're burning bridges with people in your industry - why?
> After the interview is done and the answer is a solid NO, as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you.
And plenty of companies don't even feel a candidate is owed that answer after they've made their determination. Of course it's a two way street and candidates will - and have been - doing the same thing to companies.
I have done hundreds of interviews, and I used to do a very easy, basic comp sci test. The last question I would ask was, "Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you."
The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
The worst answer I ever got was a guy who said the last album he bought was "Free Bird" (which is not an album), and was 40 years old at the time of that utterance. This person could honestly not think of one thing that excited him since then. He also ranted about Object Oriented Programming like it was a brand new thing.
The best answer I ever got, was a gentleman who was not the strongest candidate but was clearly intelligent. His answer was, "I know this is not a recent author, but I love Bukowski." And he spoke at length about his novels and poetry, and even was aware that our office was only a few blocks from where one of the pivotal scenes in one of his novels was set, and that after the interview he had actually scheduled some time away from his job to go there.
perfect answer
In my report to HR, I mentioned that he probably needed to study a little but was quite intelligent, but had fantastic enthusiasm for literature and that he was very engaging.
Of course, HR put an immediate stop to the thing with the reasoning that someone could say that their favorite book was the bible, and that could form the basis for a religious discrimination case.
This scenario of an interviewee answering with the name of a religious text is an interesting point; transparency in interviewing is a two-way street.
In a way, I can understand why people get tripped up on the "casual/lifestyle" question. Interviewees may not think of it as a casual question, but rather another question to weed out the desirables from the undesirables. So people may censor themselves or their honest beliefs because they want the job. Which is a position I totally understand.
Throwaway here, for obvious reasons, but I have to ask: is this a pisstake?
I've read this comment about half a dozen times over the past 12 hours or so and I just can't get over it.
Did you seriously grade whether people were "engaging with the universe" (WTF?) based on what their favourite book/CD/movie is and how much they enjoyed it?
Did you seriously dock points from a candidate who obviously didn't care about CDs, movies or books - because he couldn't remember the name of the last record he bought?
Has the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe he engaged with the world in other ways? Perhaps he would hike, or take his kids to soccer, or even play pool and darts on the pub on a Friday. Did you even bother to ask before dismissing this guy as some sort of sub-human degenerate?
Did you actually go home that night and Google Free Bird to see whether or not it was, in fact, an album, and felt a smug sense of superiority when you found out it was actually a longer-than-average single?
More importantly, did you seriously try to convince HR to hire a candidate who was, by your own admission, "not the strongest", because he had "fantastic enthusiasm for literature" and was "quite intelligent" (I'm guessing you based this assertion off of the fact that he read the poetry of Charles Bukowski, and therefore must, like you, be an intellectual).
Mate, I've got some news for you: the reason HR wanted you to stop asking that question most likely had nothing do with the possibility of a religious discrimination case - they either wanted you to stop basing your hiring decisions on batshit insane notions, or stop you making hiring decisions altogether.
The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
Not surprised at all. You know your motivation; they don't. It probably causes lots of candidates to mildly panic as they try to decide what they can say that won't make them come across as too weird/boring/old/etc.
> Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you. [...] You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
Yeah, because they'd rather be shown to freeze up rather than have the conversation go like this:
Them: I actually really liked the album Mouth Moods. It's an album full of remixed songs and mash-ups, kind of like what Weird Al does.
You: Oh? I've never heard of that. Tell me about your favorite song on that album.
Them: Oh... uh.... it's a song called Bustin.
You: Bustin?
Them: Yeah it's... well, it's the song from Ghostbusters but chopped up and remixed.
You: So it's about busting ghosts?
Them: Uh... well... no. It's about how bustin... makes me feel good.
You: I'm sorry? What are you busting that makes you feel good?
You're right, but it's also not difficult for genuine, high-quality feedback to be taken poorly. You can tell someone that they're not as good at data structures or database design or scalable systems or whatever core job skill you needed them to be. That can be highly useful, actionable feedback.
It can also readily feed into a very different framing. It's rarely difficult for a candidate to decide that whatever core reason is a fig leaf and something more ego-preserving is the real reason. I think we've all had coworkers who didn't take feedback well. I've definitely known people to whom all feedback is personal attacks. It's also, unfortunately, well-known and well-documented that people share negative thoughts more often and more readily than positive thoughts.
So, you're absolutely right. The good word can get around! There may be more risk to trying than is obvious, though.
I agree. Looking back at my comment, I did phrase it in a way that made it sound like "the company has no choice but to do this"; that wasn't my intention.
Discrimination on the basis of the school you attended, your nationality/race/ethnicity, even what you choose to do in your free time, is likely to be behind more than a few rejections. "Culture fit" is a polite fig leaf to hide that.
Because giving good feedback is hard work, and candidates won't always take it well (even if they don't sue). If the employer has already decided not to hire you, there's just not that much in it for them.
For what it's worth, as an interviewer I'm happy to give feedback in person, at the end of the interview, if the candidate asks for it. It's much easier to do when you're both in the same room, and asking e.g. "is there anything you think I could improve on?" makes a positive impression either way.
