Indian IT workers are easy to boss around? - <AUTHOR> Disclaimer: I'm not Indian, white, or IT worker.  But I work as a product design manager at a large company and work with various functional teams on daily basis.
I've come to a sad conclusion that one of the main reasons why managers love to outsource to companies like Accenture, Tata, and Cognizant is because their Indian consultants are easier to boss around and are far less likely to question manager's decisions.
IT workers in general have higher cognitive capacity than their non-IT managers and fellow coworkers, and I have noticed that American developers (or Russian/Ukrainian transplants from the 80s/90s) are not afraid to question bad decisions and authorities.  This is sharp contrast to Indian workers who will follow orders without much push-backs, and those who do, are often replaced at the request of management.
Do you think there's validity to this observation?  I've thought about other factors too, such as full-timer vs consultants and young vs old. <comment><USER2> I disagree with your conclusion. These "meat shops" are not the place for creative talent. They are that, meat shops. We have them in Mexico as well. You can't expect a person to use its creativity in a project where you are not expected to contribute in a creative way. These companies are hired to do manual work, not creative work.

It is a problem with motivation in outsourcing companies. I have met a ton of Indian IT workers who are amazingly creative and bright, and with strong convictions. But when they started out in an outsourcing companies, nobody really cared about their ideas or what they thought. So motivation goes to the ground. They'll do their job.

This problem is greatly attributed to people from India, because they have the biggest outsourcing industry. But it happens in the U.S. as well.

This is the main reason why so many reports discourage outsourcing. It is not that the work force is not good enough, it is just that they are not encouraged and motivated to be creative, they are encouraged to finish the work fast and with little salary.

<comment><AUTHOR> I don't disagree with your meat shops assessment. But you have to wonder how this creative and highly analytical professional devolved into meat shops.

Initially there was cost differential was too attractive to ignore. But over time, H1B costs have gone up. And even though per/hour per/body cost of H1B is still lower, anybody who've worked on IT projects many moons ago realize that we used to get a lot more done with far fewer bodies.

There were days where you can bring in couple of amazingly talented consultants on 1099 charging $200/hour doing miracle work. No more. Yes, the hourly rates were ridiculous, but the total costs were lower.

So H1B is no longer just about the cost in my opinion.

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> I have seen the situation from the other side and it seems to align somewhat with the idea of "don't disagree with the boss":

I (Australian, white male) was contracting for a telecom and my direct manager was an Indian guy. At one point, he said something technical and I disagreed and told him he's wrong.

He just said "ok then", turned around and went back to work. He didn't speak to me for three days (we sat _next_ to each other) after that, even when I asked if he had anything for me to work on (a simple no without looking at me).

Eventually I had to call my contact at the contracting agency, who in turn contacted the manager.

The first thing he said to me? "If you have a problem you don't talk to him, you talk to me". The irony apparently was lost on him. The whole reason for the silent treatment was because I dared to dispute what he said in the office where other people (who we didn't work with directly) might hear. He admitted I was right but said I shouldn't have called him on it "in public"

Between that and "if the CEO is in the office you should be, so he knows you are working" the experience was not exactly great.

<comment><USER4> I think this is independent of culture. Being challenged by a person low on the hierarchy so openly does look untactful on your part.

<comment><USER3> I don't think you understand. Or if you do, we have very different ideas about what's important.

He was my direct manager, but we were _literally_ a team of two, working on a project together.

He was unabashedly wrong - not slightly wrong, not a bit confused, not misinterpreted - just flat out wrong.

When I told him, I didn't make a fuss, I didn't make a big deal, I just told him calmly "no, that's wrong, X because Y".

Literally my only other option was to say nothing, and let the project waste time because of his incorrect assumptions/ideas.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> As an Indian IT worker, I say yes. We are easy to boss around. This might arise from our inherent low confidence and our timid nature.

</comment><comment><USER6> I think this is largely true. Some of it is cultural (authority is generally unquestioned e.g: politics). Some of it is due to lack of leverage. IT services is a factory model, where anyone should be replaceable. But, if a manager bosses around a key developer in a product company, he would be screwed just like in any part of the world.

</comment><comment><USER7> Ironic, wouldn't you agree, that Mohandas K. Gandhi kicked the British Empire out of India without firing a shot.

I once had a coworker, and close friend who was a Brit on H1-B in the US. I was treated like gold by the company, but he was kicked around. The reason is that I was not afraid to leave - and I did resign later, over a stupid decision on the part of our CEO - but if my friend left his job, he would have to go back to England.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good point. H1-B folks have very little leverage, which naturally leads to subservient behavior, and which in turns invite more abusive behaviors from others. I've been on calls where full time employees were yelling at H1-B folks. They would never dare to the same to their fellow full time employees</comment></comment>


Google Cloud Prediction API End of Life - <AUTHOR> https://cloud.google.com/prediction/docs/end-of-life-faq <comment><USER2> This shutdown had an incredibly healthy discussion internally. The reality is that this service had been unmaintained for a long while, but we'd previously chosen not to start this deprecation process until we had a GA service we could actually have someone migrate to (Cloud ML Engine).

Additionally, it turns out that very few people were using it. That's not an excuse, but the reality of ongoing investment. I fought hard for this to be our expected 1 year term, and we had hoped to have a somewhat cookie cutter guide for "Here's how you reproduce this with TensorFlow". Quite frankly, the handful of users of the prediction API likely aren't the kind to happily port to TensorFlow (and this service has existed since the sort of App Engine only days, so they're mostly hobbyists, but I still care).

It's never great to "have to" turn down a service, but ultimately when forced between letting the code rot and become a potential security nightmare versus give the small set of users some time to retool, the decision was made to go with the latter. No new features is an easy way to keep something running forever, but keeping the damn thing secure requires a team to stay on top of it.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud.

<comment> tuna-piano How much does Google Cloud spend on marketing and sales of its services, how much business do they lose from companies who believe that Google could shut down their services in a few years? How much would they have spent on maintaining this service?

I can tell you, from my experience at mid-market size non-tech clients looking to move to the cloud, that Google's reputation for shutting down services is known and is a negative. AWS' reputation for leaving services alive is also known, and is a positive.

When companies buy software, they don't want to have to worry about the future- they just want it to work.

"No one ever got fired for buying IBM" was a big driving force for IBM's success. "No one ever got fired for choosing AWS" seems to be true these days.

If you want that phrase to be "No one ever got fired for choosing Google Cloud"\- you probably shouldn't deprecate services like that. I wonder if anyone got fired for choosing Google Cloud, after Google shuts down one of their services?

<comment><USER3> Let me respectfully rephrase your argument.

Despite parent's logical argument and evidence, and despite further evidence that Google doesn't really shut down Enterprise services at industry-irregular rates, market narrative has been defined (mostly by Readergate), and you are more inclined to accept said narrative?

Alternatively, is there sufficient evidence beyond "market narrative" and Readergate that has allowed you to reach your conclusions?

(work at G)

<comment><USER4> > ...mostly by Readergate...

Oh, come on... seriously? This argument is trotted out every single time Google shuts down something: "you are still upset about Google Reader". No: we are upset about all of those other things that get shut down, and people from Google shifting blame to Reader over and over _and over again_ is nonsensical at this point: there are so many many examples of things being shut down, and Reader was probably the least interesting to those of us who care about this sort of thing :(.

Here is something I wrote four years ago when someone (as from Google!) tried to pull the "you are just upset about Google Reader" argument.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518473](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6518473)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>====

They've shut down much more than Reader (seriously, who said anything about Reader? was that even a service a developer could rely on?). Even APIs they don't shut down, such as their OpenID login stack, they routinely replace (dropping a lot of the maintenance and support, which leads to weird failures) with "exciting new APIs" that have no migration path, such as with G+ Login (I am thankfully safe from this issue, as I did something crazy with Portable Contacts that have me Google user IDs that I started storing before we even knew what they meant; so, to be clear: I have very little personal axe to grind on this, but others should be wary).

They thankfully decided to just go commercial-ish with Translate, but the same can't be said about Charts (which had a long deprecation window and a replacement, but the replacement is a fundamentally different kind of API that has different browser requirements and even different charting capabilities). They also happily will just shut down things like Google Checkout and offer no replacement at all for key use cases like "sell a physical product" (if you sell digital goods, you might be able to switch to Google Wallet Objects, an "exciting new API" released a couple weeks before Checkout was deprecated).

Google Checkout was certainly also targetted at enterprises, had a clear business model behind it, and had existed since 2006: everyone who built on that one (again, not me: I avoided Checkout like the plague) got only six months to migrate to a different provider (and figure out how they are going to handle any refund requests from recent customers, which will surely be horribly irritating as they won't be able to just tell Checkout to refund the transaction anymore). There is simply a patterned lack of care for people who may have built things on their stacks.

(Yes, some services have deprecation policies, but let's not forget that those guarantees were themselves attempts to regain faith due to a previous round of services that had been axed with little warning ;P. After the anger died down from that they started reversing course, shortening or removing the policy entirely after the previous guarantees expire. I can only imagine the people who keep citing these deprecation policies don't have much memory of how this has all been going down over the past few years ;P.)

