<story><title>I don’t know how to count that low</title><url>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/koGbEwgbfst2wCbzG/i-don-t-know-how-to-count-that-low</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ragnese</author><text>And I wonder how often a candidate actually follows up to ask why they failed and whether many interviewers will give honest&amp;#x2F;complete answers.</text></item><item><author>zomglings</author><text>No one knows why they &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; failed her on the interview. Have run many interviews, and it is very rarely the case that you fail a candidate for one technical slip up.</text></item><item><author>missblit</author><text>&amp;gt; I didn’t know the limit because it had been many years since I’d had a problem that could be solved with a DB small enough to be held in its entirety in memory. And they were right to fail me for that: the fact that I was good at solving strictly more difficult problems didn’t matter because I didn’t know how to solve the easier ones they actually had.&lt;p&gt;No way it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; to fail an interviewee because they wondered outloud if a dataset can fit in memory. A candidate should be able to estimate the answer, but beyond that it&amp;#x27;s trivia that can be researched as needed -- indeed even asking the question is a positive signal not a negative one (it&amp;#x27;s not just people with &amp;quot;google scale&amp;quot; background who reach for over-complicated solutions).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>gwbas1c</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d never give a detailed answer, because I don&amp;#x27;t want future candidates to cheat. The last thing I want is for someone to share my interview, and then I can no longer filter out bad candidates. It takes a super-long time to write a good interview.&lt;p&gt;But, more importantly, very few candidates fail on a single question. They usually fail on patterns: Poor comprehension of the task at hand, too many snap judgements, or lack of professionalism.&lt;p&gt;(Another reason, though, is that I&amp;#x27;ve rejected a lot of people who I believe shouldn&amp;#x27;t be software engineers. It&amp;#x27;s not my place to tell them they should pick another career, nor do I want to make it easier for them to bluff their way to becoming someone else&amp;#x27;s headache.)</text></comment>
<story><title>I don’t know how to count that low</title><url>https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/koGbEwgbfst2wCbzG/i-don-t-know-how-to-count-that-low</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>ragnese</author><text>And I wonder how often a candidate actually follows up to ask why they failed and whether many interviewers will give honest&amp;#x2F;complete answers.</text></item><item><author>zomglings</author><text>No one knows why they &lt;i&gt;actually&lt;/i&gt; failed her on the interview. Have run many interviews, and it is very rarely the case that you fail a candidate for one technical slip up.</text></item><item><author>missblit</author><text>&amp;gt; I didn’t know the limit because it had been many years since I’d had a problem that could be solved with a DB small enough to be held in its entirety in memory. And they were right to fail me for that: the fact that I was good at solving strictly more difficult problems didn’t matter because I didn’t know how to solve the easier ones they actually had.&lt;p&gt;No way it&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;right&amp;quot; to fail an interviewee because they wondered outloud if a dataset can fit in memory. A candidate should be able to estimate the answer, but beyond that it&amp;#x27;s trivia that can be researched as needed -- indeed even asking the question is a positive signal not a negative one (it&amp;#x27;s not just people with &amp;quot;google scale&amp;quot; background who reach for over-complicated solutions).</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>zomglings</author><text>Very rarely. And they shouldn&amp;#x27;t trust any answers that they receive.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s difficult to give an honest answer to this question even if you &lt;i&gt;want&lt;/i&gt; to be honest.&lt;p&gt;There are often so many little reasons that go into a rejection -- different reasons for different interviewers all feeding into an activation function that leads to a rejection or an acceptance (default state depends on team culture and how well you filter out candidates at the top of the funnel).&lt;p&gt;For most candidates, it&amp;#x27;s very hard to distill this into actionable criticism.&lt;p&gt;Edit: For anyone fundraising, this is also why you shouldn&amp;#x27;t listen too carefully to the reasons that investors give you when they reject your business as an investment.</text></comment>