I hate it when candidates put me on the spot at the end of the interview, because it feels like they're trying to get me to tell them (or at least hint to them) if they're going to get an offer or not. Even if that decision were wholly within my hands (it rarely is), I'm not ready to discuss it with them at that point. The other way it sometimes goes, if I do cave and give some feedback, is that they try to disprove me or show that they actually can do the thing I said they need to work on. It just ends up creating awkwardness, and doesn't benefit either of us.
When I interviewed at a FAANG company, I had multiple candidates do this to me after it was clear that their performance wasn't great. One person even asked me if they could interview with another team. This usually happened after it was clear that the candidate didn't perform very well. It was extremely frustrating for the reasons you mentioned. These were candidates that should have gone through multiple hiring cycles and known what the process is like, that I'm only doing the coding interview and recruiters and potentially hiring managers have final say based on my feedback.
It probably depends on the candidate pool, but I've had a few interviews where the candidate can tell they missed the bar, and genuinely just wants advice on how to work on it.
Definitely if they start trying to haggle, or pressure you into something, that's a hard pass, I'll say whatever bullshit it takes to get them out the door. I'm happy to help out the former at the expense of fielding the latter, though I can understand why not everyone is!
I haven't read the article, but it is off-point to say no-one sues. History has no effect on what someone will do tomorrow - exposure is what companies try to limit.
The sueing angle kicks in when you do stuff like give feedback for folks who you think will take it well Vs keep it away from folks who give you a bad feeling or whatever. It is all exposure.
Almost in all the companies I have been at, there has been a big push to keep the interview experience uniform for all candidates. So you can't have hugely different loops setup for the same level for different candidates for example.
Fun fact: This is a main reason why as a company grows, you aren't able to get in with a wink and a nod anymore, even if you know 100% of the folks already there.
If noone has sued about feedback in the past 10 years, over probably millions of interviews, it’s a fairly safe bet that nobody will sue in the next 10.
If it's hard work, then that's a symptom of the reasoning behind a no-hire not being sound to begin with.
And there is plenty in it for them, as the candidate may want to apply a second time at a later point, having been made aware of and improved on the areas that were identified as needing improvement. They'll be more likely to re-apply to a company that gave the feedback than to a company that didn't.
It's hard work because then you'll have to explain and document the hiring proceedings, then sanitize it before sending out, with content that's actually actionable by the interviewee. What we put in internal candidate notes is very different than what should be sent out, and someone has to do that translation.
There's also plenty of reasons a candidate didn't get hired that not really immediately correctable or not even their fault. For the latter, we do provide feedback/explanations and try to keep in touch in hopes they apply again in a couple of years. But 80% of the time we really just don't want to see the candidate again. I'd say 10% of the time, we see the candidate again, but so far, even on reappearance years later, they get the same feedback from completely different interviewing committees.
As an anecdote, the major consulting firms (McKinsey, BCG, Bain), all provide constructive interview feedback after interviews. They do this regardless of if the candidate is moving on to the next level of not.
It's strange that other industries haven't followed suit.
Noticed the same thing with some finance companies too (mostly those that are known to be tech-strong, however). Got some of the most detailed and useful feedback throughout my years of interviewing from those.
This must be a newish thing. Back when I interviewed with Bain in college the only feedback after multiple interview rounds and social events was "sorry, you weren't as strong as other candidates". McKinsey sent a blanket "no thanks" email.
No industry's interviewing is as awful as ours. The mythical 10x programmer has ruined our interviews. All these companies have it in their heads that you either need a rubicks cube champion or someone with 15 years of Rust experience.
You generally don't get technical interview performance feedback because technical interviews are constrained by the interviewer to put themselves in a technically confident light against the candidate. The interview is as much a crapshoot for the interviewer, because they might be less/more/similarly skilled to the candidate, but they absolutely cannot reveal themselves to be less skilled because they would undermine their status if the candidate gets hired. So interviewers stick to the same random technical question that they feel very confident of, answers to it are studied. The myth is that this posed problem is a general test of skill for the candidate, but the primary motivation is for the interviewer to maintain the appearance of professional dominance. Hence the technical discussion is kept to a narrow problem domain. Obviously there is a spectrum here, and it's more true when the interviewer feels insecure. Only when the interviewer is very skilled/confident relative to the candidate do people go off script and give advice. I confess this is how I have seen it from both sides of the interview, I'm no saint either.
My favorite interview question is a real life issue I faced where a short sighted database design wound biting us in a pretty serious way. It's a good technical problem to talk through, and provides a lot of useful information about the candidate, but it's also an excuse to set very clear expectations that I'm not looking for the "right" answer (in real life it took half a dozen smart people a couple hours to come up with a right-ish answer).
I try to use it early in the interview, and I find it sets a helpful tone, avoiding a lot of that posturing you describe.
Ah so a good interview question for a candidate is something that YOU have experience in.
Does that seem odd?
Do you think you would be an expert in something the candidate had experience in? Probably not. Should you find out how they speak about something THEY are experts in? Probably.
But like the OP said, tech interviews are about posturing so that the interviewer feels better about themselves.
This does seem logical: here is a hard problem we actually faced and solved; we want to hire people who, faced with that sort of problem could solve it; let's see whether the candidate can solve that sort of problem.