[http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/changes-to- depr...](http://googledevelopers.blogspot.com/2012/04/changes-to-deprecation- policies-and-api.html)

Yes: you might be able to find alternatives to migrate towards... but if, by just acknowledging this pattern, you could avoid that bullet--which could easily come at the "least convenient moment" (such as when you now have some competition out of nowhere while attempting to launch a new product and raise finding), requiring you to suddenly drop everything for a couple weeks coming up with a new implementation of key infrastructure before the clock runs out-- why wouldn't you?

</comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Two years ago someone (not from Google, this time) used that argument against someone again, and I linked to my earlier comment. A few people downvoted my link, and I responded with the following (which was upvoted, and my link was also upvoted back to 0).

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330249](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10330249)

</comment><comment></comment><comment>====

Multiple people (now three!) have downvoted this, but the idea that everyone who talks about Google service closures is complaining about one specific service--Google Reader--is the "meme" that we should all be quite tired of, as it is trotted out like a broken record every single time anyone points out reservations about Google's track record: no matter the context, no matter how many services have been shut down or cut down since, no matter what announcements Google makes about limiting their policies, and no matter whether the person mentioned Google Reader or not... it is even used against people like myself, who had absolutely no specific interest in Google Reader in the first place :/.

It is nothing more than a knee-jerk way to dismiss a rather easily defended position (due to the large number of closures that have been documented, ones that are more extreme or would have been considered less likely than Google Reader) by stereotyping someone's argument down to not just a "strawman" (an argument that is easily defeated), but essentially a purposely broken and laughable version of their argument so as to purposely ill-inform other people (which I feel the need to separate from a "strawman", as the goal is not to defeat the argument but to belittle the opponent). It is frankly one of the more underhanded argumentation tactics that people seem to enjoy defending here.

The reality is that Reader is a non-issue for most people here, as it isn't something you likely built your business or infrastructure around (and to the ones who ended up indirectly relying on it, that is a stretch to blame them for), but when Google randomly shuts down, cuts down, or entirely reboots APIs and services--something they have done many times, at the extremely painful end with things like Checkout and Login, but also with things such as App Engine or Charts--the fact that people seem to seriously have just forgotten how recent these things have been is distressing, and is made all the worse by people who insist on perpetuating "you are just whining about Reader" lie :/.

<comment><USER3> I appreciate your passion.

My argument isn't that Google doesn't shut down B2B services. It's that I have seen no evidence that Google does it at a vastly outlying rate relative to the industry.

IANAL, but Both AWS [0] and Azure [1] have 12-month deprecation policies - this is industry standard, as mentioned in the Google Developers blog you link.

[0] [https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/](https://aws.amazon.com/agreement/)

[1] [https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/support/legal/subscription...](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/support/legal/subscription-agreement-nov-2014/)

(work at G)

<comment><USER5> > IANAL, but Both AWS [0] and Azure [1] have 12-month deprecation policies - > this is industry standard, as mentioned in the Google Developers blog you > link.

Something to keep in mind but it's very difficult to find _anything_ AWS has removed. They have APIs / features that have existed since their launch. While they may have such a policy it's essentially unheard of.

For Azure I'm not as familiar with but a few Google searches and I also can't find an API they killed.

There is a difference between a rate in practice and a rate in policy. I don't have the numbers to know what any of the big cloud provider's rates actually are but as someone who has worked for large companies and organizations one year is _simply not long enough_ for almost any change especially one that is necessary for non-business reasons. Regardless of who's suggesting it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Before folks start comparing this to Reader or point to the general "Google shuts things down" narrative, Prediction API has been superset by the array of ML APIs and Google Cloud ML, found at [0].

[0] [https://cloud.google.com/products/machine- learning/](https://cloud.google.com/products/machine-learning/)

(work at G)

<comment> tuna-piano I downvoted this comment, because the general "Google shuts things down" narrative remains. Companies invested real money in integrating Google's existing services.

If Google's New API is so easy to switch to, and companies will get value from the switch, then they would do it automatically.

The truth is that the old API probably worked perfectly fine for some companies, who are now forced to spend time and money migrating.

If you were a purchasing manager in the IT department if a midwestern manufacturing (for example) company, wouldn't this kind of service shut down scare you?

AWS seems to support their services forever. That's what Midwestern manufacturing-type companies want. Hopefully Google will learn this, so AWS will have legitimate competitors.

<comment><USER6> Despite generally disagreeing with the comment I upvoted the parent because I think it provides an important counterpoint to the discussion.

I think it's too common to make lazy assumptions and not even read the article when it comes to a stereotype (true or not) such as Google's countless EOL'd services.

And personally I feel like Google's endgame isn't to provide the best consumer/enterprise cloud services a la AWS. They're just subsidizing their own endeavors in mass computing with presumably a tidy profit on the side. They can afford to alienate a customer here and there because they don't need a customer here and there. Which is an entirely rational thing to do for a corporation.

<comment><USER7> But there are other options that are available for the customer is not really much of a counter point, as there are almost always other options available.

People dislike shutdowns because they have invested time and resources in implementing something. Now they have to spend the same if not more time again. This has a cost involved.

How much work is created in our cultures because of the disposable nature of everything. Businesses use efficiency as an excuse of squeeze every last dollar out of workers. Yet on the other end the system is exactly the opposite of efficient.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> One thing that I find so amazing about AWS (Amazon Web Services) is that I'm not aware of them ever EOLing one of their apis (I could be wrong). We still have a bunch of code that still uses SimpleDB and even though they haven't promoted SDB for a while, they haven't EOLed it.

<comment> tuna-piano Exactly this. Companies are still running on-prem software from decades ago, because it's not economical to migrate. Why should the cloud be different?

It's very scary to a purchasing manager at a company to know that when they invest $100k+ in developer/consultant time implementing a solution, that every 3-5 years they will need to spend an additional $xk to simply keep the solution alive!

AWS is doing this right. I can't imagine recommending Google for many cloud use cases, given their propensity to decommission software that companies use!

<comment><USER9> Salesforce gets this right too. All of their APIs get built with the intention of supporting them for 20+ years. Companies can't build on quicksand.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> > Q: What will happen with my existing models?

> A: You must recreate your existing Prediction API models using Cloud Machine > Learning Engine. To learn more, please read our documentation about creating > models on Cloud Machine Learning Engine.

Slightly edited and corrected answer should be

> A: You must recreate your existing Prediction API models using Cloud Machine > Learning Engine. But, you know what? You must recreate it using Amazon > Machine Learning, because we might again shut down this service in favor of > our next platform. So If you care about your product, move directly to > Amazon Machine Learning so next time you will not be bothered by us. And > thanks for using it

<comment><USER11> Prediction API was closed source and proprietary. Cloud Machine Learning Engine is open source Tensorflow.

You can run these models on prem, on AWS, etc.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> "Let's build our entire stack around Google Cloud. I'm sure they won't shut down an API we depend on"

<comment><USER13> This one-year-long deprecation warning comes atop what is a fairly reasonable migration path for most users. I have yet to hear of a single user of any size whose "entire stack" relied on a single API, let alone this one, and who would be left without a faster, easier, or less expensive option in this move.

But you might have info I do not!

(Work at Google Cloud)

<comment><USER5> > This one-year-long deprecation warning comes atop what is a fairly > reasonable migration path for most users

After working at multiple, large companies as well as doing government contracting, it would take _a year_ just to propose and get funding for very minor changes. Sometimes it would take _months_ to get critical bugs or security issues approved and taken care of.

A year works for many tech companies. Maybe even most. But it's laughably tone deaf when talking about larger companies or government organizations.

This is why the majority of companies I've worked with opt for APIs from, say, AWS and only consider using a Google API if there is literally no other choice. No one wants to be focused on X and suddenly have to allocate money to change something that's working to use something else.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Totally misread this as google cloud predict-the-end-of-your-life API.

<comment><USER15> I misread this as a service to predict the EOL date for a given Google API.

<comment><USER16> Someone actually built a model back in 2013 to predict risks of various Google APIs shutting down:

[https://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns](https://www.gwern.net/Google%20shutdowns)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I'm tired of Google shutting down or screwing up services. I come from marketing, and while I still use Adwords, I'm more and more moving to other platforms for research and spending my money. It's not only that, the moment you have a problem, it's up to yourself, while other companies have a customer service that actually replies, with more or less success.

I'm also learning programming, basically because I want to get into Data Science and I'm doing everything I can to avoid using Google Cloud, even though I found Bigtable to be easy to use and the kind of stuff that I wanted for a project, but I forced myself into learning how to get a postgre & couch dbs up. Also using vps's from a local provider (clouding.io).

It's like... I can see myself in the future spending time on modifying stuff because Google make X decision, instead of doing stuff I enjoy.

<comment><USER18> Just curious, were you using the Predict API?

