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epolanskiyesterday at 11:02 PM3 repliesview on HN

Tangential but you reminded me of why I don't give feedback to people I interview. It's a huge risk and you have very low benefit.

It once happened to me to interview a developer who's had a 20-something long list of "skills" and technologies he worked with.

I tried basic questions on different topics but the candidate would kinda default to "haven't touched it in a while", "we didn't use that feature". Tried general software design questions, asking about problems he solved, his preferences on the way of working, consistently felt like he didn't have much to argue, if he did at all.

Long story short, I sent a feedback email the day later saying that we had issues evaluating him properly, suggested to trim his CV with topics he liked more to talk about instead of risking being asked about stuff he no longer remembered much. And finally I suggested to always come prepared with insights of software or human problems he solved as they can tell a lot about how he works because it's a very common question in pretty much all interview processes.

God forbid, he threw the biggest tantrum on a career subreddit and linkedin, cherrypicking some of my sentences and accusing my company and me to be looking for the impossible candidate, that we were looking for a team and not a developer, and yada yada yada. And you know the internet how quickly it bandwagons for (fake) stories of injustice and bad companies.

It then became obvious to me why corporate lingo uses corporate lingo and rarely gives real feedback. Even though I had nothing but good experience with 99 other candidates who appreciated getting proper feedback, one made sure I will never expose myself to something like that ever again.


Replies

PunchyHamstertoday at 8:00 AM

The person you interview isn't paying you.

The farm of servers that decided by probably some vibe-coded mess to ban account is actively being paid for by customer that banned it.

Like, there is some reasons to not disclose much to free users like making people trying to get around limits have more work etc. but that's (well) paid user, the least they deserve is a reason, and any system like that should probably throw a warning first anyway.

netsharctoday at 1:29 AM

I wonder if there needs to be an "NDA for feedback"... or at least a "non-disparagement agreement".

Something along the lines of "here's the contract, we give you feedback, you don't make it public [is some sharing ok? e.g. if they want to ask their life coach or similar], if you make it public the penalty is $10000 [no need to be crazy punitive], and if you make it public you agree we can release our notes about you in response."

(Looking forward to the NALs responding why this is terrible.)

show 1 reply
lysaceyesterday at 11:21 PM

Had a similar experience, like 20 years ago. This somehow made me remember his name - so I just checked out what he's been up to professionally. It seems quite boring, "basic" and expected. He certainly didn't reach what he was shooting for.

So there's that :).