It's always easier to hear "I'm breaking up with you because I'm moving for a new job and want to concentrate on my career" than "I'm breaking up with you because you're awkward around my friends and aren't interesting".

Perhaps it's not the rejection, but the energy in creating the next steps I need to take (more resumes, taking classes, new career, therapy, etc).

Sounds extreme. Were you applying to random jobs?

For example: As a candidate you might submit a resume and get an automated "Thank you, we'll be in touch". There's a large variety of reasons why you might face a very low probability that someone will indeed be in touch that have nothing to do with you.

The most common is that you're just too late in the process. They might already have dozens of viable candidates in later stages. They are being economical about their interviewers' time, thinking: Well, the probability that all of those later-stage candidates will end up getting terminated is low, so we're not doing first-round interviews for now. But they are not being economical about expectations created in candidates' minds about the likelihood of getting an offer. They've simply defined the process to say: We pull the advertising after the role has been filled, because there is always the chance that we will have to go back to candidates in earlier rounds.

There might be even more extreme cases. Not saying that this is particularly common, but imagine a company has decided they need a diversity hire, say hiring a woman to an all-male tech team. All applications by men may be dead on arrival. They may not want to send out rejection letters so as not to establish the pattern.

Or the role may have already been filled and there may simply be clerical error or clerical laziness to blame about why the advertising hasn't been pulled yet.

So, from a candidate's point of view: "We will be in touch" means almost nothing. Having come across a job ad means less than nothing. Your calculation is simply going to be: I get one human contact out of every ten times I submit a resume. I get one firm offer out of every ten times I get a human contact. I'm shooting for three firm offers to choose from. So that means I have to submit my resume 300 times. Consequently you can't afford to be all too picky. You just submit to everything that could even remotely be a match. You only start putting real brain power into thinking about whether you actually want to work there in later stages of the process.

It's a sad state of affairs, but it's just the world we live in now.

The whole point of web-based application process is to weed out as many candidates as possible. If you can skip that step and first make contact with a human, the odds are much better and it's less work and stress for everyone.

Tailoring resumes to specific postings, and trying to find someone at the company you have some sort of connection with, are both pretty damn important unless, as you say, you're shot-gunning an identical resume to every company within 50 miles.

Luckely my experience in job searching has not involved ghosting or spamming. Is that an US thing? Or is "job dating" less parallell in smaller cities or countries?

I would recommend that you attend local user group meetings and talk to people. Weak social connections are an excellent source of referrals.

At the very basic level you should understand what are the expectations of the employer and whether you can fill those expectations. Try to find and talk to people at those positions you are applying to. Try to understand where you fall short.

I interviewed for a position that I am way qualified for. I check every box, in terms of skills and abilities and experience. I'm essentially doing the job right now, just with a different title.

And I was passed over for a less qualified, less experienced candidate. The reason I was given, as I dove through the organization (it's where I work now) to ask for feedback to improve myself professionally, was that there wasn't really anything I can get better at, it was just 'fit'.

I was able to ask probing questions to get to the root of that, and it turns out that, outside of the folks I work with daily, people outside of my division don't necessarily know my leadership abilities. But tell me, how would you even go about quantifying that for an external candidate, other than saying the, very safe, 'we found a better candidate'?

Honest feedback hurts but it’s how you grow.

And if people cared at all about interviewees they’d give some semblance of honest feedback rather than “no thanks.”

A former Apple architect once gave me "honest feedback" about the languages I work with. It was his opinion about industry direction, that 8 years later, was 100% wrong. (Although I don't think I was a good match for his startup.)

That's why I consider honest feedback flame bait.

If you get similar pieces of feedback from 3 people, you now likely know what you need to do differently to get hired, period.

It’s not about getting specific, individual pieces of feedback. It’s about being able to triangulate toward what you need to do differently.

And maybe you get 3 pieces of feedback that are all completely contradictory. That tells you that what you need to do is keep trying.

This is a non-helpful statement. Humans are bias machines. We function based on our collective experience or in some cases differed experience. Saying there is systemic bias doesn't really add anything other than saying exploit what ever bias you can find to your advantage.

If he had said, "I need someone with more experience in language XXX," it would have been 100% true for his case, and 100% appropriate for me. I can read the market for technology.

Instead, he basically said, "you have a lot of experience in language YYY, which isn't going anywhere." That was quite subjective, as language YYY has significantly more use and investment since our conversation.

It also isn't really appropriate, because the job was in language XXX, not language YYY. Assuming he hired me, we'd have to agree that my learning curve in language XXX was appropriate for his needs in a developer. (He clearly needed someone who could hop in without much of a learning curve.)

(Remember, sometimes you hire the candidate and expect them to learn the stack on the job, other times you hire someone because they are already an expert in the stack.)

Debates on languages like this are really just pissing matches. IMO, dressing up the debate as "constructive feedback on my merit as a candidate" hurt his credibility in his leadership role.

It may be not your fault. Or, it might have been your lucky day, not getting that job. In any case, you need to make damn sure that you know your trade.

You can categorize some cases into these:

1) Someone has observed something you do that you're unaware of, and could work on.

2) Someone has misinterpreted something you do, and now you know they have, but can be glad they told you so you know where they stand, and/or clear the confusion by explaining what really happened.

3) Someone doesn't like something you do, but you are already aware of you doing it, but think your way is better, for reasons X, Y and Z, and if you feel like it you can explain that.

4) Someone who has more experience than you recognizes a behavior from their earlier selves, and points this out so that you get a head start at learning their lesson.

Regardless of the merit of the feedback, you can't process it and deal (or not deal) with it until you hear it.

If you can step away from yourself and just observe and reflect, there are so many things you can learn that I wish I could imprint on a younger me. But at least I'm trying to catch up as a 30-something now.