You're also right that sharing the problem does place you in a position of vulnerability. It's perfectly possible that a candidate will think 'what a bunch of idiots to have gotten themselves in that mess in the first place'. Or worse, when they realise how you solved the problem, 'wow, they think they solved their problems? They're in an even worse spot now'. So I appreciate that you see this as being humble and exposing the candidate to an opportunity to know more than you.
But the reality is, when you solved that problem, you:
1) knew all of the context and constraints, spoken and unspoken
2) had a team of folks around you to bounce ideas off and collaborate on the solution
3) had access to google, stackoverflow, etc.
4) did not have to come up with a solution inside a small interview room, within a few minutes, while being judged by someone who has decision rights over your future employment
5) crucially, had found yourself in a position where you needed to know how to solve this problem. If you hadn't had that need, you would never have acquired that knowledge. So unless the candidate had also faced this exact problem, why would they know how to solve it? You work here, and you didn't...
And while it might be nice to hire someone who can, under interview conditions, jump right to the right solution shortcutting all of those processes - it would obviously fill in a knowledge gap your team demonstrably had - looking for a candidate who has already learned something that came as a hard-won lesson for your team is like a general building up an army to better fight the last war.
You can do better: Use the problem as an example of the sort of thing your team has struggled with, and ask the candidate to give examples of similar problems they have solved in their own career. You are hiring them for their hard-won lessons, and adding them to your own, not looking for someone who happens to have also won the same lessons you already have.
Readit News
I once put in about 8 hours on a take home project at a company (well known in these parts) that I had tremendous respect for, only to get an email back with "sorry, not up to par. We need someone with more experience".
I asked them for a couple quick points on what I could have done better. I had zero intention of fighting them on it. No response
The whole experience made me feel very ill, especially after putting in as much effort as I did, and obviously I feel quite differently about that company now.
On the other hand, 5 years ago when looking for my first tech job, a virtually unknown startup that rejected me after a take home project and day long onsite gave me very thorough and specific feedback, encouragement, and even a bunch of reading suggestions. Even though I didn't get hired, I have very fond memories of that interview and reached out to them when I did land my first job to thank them again.
Did it have any tangible implications for their bottom line to give me that feedback? Not really. But they treated me with compassion rather than like garbage. I have never named and shamed the first company and never intend to, but I personally think there's more risk involved in habitually treating people like garbage than like human beings.
This has to do with how law is structured here: giving feedback gives an attack surface to candidates that could sue you for the feedback you gave (because they do not agree with it).
So this is it, companies do not do this because they're evil, they do this because nobody wants legal consequences.
The trick is to ask legal "I'm doing this, how can I minimize our legal exposure". Not to ask "can we do this". The second question will invariably get you a "no" (if you thought to ask, there must be _some_ risk). The first question will get a lot of grumbling, but if you're in a high-enough position, will eventually lead to useful advice.
(1) The basic idea is that in the early stages, you need to prove traction/market interest for your idea. As such, it needs to show no signs that it's backed by Adobe - it's trivially easy to get a BizzFeudNews article about "Adobe launches ShitDraw Pro" or whatnot; it's very easy to get thousands of people curious & signing up. All this is much harder when you're a John Doe, and don't lean on the brand recognition, but on the intrinsic value of your idea/product. However, this all means is that by design in the early stages you will have company employees, paying with company money, to "launch" services & get people to subscribe while hiding the true entity behind those services. No nefarious motivation behind it, but surely you can see the potential legal challenges.
I can't imagine that this makes any sense.
Let's say you give every interviewee feedback:
- 90% of candidates will be grateful
- 10% of candidates will not like the feedback and start to argue (at this point ignoring emails might make sense to avoid wasting time)
- 0.01% of candidates will actually sue you over it
The lawsuit will probably go nowhere, and in the worst case cost €10.000 in legal fees.
But all the good will from the other people must be worth something! Maybe one of all those people who you gave good feedback refers a friend, and they apply to your company. If you hire that person, you just saved 10.000€ that you don't have to pay a recruiter!
So either all these lawyers are giving bad advise, or maybe my numbers are wrong? I've never heard of a lawsuit where a candidate sued a company as a consequence of interview feedback that they got, so I assume that must be a very rare occurrence.
Can you name one case where this actually happened?
The only practical way someone could sue you is through "Allgemeines Gleichbehandlungsgesetz (AGG)" if they can prove that you discriminated them based on their age, gender or ethnicity.
All interviews could be simple Q&A sessions to make sure the person isn't a charlatan and then sell them on the position.
HR isn't a science, and it never will be. The FAANGs spend god knows how much time and money on it, and they admit that their interviews aren't better than a coin flip.
I'm curious what this means. Whiteboard style interviews aren't perfect, but at the very least they demonstrate 1. You can communicate with another engineer on a technical problem (simply writing the code with no explanation isn't sufficient), and 2. You have the determination to study CS topics for a long enough time to be prepared for an interview.
Both of those skills should have at least some correlation with success at your job, certainly better than a coin flip.
Looks like this is a common pattern with take home projects. I faced a very similar problem a few weeks back.
