Damn, the top comment on the article is about how you need to lie in tech interviews. How far have we fallen if we don't even have enough dignity to walk away from garbage tier companies who can't even put any real effort into hiring. Lying is not a solution, letting companies like Databricks die a slow painful death because they create toxic environments and all their programmers keep quitting is the solution.
A common way of avoiding having to lie is registering your own consulting company after getting laid off. No resume gap! As far as if it fools recruiters, no idea. It's got to sometimes, right? I see it too often on LinkedIn for it to be useless.
>A common way of avoiding having to lie is registering your own consulting company after getting laid off. No resume gap! As far as if it fools recruiters, no idea. It's got to sometimes, right? I see it too often on LinkedIn for it to be useless.
"Consulting" is the programmer equivalent of claiming "Entrepreneur" as a job title. Sure it exists, but it generally translates to "Unemployed".
I've been led to believe that there are brokers who have information on your employment history and that it will likely show up in a background check. Famously, employment dates are the only thing a typical HR department will give out when cold called by a potential new employer. Basically, it's not something I'd fluff beyond a month or two. I'd find something else to fill a big gap on a resume if needed (sabbatical, volunteering, consulting, whatever) just in case it's something that an automated filter is tossing out.
Indeed. This is not a categorical issue since, as noted elsewhere in the thread, employers lie and obfuscate all the time.
Would I judge someone for fudging the dates of their last employment to get around a ridiculous recruiter screen like this? Absolutely not. Would I judge someone for directly lying about their experience or knowledge? Yes, that’s unethical.
> is about how you need to lie in tech interviews.
Doing recruiting rounds as a candidate in the early 00's taught me that you have to lie in interviews. All the questions were "give an example of a time when ... " - everyone displayed leadership when they were captain of the national championship winning football team, and overcame adversity when they climbed the three mountains taller than everest in the same day. At the end of the day ... it worked.
Much like social media etc today - real life cant compete with the fantasy of the 100x coder who added $50mil of sales to the bottom line of their last employer.
You should also consider lying to your doctor when they ask how much you drink / smoke / exercise. They will just assume that you are so 2x whatever you say for drinking and 1/10th the amount of exercise you self report - because everybody lies.
> letting companies like Databricks die a slow painful death because they create toxic environments and all their programmers keep quitting is the solution.
True, these places eventually fall away, whether it takes 2,4,6 10+ years. They eventually perish.
Sure, some people would claim "It's just about putting your best foot forward and presenting yourself in the best possible light," but those people are such liars they lie about lying. Lying by admission is still lying.
God that's cynical. In the final round of my last FAANG interview after bumbling through part of it, at a very senior level, the interviewer flat out asked me "so uh, how long has it been since you did Android?", presumably due to my poor performance. I admitted I'd spent the majority of the last 2 years on iOS even though I'd done Android in the past too, and lo and behold, hired. Honesty and respect are valued where it counts, and if they're not, find another employer.
I like to quite Dave Barry: A resume is not just a piece of paper, it’s a piece of paper covered in lies. And it can be the difference between not getting a job, and not even coming close
Fun fact: in some jurisdictions such as New York and DC, this is illegal. It's called "discrimination against the unemployed". Check the laws of your state, the state you would work in, and the state the company is headquartered in to see if this may apply to you.
While it's nice to know these laws exist, what would you really do with it? The company proved it has a terrible culture. Doesn't seem worth it to fight for a job with them.
Assuming sufficient evidence, one could have an employment attorney pursue the claim and let the attorney keep any damages awarded beyond their contingency fee. Negative stimuli may not improve the culture, but it may improve the discriminatory HR behavior. And even if the behavior isn’t improved, there is then a mostly immutable public record of said discriminatory behavior (which is arguably more valuable than whatever scuttlebutt is on Blind or similar platforms).
I like to think that it’s not always a direct individual outcome that helps. With enough soft complaints the regulator might write a reminder letter to the given HR dept which could go over relevant law and warn about repercussions of breaking it. And that might be enough to straighten out some practices.
"While it's nice to know these laws exist, what would you really do with it?"
This is exactly how I feel about tenant laws in the US. It's great they exist, but who's going to get a lawyer to stay somewhere they aren't wanted. All these laws that protect the vulnerable still require a lawyer to enforce them. Lawyers aren't accessible to most.
I just glanced at their career page and all the US based engineering and product management jobs are in the bay area. California doesn't have protected status for being unemployed.
It is very weird that your precise case has to fit a couple of narrow criteria to be protected against discrimination in the US. From a moral perspective, discrimination is discrimination regardless of its grounds. The default position should be that it is illegal. This would avoid endless sterile discussion about whether this or that is a protected class.
There's a missing bit of context here about what "laid off" actually means in this person's case. We are assuming it means a non-performance related reduction in force, but it may be something different.
