Soft Skills Engineering - Episode 107: Silence After Interviews and Newsletter Politics

Episode Date: April 30, 2018

Dave and Jamison answer these questions: I recently interviewed for a role I was very interested in. I didn’t get the job,and despite several attempts, didn’t receive any feedback on what I could have done differently. I still really want to work there at some point in the future, but have I taken it too far? Have I accidentally burned all of the bridges before I set foot on them? I am a lowly SSE that recently started a tech newsletter at my company. One of the senior VPs (let’s call them “E”) sent out an email to the org asking people to reply to a newsletter survey so that their team can be featured. A senior manager (“K”), was upset his team wasn’t featured but I informed him that he didn’t reply to the original survey. I explained to “K” that he can still send me information for the next issue. “K” then replied back with something very condescending and has now made the newsletter a political device. How should I proceed from here?

It takes more than great multitasking skills to be a great software engineer. This is episode 107 of the Soft Skills Engineering Podcast. I'm your host, Jameson Dance. And I'm your host, Dave Smith. I guess it's 107. It's not one and then the letter O and then the number seven. That's true. I feel like I'm on Sesame Street now.

You also aren't supposed to say the word and when you say 107. Yeah, I think it probably parsed incorrectly on some device now. Does anyone actually have great multitasking skills? uh certain computers do pretty good at it well i said anyone any one computer are you saying well i don't know i'm just wondering if you consider computers people now sometimes only when they rise up and tell me what to do

um okay do you want to read our uh or do you want to do you want to talk about our wonderful patrons yes we'd like to thank our wonderful patrons who contribute at the level that gets them a shout out every week paulino de rocha david jackson chris fitkin ken howard sean clayton and dustin coats thank you so much yeah thank you if you would like to join this illustrious group or just contribute in any way you can go to our website softskills.audio and then click the support the show button on there you can also go to our patreon site directly it's patreon.com slash soft skills eng and we would love it to see your support and thank you all to uh to everyone who's doing it already yep i'm gonna read oh did i just cut off a hilarious

thing you're gonna say nope i never say hilarious things and this was no exception were you about to take a giant bite of food just take a huge breath before you do it it's gonna take some time to chew on this i better breathe early yeah okay i will read the first question this is from a listener chris chris said to pronounce their name with confidence so chris that was good thanks i need someone to tell me say everything with confidence like just say this next sentence with confidence and then i will and then i'll just feel happier in life okay i recently interviewed for a role i was very interested in after nearly a week i got a simple no from the recruiter i was disappointed but i wanted some feedback to

highlight missing skills so I could improve and reapply in the future. After a week, the recruiter was unable to get anything. I called the company thinking I could obtain the email address of the head of engineering and contact him directly. I ended up speaking to the company's internal recruiter, who had been part of my interview panel. I explained to her how disappointed I was and that I wanted to obtain feedback. She told me that this would have to come from the head of engineering, so I gave her all my contact information. After a month had passed with no feedback i wrote the head of engineering a letter an actual letter on paper and everything explaining how much i wanted to come yeah i i can't remember when i last wrote a letter

explaining how much i wanted to come and work for him and that if he would tell me what he was looking for i would focus my efforts on becoming that engineer can you guess what happened that's right nothing happened despite this i still really want to go and work there at some point in the future but have i taken it too far have i accidentally burned all the bridges before i set foot on them wow pre-burned the bridges pre-emptive bridge burning yeah i think you would have had to send the letter before you interviewed there to completely pre-burn them wow well you certainly tried hard chris with confidence you did yeah yeah the confidence shows through in your actions absolutely have you ever tried to get feedback like this from

after an interview oh jameson how presumptuous that you would think i've ever gotten a rejection from an interview tell me more about why you made me this offer please yeah um i'm just kidding i have been rejected and i've never gotten meaningful constructive feedback i've only gotten things like well you weren't a good fit for this role or we were looking for someone with more insert skill name here that i happen not to have uh one time i was rejected for um not having enough usb development skills and then i went on to another job where i wrote a whole bunch of usb code and it was totally successful so that one felt frustrating and then you like emailed it all to them said what now look what you could have had you could have had all this

usb code that i just gave you from my new company yeah i've gotten the feedback that was like we actually decided not to hire anyone for this position and then later on found out that they did hire somebody like i don't know yeah i've just got a i've gotten all of the feedback i've received has been wishy-washy and vague and just unhelpful to me so i don't think this is weird that they wouldn't tell you anything chris it's not weird at all it is unfortunate though yeah i've i've also never heard anyone try as hard as you have to get that feedback i feel like when most people get rejected they just like go away and feel sad instead of kind of doubling down i think chris is a go-getter yeah chris went in but didn't get he's a goer but not a getter yet