Though they called me for the interview. The general approach is to take some ones overnight deadline coding and code review it for a week. Then they dissect your code written in deadline duress like they are some masters of the universe. They also told me my code passed through their automated test suite, and then some programmers in their office reviewed it too.
And then after two rounds of interviews they rejected me because apparently 'cat error.log | grep 'ERROR:' | wc -l' is not how real programmers find error count, but write python programs every single time they face such a problem.
In short these places with take home interviews generally tend to be people who are full of themselves. They are also a kind of workplace full self-congratulatory people who have fallen in love with their own legend.
Haven't had a single good experience with places that give take home tests.
bulletsDodged += 1
What I'm looking for that it doesn't have obvious SQL injections (I've seen this a depressing number of times), it has some semblance of unit/automated tests, API validation, error handling, database migrations, good naming, and the code isn't all jammed in to one or two files.
I've been on the other end of that, where we were explicit that the goal of the exercise was to solve problem X with technology Y so that we could gauge the applicant's skill with Y. And yet, we'd still get submissions that used Z because it was way better at solving X than Y was. Well, yeah, we know that. That's not what we were trying to assess.
I'm not saying you did that. It just gave me flashbacks to those situations.
Perhaps real programmers would 'grep -c 'ERROR:' error.log'. I’m not sure what kind of overhead the extra pipes use.
With several of the companies, I managed to (via either vowing silence to recruiters, or having an inside guy) get feedback on my projects. Nobody volunteered feedback willingly. And honestly, based on what feedback I did get, I see why they didn't want to offer it. It was an unscientific mess.
Generally:
* There was either no rubric or very basic rubric for scoring the assignment * reviewer gut feel and comments were seemingly more important than the score (if present) anyway * frequently, reviewers disagreed over whether a cool doodad was indeed cool or over/under engineered. * frequently, there were "gotchas" where they were either expecting you to notice an "issue" with the prompt, or they gave a vague prompt and wanted you to fish around to discover specific non-obvious things they wanted to see.
Now obviously, it's not like any strategy for interviewing software people is all that great. But at least interviews take nearly an order of magnitude less time than projects, and also have some built-in feedback via facial/verbal cues and such. Instead of just shooting your project tarball into the abyss just to get a boolean back.
I immediately discard such companies (if they don't budge). They have shown, from the get go, they're not respecting their engineers. Why would you work for such a company? You're never going to be treated as an equal there.
But I only do homework after the on-site interview, so I know I really want to work there and they have some "skin in the game" too not just shotgunning random candidates that they never actually planning to hire.
Also, anything over 3 hours is a no go.
Edit to add: as far as getting paid, nobody expects to get paid for an onsite interview so I wouldn't expect to get paid for a take home project either. As long as it takes the same amount of time that the coding portion of an onsite interview reasonably would, that is.
The time you spend on-site grinding leetcode with some Google engineer is non-paid as well, so let’s not pretend it’s really any different.
The same lack of understanding/appreciation can be felt in some jobs, but a change might be good?
Ultimately I'd work at a garden centre or something and be outside more, but the pay would be less ! In any case, hope you have a plan.
If you have 50 candidates do a takehome assignment, then you will need an engineer to do code review and write comments on everything. Whereas it's easier to execute the code and have an engineer glance at the code quality. Their time is better spent looking more deeply candidate's who move onto the next round. I'm not saying it's morally right, but it's just more time efficient for companies to do this and that's how the power dynamics unfortunately work.
This is why I don't do such things. Want 8 hours of my time? Pay me.
Why are you against naming and shaming the company?
I feel your pain, but doing this gets them nothing and costs them effort.
It might also be harmful. If the advice is "we needed more experience in X", and your reaction to it was either not apply for jobs asking for X (because you are unlikely to get them), or to get more training in X then that would be wonderful outcome for both you and the company. But as someone who has hired people, the most likely outcome is you are training someone on how to lie better about their expertise in X.
That makes this a win for you, a lose for the company doing the hiring. In my experience that means it ain't going to happen.
You’d need to assume interview feedback is constructive and relevant to your professional growth, interviewers are well-trained, interview processes are fair, and candidates receiving feedback are capable and willing to act positively on it. From my experience, having all of these factors be true isn’t all that common, and one of these factors is beyond the company’s control.
The issues I have with this point of view is it's very short-sighted. Word travels. If people have a shitty selection experience when they apply to you they'll tell other people about it. That will impact your ability to hire the best talent. It's to companies' benefit to provide a good experience during the selection process, and that includes giving feedback.
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They should have.
And there is less risk in assessing a piece of work you paid for.
I've also seen good reviews on Glassdoor from candidates who weren't hired but were given prompt and appropriate feedback.
You should. Does it look like they give a fuck about you? Who are they?
Well, it's true, what exactly do you expect people to say? No one's saying it's good or nice for the candidate.
You know if someone you don't remember from an interaction ages ago emailed you to say "Hey, you probably don't remember this, but you once told me $thing, so I took $action, and now I've achieved $outcome. Thanks you for that, it really helped my career!", it'd make you feel great and would probably be the highlight of your day, right?