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> The discussion seems to have pretty well settled on Google's policies around service deprecation, but in case anyone's interested in chatting about the replacement API, I'm excited about the long-term prospects of their ML Engine product.

The open-source distributed tensorflow stuff is pretty nice, but it still requires a huge amount of hand coding and tuning the machinery, reminding me quite a lot of just rolling the damn thing in MPI yourself. I'm very excited to see where distributed tf will be in a year or two, but it's a chore today.

The hope is that using Google's secret sauce to auto-distribute the execution graphs and associated data ingestion makes things "just work". At the moment, the documentation and examples for that are a bit all over the place at the moment, and require writing models to conform to the newish tf.contrib.learn.Experiment API, which is also a bit underdocumented and underexampled. Using it for very large datasets (say >tens of TB) seems to be pretty challenging at this moment (to me at least).

At any rate, I've been banging around on it for a few weeks and am really hopeful. I will follow Cloud ML Engine's career with considerable interest.

</comment><comment><USER20> tl;dr Cloud Prediction is deprecated in favor of Cloud Machine Learning ([https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/](https://cloud.google.com/ml-engine/))

</comment><comment><USER21> I think Google just made job of some sales manager at AWS Rekognition way easier.

<comment><USER22> You may be confusing the Google Cloud Vision API with the Google Cloud Prediction API.

<comment><USER21> I know they are different, but Google needs to realize their approach to consumer products does not transfers well to cloud computing.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Does Google use ML to predict the failure of one service?

</comment><comment><USER24> Why not just make the old API be a wrapper for the new one?

</comment><comment><USER25> Didn't see that coming, eh?

</comment><comment><USER26> I initially read this title as an API to predict when Google Cloud APIs would be end of lifed.

</comment><comment><USER23> TL;DR: if your business relies on a Google API/service, your business is in risk.

</comment><comment><USER27> It didn't meet our needs in classifying hotdogs vs everything else.

</comment><comment><USER28> Good on Google for giving people some lead time on deprecating this service.

</comment><comment><USER29> There is no way I will ever build a product, or spec anything for a client, that depends in some way on a Google offering other than public search.

</comment><comment><USER30> Now this is going to be a moneymaker, this is a sensible business move.

People misunderstand Google: they offer things for free because it lets them collect data (search, gmail, etc.) or it drives competition out (1TB free for BigQuery, for example).

For everything else, they either shut them down or charge money =)

<comment><USER22> The Predictions API costs money. The replacement also costs money. What are you trying to say?</comment></comment>


Thousands of Public Data Sources - <AUTHOR> http://blog.bigml.com/2013/02/28/data-data-data-thousands-of-public-data-sources/

<comment><USER2> I'm sorry but I didn't find this entirely useful. Are they allowing us to use the raw data sources? If so, I wasn't able to download anything, just clicked through and found more documentation.

<comment><USER3> It looks like this aggregates links to other dataset sources rather than being a source itself.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I'm impressed, this will be super useful. I spend a decent amount of time looking around for datasets, and it's harder than I would have imagined.

Finding out about Quandl is alone a pretty big victory.

</comment><comment><USER5> There's always the ever-popular enron emails. <http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~enron/>

A bit played out, but solid.

</comment><comment><USER6> There are a lot of awesome data sources out there that are currently being put up for public consumption by small independent teams, one example being DrugCite.com which takes the FDA AERS (Medication Side Effect) data and lets you search by drug name, side effect, ect. then sort it be age and gender.

</comment><comment><USER7> For people looking for additional data sources, AWS has many public data sets available - <http://aws.amazon.com/datasets></comment>


Designing a State Machine without conditionals - <AUTHOR> http://jjcorrea.github.io/2015/05/05/designing-a-state-machine-without-conditionals/

<comment><USER2> The diagram resembles a decision table:

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_table](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decision_table)

<comment><USER3> Does the rest of the article seem to resemble a state machine to you, or do you see an obvious way that the classes he wrote could be used to create a state machine? Because I do not.

<comment><AUTHOR> Hi,

The main peculiarity about this solution is that on this case we had a complex input type, where a transition on an inner element may influence the state on the outer element.

For example, given the following structure:

\- A1 (state=1)

\-- B1 (state=2)

\--- C1 (state=5)

\-- B2 (state=3)

If the state of C1 changes, then this change should be considered by the B predicates, and so should the A predicates.

After all, for the example in specific we are returning all the updated statuses in a list, as in our case we needed to show what was the difference on the overall state after the execution.

<comment><USER4> Nice article! After deeper thoughts i finally realized what bothers me about it: It doesn´t address the inner dependencies between those transitions. By your comment above, it´s not a big deal because of this kind of hierarchical structure you described, but it was not clear when i first read it.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


PEP 374 -- Choosing a distributed VCS for the Python project - <AUTHOR> http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0374/ <comment><USER2> Kinda old, but interesting.

The three reasons for hg > git were quite reasonable. As a side note, the transition is now complete:

[http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2011-March/10873...](http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python- dev/2011-March/108738.html)</comment>


Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Given Feedback - <AUTHOR> https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/12/02/the-real-reasons-why-job-seekers-are-not-given-feedback/#303e3aaeadf1 <comment><USER2> We interviewed a lot of hiring managers/etc. while we were working on a previous business in the hiring space. As part of that, we asked them this very question.

The fear of litigation was by far the biggest reason we heard, but there were some other popular reasons (mostly relating around conflict avoidance):

* Notably, giving feedback feels like an opening for the candidate to submit a rebuttal instead of ending the conversation (e.g. "You didn't do well on X" "Well here's a list of reasons why I didn't do well, and here's me demonstrating I actually understand X").

* It was just a personality conflict that few people would admit to in writing (e.g. "You're kind of an asshole, I don't want to work with you" isn't something you tell a candidate).

* There just isn't much actionable feedback to give. "Nobody felt excited to potentially work with you" isn't really actionable feedback, and sharing that just feels kinda mean for no reason.

* Someone better came along to fill the role and nobody wants to tell a candidate "We found someone better than you".

<comment><USER3> While that's all very understandable, at the very least give some kind of generic rejection.

This was many years ago, but one time I did an all-day onsite interview (~6 hours long) and I was ghosted and never heard from the company again.

That infuriates me even to this day. At least give me some kind of news that it was a no.

<comment><USER2> Not too many places will straight up ghost candidates that have done on-sites, that's pretty unusual.

Sometimes they'll dangle candidates if they're waiting to hear whether their first choice accepts, but even then it's rare not to communicate at all once you've done an on-site.

<comment><USER4> It happens a lot. Even Google ghosted me after an all-day onsite interview in Mountain View in 2015.

<comment><USER5> Microsoft did the same to me, the same year. Product owner/manager position.

<comment><USER6> Bloomberg did it to me. Even blocked my phone number. I figured that out when I changed my caller id. It was back in the day when VoIP was new and they didn't expect that someone could do that. It was worth hearing the panic on the voice when they realized who it was.

The only reason I called was because they stiffed my the reimbursement for travel expenses which they had agreed to pay for. The HR turnover was so high that everyone I had talked to before the interview was gone by the time I put in for the reimbursement.

<comment><USER7> Interesting, when I worked at Bloomberg we had a standard form letter for rejections that was sent every time. (Email)

Funny story about that, I'd set up a macro to fire off said email with one keypress. Finishing up a phone screen that went horribly, I thanked him for his time and all the other niceties, and pressed the key right as I was about to hang up.

"But wait! I have some questions for you, too!"

Cue the longest 5 minutes of my life.

<comment><USER8> Couldn't you just say the same thing over the phone? Or do you need to keep the mask on during the call? As if the rejection is only possible in the next turn.

<comment><USER7> 24-year-old me didn't create the process, I just followed it. Well except for the part about waiting until the call is really over ;)

After reading some of the comments here about candidates who want to debate the interviewer's decision, it seems to make sense.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> As a candidate, I've always preferred polite "thanks, but no thanks" responses in a timely manner. The other kind of feedback that I like is things like, "we need people with a different background / experience than you have."

IMO, judgement feedback (you screwed up how you handle your yak shaving, or I don't think we'll get along with each other) is too subjective to be constructive.

And, I get it. As someone who's interviewed a lot of candidates, my biggest fear is hiring someone who is either incompetent or difficult to get along with. Evaluating a candidate is so subjective that feedback beyond "your experience doesn't match our needs" is just flame bait, or worse.

To paraphrase Joel Spolsky: It's safer to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad employee.

<comment><USER10> > "It's safer to pass on a good candidate than hire a bad employee."

After a decade of building teams in machine learning, I regard this as one of those hallowed mythical pieces of wisdom that is just totally wrong.

It dramatically over-estimates both the chances and costs of hiring a bad employee, while discounting the huge, huge opportunity cost of not hiring rare, exceptional candidates.

I'd much rather spend a year or two managing someone out as a result of actually trying to hire exceptional people than living with mediocre hires who memorized the right fizzbuzz HackerRank crap and said all the right Team Player catch phrases to get hired.

