> The fact that so many employers treat candidates like this
Don't give up. Most established companies aren't run by 20-somethings. If the seniors are already in their mid-20s and lack professionalism, then most likely there are other issues going on at this company. You may have dodged the proverbial bullet.
Wish I could upvote this twice! Every rejection I've ever received came with an information-rich sideband that told me more about the prospective employer than an acceptance would have. In at least half of such cases I said to myself: "phew, that was a bullet I was lucky to dodge... imagine how it might feel to work with these people!"
Often the "information sideband" is the very fact that the company decided to cut off all communication as a way to convey rejection. If they treat random people that way, how do you think they treat people who are obligated to be on their worksite every day?
Companies: DON'T DO THIS! I, for one, actively discourage smart friends from interviewing at places that treat candidates like shit.
I had nightmare of a interview experience with AirBnb in 2012. They asked me take 2 days off from work and fly all the way to SFO after I wasted couple of hours doing their coding homework. The first interviewer started with "your degree is not from a good school" like the very first sentence right to my face. He then asked me a string matching question, and insisted that I code up his brute force solution (with terrible insert complexity) and second interviewer asked me to code up a binary search tree and . After which the recruiter walked in asked me to leave the building saying the interview was not going well and walked me out of the office.
I felt so humiliated, worthless and traumatized that I stopped interviewing for atleast 3 years after that. I now have (irrational) fear of interviews.
This experience has dissuaded many of my friends from applying there.
> This experience has dissuaded many of my friends from applying there.
This should be the lesson for employers: an interview candidate who feels good about their interviewing experience, even if they aren't hired, can refer their qualified friends to your company. The alternative is that they might discourage good candidates from interviewing with your company by warning people on Hacker News about its hiring practices. Also, the candidate might be a good fit for a different position in the future.
Nowadays, at least for their engineering internships, they have a pre-filled list of top schools to choose from followed by an "other" option (at least when I tried applying a couple years ago).
That told me exactly what I needed to know. I'd be instantly rejected because of not going to a "good school".
I'd love to say "don't worry, you'll get a chance to prove yourself", but I can verify the instant rejection.
Sample size of one, but I dropped out of a top public school, immediately started working full-time x 1.5, and ended up with a resume that my now-graduating colleagues are blown away by. A few top companies (Google and Yelp! included) have flat out refused to screen me based on no other conversation than "Oh, I never finished school because _____". Hell, I interned for a large bank and received a great job offer which was promptly rescinded after the right manager found out what everybody else already knew.
It's one thing if I fail the interview process. I get that. I know I have a lot to learn. But the way some of these companies act is just messed up. FWIW, none of my independent clients care.
Hell, I interned for a large bank and received a great job offer which was promptly rescinded after the right manager found out what everybody else already knew.
Yeah, banks (and many big companies) are like that.
I hope this comment doesn't discourage others. I went to a school not known outside of the southeast (and even sometimes not then) and received interviews with many of the top companies (Google, Microsoft, Intel, Amazon, etc), even when I had to check the "other" option for schools.
Curious. What schools are on the list? Would a CS degree from Georgia Tech do? Also curious about VT and NC State. I think all three of those are 'good technical schools'.
"This applicant went to some cow-tipper school called the University of Illinois at Chicago. Claims he had as a thesis supervisor some guy named Daniel Bernstein for his cryptography project... eh, put him in the 'Other' pile. And when he turns in his 8-hour take-home, make sure it's perfect."
FWIW, someone else in this comment thread said they had interviews at top companies without going to a top school.
So don't necessarily count yourself out immediately. Take what I said with a grain of salt.
However, since they do have lists like that (they being unicorn-type companies, I think) they quite likely do use it as a metric- maybe not necessarily a requirement.
I studied Computer Science at NC State. Your experience will depend entirely on what you hope to get out of a CS education:
At some schools, the CS curriculum is focused on "pure" computer science. These curricula are packed full of theoretical CS and rigorous mathematical courses, and are great for people who hope to go into CS research or academia.
At other schools, the "CS" curriculum would be better called "software engineering." These curricula focus on programming and applied CS, giving more "practical" skills for people planning to proceed straight to industry.
At NC State, the undergraduate CS curriculum was a pretty good balance between both. You'll get a mix of both theoretical and applied CS, the downside being that you won't get very deep coverage of either. However, I feel that I was well-prepared to enter industry after graduation, and I've been pretty successful in my line of work.