If he didn't remember you before, he'll remember you after. I've given thousands of semi strangers advice in various forms. I remember the two or three who followed up with me and said, "thank you for your advice, I followed it and have since reached my goal," and have kept in touch with them. It makes you feel really good to hear that.
What I’m getting at is, there will always be bad apples, or people who react in a way that damages your organization. But not providing useful feedback to people who ask for it simply because one person went crazy is punishing a lot more people because of that one. Who knows if all of their negative karma ends up being worse in the grand scheme of things?
I personally avoid applying to places that other engineers tell me to avoid because I trust their opinion more than I trust a company selling me the highlight reel in an interview. If a trusted engineer said he got a rejection in an interview, asked for feedback, and none was given, I’d avoid that place too.
They don't have to provide feedback, so they don't have to take the risk if they don't want to.
Don't really think your comparison was fair.
Most people, ESPECIALLY people who ask you for feedback, do not want feedback. They want to get in a fight with you.
Edit: I don't remember ghosting anyone personally in either setting, but it's happened to me plenty. Getting upset about it just means you're new to the experience.
A good typical whiteboard interview naturally includes hints, feedback, and collaboration. After several hours of it, we have a very good idea of how well they may respond to feedback from members of our organization.
Honestly, I love giving feedback. I love helping candidates be better at interviewing. Bad interviews are painful to the interviewer too. I'm out of a small market so people and word gets around.
If it really isn't their fault they didn't get the job, we try to make that very very clear. It really sucks when we have to pass up on someone who absolutely killed the interview because someone else did better.
The harsh reality is, many people that don't pass on the interview are people we do not want in the industry. The good ones we give every hint and help we can.
There's also more tactical ways of extracting feedback from companies rather than directly asking for it. We can't tell you about how you did well after rejection, but we can talk about what our expectations are during the interview; put two and two together. I've noticed the good candidates that are serious about improving their interviewing do it, and from the company side, it's a strong signal they're not trying to contest a decision.
Food for thought, when was the last time you gave a company feedback on their interview process? I've traded feedback for feedback quite successfully many times when I was interviewing.
So, your employer does give feedback to candidates on request? It must be difficult for you to find places that are acceptable to you to work, since very few companies typically give feedback. Or do your friends just not usually ask for feedback and as a result that clause on your criteria never trips (i.e. the company wouldn't have given feedback, but since your friend didn't ask, you don't strike it off your list)?
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I applied to one company and got a response back which was effectively "we really like you as a candidate, but it doesn't seem like you would be the right fit for this job / it doesn't seem like the interests you expressed in your interviews [which they correctly restated] matched up well with the duties we would have you perform. We will likely have jobs opening up which would align with what you like and you will be on the shortlist of candidates if you apply for those". Was it truthful? Who knows, but it left me feeling happy about how things went and I would consider applying there again.
Similarly, earlier on in my career after taking a few CS classes I applied for a different job, and the response was effectively "You are smart but you don't have the skills we require yet which are [x, y, z]. Come back when you do". What they said was true and I appreciated the feedback.
Contrast that with the myriad companies I applied to and never heard a response back from or didn't get a response back for many months from. I will never apply to these places again because it is clear that they don't respect prospective employees enough to even send a perfunctory email. Boiler plate rejections aren't as irritating but they are definitely still irritating. If you don't provide reasons for not hiring then employees will construct their own reasons, and they may not be true and / or favorable towards your company.
I suppose if you're thinking exclusively about a short-term benefit to the company alone without considering the impact to the candidate, the wider ecosystem and culture in general then it wouldn't make sense to take the risk.
In fairness I received feedback I didn't get the position because I was too chatty from a hr person who told me to act more chatty because qualified candidates on paper were failing for being too quiet. I kinda wished they didn't provide feedback because I have an opinion on the internal culture that would make me avoid them in the future.
Edit: Just for context on the interview—they had me do a take home assignment in Django, which I had never worked in. Was desperate, so I learned Django and completed it in a week. Went onsite and their whole office was a one tiny, dated swelteringly hot room. The interview was mostly around a bunch of basic syntax stuff, and had me implement merge sort. Didn’t hear from them at all for a month so I wrote on Glassdoor about it.
Sometimes it’s no one’s fault and it’s simply a bad fit.
And of course like you say, people aren’t taught how to evaluate feedback and they may actually contest what is a courtesy in an adversarial manner and thus make things so much worse.
It used to be common knowledge that doctors should never say they're sorry, for the same reason (fear of lawsuit). Then research showed that apologizing actually reduced the number and severity of malpractice lawsuits.
I see plenty of people attacking tech company interview processes on social media already, without being provoked by honest feedback. I'm having trouble imagining how feedback could make a person more angry.
Usually the blowback to the company hits marketing/legal/HR. Gathering and delivering feedback takes work. It's really politically expensive to explain why you're going out of your way to do work to cause other departments to do work for the sake of tech community altruism, especially right after it just burnt you. Giving career advice to strangers after an interview isn't the norm in any other field.
I don't really care if the candidate tries to sue the company. I don't work in legal, that's mostly not my problem. But if legal doesn't want to deal with it and ends up being a pain in my ass, yeah, I'm dropping the practice.