<comment><USER11> A large company can afford bad hires. You can shuffle them around or find something they can do.

A small company can not afford that luxury so they have to be more careful in their hiring. A bad hire completely distracts a small team.

<comment><USER12> Google for example does not hire when they think it is not beyond reasonable doubt that the hire is a good one. They rather let a good candidate pass.

This should prove that numbers speak towards the idea that bad hires are very costly. Google's policy is also not to give feedback. 50 percent of their hires had to apply more than once.

I would say large companies do not need that exceptional candidate since they have so many great ones already. Exceptional won't make a difference unless it is executive role or something like that.

<comment><USER9> > 50 percent of their hires had to apply more than once.

That's one of the reasons why I pass when a Google recruiter comes why way.

(The other is that I don't want to move. I'm no longer a bachelor who can move on the drop of a hat, moving is way to disruptive to my family.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I'm a software developer turned temporary recruiter for a startup (just hired last position yay!). The number one reason why I don't give feedback anymore is the candidate's response. It is almost universally negative. Candidates want to get into an argument about their skills or performance.

Now, everyone gets a form letter, and I don't deviate from that.

<comment><USER14> Thank you for sending out a form letter.

A form letter, email, whatever would be better than what I experienced in my last job hunt. It was silence after silence. Was the rec closed/filled? Am I even in the running or was I rejected early on and now I am just waiting for no reason?

A lot of the companies used automated submission systems, which confirmed they received the resume, but they never sent out a notification that the position was filled/closed/rejected. Just a one line email would have been better than nothing. I feel even that common (and super automatable) courtesy has been lost.

<comment><USER2> Just explaining not defending: That's partially due to the volume seen with online applications.

Even 2-5 person companies will sometimes receive ~20-30 resumes a day for an open job, and 90% of them will be obviously inappropriate for the job even just from glancing at their resume.

It's a positive feedback loop: People have learned to "shotgun" their resume everywhere, and as a result even small companies have learned to process resumes as "efficiently" as possible (which often includes not sending responses to rejected candidates at that stage). This leads to more shotgunning, etc. etc.

<comment><USER15> While a wonderful comment, it doesn't not address OPs concerns. If they are processing things as efficiently as possible by automating, when they decide a candidate isn't a fit and click a button to not consider them for the position, why not have it automatically send out a one line email so they are aware?

Or at bare minimum, automatically mail them when the position is set to closed?

None of that can be claimed due to efficiency.

<comment><USER2> Two main reasons:

1\. You're assuming they're using an ATS with that feature, which isn't as common as you'd think. You'd be surprised how many companies track incoming candidates using spreadsheets and email.

2\. Part of that "efficiency" is not actually taking the 5 extra seconds to reject candidates, but instead just ignoring rejected candidates.

Think of it as leaving something read in your email inbox vs. choosing to archive it. Imagine you're getting 100 emails a day. Now imagine how many people you know (not necessarily you) who would leave those emails as unread in their inbox and quickly scan for important ones vs. choosing to go through each one and archive them as necessary.

> Or at bare minimum, automatically mail them when the position is set to > closed?

Many places will leave positions open for opportunistic hires, e.g. see how many places are constantly hiring for "software engineer". Many job positions never actually close.

<comment><USER16> > Many places will leave positions open for opportunistic hires, e.g. see how > many places are constantly hiring for "software engineer". Many job > positions never actually close.

This is a good point, and while it's weird and a little frustrating from the outside, it's _awesome_ from the inside:

The right time to hire is not when you're ramping something up or strapped for time and really need someone immediately. The right time to hire is when you've got someone awesome who is really interested in the job.

Keeping the req open gives you a better chance of grabbing that awesome person: whenever _they_ are ready, the position is waiting. If you have to align the stars so that you're looking at the same time they are, you're going to miss some opportunities.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> > Too Much Data > It becomes virtually impossible for the company to get back > to everyone who submits their résumé.

This one seems like "blaming it on the victim" to me. You get too many candidates, you're unable to give each of us an in-depth review, you may as well say a single sentence like "You resume was quickly filtered out based on this one requirement." It's like they're ashamed to admit they pre-filter people based on hasty criteria to deal with the deluge of candidates.

> Stalling For Time > There is a belief by corporate executives that there is > an abundance of qualified candidates. They erroneously believe that if the > HR department waits longer, they will eventually find the perfect person > suited for the role for a cheaper price.

This explains why we don't _initially_ get feedback, but not why we often don't get it at all.

<comment><USER18> > You get too many candidates, you're unable to give each of us an in-depth > review, you may as well say a single sentence like "You resume was quickly > filtered out based on this one requirement."

So, the obvious _application_ of feedback would be that you try to rectify the problem and then reapply.

I suspect companies don't want you to reapply, regardless of whether you've improved. They already said no.

But in that case, what's the feedback for?

Your idea here hits a similar problem: if the company starts giving out the information "we threw away your resume because you have it in Times New Roman, and we prefer to hire Courier people", they just gave away their valuable resume-filtering trade secret. Once they've done that, all of the resumes they get will use Courier, and they'll _have to come up with a new filtering system_. So they just imposed a cost on themselves without benefiting anyone, themselves, you, or third parties.

<comment><USER7> > I suspect companies don't want you to reapply, regardless of whether you've > improved. They already said no.

One small anecdotal counterpoint: I interviewed at Google many years back and didn't get an offer. They were nice enough to call and let me know, which I very much appreciated. Since then I've been getting hit up by their recruiters on a regular schedule, every 6-12 months.

At some point I was short on patience and straight up said "you guys know I already interviewed with you back in 20XX, right?"

Their response was "Well yeah, but so what? That was a while ago."

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> As a Support Engineer for a well known tech company, I took on the extracurricular role of sourcing, screening and interviewing candidates for our team. We often had better results identifying candidates as an engineer making a direct contact.

You do walk a fine line and create a lot of overhead to give feedback to all candidates. Generic feedback like "you weren't the right candidate" or "we were looking for someone who is a better fit" isn't any more helpful than a simple "no".

More detailed feedback can be tainted with personal bias and potentially skewed personal perspective based on how well you got along with an interviewer.

If I was in charge of HR/recruiting/etc I would advocate for not giving feedback, but build more robust communication mechanisms that give candidates a notification or view into the process. For example: 1\. I submitted my resume and can see that a recruiter has reviewed it and moved me on to phone screen or its pending recruiter review. > I wasn't selected, but I am a good candidate for other jobs so my resume has been recycled.

Honestly, I don't want feedback from some of the places I've interviewed but I sure hate being ghosted and feeling like I sent me resume into the abyss for no reason.

<comment><USER20> _More detailed feedback can be tainted with personal bias and potentially skewed personal perspective based on how well you got along with an interviewer_

Absolutely. Two weeks ago, interview at a certain top-10 liberal arts college. Meetings with 4 or 5 faculty members, the usual.

Chitchat throughout, nothing substantial is being said, certainly nothing pertaining to the role. There is a tour of the facilities, the research labs are empty, even though the semester is still ongoing. You marvel at the unstructuredness of it all and ask: is this Potemkin's Village? The general impression is that the institution is living on past glories.

The rejection arrives in less than a week, and just for grunts, you ask if there is any feedback to be had. There is feedback: the interviewers could not assess your competence.

Guys, it was your job to convey expectations and bring the conversation back on track, if necessary. You just managed to turn a disappointed candidate into a completely enraged one. What a waste of time. People talk to each other, if anyone asks about the institution I would strongly recommend not to have anything to do with it, not as student, not as faculty, not as staff.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Sometimes there isn't much in the way of actionable feedback. The most recent position I was on the interview loop for, after a long filtering process (pre- me), we interviewed 5 candidates and chose one. In the final debrief, there were 3 very much viable candidates and significant discussion to winnow down to the one we ultimately hired. A few butterfly wing flaps could have led to a different candidate being offered the role.

What can we tell #2 and #3 that is helpful? ("You are a very strong candidate and the cosmic die roll came up a 1-2, where your number was 3-4 or 5-6.")

What can we tell #4 and #5 that is helpful? ("Sorry, three other candidates seemed more intelligent, had a stronger demonstrated tech background, and though you made the cut to on-site, you were the one of the two weakest links.")

I'm not sure what the candidates would do to "fix" anything about that; the high order bit (that they didn't get an offer) is the information that I'd _need_ as a candidate. Sure, I _want_ more, but there might not be anything more there.

In other cases in the past, I _have_ given feedback to candidates about why we didn't select them or what I saw as gaps that they could close, but if I don't think there's any reasonable action the candidate could do to change the outcome in a similar interview situation 2 years from now, I'm probably not going to give them any detailed feedback.

<comment> D-Coder Almost any feedback is useful. "The other candidates were a better match" — okay, perhaps I'm applying to the wrong jobs. "You failed roll of the dice" — so I did everything right and should keep doing that.

<comment><USER22> > "You failed roll of the dice" — so I did everything right and should keep > doing that.