but you will become a getter but he got a hold of the internal recruiter you have a bright future social engineering anyway so i i think i think i know why this doesn't happen and it's two reasons the main one is it's hard to tell people why you decided to not hire them right it's it's a rejection of them as a person in some ways and i mean it shouldn't be right like there are different skills that you need for roles but but ultimately you're saying like you don't have these things we're looking for and sometimes those things can be technical skills like not enough knowledge of usb development even though you could learn it in dave's case but sometimes it could be just like we just really didn't like you and that's really hard to tell somebody you can't just say like

i don't know you you like the wrong kind of music or whatever the dumb thing that made them not like he was um so so how do i put it giving people direct constructive feedback is the hardest part of my job as a manager and i spend a ton of time on it and i do it because i'm investing in the people that i work with and so it's worth the amount of time and stress and and pressure doing it to some random person that you don't want to hire is like all of the pain without the benefit i guess um so so i mean most people don't even give constructive feedback to people they work with the default is just to ignore everything until something is bad enough that it explodes so i think yeah i i'm not surprised the other reason is they don't want to get sued like

in their head they're they're thinking anything i say could turn into a lawsuit against me and even if that almost never happens the fact that it does happen is enough to dissuade people from giving clear explicit feedback and if all you say is you were not a good fit then the the common wisdom is that's harder to use to build a case about why you weren't hired because of discrimination or some or some reason that is i don't know the i only know the space lawyer term some reason that allows you to get laser sued oh man yep have you ever given anyone feedback that you declined to hire yeah so i i was thinking back on that i have probably declined to hire i don't know hundreds of millions

the teaming hordes that want to work with dave you just can't keep up with them all if i only count people on earth it's probably only only millions um and only in a few rare cases have i given feedback and i was trying to think why and one time i told someone look you are on track to come work on this team you just need to go make six months to a year's worth of early engineering mistakes at some other company and then come join us and you know what they did six months later they came back and interviewed and got the job wow and uh that was actually after i had left that company so it wasn't even me with my previous biases they came through and legitimately passed the interview and so that was an easy one because

it was like you have a ton of potential at this point we need someone with just a little bit more seniority we don't we are not prepared to provide the mentorship and guidance for someone who's like fresh out of a boot camp or out of college right now but if you had a year of experience under your belt with what the potential you're showing right now we would hire you and you know what we did a year later so that i don't know if it was a year or six months but it was great um but very rarely have i given feedback other than that i will say this though i think that what i'm noticing among the larger companies uh is that they do have feedback to give and they do give it and really yes and what i have noticed you mean like the mega tech companies like the amazon

microsoft google yeah the big you know the big four big five the fang as they say facebook amazon netflix google sure and microsoft okay the m fang anyway based on anecdotal experience from myself and others i've seen that they do get feedback and i believe the reason is is that they have much more structured interviews so the recruiter can actually look at the feedback and say you scored well here and you scored low here um and it's just it's it feels to them i think so objective that they can give that kind of feedback whereas in a little bit like you you studied for a test you got a bad grade here all the questions you got wrong yeah go learn those things to get a better grade next time right which is a lot easier to say than i read your book and i thought

it sucked right yeah i'm not hiring right it's like so much more objective you can like not because the test is necessarily good but because you can at least point to the the deficiencies on the score right yeah and it's much more comfortable to say like this number was low than this trait about you caused us to not want to hire you this unchangeable thing about your core being is bad yeah exactly versus like you you took too long to answer this specific question right you could be like well i'll go get faster at that and i've actually had recruiters say hey dave uh you interviewed this person um can you give them some feedback and i would write a little blurb you know and and because i was assigned a very structured assessment of certain

skills i could say i you know this answer to this question i felt like did not meet our hiring standard you know and and it's pretty much objective and then the recruiter of course i'm sure applies filters to that to prevent us from you know prevent space lawyer laser lawsuits yeah well they only we can prevent those they do their best but underqualified for space lawyering i think that in many cases the company's interview process is so loose and so unstructured that they literally cannot verbalize why they're saying no yeah you have like six people who interviewed you and they all just said my gut says no and you're there like okay that's a no yeah you know that makes a lot of sense i think that's actually

