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Comment by acjohnson55 | Hacker News Reader

That's unacceptable, in my opinion.

I work at a company that grew more than 10x in under 2 years from a couple dozen engineers to hundreds. I personally interviewed well over 100 engineers. My time was valuable, but not so valuable that I couldn't spend an hour productively with each candidate. And certainly not by making them feel like it's an extended failure. On the super rare occasion that someone was gigantic "no", it's still possible to make the candidate feel valued.

One time, I had to shut down an interview cycle because a candidate was abusive to one of my reports. That's the only time I've cut a round short.

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I once interviewed someone, who clearly had no programming experience. They had someone else complete the screening take-home coding exercise for them.

We spent the whole hour interview making zero progress on the task assigned. I kinda wish I had setup some kind of get-out-of-jail situation so that I could have saved everyone the time, but I sat though the whole hour just out of the embarrassment of ending things early.

I interviewed someone once who refused to try my problem. I don't know what was going on for him that day, but after the quick intro to the problem, he didn't want to do it. I was the last one on his interview schedule, so I walked him out and got 30 minutes back.

I always put some “wrap ups” in my interview. Logical points where, when they stall or give a terrible answer, you can ask, “is there anything else?”, let them say something else, and just say, “Thanks! I think that’s a great place to stop, is there anything you’d like to ask me?”. I practice saying it with a smile, and don’t diverge from the script. Makes it much easier to end bad interviews.

Yes. When I was very inexperienced I still remember being interviewed by an extremely big dog in the open-source world (he was VP of engineering at a very successful startup). I was probably about a 3/10 in terms of quality of interview answers, and unsurprisingly didn't get the job.

Despite that, he still managed to make me feel good about the whole experience. At some points in the interview where I was close/slightly off he'd first coax "that's quite similar to X or Y, don't you think?" then if that didn't work he'd coach "here's how X works, elegant explanation, ok, let's talk about Y".

I remember this vividly years later with a smile. Just like I remember all the negative experiences where people were dismissive or ghosted.

If somebody is a no-hire, what favour are you doing them by extending the interview loop to the end? You're just wasting their time at that point. (Though I've never heard of an interview slot being cut short like that based on a couple of questions. If the interviewers are habitually preparing for that, it is just insane.)

I mean, I can imagine situations where it's appropriate, but like you said, I think it says more about the company if it's a common occurrence. For the types of interviews my company does, they're designed not to suck, even if you're not knocking it out of the park.

Most of the sessions are collaborative solution design exercises. The interviewer can drive the solution, if necessary, and hopefully it's at least educational. The remaining session is a behavioral interview centered on the candidates accomplishments. It's usually possible to set least draw out what the candidate is proud of from their career.

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