DEV Community

Discussion on: DISCUSS: Technical Interview Horror Stories

Collapse
 
chechenev profile image
Maxim Chechenev

Recently I spent 10+ hours (I wish I didn't do this) for a frontend home task for a quite big modern company, made it very accurate and beautiful, covered by different tests. Sent it to the company, they told me something like: "cool, we will come back to you in 1-2 days".

Nothing happened in 2 days. Nothing happened in 1 week. I sent a polite follow-up email just to check it because I understand that something could happened and their devs just don't have time. (but hey, just say it). And finally I received a default rejection email without providing any reasons why.

I strongly believe that it's beneficial for candidates to know why they were rejected. Besides, why candidates have time (like 10+ hours) for the task but company doesn't have 5 mins to explain rejection reason?

So I asked for more detailed feedback. Again, my email was ignored for a while. After a week I sent a little bit more aggressive reminder and I received an answer immediately and it was so weird:

"I had issues with my mailbox and had to use the external tool for "cleaning" and unfortunately about 20 candidate emails were deleted as well. I've figured it out only today after a couple of more emails like yours :( So my apologies for this long period of silence! "

Really? Hey, just say that you missed my email. That long overcomplicated explanation looks extremely fake, I won't ever believe into it.

And I don't even tell that detailed feedback wasn't even close to detailed feedback. It was just vague generic words "we didn't like your styling approach, not a pixel perfect". Do I need to tell that "mockup" was a png screenshot file? Did I go back to ~10 years ago when I used ruler tool in Photoshop to get all sizes?

I'm totally fine if they didn't like my solution, but, hey, add some humanity to your process, don't treat me in that old-fashioned way.