I think a _lot_ of job offer/no-offer situations come down to this, because most of us are well meaning, hard working people. The default response to rejection should basically be this (alongside _some_ non-punitive self- reflection to micro-optimise some parameter or the other).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Years ago I interviewed at a startup in SF. It went well except for one ex- FAANG asshole who spent the entire whiteboard interview thumbing his phone while I went down the wrong rabbit hole on the problem he gave me. No attempt to guide me back, critique my approach or anything of the sort.

I didn't get the job, as expected. But the memorable thing about the process was that the recruiter made a point of calling me to tell me I was getting rejected.

The reasons given were fairly generic as far as I recall, but I appreciated him having the class to actually speak with me.

If I ran a tech company, I'd make that guy head of recruiting.

<comment><USER24> The one time I got some feedback on why I was rejected it was also over the phone.

I assumed the California ban on recording phone conversations without consent made the conversation legally non existent.

<comment><USER18> When I followed up an email rejection from Google asking if they had feedback, I got email back saying "yes", and setting up a phone appointment specifically to provide it.

So... I'd say they have something like that in mind.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I think most job seekers would simply appreciate a "no thank you" response and not get ghosted.

Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more common to just go silent on candidates. What a cowardly thing to do.

<comment><USER26> Yeah I've had two companies just blatantly ghost me rather than reject me outright. I already had a bad feeling talking to them, I'm glad they proved me right and didn't waste my time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> _They are especially scared to give negative feedback to candidates out of fear that it might be misinterpreted as discrimination._

And this is why we can't have nice things.

<comment><USER28> That bit made no sense to me.

I think the opposite is true; when given no concrete feedback, one begins to hypothesize why they were rejected, and their mind will often point them to discrimination as the reason.

If one is given clear, concrete feedback ("We rejected you because you didn't come up with a simpler algorithm, and you lack experience with framework x"), there is little room for them to think they were discriminated against in any way but their skills/experience.

<comment><USER29> From the point of view of a company that employ many people who do hiring, someone is guaranteed to write something stupid. When people write code, they do bugs. When they write feedback, they do stupid.

Or even more likely, someone will inadvertly show his bias that could have stayed under cover. People are not that great in hiding their biases over many interactions.

<comment><USER30> We're dancing around a reason that the article misses: a lot of hiring decisions _are_ discriminatory.

If they were confident about having processes with no discrimination, it would likely be advantageous to the company to show their cards and give the feedback.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> I had an interview with Facebook and was eventually turned down. I asked for feedback at least twice, and even from a person on the inside that I know personally if they could get any from the recruiter. Nothing.

Then a few days later they sent me an email asking for my feedback! I n/a'd everything and made sure to list all of my interviewers names.

<comment><USER32> > I n/a'd everything and made sure to list all of my interviewers names.

prbly inconsequential .

fact is that you cannot do _anything_ but move on after a rejection.

<comment><USER31> Not entirely true. I can attempt to shape the world how I want and then give up after being satisfied with my efforts. I left it at what I already posted and moved on. I believe feedback is important but if people aren't listening then that's OK too.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Working for a large company at this time. We actually rarely even get contact information for the people we are interviewing, probably intentionally because the feedback cycle for applicants that don't make it seems to be locked down (probably due to potential liabilities). I've asked the team to send follow-up on an occasion or two but it's not clear that it's actually happening.

Knowing this, I'll frequently pivot to feedback mode during the interview itself if they clearly aren't going to make the cut. Not sure if that's allowed or exposing us to liabilities, but it does feel better (unless the person is an asshole or seems like they are very likely to use the feedback as leverage against the decision).

</comment><comment><USER34> I'm absolutely fine with getting no feedback now. I just want to know that I'm out of the running, through an email, and I'm entirely happy.

I used to ask for feedback, but it turns out it's absolutely pointless to do so, since bad interviewers give bad feedback, which ends up only, even subconsciously, costing you. Absolutely 100% of the feedback I've got back has been of this kind.

It's very hard to actually think of any actionable feedback someone who's not clueless about how hiring works could get anyway. Sure, if you were to tell me "study basic algorithms" or "take a bath" it would be helpful but provided I know I need to tick those boxes, then what?

</comment><comment><USER35> A couple years ago I took a full day off work to interview with a midsized startup that had been after me for months. Halfway through the interviews it started to become clear that they'd expect me to work 60-hour weeks, with regular weekend travel, for less pay than I was making at my 9-5. In the final interview with one of the founders I told him I wasn't willing to do that, so I wasn't surprised when the head of HR emailed me a couple days later to say they wouldn't be making an offer. I responded that I understood this was likely due to my need for better work-life balance and asked if they could provide any feedback. She responded that they could not, as it was against the company's policy. This excuse would have made sense coming from a recruiter, but she was the head of HR--she set the policy. This and the work-life balance thing were enough for me to tell others to stay away from that place.

<comment><USER36> So you expect the person setting the policy to feel free to break it at will? That would be a terrible example, even if the head of HR set it unilaterally, which, as someone else mentioned, is unlikely.

Furthermore, if it WAS unilateral, wouldn't that mean that the head of HR who set the policy was the biggest believer in said policy?

<comment><USER37> When the question is asked "why are you doing this" and the answer is, "because it's our policy," what that means is, "we are doing this thing because it's the thing we do."

I think people who give that answer honestly believe it's a valid answer possibly because they're thinking of the rationale behind the policy rather than the literal meaning of what they're saying. But when I've heard it, it's felt like an insult to my intelligence, like it's some stupid word game to dodge my question.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> FWIW I do try to tell folks what went wrong and what were the perceived gaps through the recruiters. I in fact ask my recruiters to give them known ways to prepare for our loop. You'd be surprised how many don't even after all this. I am assuming this is because many are just trying to see what's out there, don't have time to prepare etc. But the flip side is we do want candidates who are obviously good AND are excited about the opportunity. All the other concerns here around conflict avoidance / litigation risks are all valid too - That's why I put my feedback through the HR filter.

Having said all that, The other angle that always nags me is the fact that our (in all the three companies I've been part of) interview process isn't a perfect measure. In theory, you may be able to crack it if you prepare for it and are well versed in full-stack engineering. In practice, this is just 5 hours of 5 different people trying to look for good signs and feelings and converge after. There just isn't enough information, so most of the time we work towards avoiding a false positive (which have been disastrous in the past). We have tried other mechanics around building a test project etc., but nothing stuck. Those just added a not more non-determinism compared to this model where we know what to expect. I've done more than a 1000 of these, so there are patterns I can fallback on.

If I were to start a company, I know how I'd want to hire: It will be just like finding co-founders. But that doesn't scale and probably becomes illegal when it goes beyond the founding members. I do like the doctor group models where everyone joining graduates to a full partner eventually and take a share of yearly profits until they work there: But our current world of software development that's highly leveraged on future performance (stocks), doesn't seem amenable to the same :(. But yes - It would be awesome to see if somehow we can replicate that model.

<comment><USER39> >If I were to start a company, I know how I'd want to hire: It will be just like finding co-founders. But that doesn't scale.

This rings true to me (both parts), and it makes me wonder if it's a viable path to attack it from the other side, where you restrain yourself to markets/projects of a size that it doesn't _have_ to scale.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> I would love to be able tell applicants why we didn't choose them to help them along in their job search or clear up any misconceptions. There problem is it is a risk to a business with 0 chance of making it more profitable. Chalk this up as overregulation at it's finest having predictable secondary affects.

<comment><USER41> But you are not your business. There are more things to life than making profits, like helping fellow humans. If the risk is very low and the cost basically null, doing nice things is a positive externality.

<comment><USER42> But the risk is not very low when you adjust for magnitude of secondary effects.

<comment><USER41> What risks are we talking about? Frivolous lawsuits by random loons? I am not certain that this risk goes down by being unfriendly to interviewees.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> Another reason not covered - some people don't act like adults and cannot handle critical feedback. No matter what they are always the victim.

These types of people take rejection as an affront to all they hold dear and make it their mission to slam your company on any platform that will give them a voice.

You don't know who these people are ahead of time. Due to the [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit#Bullshit_asymmetry_principle) you will spend way more time defending claims from people like this.

</comment><comment><USER44> > It wasn't always like this. In the past, it was standard protocol to provide > feedback and constructive criticism to candidates. The hiring manager or > human resources professional would diplomatically let the applicants know > what they did well and the areas in which they need to improve upon.

As far as I can tell, this is still the case in Belgium and the Netherlands for everyone who makes it to the interview stage. It would be considered very rude to have someone go through the associated stress and logistical hassle otherwise. Is this a U.S. trend for now?

<comment><USER45> yes its very much the normal. Some companies will even ask you to write an entire app, send it in and never reply whatsoever, even when prompted(Uber did this to me). I have heard some other pretty disheartening stories... hiring in tech is kinda wack.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> The feedback mantra I follow as a manager is simple: "Feedback isn't about the past, it's about the future."

A lot of managers I know conflate feedback with critiques or praise, which are very different tools used for very different purposes.