It was a whiteboard session on how to manage scheduling and reporting progress/success/failure information for long-running jobs to a frontend UI... which is something I had been specifically doing at my previous company for a year, and have done many times in many ways before. I took some lessons about communication and focus from it, but in my mind it showed that either that section's interviewer was not very good at evaluating candidates, or some other reason was the real reason and they chose to voluntarily tell me something else as a cover instead.
I'm assuming the former, because I never asked nor expected a specific reason for rejection - no cover was necessary. Finding out just frustrated me further - I really wanted that job, and of course you can't go back saying "Maybe someone else should give that section? I think I'm really good, trust me, the guy you just rejected!"
I don’t know which way it tips, but looking at just the potential damage of providing feedback seems insufficient.
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Fear of the occasional keyboard ninja is not a rational reason for giving every single job applicant a worse experience.
Not to mention that generally they end up looking worse than you do, and you've probably done the rest of us a favour by outing them as an asshole (I'm assuming you were respectful and constructive in the feedback that you gave).
Anyway, the way to avoid negative reactions and defensiveness from candidates is to practice giving feedback in a way that’s constructive. We’ll cover this next.
Surely a reasonable person with good critical thinking skills can look at one of those "rampages" and recognize it for what it is.
you monitor candidates social media post interview? quite disturbing trend if so.
I wish more people would give real, actionable feedback on interviews.
Assuming Microsoft actually measures this stuff, that's kind of surprising to me. I've never placed much weight on being able to write a program on the spot.
I don't disagree, and personally I hate in person coding exercises, but if you keep the question simple and allow the candidate to code in their native language, something fizz-buzz like will go a long way in weeding out the people who have languages on their resume but can't code.
At our company we offer two simple coderpad tasks to be done in advance with no supervision or pressure - write a linked list in CPP and solve a simple puzzle in Python. You pay attention to the candidates who use templates, destructors, smart pointers, even if they make mistakes those are the ones you probably want to hire.
The best part about it? I was already a full time employee at Microsoft. I just wanted to switch teams. I still had to do a full interview loop with the team and well... I didn't get the job.
I blazed through all the questions the manager asked, and the manager told me I was the most talented person he'd ever interviewed and would definitely get the job, and then I didn't get the job, and got no further feedback. It was the most confusing interview process I'd ever been in.
I sent him to ask him if there was some sort of mistake, and he didn't even reply directly, just sent me back a message through the recruiter saying no, it wasn't a mistake.
Luke Hohmann, author of The Journey of the Software Professional, advises to give such feedback. I've endeavored to do so.
FWIW, though I've been insulted and hazed and ghosted many times, I've yet to be given constructive criticism.
A few times I've been told why I didn't "pass". One guy was upset that I didn't favor aspects (a la Spring). Another was disappointed by my answer for how to resolve a hypothetical impasse ("try both").
That sort of thing.
Job interviewing is just dating. I accept that most people can't articulate why it's a "No." But I can't abide by the tortured rationalizations of poorly socialized geeks and accompanying general purpose meanness used to mask their own inadequacies.
Said more kindly, most people, and especially geeks, shouldn't be allowed to conduct interviews unsupervised. It's a teachable professional skill like any other. Asking the unprepared and unsuited is just cruel to all parties.
If you get fired four weeks in to your internship, because no amount of coaching from the senior employees is worth the investment by the company.... that’s a tough situation to be in. It’s pretty late at that point to start looking for another internship for the summer.
And if you’re the kid’s supervisor... that’s not a fun conversation to have.
Wonder how long ago this policy was in place because when I interviewed last year I was able to interview with multiple teams.
The gotchas are ridiculous.
If an interviewer googled the question - why do I need to know the answer?
I recently had an interview and I spent _literally_ over an hour trying to figure out the algorithm or a mathematical function to solve it and I finally got to the point that I gave up.
I asked the person what algorithm they used to solve it and they said “brute force” and were expecting nested loops that under real world load would have been O(n^2).
I definitely don’t consider myself an algorithm expert, but my feedback was, and I shit you not, that I didn’t know ruby. I’ve been developing in ruby since 2006.
Anecdotes and all. Our industry’s interview process is flawed AF.
If on the way to work you see someone trip and they can't get up, you should offer them help even if doing so will make you late for an important meeting.
Surely if a rejection was for a reason that a couple weeks of study could "fix," it wasn't worth a rejection, right? Are hirers out there really being THAT picky?
I'm going through resumes right now and rejecting people if I think they need a year or more experience under their belt than what they're presenting. If it's because they know react and not vue, that's not reject worthy at all...
I don't remember 99.9% of what recruiters have said to me, but I do remember the two companies (Hulu and LinkedIn) that made me feel like crap and jerked me around. It was 2 years ago and I'm sure most of the people who were a part of that are gone, but I still kind of have that grudge.
Some companies do actually hire people fresh out of college/coding boot camp, and for those people, some feedback and a few weeks studying might make a world of difference.
So do it at your company and have a competitive advantage.
If the decision to reject was purely objective then sure, but isn't a big part of it if not most of it subjective? And even when the reasons could be objective, I imagine people are deciding in part through gut-feeling and might not be able to articulate the reasons for rejection in an objective enough manner. That's why I imagine people are inclined to fight when given the reasons for rejection.
