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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

It's hilarious, but I think you dodged a bullet. Imagine for a minute actually working there.

My (somewhat charitable) interpretation was that either:

- The position had already been filled and they didn't want to bother fully informing me

- Both my contact and the person who "reviewed" my submission just really didn't care at all about the process and/or felt their time was better spent writing code than doing hiring (both people were technical)

For what it's worth, this was actually the second time I'd interviewed at this company, and the first time - while I didn't get the job - I went all the way through to the final interview and everyone I met was perfectly reasonable and nice.

Just reinforces the point from the article: an enormous factor in these processes is what kind of person you happen to be randomly assigned to on the other side. So don't take the results too seriously.

You need to be considered for sainthood, with how charitable you’re being here. It’s also possible for interviewers to just be wrong and incapable of seeing it, like the one who misjudged the runtime of code that I wrote and didn’t even have the toolbox to resolve such a disagreement.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1ilh7o/w...

Technically, your code runs in O(n^2), as O(n) is a part of O(n^2). Still, he should have accepted the more precise answer O(n).

> (both people were technical)

Well, they might have claimed that but based on your account I'm having my doubts.

On a more serious note, I do find the attitude towards hiring in many companies perverse. I realise it can be time-consuming, frustrating, and draining, but at the same time it's hugely important.

Of all my responsibilities, Literally the most important is building a strong team: hiring is a critical component of that. We're always looking for ways to improve the experience for candidates, and I'm still involved in interviewing fairly regularly. I feel like it's important for me to set that example.

As with many things, if you're hiring and want to enjoy the results of making great hires, you have to learn to love the process somewhat.

Thank you for this follow up comment.

To be honest I never understood this logic. Clearly a firm's skill at interviewing might diverge from their ability to mentor, innovate, have a great engineering culture and so on? Sure - perhaps it's slightly less likely, but it's not at all obvious that interviewing skill and company excellence are 100% convergent.

Well, from this example, management side was unwilling to even invest time in exploring or acknowledging the idea that they might be wrong. I don't know about you but I don't want to work with people who you can't have a reasonable conversation with to get to the bottom of a problem and figure out the issues together. Everyone makes mistakes, sorting them out together and achieving mutual goals is what makes this sort of work bearable.

If management doesn't understand collaborative working environments, humility, and basic problem solving, I don't (and will not) work with them.

They might not even have reached the management team... who knows if the recruiter passed this on or not.

If you have ever been in a situation where things were done to a standard of excellence, this type of excuse is simply unacceptable. People who have first-hand experience with environments that pursue excellence in earnest have little patience for such nonsense.

Kind of like the movie line "Failure is not an option." The line involves a bit of creative license, but was based on the movie people interviewing someone from NASA.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tid44iy6Rjs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_Is_Not_an_Option

I wasn’t implying that it was ok... just that it might not be the hiring managers doing the ignoring.

Sounds like poor internal communication structure to me then.

If the recruiter is from a third party it's a bit more forgivable (though I have gripes about this approach in general). I'd contact the company directly if I was working through a third party that stonewalled me. It's usually pretty easy to find recruiters public facing profiles to figure out how closely (if at all) they're connected to a given business.

This was definitely true at a past job which happened to be a fantastic place to work. The HR recruiting team was well-liked by the executives and run by a founding member of the company (so had a lot of power and autonomy). But they absolutely tormented us with things like not telling us a candidate had canceled until right before the scheduled time (we could find their emails in the recruiting software from hours or days earlier), scheduling individuals for multiple interviews simultaneously because they didn't care about our time so put it on us to find someone else to help, and occasionally forgetting to book a conference room forcing us to scramble and generally look bad.

The only satisfaction we got from the whole situation was reading the furious reviews the candidates would write on glassdoor.

I once worked at a company where hr would go for months saying there are zero candidates for x position. I finally escalated and got access to the database and there were loads of candidates. The issue was they were purposefully holding my req because they were sorting out a budget issue in another department. Even after that got resolved I literally had to go into the database, read them all, and then say this person, that person, etc..completely useless.

No, but their skill at being inconsiderate assholes almost certainly transcends the interview process as well as their engineering process. It likely permeates their whole organization. That's what I think the interviewee is looking at in this case and that's what was found. Unfortunately, fixing inconsiderate asshole syndrome is close to impossible. I wouldn't want to work at a place filled with them as described by this interviewee's experience above.

My opinion is based more on the final sentence than on the borked exercise.

Everyone makes mistakes. Character is revealed in how one handles it when the mistake is pointed out in good faith by a party who has a perfectly legitimate reason to do so.

If someone giving you an interview problem isn’t mortified that the entire premise of their result is invalid because they didn’t even bother testing the code, I would not want to work with them.

Yes, its a blessing in disguise to fail the interview at such a company, but it is kafqaesque, infuriating and leaves a bad taste. But I agree that’s the best way to think about it.

To look at another way, you would immediately be the domain expert and go-to person!

That's not how toxic environments work. They typically want your head on a platter for outshining the people already in power.

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