Here's a small subset of what I studied as an undergrad at NC State:
Theoretical | Applied
-------------------------------------------------------------
Discrete mathematics | Java
Automata theory | C
Computability & complexity | x86 assembly language
Linear algebra | Software engineering
and some courses that offered a healthy mix of both:
Mix
----------------------------
Data structures & algorithms
Operating systems
Computer graphics
Artificial intelligence
Database management systems
Multimedia systems
Human-computer interaction
Of course, there are a lot more courses offered than just these, but this is a subset of the ones I took, along with how I would categorize them. Using your restricted and free electives, it's definitely possible to plan a degree that leans one way or the other: more theoretical or more applied, but the way the required courses are laid out, your foundation will always be a bit of both. There's also a "Senior Design" capstone project, where you're put into a small team (~4 students) and given a project from a local sponsor company. You'll work closely with some contacts at that company on a real-world software project. I formed lasting bonds with my team mates, and we still keep in touch to this day. Two of us were also offered full-time positions at EMC (our team's sponsor company), where I worked for about 2 years before leaving for greener pastures.
Another benefit of NC State is that it's in the NC Research Triangle area, and the Research Triangle Park is only about 10 minutes down I-40 from campus. RTP is home to a TON of tech companies, so there are plenty of opportunities for relevant employment, both for students (internships, co-ops) and for recent graduates (full-time work).
Raleigh is also a great place to live and work. Plenty to do, great job availability, low cost of living, and traffic is never too bad. The only downside is that the public transportation story isn't nearly as good as, say, D.C.'s (the bus system isn't terrible, though -- I generally found that I could get where I wanted to go in a reasonable amount of time, and there are connecting buses that will take you to nearby Durham (Duke) and Chapel Hill (UNC)).
I very much enjoyed my time at NC State, and if I could go back and choose a university again, knowing what I know now, I'd choose NC State again.
I hope this helps! Feel free to ask me questions :)
It might be that the list includes schools where they have visited and presented, etc. Thus they can measure the effectiveness of their intern pipeline development program. I know that is something my company does.
Might be smarter to have a "Where did you hear about this internship?" question instead and have "on-campus event" as a choice.
Its all too common. Probably for the usual reason - it works so well. Many candidates from a 'good school' have been filtered for ability, so essentially come with an endorsement. Those from other schools don't have that endorsement. They may be equally capable, but then again they may not. In fact, often not.
So, discrimination is rampant because it works so well. Its not fair, possibly not legal, but hard to stamp out.
They have a perfect right to use educational background as a filter. But that's not the issue here.
If that's the filter they want to use -- the time to apply it is before inviting the candidate to take 3 days out of his/her life to fly across the country for an interview. If it's such a huge "ding" for them that a candidate doesn't come from a certain set of preferred schools -- fine, don't invite them for an interview. It's really quite simple.
Of it's a "ding", but they want to give the candidate a "shot" -- that's fine too, but there's no need to blatantly neg the candidate right to their face. It serves no purpose; it's just uncivil and unprofessional. (No purpose, that is, other than to give the interviewer an ego rush, and thereby provide a temporary defense of sorts against their own very deeply rooted insecurities. That, and to basically deep-six the candidate's performance, and nullify whatever enthusiasm they might have had for Airbnb during the rest of the, by that point, manifestly pointless "interview").
And the fact that such allegedly highly educated people would so quickly resort to numbskull behavior like this suggests that maybe's it's not such a good filter, after all.
This x1000. Well said. I've gone through the same thing: at one place, for the third(!) onsite, I got to talk to the CEO, who said, "Well why the heck should I hire you, given that [part of history]?!" -- something that had been discussed with each interviewer over the previous two rounds. I wanted to find a diplomatic way to say, "I don't know if you're just probing my ability to sell myself, but if not, and this was such a dealbreaker for you, it might have been a good idea to resolve that before taking me through three onsites, you know?"
If that [part of history] was a brush with law, taking time out to deal with personal problems, or being caught up in a failed business endeavor of some sort -- you can always spin it out as a learning experience, and say some variation of "It wasn't the best choice make, but I think that going through it made me a better, more mature person."
But not knowing what exactly that [part of history] was about, of course we can only speculate.
Nothing at all like that, and I had no problem applying anywhere else. The point is, they shouldn't send you through interviews when they can know they're not going to hire you anyway. (In the context, it seemed like the CEO was just trying to make himself useful by feeling out each candidate for what his gut told him. Whenever I asked him to clarify a question, he would refuse to explain at all, and just say "whatever you interpret that to mean".)
Hmm -- I'm not you, and I wasn't there. But something tells me you're looking at this (retroactively) as a "glass half-empty" thing. As in: "they must have seen some big negatives in me, otherwise they wouldn't have asked that question, about [past history]."
Whereas you could have also looked at it this way: "They must have seen some big positives in me, being as they asked me to come talk to them, knowing full well about [past history]." You know, the glass half-full route.
You're talking about this like I'm some charity case. Again, I don't have trouble finding interest or applying elsewhere and I don't depend on anyone seeing enough "goods" to take a chance on some bum.
