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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Its like a real-life implementation of that life-score episode of Black Mirror (and what the chinese government is looking to do to their entire population.

When I first interviewed with google, it took three-freaking months of panel interviews.

Then they said I scored really well, and that I'd have an offer the next day.

I got the call the next day and said, in fact, no offer was coming. No reason given.

Then they attempted to recruit me for the same position for the next four years on three separate occasions.

I told them the story of my first experience, and then they'd say "yeah let me check..." then get back to me and say "sorry, we wont interview you for this position", again, no reason given.

Then they called me one more time, for same damn position. I told them "Ill make this simple, just give me the damn job or stop freaking calling me"

They finally stopped calling me.

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Warms my heart to know that I was not the only person/startup given this treatment.

I was invited to pitch my startup to google startup team twice (For their launchpad AI studio and Gradient ventures).

Got an email two months later that I made it to the next round and requesting more information about the startup.

I sent the emails and then... crickets. Followed up via emails and linkedin and there is just no response. No negative, no waiting, no request for more information. Just a cold dead silence. Very demoralizing.

You placed your hopes in someone other than yourself and we're disappointed when it didn't go well?

Its not the outcome which matters. The outcome is what it is, you move on. Its the way the outcome is communicated which is a complete disregard of social norms. Its considered impolite to flat out ignore someone. You only do that if you seriously dislike that person, and want to burn your bridges to them, or if you lack communication skills. Consider you might have an appointment with a possible customer on Thursday at 2 PM at Starbucks, but you'd verify it because you are also busy. You never follow up on it. They phone you at 1 PM, but you don't pick up. You don't reply to the missed call either. Now, consider how your potential customer felt at Wednesday evening and Thursday morning. They wonder what's up. They'd like to plan their time as well.

I know, I know, corporations are psychopaths [1], but a hint of humanity or compassion would've at least kept the façade somewhat up. Actions like these can harm your faith in corporations and humanity, and that might very well be the goal. It can be extremely demotivating, and if Google doesn't buy the startup its generally in Google's interest the VC doesn't get bought by the competitor. So from that PoV it makes sense.

But we are talking about real humans here, with startups, with limited resources, and a lot of stress. Is it too much to ask for a response you've been declined preferably also with a honest mention of "because of reason X or Y"?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Corporation_(film)

Screw this logic. Ok the company who is one of the biggest data--based companies in the world is trying to "make the world a better place" - and we are all one big family blah blah gives no data back, so as to literally stomp on some dream rather than to foster growth.

So, to the VCs out there, you have a moral obligation to tell people why you don't want to invest/work-with or hire.

Otherwise you stick the idea of "vulture capital" aren't helping people get better.

Look at some from the ashes type teams, like WhatsApp - might find more of them if you weren't to crush them out early.

I don’t know whether to be disheartened or comforted that their approach to hiring is basically the same as their approach to customer service.

Not really. I am disappointed that there was no response from the reps. Usually VCs do not respond when your startup is so bad it's cringe worthy.

I had a similar experience interviewing at Wikia.

I was straight out of uni and the interview was a three-part, month-long process.

At the end, HR called me and gave me an offer, "welcome to the team" included and so on.

I was just told to wait a week for the CEO's formal approval, which was to be "standard procedure" for every new hire.

A week became two weeks, then another two weeks, then another. During that I was still assured the job was coming.

In the meantime, I found another job, a pretty good one.

A month later, I got a call from HR at Wikia saying that maybe I should start looking for a different job.

At the time it was a real disappointment for me, but it taught me to be never be sure until I'm holding the signed contract in my hand.

>>At the time it was a real disappointment for me, but it taught me to be never be sure until I'm holding the signed contract in my hand.

Always this. And don't stop interviewing and applying until it happens.

Sounds like callback hell :)

That story sounds very familiar. :-)

I've had the worst interviewing experience with google. It seems like they just don't give a shit about the people they're trying to hire. In my phone interview, my interviewer never came. I got rescheduled. In my next interview, the lady thought I was someone else and was reading someone else's resume. She apologized and then I did a binary tree search problem in google search.

The recruiter wanted to do a full on-site panel. I had already offers from several companies at that point. Google was just so bad and careless that I decided to there was no point moving forward. I called it off and chose another company with a sane hiring process.

Google is big and has an insane amount of money in the bank. They can have the shittiest interview process but the input to the pipe is so large that their hiring funnel still works out.

Although I am convinced the reason why google has such a bad male:female ratio of engineers compared to Microsoft is possibly due to their hiring process.

I went and did the phone screens and in person. Took 2 weeks to reject me. I don't really mind a rejection, I thought the interview was pretty meh on my part.

Decided to try again a while later. They had me start at the phone screen stage again, then wanted me to do a second. Almost did it, called it off because I decided it just wasn't worth the trouble.

I've been rejected by other places but google just really annoyed me. I think it was the overwrought, slow, unpleasant process which produces high false negative rates but that they are also seemingly extremely proud of. Only place I wen to where they told me multiple times about how common it is to interview 2-3 times before getting in. I'm sure that happens at other places but they seem to treat it more as a flaw then a feature.

Anyway, I hate jumping through hoops. I'm hoping next job I can leverage people a bit more and maybe move through things a bit more quickly.

If they have enough candidates it makes sense to not care much about false negatives, only about false positives. Anyway, the way a company treats applicants strongly correlates to the way they treat staff, so a bad interview process is a red flag. It can be tough, but it must be respectful.

It really doesn't if you have any interest in a good process. They seem to engage in a lot of back patting about how great their process is.

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