Feedback in the interview process is invaluable, whereas critiques are unvaluable.

For example, here might be a piece of feedback that would help someone perform better in a future interview:

"During the debugging brainstorming work scenario, we liked that you brought ideas in many different parts of the architecture, but some of the best solutions we saw for this scenario indicated which options were most likely and grouped them by system or issue type."

That feedback is about performance and provides suggestions for improvement. In my experience, that's the type of feedback that's really well received and rarely debated.

</comment><comment><USER47> How do people here feel about feedback for technical tests that take at least a couple of hours?

Personally I don't care if I'm not given feedback after a phone interview, or even an on-site interview.

But when it comes to technical tests, I would really appreciate feedback, since it could actually help me improve my coding skills, or at least know where I need to improve. If I'm not given feedback on these, it's just another red flag to me, the company doesn't value my time, and seems to treat the interview process as a one way street.

I recently was asked to do a coding test, the HR person told me to do it over the weekend, as most candidates needed all the time they can get. I told HR I was only willing to spend around 4 hours on it, they could judge me on whatever I could do in that time. And even working for free for 4 hours was as stretch, after all, I'm not getting paid, there are other things I could've been doing. And to this day they haven't even acknowledged my test, I did get through to the next round, but no mention of my test whatsoever.

</comment><comment><USER48> Interesting, they missed a couple from my experience.

The big one is starting a debate. Because I'm a helpful person when someone asked for feedback why they weren't getting the job I would offer them my thoughts. Way too often this turned into a discussion by them to me about how I was wrong about them and my thoughts didn't apply. Sometimes it might be due to a phenomenal lack of self awareness and sometimes it might be a negotiation tactic, but it always was awkward and uncomfortable.

At Google, the 'sourcers' really didn't want to put 'not a fit' into the application tracking system (ATS) because if they did so they would not be able to call that person back if another position opened up. Inevitably applicants would say they had other people who were talking to them and would probably provide offers (I think some people think that is a useful tactic for pushing things along) and the sourcers would just cross their fingers and hoped they would take that other job, or another candidate that was a better fit would get accepted. Either way they preserve a 'possible' in their list of candidates for the future.

In my discussion with Google's recruiting folks at the time I argued that the ATS system was hurting Google because while someone might be a poor fit in one role, there may be another role where they were a superstar. I've seen it in my career many times where a change of roles completely changed the evaluation of the person doing the job. I never got very far in that discussion but did learn of the 'trick' of just not talking to them as a way of leaving them in a viable 'possible candidate' state for the next role that might come up.

One alternative is to be really clear in what you want out of someone in a role and if they don't meet the standard move them out. But that is very risky for "protected" people such as older engineers, or other races or religions. You can combat that risk by managing to a very diverse workforce but it feels to me that way too many people hire people like themselves.

At the end of the day these can be opportunities for startups to get some great talent.

</comment><comment><USER49> I just went through this process looking for a job in a VP of Engineering role after spending the last 15 years running my own startups and doing my own hiring. And man it really made me rethink how I will do hiring going forward. Feedback as a candidate would be great, but based on my own experience hiring it's difficult to have that conversation go well. Maybe 1 in 10 people would say "hey thanks, I appreciate the feedback" and the rest wanted to debate their worthiness. So there is no ROI for this effort. But having just been looking for a job I can confirm that almost all of the companies I talked to sucked at communication. They were just awful.

<comment><USER37> Here's a thought: maybe do most of the feedback _during_ the interview process.

Train interviewers to explain their reasoning for the questions they're asking and what they're trying to evaluate.

And then, at the close, identify all the positive things the candidate demonstrated and what bullet points they're going to bring to the debrief.

I've been doing the former quite routinely, and in the last interview I did, the candidate just asked me why I asked those questions so I went ahead and explained it.

I think it helps make an interview less nerve wracking, and it helps me to think aloud about the case I'm going to present in the debrief.

And, frankly, some interviewers are asking stupid questions and it may help if they have to explain themselves.

</comment></comment><comment><USER50> > Many job seekers take the not-recommended approach of submitting their > résumés for dozens of jobs

I wish I only had to apply for dozens of jobs.

<comment><USER36> What's your field and geo area? I don't think I've ever applied for more than 6 jobs in a round of looking. And more often than not I haven't even had to look. ~20 years, bay area.

<comment><USER50> It's sort of complicated. I did a boot camp, 100 applications 3 interviews 0 offers, went back to school (Harvard, the real one not the extension school) and am currently doing the summer internship grind (30 applications 3 interviews 0 offers). But I'm CS.

<comment><USER36> Ugh. I hear that first step can be rough. I took a non-traditional path so it wasn't an issue for me. I didn't realize internships were so hard to get, though.

<comment><USER51> What was your non traditional path?

<comment><USER36> Worked in tech (ISPs, support, then unix sysadmin) in my teens and after graduating high school, quit my job to go back to college at 21. Worked part time in IT dept during college and summers, remote part time work for a web hosting company during summers as well. Business major, not CS.

It seems like dev jobs in particular are interview meat grinders.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> > They are especially scared to give negative feedback to candidates out of > fear that it might be misinterpreted as discrimination.

>There is also the concern over a social media backlash because of something an employee said to a candidate.

This right here, is 90% of it. Sure, the other stuff like too few resources, or too many applicants is partly true, but the crux of it is that people are far too sensitive right now. And if you say "we didn't think you were a good fit for our company culture" to somebody that is even the slightest bit insecure about some part of themselves, you can guarantee you'll be hearing about it.

<comment><USER53> It's that people are too sensitive, is it? Or is it that "culture fit" excuses...uh...suck?

The hand-wringing sorts who are simultaneously so protective of a company's "culture" but are so unable to substantiate how someone might not fit in in a way that isn't telling on themselves _should_ be worried, but not because somebody might get mad at them on Twitter. It's because they're at best losing out on good candidates and at worst perpetuating dark and shitty behaviors onto people who don't deserve it.

<comment><USER52> Yes, that feedback isn't very useful. It was just an example. But people would be offended at almost anything these days. Not educated enough. Not skilled enough. Not personable enough. Whatever. People can't look at themselves honestly and take on board criticism, and it is making us worse people.

<comment><USER53> This is, to put it--well, honestly--is nonsense. It is the okeydoke of a regressive casting of a history that never existed in comparison to a present that differs only in the breadth of unwilling to take _quite as much_ shit as prior generations because they know that maybe they don't, on all axes, have to do so. (Just on so many others.)

The galaxy-brained _fear_ that makes people act as you are acting right now is a worse thing for all of us than some mythical inability to take criticism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> The need for a feed back is mostly psychological need. You go in, you think you did well, but you didn't get the job. The company of course found someone better than you, some one did even better. Most likely the feed back won't help you on your next interview, and second you just need to read most of the writing which is already on the wall.

If you failed a white board, you'd know it. If you aced the white board someone can ace it better.

<comment><USER55> I've been in hiring loops where the candidate aced all the technical stuff, but wasn't hired because he wasn't enthusiastic about the new company, just sounded like he wanted to leave his old company. With a no feedback system, he may go study harder on the technicals for no reason. So I think feedback would have definitely helped his next interview.

<comment><USER56> "Learn to feign enthusiasm better next time."

It sounds useful and depressing at the same time.

<comment><USER57> [https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3454](https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3454)

<comment><USER56> Yep. My (brief) time in the metal industry was quite different.

Nobody talked about passion and enthusiasm. Companies look for somebody to perform a job, and people with the relevant skills offer their hand. A simple, professional exchange, no cults, no kool-aid.

No "you need to be keen about learning new tech like a kid that just got out of high school, oh and you gotta be super competent with all this stuff we use because we don't have time for people to be learning things on the job, oh and you gotta be social and charming and customer focused, oh and you gotta be very enthusiastic about our company and product (actually we don't know which product or team we'll assign you to yet, but you still gotta be super enthusiastic about it), oh and you'll probably end up maintaining some terrible legacy stack that nobody else wants to touch. So, why are you applying to this job? Justify your presence! It's not like we posted about an open position, and it's not like we're constantly complaining about shortage of talent while turning people down left and right .. oh wait"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> Applying for jobs is probably the WORST thing nearly everyone will do in their professional lives.

With the exception of the resume 1%ers that have some incredible experience/knowledge/executive-connection, applying for jobs is the most soulsucking lottery that can make you feel completely worthless.

I think, at the very least, anyone that gets past an initial screening deserves some feedback.

</comment><comment><USER59> Giving people feedback is not always a good idea. Sometimes the information just helps them to hide something from the next person they encounter.

This is true in many domains, I think. You should not explain to the conman how you saw through his lies. That will help him fix that and con more people.

You shouldn't tell people in your dating profile what turns you off. They'll just avoid revealing they have a third arm if that's one of your turn offs.

I think interviewers have incentive to help people they like but no incentive to help someone they don't think they want to see in the candidate pool down the road.

Maybe they will point you to things you can learn if it will make you a better candidate but not if will just help you tune your pitch.

