two-way interview

Sometime in my career, I was interviewing at a company while having no significant reason to leave my (at that time) current employer. I used a programming language I was fluent in and was no longer a fresh graduate.

I thought the interview went well (phone screen on browser-based editor). Wrote tests, debugged unexpected behaviors, applied duck typing a la Ruby.

Several days later, I received an email from the recruiter saying that my specific skillset wasn’t strong enough for their current need.

Reading the reason sounded odd to me, so I followed up for feedback to which the recruiter agreed. We scheduled a phone call for the next day.

On the phone call, they said (paraphrased):

We thought you performed well in the interview – you gave simple approach to designing the objects, wrote tests, followed through debugging successfully, and showed good understanding in the language. However, it seemed that you had to go back-and-forth on understanding the prompt and wrote too many unnecessary methods.

I can come up with justification why I did what I did, though I don’t think I would ever use such metric to measure someone’s fit (or worse, turn them away). There is no fair judgement that I can infer from someone’s code style or how many questions were asked.

This is perhaps the 2020 version of Google’s brain teasers interview questions which establishes the same goal: gatekeeping. Not necessarily about commenting on code style, but rather using bogus reasons to imply that somoene is not strong enough.

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With that being said, I personally would give the benefit of doubt to the interviewer in this case. I find it more convincing to think that the above scenario is a symptom of bigger problems.

Some possibilities which may fit:

• they look up to senior engineers who turn away people using such reasons, hence thinking these behaviors are included in the packet of things they should aspire to be
• they had a bad experience being turned away with such feedback and now they associate it with improvement
• they thrive in such environment, such that when you’re part of a system, you’re incentivized to consider that system is fair

I would like to emphasize that they in the list above is an interviewer as persona, not referring to any company or any individual.

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What this incident has taught me is that asking for feedback is important to get a full picture, because sometimes you’d realize that you probably don’t want to work there anyway.

Remember that when employer interviews candidate, the candidate is also taking notes of the employer.