If I had to guess, I'd suspect the hiring committee found reason to suspect this person was laid off for performance / behavior. For example, perhaps their company has not conducted a large layoff, or is known for laying off based on performance.
We also don't know what else happened in the interview. Perhaps he talked ill of their former employer in relation to the layoff. He may have cleared the technical rounds but the interviewer noted this, and the HC weighted it negatively.
All of this is conjecture - for all I know Databricks' HC is really made of idiots, but it's probably not the first assumption to make based on a Blind post that lacks context.
> There's a missing bit of context here about what "laid off" actually means in this person's case. We are assuming it means a non-performance related reduction in force, but it may be something different.
But that's basically the definition of a layoff; the elimination of roles from a company due to reasons unrelated to the performance of the laid off people (e.g. lack of work, economic conditions). If somebody loses their job due to reasons related to their individual performance, they were not laid off. They were fired.
I am aware of and agree with this definition. But...
One company I worked for had two rounds of layoffs - the first round got rid of exclusively low performers (they didn't announce it that way but it was clear) while the second cut across the board. If someone had that insight, they'd be right to consider someone cut in the first wave as a red flag.
But more generally, I don't think people stick to this definition, especially when talking about themselves. "I was laid off from X"... No dude, you got fired for harassment.
Again, all of this is conjecture - we have no idea what the situation in question actually was nor how the person communicated with the company about it.
Not necessarily true. I have seen in the past employees be “laid off” solely due to their performance. Rather than fire the employee for performance reasons they opt to eliminate the role altogether, and not rehire for it. The team had a lot of flexibility and mobility in roles, so they could reallocate people to pick up any slack. I think they do this partially for the benefit of the person being let go, and partially because it’s more “paperwork” otherwise.
> I'd suspect the hiring committee found reason to suspect this person was laid off for performance / behavior. For example, perhaps their company has not conducted a large layoff, or is known for laying off based on performance.
Even if true, this is something the recruiter and/or some of the interviewers should also have been aware of. The candidate should not have to go through the entire interview loop (I would imagine at least 5 rounds) only to be rejected for this reason.
That's what I am saying. The HC is there to make final judgement based on the data. This is what's making me think it's not a systematic thing (we never hire people who were laid off) but something specific to that person (we suspect he was fired for a reason)
This is asinine, discriminatory and unfair. I'd even say it's borderline malicious.
Glad they named and shamed. I would't do any business with this company, nor attempt to work for them.
A RIF has nothing to do with a person's performance .. at least officially. One has to assume it was a business decision only, not performance based, although with a large reduction it seems improbable that the people left would be, now or in the past, under-performers. More than likely, the person being laid off was due to their salary being high, and their function being covered by someone else. Nothing more complicated than that.
For anyone like you (and me) who says being laid off doesn't mean bad performance you have someone else saying it's good that Meta, Twitter, etc. are cleaning house, getting rid of all the slackers. Those are the folks calling it a red flag later.
The thing, is we want to believe that a company makes careful decisions about whom to lay off. We know it doesn't quite work like that but as you said yourself there can be a bunch of reasons. And with that context you're still looking at the reality that the company didn't deem the laid off workers important enough to keep.
I don't agree with what happened to the candidate here and we are all at risk of being laid off after all, but at the same time we cannot just assume the companies didn't have reasons to select one person over the other. And being overpaid itself might be a red flag for some hiring managers.
What I mean is, we cannot have it both ways, saying RIFed doesn't mean anything while at the same time assuming that companies follow a rational decision process and don't just play roulette.
I got laid off along with 30% of the company and 1 month later was contacted by my manager to let me know that he had put me on a “single point of failure, do not fire” list, and someone in HR managed to get some spreadsheets mixed up and I instead made it onto the list of people to be laid off. At this point I already had accepted another offer for more money, and obviously had less than stellar feelings towards the company, so I told them I wasn’t coming back.
Everyone wants to believe that the people and organizations holding their careers in their hands are competent, rational, and trustworthy. Unfortunately that is often not the case.
It can both be true that most of the people who were laid off were done for "performance reasons" and also that it's not rational to reject a candidate because of a "red flag" like being laid off, at least if you are doing any evaluation of candidates yourself. After all, the prior company could have been wrong? Or they value different things?
I agree with you in that you can’t infer whether it was random or performance related but RIFs first start with underperformers from the last review cycle at a lot of companies.
I think their HR culture may be a little toxic. When I told them their offer was not enough, they got very irate. They said if I only care about money I’m not a good fit for their culture of builders, and that I should watch out because there are lots of lay offs happening. It all left me with a very poor impression of them.
This is the type of toxicity I experienced at most companies in a top third world country (that shall not be named).
I worked there for about 3-4 years and people would try to make you feel bad or guilty for all kinds of things. Sharing you got laid off was an automatic disqualification from any interview. Lying your way through was the only way. Now I think it could have been systemic or cultural.