</comment><comment><USER60> This is probably me just screaming into the void, but I'll provide my experience anyway.

I've found the entire "finding a new job" / interviewing process to be an incredibly alienating process. It truly brings me despair.

I've been working in IT for my entire professional career. I've worked as an analyst, project manager, and I'm currently a developer. I'll be the first to admit, I'm not a phenomenal developer, but I think my "Jack of all Trades" experience provides me with interesting insight. I'm more than the sum of my parts, I have a college degree in something completely unrelated to computers, I've started my own business, I love electronics and 3D printing. I'm attempting to leave my current company of 5+ years, and whether it's the "We only hire the best and brightest" mantra or something else, this experience has been miserable.

I've been asked to do push-ups in an interview, I've been ghosted multiple times, in a variety of places in the interview process. I've gotten berated on the phone by interviewers.

After the last volley of rejections, I've been looking inward whether IT is even really for me. Apparently the economy is doing great, and hiring is up, but that has simply not been my experience.

<comment><USER61> I'm interested about your entire interview experience, but I _really_ would like more info about this bit:

> _I 've been asked to do push-ups in an interview_

What?

<comment><USER60> It was what it sounds like; I was interviewing for a project manager role at a IT security company. The lead PM in the middle of her interview questions said "Drop down and give me five push-ups." I didn't think it was that strange, so I did it, but everyone I told about that experience thought it was incredibly strange. Her reasoning was that it showed that I was willing to follow orders, or something.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> As an interviewee, I would love companies to provide some transparency and feedback. The feedback doesn't have to be super detailed, just areas for improvement. This was something which I really appreciated about Facebook. I interviewed onsite a year back and later the recruiter told me "You did well in all the coding interviews but we felt that you did not display the level of competency required in System design for a senior role". That was actionable feedback IMHO and I would not hesitate to interview again.

The flip side is I hate interviewing for companies which ghost / refuse to provide feedback, especially when they give you a take home test / assignment where you don't even know a) Whether a human / engineer saw your submission b) What is the criteria being used for evaulation (especially for working solutions). The worst offender has to be Slack (though Twilio/Amazon is right up there) where they make you create a slack bot which does something trivial (play tic-tac-toe). Wasted a bunch of time to read the documentation and get a basic bot working before I got to actually work on the problem (tic tac toe). My submission was rejected and I was given no feedback / reason why

<comment><USER63> I had a rejection from Facebook a few months ago and I got no feedback like that. The feedback I got was that I did extremely well throughout the interview process and demonstrated that I was qualified for that type of position. It was just a no for some reason. Unfortunately it's a rare position and they haven't called me back with other opportunities.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> In October I had one of my best phone interviews. I never heard back yet other recruiters keep contacting me about the job. Today a recruiter got back to me saying oh yes they interviewed you and they said you have too much graphic design experience and not enough UX. Huh I've been a UX Designer and UI Developer for ten years.

Not helpful and their reason has to be personal, so they just say nothing or as today were forced to make stuff up.

<comment><USER65> Sometimes companies just don't understand a role that well. Maybe the last UI/UX person they had was initially a UX person that turned UI and so they think you need more of one than the other. I can't count the number of times I seen job descriptions that look like a copy and pasted resume of the previous employee they had.

<comment><USER64> Well it was weird cause it came directly to the recruiter via the UX Manager. But oh well I fortunately have a job and sometimes just go and see what's out there.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER66> For software engineering, the reason HR fears for arguments is because the whole process is so utterly lacking in rigor compared to the work that engineers do. Coding questions provide some amount of objectivity, but the selection of those questions is largely baseless. Moreover, engineers are accustomed to sharing key ideas and results, but in hiring even salary data is used in information arbitrage (especially before levels.fyi).

Even worse, we have things like Rooftop Slushie where FAANG engineers will give candidates feedback but for a price. As if FAANG engineers weren't paid enough.

One gap that individuals can bridge is for IC interviewers to ask for feedback on their own interviewing. ICs typically don't see how well hires do through year one, and almost never see where non-hires go. Hiring managers often stay on top of this data (or at least have access to it) in order to self- calibrate. If that data has any chance of helping inform candidates, it needs to trickle down to the IC interviewers first.

</comment><comment><USER67> Last year I was really stoked for an interview with this risk analysis company and pretty sure I had a good chance (I have a master's in international studies, which isn't much, but it's something).

After they reviewed my resume and gave me an initial phone screening, which went okay, I was given an assignment to perform. I had 24 hours to write a risk analysis on this Crimean wine company and use my Russian language skills to research the company's ownership, history, and risks. I thought I did an amazing job, having written about 5 pages on them, citing numerous sources from the Russian financial times and other sites.

Then, for the second interview, I talked to a member of their senior leadership (former US Treasury guy), and man, this guy was very much a jerk to me. He asked me, "What is the legislation that makes sanctions work?" I didn't know exactly, so I mentioned a recent UN Security Council resolution that added North Korean officials to US and UN sanctions lists. He interrupted me, saying that if I didn't know, I should just say so. I said I'm trying to tell you what I know. He said "Why didn't you prepare for this interview?" I said I read everything I could find on the company and did my best on the assignment, and did he see the assignment? He paused for a second, lowered his voice, and said "thanks, we'll be in touch" and that was the end of it. I'm still reeling from this, and this was over a year ago. I have every reason to believe that they used and profited from my research, because this company was recently in the news. I suppose this is a sort of crime that is nearly impossible to legislate against. Anyway, I am trying to improve my interview skills (and they did not reply to my request for feedback). Do you think I should have just said "I don't know"? I was always told _never_ to say this, but just to stick to your guns. But I got shot down by a snotty executive here, and it still hurts.

<comment><USER68> It sounds vaguely as though your definition of risk analysis and their definition might not have matched. In other words, you may have done homework for or interviewing for a different nature of job than they expected.

<comment><USER67> That idea makes me so annoyed I don't even know what to do. I took a graduate- level class on the damn concept, but it doesn't translate to the private sector? I don't get it. I'm such a putz....

<comment><USER67> This is also what led to a sort of job interview PTSD for me. I was getting _worse_ at interviews, not better. So I just gave up applying to jobs formally, and got one through a temp agency which didn't actually interview people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER69> In the past, I've gotten good feedback when working with 3rd party recruiters. They have long term relationships with the companies, and an interest in getting your hired somewhere. So they get feedback that's useful for the next company the recruiter has for you.

As they middlemen, they provide some insulation between the two parties.

</comment><comment><USER70> This really explains why the last time I did job hunting it was such a stab in the dark for 6 months.

Job hunting in general is terrible.

<comment><USER18> I applied to HackerOne to do the exact same job I'd already been doing for a year.

They rejected me with the feedback "we asked you why you wanted to work for us, and you didn't seem enthusiastic about the company". (My answer to "why did you apply?" was "it's a good match to the work I was already doing".)

<comment><USER71> I spend a fare amount of time on this question and it does get annoying it's usually some version of the following.

Hiring Manager : "Why this company."

Me: "Carefully choreographed pile of horse shit that is rehearsed to sound genuine / personal, but doesn't over share or reveal accidental character flaws."

My brain: I get it company you do "things" and along the way someone pays you money for them or it or w.e. Why should anyone be over the moon about this. I'm here because I think I can do what ever vague role description you posted. Stop asking this question, it doesn't reveal anything because we are all lying.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> Five hours for a tech test and interview at EA. I know I crushed the tech test. Interview, not as much. Got a generic rejection letter.

Don't be surprised when we stop jumping through hoops if you're not going to give any feedback. If you think you can run your company solely off hoop- jumpers, more power to you.

</comment><comment><USER73> I was rejected by a pretty well-known DB startup over a fizzbuzz-level coding assignment. I didn't blow it off because of its triviality--quite the opposite, I gold-plated it with spec comments, code comments, computational complexity comments, unit tests, type annotations, etc. I showed it to some friends at FAANG companies and they couldn't understand why it was rejected either. It was just really weird and unsettling to be rejected over a trivial test when I know I'm capable of so much more (I've eg implemented major features in a production MPP database engine). It might be partly due to their resume-blind process, which I support in principle, but it seems weird to disregard 20 years of mostly non-trivial software development when evaluating someone on a trivial test.

<comment><USER29> Possibly they did not considered you fit. If they want to hack around (which plenty of teams want), someone who polishes things looks like odd one and is just annoyance to them.

Startups are unpredictable in their expectations. What you consider good code they consider bad code. I have seen startup where long variable names were wrong. So "nameFilter" would be wrong and "flt" would be correct. Seeing one as stupid overengineering and the other as smart.

</comment></comment><comment><USER74> Another concern is that there might be several weaknesses in a candidate, where one weakness masks another.

If you say something like "You have weakness X", and they go take a class and work on X, then they might expect that they are now hirable.

You can imagine the friction that might happen when a candidate keeps going back only to hear about yet a new reason to be rejected.

