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Comment by DavidWoof | Hacker News Reader

1. Honestly, if I were giving a simple coding exercise and the candidate submitted work using their own custom framework (which is implied here), I might reject them also, or at least put them at the bottom of the interview list. It's just a complete misread of requirements, and points to an inability to follow directions.

2. On the one hand, Joel Spolsky created a lot of problems with his idea that a "no" from any interviewing dev results in a "no". Some people just don't evaluate interviews very well.

OTOH, everything looks like it went well here. One interviewer voiced concerned about a specific technical field, but the team as a whole gave that item its appropriate weight. No problem.

3. Yeah, HR often sucks. But I don't see how a story about the recruiter completely dropping the ball for two months is somehow a defense of how valuable recruiters are.

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OP here.

1) The candidate implicitly thought he should use it, because I liked his stuff during our technical interview. But then the interviewing engineer at the firm did not take time to look into my notes. So it's more an example of me pushing what I like instead of assessing what the firm likes / how much time they really have looking at profiles.

I'm with you on 1) because I've worked with these kind of people before; smart people who disregard existing solutions AND disregard team choices for technology stacks. Their code is impossible to integrate, difficult to test, difficult to review, and impossible to support. But by god they think it's the better way.

You cannot deduce from that that that engineer is one of "these people." There is not enough information in the situation to draw that conclusion. It's like claiming, solely based on your remark, that you are one of those people who jumps to conclusions prematurely. It doesn't work like that.

Regarding your point 1, wouldn't the sensible thing be to question them about this sort of thing? Find out their reasoning for implementing the solution the way they did.

A lot of this depends on context, and obviously we're not getting any of that in a quick anecdote (not OP's fault, just the nature of things).

In a larger company, where you're always hiring and there's specific time allotted for it, that approach makes some sense. But in a smaller company where I might have one or two positions to fill and the interview process is a serious hit on productivity, presumably the net step is to set up interviews and the first interviews are going to go to the people who didn't completely misread the exercise and submit Enterprise FizzBuzz.

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