I was an internal referral there for an ml position. They rolled a fucking front-end developer who had never looked at my resume into my first interview just shy of 25 minutes late. And yes I'm sure about the time, because I was walking out at 25 minutes. Dude was nice and we had fun chatting (not about work, just a cool outdoorsy dude), but we had nothing in common in the work we do. I finally talked to one of their ml people and absolutely nailed that part of the interview. And talked to a weird founder (who always asks weird questions. That were not a good fit for a quantitative person.)
They then decided they weren't sure if I wanted to work there (apparently because, you know, I'm in the habit of wasting a day of my life interviewing for giggles) and made me have another conversation with an early engineer there. Who was really cool, but still, it was a strange process.
They also low-balled me on cash, and were strange about it when I turned them down and didn't negotiate at all. Someone else offered me $20k more and I figured it was a sign they wanted me so I went with them.
> They then decided they weren't sure if I wanted to work there (apparently because, you know, I'm in the habit of wasting a day of my life interviewing for giggles)
That's not really fair though. Tons of people apply for jobs because they need a job. I've surely done it in the past. I've applied and accepted jobs I didn't give a damn crap about. I had to pay rent, feed 2 kids, and pay my wife's tuition. And even did so with multiple jobs at the same time. Anything else was secondary. I went into interviews, praised the greatness of the ideas of some shitty startups which were doomed to fail. I always showed up prepared and was "professional" (in so far as you can show up and not give a rat's ass, but not let it show), and always tried to show I was invested by having already ideas about their products, website, etc... But still, didn't actually care for that stuff.
So, I was motivated and a good "employee", but was I a good fit? Probably not.
And, on the other hand, I also actually did interview at times just for giggles. Or for practice. Or just in case. Or to get leverage.
And when I was the recruiting, while I surely wouldn't assume that the person in front of me would be "interviewing for giggles" (at first), I can totally understand the "weren't sure if I wanted to work there". Like I answered on another part of this thread: the onus / burden of proof is on you, you are the one who has to show you really want to be there (even though you actually may not).
It's screwed up, but it's how it is, because we also work for money. I know I did often. Still did my best in any job I got though.
(And you should not expect that either, actually. I'm similarly pissed by friends or colleagues who tell me "damn it's like these guys don't care about the job or don't give it all". Well, heck yeah, why would they?)
> "I also actually did interview at times just for giggles."
Then you are an asshole. Seriously you wasted how many people's time for your own amusement? If you want practice or informational interviews there are ways to achieve those without being completely inconsiderate and disrespectful of peoples time.
It fits that you are suspicious of other people based on your own questionable practices. Most normal people don't do this however.
Giggles is not exactly the right word. I didn't make it just to see if I could pass or take a piss at someone.
I don't think anything is a better practice than an actual interview. Doing a rehearsal or workshops won't compare.
But thanks for the insult, random stranger.
Besides, if that was your only take away from my comment, I think you may have missed the main point. Maybe you were too infuriated by that point already.
And I think that when it comes to cumulative time-wasting, the culprit is usually more the interviewer (or the incompetent recruiting agency).
Also, would be interested in having data on the "most normal people don't do this" bit. I know plenty who do or did at some point, across several countries.
That sounds horrible! I have no degree at all, which means that I got exactly where my interviewers are entirely for free. No crushing student loan debt, no heat waste of having to take college classes that have nothing whatsoever to do with my chosen profession. Those who have the audacity to judge a person by their degree deserve to have this advantage flown in their faces, if only implicitly.
Just to add a data point - I interviewed with AirBnB in January 2014 and had a very similar experience.
I was referred by a college classmate and close friend who used to work there at the time, who knows me extremely well, and is easily in the top 1% of engineers I know (Linux contributor, loved by every employer he's ever had, etc.). He told me I totally had the level to work there, and was better than most people he worked with. So I went along with it, and went to their holiday parties, where one of their execs schmoozed with me for a while, told me I sounded like a great fit, and a recruiter would be in touch with me.
I talk to the recruiter on the phone, get assigned a home coding challenge. I spend a Saturday on it, and get a perfect score on it. I don't know if it was by design or not, but it showed me the rankings of every person who ever did that challenge. I was tied for 1st place with 40 or so other past candidates, in a pool of a few thousand participants.
I do their onsite interviews (fortunately I was local to SF) - don't remember much, except that they felt very stilted. But it was the usual "here's a canned problem I know the best answer to, you have 40 minutes to figure it out while I give out cryptic clues". After 3 or 4 of them, I sit in the room alone for about 30 minutes - the recruiter then comes to me and tells me that they won't move forward, bye bye.
My friend met me outside for a smoke, and told me he had no clue what happened. Oh well. AirBnB definitely left a bitter taste in my mouth, but I got a much better gig at a much better company a few months later, so things worked out.