My advice to OP, you really dodged a bullet. This isn’t a healthy workplace culture that values you as a human being. Pat yourself on the back and move onwards and upwards.
A "little toxic?". This is a nuclear bridge burning option from them, for absolutely no reason at all.
Instead: "Mr. Cochne, we're sorry that we can't match your salary expectations this time. We do find you a good fit for the company, so please think about us in the future."
There. No hard feelings. No burning bridges. Professional. People come and go.
I met Reynold a few years ago about a job and also withdrew because he frankly got too self-righteous and made me feel uncomfortable. Cloudera was a bit warmer but was missing a lot of productive energy. I think the founding Databricks team are just very analytical and system-oriented, even when it comes to people. It's reasonable to expect the early team to have adapted to people management by now, but some of the potential champions of that have left, and the product remains primarily B2B.
> They said that I should watch out because there are lots of lay offs happening.
They should display some more empathy and should read the situation correctly. A significant portion of the recently laid off people are from HR and recruiting.
If money isn't that important, why are they regularly getting VC money for 10 years at something like 40 Billion valuation?
The sad reality is this industry is full of assholes, I don't even mean they trying to pay as little as possible, that's "business", I mean unprofessional people who play "good cop, bad cop" and all the childish games they learn on TV movies.
Some of them really think they are the "new Steve Jobs", and act like one.
These are just recruiters, though. It’s a sales job and they have quotas and incentives. Many of them were not in the industry a short time ago and many are now leaving the industry on a rail.
Do you expect your car sales guy to be professional? I’d love for that to be the case, but the reality is usually not so.
I had a pretty bad experience with them when I interviewed about a year and a half ago. I don't remember all the details, but I recall them giving me (a frontend SWE) a phone screen problem that was all about micro-optimization. I think they wanted me to implement a trie within the last five minutes of the interview or something. After the interview, I emailed the recruiter and said I didn't want to go forward with them.
I'm sure some people here will say DS and Algorithm questions like that are perfectly reasonable to show off CS skills, but the question was just so far removed from anything a frontend engineer could expect to do that it showed that they just had no respect for the specialty and were hiring for the wrong thing.
I gave a ref check for someone trying to join databricks and honestly their level of probing gave me the creeps. Like they were trying to find some dirt. Never seen anything like it. It seems like they’re either not confident in their interview process or trying to lowball people, either way wouldn’t recommend interviewing there
Instead of laying off maybe companies should make a press release like they do with top execs that get fired “15% of our staff has decided to spend more time with their family”.
Lol like that time a VP at google sent a resignation letter saying that he wants to spend more time with his son who just went to college (wat) but it turned out it was sexual misconduct.
Readit News
Agreed. You should not lie in interviews.
A common way of avoiding having to lie is registering your own consulting company after getting laid off. No resume gap! As far as if it fools recruiters, no idea. It's got to sometimes, right? I see it too often on LinkedIn for it to be useless.
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"Consulting" is the programmer equivalent of claiming "Entrepreneur" as a job title. Sure it exists, but it generally translates to "Unemployed".
I did that one time when I quit for a 4 month break, no one seemed to ask if I had quit yet and interviews went fine?
My favorite piece of advice from interview.io's interview coaching was an emphatic "There is no place for honesty in a behavioral interview."
On the one hand I agree with you, on the other, you can't pay your mortgage with dignity.
Would I judge someone for fudging the dates of their last employment to get around a ridiculous recruiter screen like this? Absolutely not. Would I judge someone for directly lying about their experience or knowledge? Yes, that’s unethical.
Doing recruiting rounds as a candidate in the early 00's taught me that you have to lie in interviews. All the questions were "give an example of a time when ... " - everyone displayed leadership when they were captain of the national championship winning football team, and overcame adversity when they climbed the three mountains taller than everest in the same day. At the end of the day ... it worked.
Much like social media etc today - real life cant compete with the fantasy of the 100x coder who added $50mil of sales to the bottom line of their last employer.
You should also consider lying to your doctor when they ask how much you drink / smoke / exercise. They will just assume that you are so 2x whatever you say for drinking and 1/10th the amount of exercise you self report - because everybody lies.
True, these places eventually fall away, whether it takes 2,4,6 10+ years. They eventually perish.
You: "because I wanted a new challenge"
We all know that in most cases thats a lie. But if you were to tell the truth you would stand a high chance of being punished.
Why?
Sure, some people would claim "It's just about putting your best foot forward and presenting yourself in the best possible light," but those people are such liars they lie about lying. Lying by admission is still lying.