Or, on the other side of the coin, you can imagine people who are good at checking boxes and working a system, but not a good fit for the position. They will knock down the reasons for rejection one after the next and eventually get hired, but they may still be a bad fit for the role. You can't test for everything perfectly during your interview process.

</comment><comment><USER75> I always push for feedback. I can be pretty feisty when it comes to asking. I think it's only fair that if I bother to talk them either on the phone or in person that I get some sort of feedback. I've even taken to asking the interviewer in the interview itself. I love establishing an easy going, open and honest rapport.

Worst I had was after completing an unpaid "test" project that took me almost a day of my time, I was rejected without feedback. I pushed for feedback, it was a trial but I finally got it. The feedback? "No comments in the code". Thank you. I'd dodged a bullet, I told the recruiter.

</comment><comment><USER76> I understand the rationale, but it's not without cost.

If I've taken the time to do an in-person (or even a lengthy set of calls), then there really has to be something in it for me after they decline, or I won't apply with them again.

Also, if everything else seems like a match, my potential new mates and I hit it off, and they clearly need to fill the position, the vacuum left by a lack of explanation with the decline often leaves me wondering whether it didn't involve irrelevant (and often illegal) demographic bias. No way to really know, of course, but like everyone else, I play the probabilities.

</comment><comment><USER77> I received feedback a few times and it was quite motivational. I failed an interview and the feedback stated that I need to work on more advanced object- oriented topics like SOLID and design patterns. I studied these up and it helped me land the next job. I also became a better programmer as a result. Recently I went through something similar - I was rejected due to the lack of of experience regarding modern front-end frameworks so I'm now going through a book about Angular. I now feel more confident when applying for fullstack jobs.

</comment><comment><USER78> Every job ad I've put up since starting my company has had over 100 candidates. 80 of whom are wholly unsuitable and do not send any cover letter. Another 10 don't bother with the cover letter but may have been suitable. All these are instant rejects with no feedback.

The 10 I phone interview I will at least give feedback to, likewise the 3 who we eventually interview.

Given so many no hopers though just clicking apply or sending a generic CV, I'm not surprised the vast majority get no feedback.

<comment><USER79> I've never given a cover letter in my 10 year career thus far.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Part of the problem is inaccurate job descriptions. They should be structured with transparent weights attached to specific requirements. They are currently written by lawyers and for lawyers. If a job description requires automated parsing, it contains too much irrelevant to jobseeker content.

So far, they only do that for travel time estimates.

An interview is like passing an acceptance test. It would be nice to know the actual acceptance criteria and other metrics.

</comment><comment><USER6> I always think of Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" when I hear about hiring in IT. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons)

(Not that any particular company or person is a lemon but the market collapse from information asymmetries)

</comment><comment><USER81> This just happened to me and I was kind of shocked. I haven't taken a formal interview in a long time, but 0 feedback, not even a thanks for your time, seems potentially damaging as well. Especially in the long run. Word of mouth is a powerful thing and I'm definitely not going to say kind things behind closed doors after this.

</comment><comment><USER82> My favourites are going to an interview, not hearing anything for 3 weeks and then being told "congratulations, we would like to invite you to the next stage".

At that point I have likely mentally moved on, and probably moved on in very real terms.

</comment><comment><USER83> Feedback can be controversial + legal problems, I don't mind absence of it.

But - for god's sake - give a 'yes or no' in reasonable terms.

So many 'good companies' have ridiculous hiring processes without any information to the candidates.

</comment><comment><USER84> I've helped a lot of people land good jobs over the last 8 years or so. I'm no pro, but I think I'm usually helpful. Happy to provide feedback/advice if anyone is interested. Contact details in my profile.

</comment><comment><USER85> And people wonder why Catbert is such a popular character...

</comment><comment><USER86> I assume companies don't explain why they aren't hiring you because it would cause too much self-realization at the organizational level.

</comment><comment><USER71> Does anyone here record their phone sessions? Some states this is completely legal to not inform the other party they are being recorded.

</comment><comment><USER87> That's actually not universally true. SpaceX would happily share feedback with you (or at least it did in the past). FB will share it if you request it.

This strikes me as a more "honest" and transparent position on the issue, and it also forces the company to stay well clear of race/gender/age/sexual orientation/ethnicity/etc as _latent_ disqualifiers (it's never overt, mind you), because factual justification is required in the feedback.

</comment><comment><USER88> Lawsuits, for sure. I never give negative feedback to anyone. I never say the truth to strangers because I fear lawsuits.

</comment><comment><USER89> it is a two way street

I can imagine some candidates reusing half of those arguments ("Too Much Data", "Stalling For Time", etc.) to ghost recruiters and not answering to offers

someone should definitively write a counterpart "The Real Reasons Why Job Seekers Are Not Giving You Feedback"

</comment><comment><USER90> What'd I keep telling you, Hackernews? This is the new norm, get used to it.

</comment><comment> shadow-banned Experienced this at a local tech company that will remain nameless. They're in the logistics space. They enable fast shipping for merchants.

Did 10+ hours of a challenge project - something I would have charged $5,000+ for, including a channel-specific attribution model (with defense of my choice), a complete onboarding campaign flow with timing, and sample email creative, lead scoring model, and a bunch of pedantic questions about my background and history. 15+ pages, presentations, etc.

Did three virtual conference calls. Met the head of engineering and CEO. Went over; great, energetic conversations.

Received a call from the recruiter, poor thing, and she could barely get the words out to me.

Them: "I'm so sorry... uh, but... but it was a no."

Me: "I completely understand! Not everything is a fit. Do you have any actionable feedback for me?"

Them: "Uh, they... I mean, we... just... are looking for, more? I think."

Me: "Um, okay. Thanks for the opportunity."

They still have not filled their head of marketing role. Two months later.

(I suspect their young founder didn't like me - not a problem, but not something you can tell a candidate.)

This article resonates.

<comment><USER91> > Did 10+ hours of a challenge project

Those things are a hard "no" for me.

10 hours of interviews... I might not like it, but at least it's symmetric. People at the company are putting their time in to the process as much as I am.

But with a job, kids, hobbies, volunteer work and so on, I just pass on companies that have day+ long 'coding challenges'.

<comment><USER92> For the most part I agree. Let me offer one counterexample though.

I've never been primarily a developer but I have worked in areas where one of my primary outputs is writing. When I've hired for a similar role, if someone doesn't (for whatever reason) have writing sample(s), they're not going to get hired unless they produce one. It doesn't have to be an assignment; choose a relevant topic. But I'm not going to trust you that you've done tons of great writing if I can't see it.

And that may take a day or two.

<comment><USER93> I'm curious about what the situation would be where a person had done tons of great writing but could not come up with one sample. Confidentiality?

<comment><USER92> I agree it would be a bit odd--and something of a red flag TBH.

>confidentially

But yes. One can imagine someone writing non-public reports and analyses for internal or client use only and just doesn't really do that kind of thing in their spare time. Myself, I have tons of public material but I've also written many things I couldn't share.</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Get a free Macworld Expo 2008 pass. Code: 08-G-PC152 - <AUTHOR> http://www.macworldexpo.com/registration I'm not certain I'll actually attend the expo this year, but since we're only a couple blocks away, I nabbed a pass. I remember ten years ago when I would have killed for a free pass to the expo! <comment><AUTHOR> I'm not certain I'll actually attend the expo this year, but since we're only a couple blocks away, I nabbed a pass. I remember ten years ago when I would have killed for a free pass to the expo! (pass found on istockphoto forum)</comment>


Show HN: Platform for underrated content - <AUTHOR> https://exposure.cards <comment><USER2> What qualifies something as underrated? Is it just personal opinion or is it metric based?</comment>


Yeoman on FreeBSD 9 - <AUTHOR> http://sergeylukin.com/2012/yeoman-on-freebsd-9/ How I got Yeoman up and running on FreeBSD 9 <comment><USER2> The idea of doing "curl -L <URL> | bash" fills me with horror. Is this really the best way to install software in 2012?

<comment><AUTHOR> Well what would you offer instead?</comment></comment>


Google Responds To The HTC/Apple Lawsuit It's Not A Part Of - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/google-htc-apple-lawsuit/

<comment><USER2> I don't understand the snippiness of your submission title. Apple's attack is obviously focused on Android, which HTC uses and Google has spearheaded. Maybe I'm just reading it wrong?</comment>


DolphinAttack: Hacking Siri and Alexa through inaudible commands - <AUTHOR> https://www.fastcodesign.com/90139019/a-simple-design-flaw-makes-it-astoundingly-easy-to-hack-siri-and-alexa <comment><USER2> Where did the front page discussion of this go?</comment>


Reddit users karma and upvotes depends on what sub you post on - <AUTHOR> https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/f1jszx/oc_the_relationship_between_karma_and_upvotes/ <comment><AUTHOR> Full research description and data collection also available.[0]

[0] [https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/f1jv8c/xpos...](https://www.reddit.com/r/TheoryOfReddit/comments/f1jv8c/xpost_dataisbeautiful_i_collected_data_for_a/)</comment>