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Comment by SkyPuncher | Hacker News Reader

I had a similar thing happen with a well-known messaging app startup I interviewed with.

This company had me do an initial technical screen (2-hours of work) and expressed great interest in the work I did. They asked me to complete a follow on "work sample" which I promptly completed with extras (error handling, specs, etc).

After completing the work sample (a non-trivial amount of effort), they suddenly decided they weren't interested in me. I hadn't even talked with a person and they went from being "extremely excited" to "uninterested" after getting me deep into their process.

Apparently, the recruiter was pushing me through the steps and the technical team hadn't even looked at my resume - or even considered it worthwhile to schedule a call with me.

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That’s disgusting, and I’m really sorry to have read that happened to you or anyone else.

My policy is that anyone that completes the technical screen (2 – 4 hours of work) gets an on-site interview.

Just this morning, I had to spend about 20 minutes debugging a candidate’s code to get it to both build and run, but he’s still getting invited for an on-site.

I don't care about being turned away (I did a very similar project for another company, that I now happily work for).

However, it's infuriating to have spent so much time just to learn that the engineering team didn't want me anyways. If I got rejected for a bad work sample - that's fine. Getting rejected because the hiring manager couldn't be bothered to look at your resume before assigning tasks - not cool.

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Good on you for bringing candidates in. Technical screens are tough and can be mis-understood by candidates. They should only be a tool to support other data points.

Are you really likely to hire this candidate? Asking him to commit even more time when he's started off so poorly seems like an (unknown to him) poor use of his time.

I also had something happen with a well-known messaging app. They gave me a take-home assignment that turned out to be pretty non-trivial (16+ hours). They liked it, even had good things to say about it, I had an hour mostly non-technical meeting with a manager(?) there that seemed to go reasonably well, and nope, they weren't interested.

I told people to avoid this place because of how bad of an experience it was.

Does said messaging app also not show up on Glassdoor? Making it hard for candidates to identify this problematic process.

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