It might even be demonstrably securities fraud.
https://wp.nyu.edu/compliance_enforcement/2022/06/22/can-sec...
walk them right into small claims for 25k
This is exactly how I feel about tenant laws in the US. It's great they exist, but who's going to get a lawyer to stay somewhere they aren't wanted. All these laws that protect the vulnerable still require a lawyer to enforce them. Lawyers aren't accessible to most.
If I had to guess, I'd suspect the hiring committee found reason to suspect this person was laid off for performance / behavior. For example, perhaps their company has not conducted a large layoff, or is known for laying off based on performance.
We also don't know what else happened in the interview. Perhaps he talked ill of their former employer in relation to the layoff. He may have cleared the technical rounds but the interviewer noted this, and the HC weighted it negatively.
All of this is conjecture - for all I know Databricks' HC is really made of idiots, but it's probably not the first assumption to make based on a Blind post that lacks context.
But that's basically the definition of a layoff; the elimination of roles from a company due to reasons unrelated to the performance of the laid off people (e.g. lack of work, economic conditions). If somebody loses their job due to reasons related to their individual performance, they were not laid off. They were fired.
One company I worked for had two rounds of layoffs - the first round got rid of exclusively low performers (they didn't announce it that way but it was clear) while the second cut across the board. If someone had that insight, they'd be right to consider someone cut in the first wave as a red flag.
But more generally, I don't think people stick to this definition, especially when talking about themselves. "I was laid off from X"... No dude, you got fired for harassment.
Again, all of this is conjecture - we have no idea what the situation in question actually was nor how the person communicated with the company about it.
Given you have one of them replying in the comments on that site and throwing around vague accusations, I'd say they are idiots.
Even if true, this is something the recruiter and/or some of the interviewers should also have been aware of. The candidate should not have to go through the entire interview loop (I would imagine at least 5 rounds) only to be rejected for this reason.
Glad they named and shamed. I would't do any business with this company, nor attempt to work for them.
A RIF has nothing to do with a person's performance .. at least officially. One has to assume it was a business decision only, not performance based, although with a large reduction it seems improbable that the people left would be, now or in the past, under-performers. More than likely, the person being laid off was due to their salary being high, and their function being covered by someone else. Nothing more complicated than that.
The thing, is we want to believe that a company makes careful decisions about whom to lay off. We know it doesn't quite work like that but as you said yourself there can be a bunch of reasons. And with that context you're still looking at the reality that the company didn't deem the laid off workers important enough to keep.
I don't agree with what happened to the candidate here and we are all at risk of being laid off after all, but at the same time we cannot just assume the companies didn't have reasons to select one person over the other. And being overpaid itself might be a red flag for some hiring managers.
What I mean is, we cannot have it both ways, saying RIFed doesn't mean anything while at the same time assuming that companies follow a rational decision process and don't just play roulette.
I've been watching the layoffs affect former colleagues, former workplaces, etc lately - and pretty much all of them are pseudorandom.
Got assigned to a project that's being cut? You could be the worlds strongest worker, a 9001x engineer, you are still gone.
Everyone wants to believe that the people and organizations holding their careers in their hands are competent, rational, and trustworthy. Unfortunately that is often not the case.
On the flip side, we too can ‘red flag’ Databricks and other companies that operate that way and not work there or buy their products.
I worked there for about 3-4 years and people would try to make you feel bad or guilty for all kinds of things. Sharing you got laid off was an automatic disqualification from any interview. Lying your way through was the only way. Now I think it could have been systemic or cultural.
My advice to OP, you really dodged a bullet. This isn’t a healthy workplace culture that values you as a human being. Pat yourself on the back and move onwards and upwards.
It's OK, we all guessed it was the US ;)
Is this meant to convince you to take the offer, or is this just to vent off some steam before closing your file?
Instead: "Mr. Cochne, we're sorry that we can't match your salary expectations this time. We do find you a good fit for the company, so please think about us in the future."
There. No hard feelings. No burning bridges. Professional. People come and go.
As expected. They will all attempt to drive down salaries. It will probably work
As a large corporation, do they care about something else other than money?
They should display some more empathy and should read the situation correctly. A significant portion of the recently laid off people are from HR and recruiting.
The sad reality is this industry is full of assholes, I don't even mean they trying to pay as little as possible, that's "business", I mean unprofessional people who play "good cop, bad cop" and all the childish games they learn on TV movies.
Some of them really think they are the "new Steve Jobs", and act like one.
Do you expect your car sales guy to be professional? I’d love for that to be the case, but the reality is usually not so.
Wow what a nice place, that's the mindset i want from my future employer. A truly nice place for builders i see... ;)
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Run, don't walk away from them...
I'm sure some people here will say DS and Algorithm questions like that are perfectly reasonable to show off CS skills, but the question was just so far removed from anything a frontend engineer could expect to do that it showed that they just had no respect for the specialty and were hiring for the wrong thing.
"I'm very sorry (not sorry), I've decided to spend more time with my family."