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.

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.

We had a new hire that didn't work out at a place I used to work at. Fired after 3 months. No hard feelings, he took it well and found a good job a few weeks later. Everyone is happy.

Which means you probably went 6 months or more without a role properly filled.

On a small team that's a huge dent. For half a year.

Not to mention the time spent in the hiring process itself, which you now get to repeat.

So either you pay the cost by trying more people more quickly, or you pay the cost desperately waiting and waiting because you’re so confident your interviewing filter is tuned correctly and that you know better regarding who to hire.

(In a small company, the process of hiring is often quite poor because it’s idiosyncratically controlled by the early employees and founders, and usually reinforces their cultural views and their biases of interviewing, so having a restrictive filter is even more harmful to small companies.)

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.

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.)

Why? I do not agree that Google’s hiring practices have anything to do with “bad hire” costs.

But none of that has anything to do with the screening process itself, and it's certainly not advocating screening based on bullshit.

Any policy about the relative importance of true/false positives vs negatives is a policy about screening processes.

"The thing I enjoyed working on the most was ..."

"In five years time, I see myself ..."

"If I could choose to be any animal, I would be a ..."

After the interview the recruiter sent me an email and told me that he wouldn't work with me anymore as I was hostile during the interview.

It was insanely bizarre. It was like being found guilty without ever even being given a trial or being told there was a trial.

The interviewer comes in and starts berating me for not finishing and how I must’ve gone to a bad school, must not be smart, etc. Then he goes on and on about how I’m clearly not suited for the job and his young assistant is sitting beside him laughing.

It was a crazy interview. I mentally gave up after a few minutes because the guy was clearly fucking with me and didn’t want me, so I started giving smart ass responses since there was no reason to let myself get beat up.

I get a call a few hours later telling me I can start any time. I told the recruiter to tell the company that the interviewer was a dick (in nicer words) and I’d pass.

Worse than no feedback is opposite feedback. Don’t play mental games with people.

After lunch interview was with a xoogler and everyone earlier warned me it would be a “google interview”. So he struts in and asks what I know about number theory. I say nothing and he tells me he was a math major and proceeded to ask math proof questions and push on the math side of things the whole time. Weirdly instead of asking how to make a Cartesian product in SQL he had this round about way of describing baseball players and teams and generating a report of games played.

So as it went on I gave up. He asked me toward the end how many prime numbers there are... I answered “optimus prime”. He looked at me and asked if I seriously wanted him to write down “optimus prime” for my answer and I swear on my life I looked at him and said “yep. Autobots roll out”.

Man I've been steady on the job hunt and I have to say I needed a funny story like this. Thank you.

I'd like to think there is a good follow up but my guess is you got ghosted.

I don't think it's possible to have a finite number of primes though? But it's a programming interview, so really, who gives a shit?!

In your example it would be (2 * 3) + 1 = 7, prime.

This is Euclid's proof [1] and it's some 2300 years old.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_theorem

I was distraught by it, but then I talked to a friend and he told me - well, maybe they were looking for someone to handle stress really well, and it's not you.

Looking back, I think it was utterly bizarre (for a programming job, anyway). But, hey, to each his own.

Something along the lines of: "To pay you as much money as you requested, we'd have to categorize you as a [Senior/Prinicipal] developer, but your skills/experience only put you at [Junior/Professional]".

If, as a candidate I had received this kind of feedback from two or three companies in one vertical, I would know that I have the choice between getting payed less and switching to a different vertical that pays better.

I usually say (and I happen to be in a country that is not very litigious) "While I can't tell you how you did in this interview -- we have to go through HR's process first -- I could offer you some general advice based on my experience", and would give some positive suggestions based on what I've observed. E.g. "try to read up more on how technology X works under the hood" or "when faced with a complex problem, it's okay to take time to think it through or ask questions", or "your communication skills are good, but you can be even better if you lead with the answer and have the lengthy explanation follow the answer" etc.

I'm wondering whether this is a good practice?

We try to hire more long term (we aim for 5+ years retention), dunno if that's related, or if there is any evidence to back this procedure.

I find it a bit weird myself, which is why as a candidate I'd like to know about it :-)

It's better to offer the candidate what the company is prepared to offer, both in terms of position and compensation. Let the candidate decline. At least some candidates will like the company enough to try working their way back up.

Though I'm sure acceptance rate is in some KPI, so there could be some bureaucratic nonsense involved.

Normally, the good interviews begin with some kind of high-level salary discussion with HR or the recruiter. Typically, the recruiter (or HR rep) casually asks what I make in my current job. In one case, I accepted an interview where I'd get a small paycut. (Some things are worth taking a lower salary.)

Being terminated by phone or in person is respectful compared to email. Being rejected by phone for something that for most times is going to not be successful, that's just twisting the knife.

At the moment I don't know how to respond to call requests when it's not successful. I fear that saying: "Hey if this is a rejection, I would prefer to just get an email. I understand."

I don't care if it wastes the caller's time as a misplaced (and insincere) gesture of respect. They've wasted enough of my time at this point and don't deserve any more.

I've got two such calls from FAANGs and I'm glad they told me I did great in such and such interview but fell short in this other one, apply again etc (even if it may not have been true). Better than the boilerplate emails.

Now, not every one became awesome. But, there are places for even the non-best developers to be productive. Good management is putting best employees on critical systems and others in supporting roles.

But how many did you reject because your other reports said no?

Hence the byzantine process interviewing has become. Like most of what Joel says it’s flattering to the audience but just not true. Pretty much every company in the universe operates a 3-month probationary period. The risk of a bad hire in the real world is well mitigated. Also true in the real world, it is better to do this than waste months of time looking for the perfect candidate when you could easily get someone decent on board in mere weeks.