Regardless, brand matters as well. You want candidates to have good experiences even if they are rejected as they will talk to peers about company x
Obviously my skills and experience are still exactly the same, so this makes perfect sense.
I don’t know, but I personally think this is a terrible signal.
95% of the time, you didn't give as strong answers as other candidates. The other 5% of the time, you came across as a jerk.
Do you only ask candidates 1 question/only look for 1 attribute? And only hire for one level? Cause otherwise, they could've done great on 8 things but missed on another. Or they did well but not quite well enough for the seniority that was desired. I've gotten feedback like this in the past - "your technical answers were great, but we thought you were a bit too green collaboration- and project-ownership-wise" and it was super useful because in my head before that, it was the places where my technical question answers could've been even better that I'd been beating myself up over.
Treating people like disposable garbage because they didn't check the checkboxes the best is a great way to be a shitty manager and a shitty human being.
For much of the time, the reason people don't get the job is that there was someone marginally more qualified/attractive/likeable, or some combination of the three; the classic "there were many qualified candidates and we could only choose one" line in the rejection email.
That doesn't help the interviewee beyond telling them that it's a numbers game, but that's the truth.
After the interview is done and the answer is a solid NO, as a company we have NO BUSINESS RELATIONSHIP with you. Any iota of effort we put towards you is essentially wasted effort, even if very minor.
What changes that discussion further is that there is a small, but still quite real, possibility of lawsuit, social media rant (as another comment mentioned), or even a disgruntled applicant shooting up the place.
(I believe Pres. William McKinley was shot by a disgruntled would-be bureaucrat who didn't get a job...)
A perfunctory if generic rejection is a safer choice. Short-list candidates who made it to a 3rd interview, or folks who we reached out and headhunted (but didn't choose) may be a different story, but those are rare edge cases.
I think this could be phrased as "we have the choice to have no business relationship with you." But it's not a good idea to straight up cut off candidates. We've had plenty of cases where we just didn't think we had the capacity to help a candidate get up to speed and thought if they worked somewhere else that could provide that to them then we could hire them 6 months to a year down the line. It's not the standard, but it's happened before.
And plenty of companies don't even feel a candidate is owed that answer after they've made their determination. Of course it's a two way street and candidates will - and have been - doing the same thing to companies.
I have done hundreds of interviews, and I used to do a very easy, basic comp sci test. The last question I would ask was, "Tell me about a book, cd or movie that you've read/listened to/watched that was interesting or excited you."
The point was to see if the person was engaging with the universe, not to judge their taste or anything else. You'd be surprised how many people get tripped up by this.
The worst answer I ever got was a guy who said the last album he bought was "Free Bird" (which is not an album), and was 40 years old at the time of that utterance. This person could honestly not think of one thing that excited him since then. He also ranted about Object Oriented Programming like it was a brand new thing.
The best answer I ever got, was a gentleman who was not the strongest candidate but was clearly intelligent. His answer was, "I know this is not a recent author, but I love Bukowski." And he spoke at length about his novels and poetry, and even was aware that our office was only a few blocks from where one of the pivotal scenes in one of his novels was set, and that after the interview he had actually scheduled some time away from his job to go there.
perfect answer
In my report to HR, I mentioned that he probably needed to study a little but was quite intelligent, but had fantastic enthusiasm for literature and that he was very engaging.
Of course, HR put an immediate stop to the thing with the reasoning that someone could say that their favorite book was the bible, and that could form the basis for a religious discrimination case.
After that, I declined to do interviews anymore.
In a way, I can understand why people get tripped up on the "casual/lifestyle" question. Interviewees may not think of it as a casual question, but rather another question to weed out the desirables from the undesirables. So people may censor themselves or their honest beliefs because they want the job. Which is a position I totally understand.
Did you seriously grade whether people were "engaging with the universe" (WTF?) based on what their favourite book/CD/movie is and how much they enjoyed it?
Did you seriously dock points from a candidate who obviously didn't care about CDs, movies or books - because he couldn't remember the name of the last record he bought?
Has the thought ever crossed your mind that maybe he engaged with the world in other ways? Perhaps he would hike, or take his kids to soccer, or even play pool and darts on the pub on a Friday. Did you even bother to ask before dismissing this guy as some sort of sub-human degenerate?
Did you actually go home that night and Google Free Bird to see whether or not it was, in fact, an album, and felt a smug sense of superiority when you found out it was actually a longer-than-average single?
More importantly, did you seriously try to convince HR to hire a candidate who was, by your own admission, "not the strongest", because he had "fantastic enthusiasm for literature" and was "quite intelligent" (I'm guessing you based this assertion off of the fact that he read the poetry of Charles Bukowski, and therefore must, like you, be an intellectual).
Mate, I've got some news for you: the reason HR wanted you to stop asking that question most likely had nothing do with the possibility of a religious discrimination case - they either wanted you to stop basing your hiring decisions on batshit insane notions, or stop you making hiring decisions altogether.
Not surprised at all. You know your motivation; they don't. It probably causes lots of candidates to mildly panic as they try to decide what they can say that won't make them come across as too weird/boring/old/etc.