The "good school" thing is an entire topic in itself. You get good and bad from any school, but from what I've found over the years is people want Ivy League or close when they want someone just. like. them. Someone that looks like them, talks like them, thinks like them. They want a person who will be a puppet for management, nothing more.
I have worked with, and currently worked with people who are amazing problem solvers and developers who went to community college or trade schools. Recently I worked with one of the smartest people I've ever known who had no college experience at all. He's so good at his job his makes over 6 figures with a high school diploma with no student loan debt.. how could you not call this person smart?
I definitely wouldn't say that people who come top schools aren't top talent, but it's no guarantee and I think it's silly when people require it.
I think just asking for a degree (in a computer-related field) is kind of a dumb idea. I don't have a degree, and I'm very successful at my software development job. The best programmer I know has a degree in Psychology; another has a degree in Biology.
From my own experience as an interviewer, "has a degree" was absolutely not even a factor when determining who was good and who wasn't.
Whoa... That sounds just terrible. What makes it especially terrible is that they already had you do some coding work before flying you in.
Something is utterly, terribly wrong with their process if the coding exercise made them think that you were worth flying in for an interview and then they cut short the interview process because they thought it was going so badly.
There are other signs that the tech leadership at airbnb is confused. Witness this almost parody of a video of their devs describing how they worked their way through pretty much every javascript hotness de jour through the years. I honestly thought this was some sort of a parody initially...
it's them that should feel humiliated. It's not like you showed up at their door right off the street; you successfully completed their take-home coding problem and i assume at least one prior telephone interview.
One thing you might not realize is that many companies ask a lot of employees to interview people, and therefore they are not well vetted. If an interviewer is terrible, chances are they don't know! Please, let their recruiting department of things like that. If they are not a terrible company, they'll probably do something about it.
Are you kidding me? This actually happened? I understand maybe feeling traumatized but really fuck those people. Its a shame that Glassdoor is such a pile of garbage there should be more of a forum for people to get the word out about such douchey and unprofessionalism. I hate to generalize but I feel like this bratty and completely unprofessionalism seem to be quite common in San Francisco and the Peninsula. I am basing this on interviews I have had and others I've spoken to. This childish behavior is not really common in other parts of the country - It's hard to imagine this happening in New York, Boston or Austin for instance.
How is user generated content "expensively-gathered"? Content comes at exactly no cost to them so yeah it is lame. The data comes from community. Have you looked at the site?
Really? Setting up the site was free? Architecting the systems scalably was free? Popularizing it was free? Getting people to give their information to it was free? Protecting it from spammers and malicious activity was free? Securing it was free? Usefully organizing the data was free? Protection from lawsuits was free?
GlassDoor didn't just put itself together one morning, or a free, open-source one would already exist.
Do you also spread the meme about "Viagra was invented by accident", as if all the clinical testing, information dissemnation, regulatory approval, chemical isolation, etc were accidents too?
This is especially hilarious^W demoralizing when the same company continues to actively recruit across all available channels. Successive waves of aggressive recruiter spam from some of my past "dead silence" rejections continue to cause hilarity^W^W rub salt on the wound to this day.
Respond with "I'd love to start a conversation about this great opportunity, but I'm still waiting to hear back from you about the interview we did 6 months ago!" :-)
This so much. No response is only really acceptable when you sent a job application, and their only communication back to you was an automated email letting you know they received it. If you were actually in communication with someone at the company, they can at the very least give you a two-line "we've decided to move forward with other candidates" message.
I've had rejection emails from huge companies and tiny startups personally written by the hiring manager. It's not that hard.
Yep. I had a company in the Bay Area fly me out for an interview explaining that they'd pay all expenses (as is common). They made me an offer and I went with a different company. They completely ignored my expense submission (they indicated how to submit this previously...basically just send them photos of the receipts and they'd send me a check) and ignored me after I let them know I was going with another offer, so I was stuck with ~$300 in taxi bills (SFO <-> South Bay gets pricey real fast in the days before Uber).
At the opposite end, I had a company fly me out and pay for expenses, and didn't get the job. They followed up a month or two later and sent a check, although by that time my address changed, so I didn't receive it, and told them this after asking my why it wasn't cashed. They sent another one and after procrastinating on cashing it (it was something like $80 worth of Lyft rides), they followed up again at which point I cashed it. Some companies are pretty good at giving a decent interview experience even if they reject you.
Yelp tried this with me, when I was in grad school and $150 was a really big amount. A friend of mine kindly offered to carry the expense report and drop it off with the recruiter when he went in to interview a month later.
Don't give up. Most established companies aren't run by 20-somethings. If the seniors are already in their mid-20s and lack professionalism, then most likely there are other issues going on at this company. You may have dodged the proverbial bullet.