Yeah, because they'd rather be shown to freeze up rather than have the conversation go like this:
Them: I actually really liked the album Mouth Moods. It's an album full of remixed songs and mash-ups, kind of like what Weird Al does.
You: Oh? I've never heard of that. Tell me about your favorite song on that album.
Them: Oh... uh.... it's a song called Bustin.
You: Bustin?
Them: Yeah it's... well, it's the song from Ghostbusters but chopped up and remixed.
You: So it's about busting ghosts?
Them: Uh... well... no. It's about how bustin... makes me feel good.
You: I'm sorry? What are you busting that makes you feel good?
Them: Never mind, forget I said anything.
Also, why did you even mention the enthusiasm for literature bit to HR?
Yeah, but that also true if you give good constructive feedback with your rejections.
The "word" doesn't have to be bad, you know :)
It can also readily feed into a very different framing. It's rarely difficult for a candidate to decide that whatever core reason is a fig leaf and something more ego-preserving is the real reason. I think we've all had coworkers who didn't take feedback well. I've definitely known people to whom all feedback is personal attacks. It's also, unfortunately, well-known and well-documented that people share negative thoughts more often and more readily than positive thoughts.
So, you're absolutely right. The good word can get around! There may be more risk to trying than is obvious, though.
If the feedback can be interpreted in such a way ....
then the rejection is discriminatory.
Pure and simple.
"Culture fit" reasons are code for bias.
"Culture":
* national origin
* age
* religion
* gender
* sexual orientation....
... all protected classes, yet covered with the "culture fit" excuse to protect a company from being accused (correctly) of discrimination.
Discrimination on the basis of the school you attended, your nationality/race/ethnicity, even what you choose to do in your free time, is likely to be behind more than a few rejections. "Culture fit" is a polite fig leaf to hide that.
For what it's worth, as an interviewer I'm happy to give feedback in person, at the end of the interview, if the candidate asks for it. It's much easier to do when you're both in the same room, and asking e.g. "is there anything you think I could improve on?" makes a positive impression either way.
Definitely if they start trying to haggle, or pressure you into something, that's a hard pass, I'll say whatever bullshit it takes to get them out the door. I'm happy to help out the former at the expense of fielding the latter, though I can understand why not everyone is!
The sueing angle kicks in when you do stuff like give feedback for folks who you think will take it well Vs keep it away from folks who give you a bad feeling or whatever. It is all exposure.
Almost in all the companies I have been at, there has been a big push to keep the interview experience uniform for all candidates. So you can't have hugely different loops setup for the same level for different candidates for example.
Fun fact: This is a main reason why as a company grows, you aren't able to get in with a wink and a nod anymore, even if you know 100% of the folks already there.
And there is plenty in it for them, as the candidate may want to apply a second time at a later point, having been made aware of and improved on the areas that were identified as needing improvement. They'll be more likely to re-apply to a company that gave the feedback than to a company that didn't.
There's also plenty of reasons a candidate didn't get hired that not really immediately correctable or not even their fault. For the latter, we do provide feedback/explanations and try to keep in touch in hopes they apply again in a couple of years. But 80% of the time we really just don't want to see the candidate again. I'd say 10% of the time, we see the candidate again, but so far, even on reappearance years later, they get the same feedback from completely different interviewing committees.
It's strange that other industries haven't followed suit.
I try to use it early in the interview, and I find it sets a helpful tone, avoiding a lot of that posturing you describe.
Does that seem odd?
Do you think you would be an expert in something the candidate had experience in? Probably not. Should you find out how they speak about something THEY are experts in? Probably.
But like the OP said, tech interviews are about posturing so that the interviewer feels better about themselves.
You're also right that sharing the problem does place you in a position of vulnerability. It's perfectly possible that a candidate will think 'what a bunch of idiots to have gotten themselves in that mess in the first place'. Or worse, when they realise how you solved the problem, 'wow, they think they solved their problems? They're in an even worse spot now'. So I appreciate that you see this as being humble and exposing the candidate to an opportunity to know more than you.
But the reality is, when you solved that problem, you:
1) knew all of the context and constraints, spoken and unspoken
2) had a team of folks around you to bounce ideas off and collaborate on the solution
3) had access to google, stackoverflow, etc.
4) did not have to come up with a solution inside a small interview room, within a few minutes, while being judged by someone who has decision rights over your future employment
5) crucially, had found yourself in a position where you needed to know how to solve this problem. If you hadn't had that need, you would never have acquired that knowledge. So unless the candidate had also faced this exact problem, why would they know how to solve it? You work here, and you didn't...
And while it might be nice to hire someone who can, under interview conditions, jump right to the right solution shortcutting all of those processes - it would obviously fill in a knowledge gap your team demonstrably had - looking for a candidate who has already learned something that came as a hard-won lesson for your team is like a general building up an army to better fight the last war.
You can do better: Use the problem as an example of the sort of thing your team has struggled with, and ask the candidate to give examples of similar problems they have solved in their own career. You are hiring them for their hard-won lessons, and adding them to your own, not looking for someone who happens to have also won the same lessons you already have.