very likely yeah but the fact that you didn't even get any response at all that said at least sorry it's not our policy to share feedback like this we just don't do it you know like at least that would have been a nice professional courtesy yeah i mean maybe someone dropped the ball i don't know the size of the company if it's one of the the m things the famine the famings i don't think so because it said uh chris confident chris has he interviewed the head of engineering so yeah i guess i mean unless chris is like an absolute industry superstar he probably didn't interview the head of engineering yeah of google i've never worked somewhere that had a structured enough process to give to give feedback that wasn't dependent on the people in the interview

process to like go out of their way and write it up um so it could be like you said that there's just a gut feeling that people don't need to articulate beyond like did you want to hire this person no did you nope like and and there's no debate so they don't really dive into it more yeah i i will never ever interview that way again just personal preference now like if i can't be troubled to write down in a way that's quantifiable my feedback for a candidate um so that i can compare it to my other interviewers feedback then i have no business interviewing people i mean that's just if you're just going yeah well you know sounds good this person this my gut says this person is good. Like that is so, that is such a crappy way to interview. Sorry. I know

I was a bit of a tangent. How dare you, sir? How dare you take us on tangents? I have, so there, there are two parallels in my life with this. Um, one, I had one candidate ask me pretty directly for feedback. I haven't, haven't had many people come back and ask for feedback, but this person did and uh the feedback was a little tricky because it was it was basically like you are very overbearing and the team reacted very negatively to that so i wrote them a long email that began with please don't sue us this is why people don't give feedback oh wow please don't sue us but the team reacted negatively to a feeling that you were overbearing that you were trying to tell them what to do instead of understanding the problem that you you weren't

really listening and working together with them and they responded very politely and we're like thanks for the feedback i'll try and work on that and it's helpful wow so that was like a good experience but it was still scary to send yeah because again it was like it was just me this person emailed me and i was like i don't i don't know what i'm doing i'll sure i'll respond i hope this doesn't blow up in my face and then another parallel is i run a conference called react rally oh yeah come to react rally um it's probably sold out by now but you should have bought tickets earlier and as part of that we run a call for proposals process all these people submit their their wonderful ideas for talks and we review them all and then we end up rejecting like 90

of them because we don't have room to accept them all and as part of the rejection i say i'm willing to give feedback if you want and part of that is me feeling guilty for rejecting them and part of that is just wanting to help but that's also scary too right because you're telling people like this proposal you worked on for a long time that you may have given to other conferences even this is why it didn't fit for the conference and it's a ton of work it takes more time than reviewing the proposals figuring out how to collate all the feedback and and do it in a way that's constructive without being hurtful and yeah so it's just a lot of work i think the most comfortable thing to do in a lot of cases is just ignore it and hope it goes away it takes a

effort that's like a good policy for life ignore it and hope it goes away i have this growth on my arm well i'll just ignore it and hope it goes away yeah that works for most people eventually it will as we all turn to dust eventually it will go away yep that growth will also turn to dust oh man that was such a cosmic space lawyer like higher plane attitude right like that will be eight thousand dollars if i ignore your bill will it also go away you know i've tried that and it does for a little while and then it comes back with a it comes back with a guy with a two by four yeah the yeah the phone equivalent of that oh man can i i'll just say one last thing on this which is interviewing people is very hard to do

well and being so good at it that you can give coherent feedback that's actually useful to your interview candidates and won't get you sued afterwards is like next level hard so i wouldn't fault any company for withholding feedback from a candidate that they rejected at the same time boy would it be great for the candidate to have a good sense for why they didn't get the job you know yeah so chris i'd say to you this is normal and i don't think you burned any bridges by doing this if i were on the receiving end of these letters i would be like wow chris is thorough if anything i would think more highly of you even if you know i didn't think you were qualified for the job i was hiring for yeah yeah that's a good point also did you try sending certified return

receipt requested mail because then you'll know if they actually got it i mean you could stock them just show up at their house there's always you could always escalate more right their data is probably in some cambridge analytica place you could just pay money to and find out where they live oh my gosh that would definitely be bridge burned if you show up at the head of engineering's front door oh i've been waiting for you all day yeah just just stick your resume to their front door some ominous red tape or something oh good luck chris yeah good luck shall i read our next question please read it this comes from an anonymous listener who says i am a lowly sse um do you think that stands for senior software engineer or soft skills engineer oh oh all those

people that say they're senior software engineers they're actually soft skills engineers yeah there's an army there's actually a lot there's a lot more truth to that than than i think is on the surface okay yeah you're probably right the s and senior that would be 8 000 more dollars okay let me start over sorry from an anonymous listener who says i am a lowly sse that recently started a tech newsletter at my company one of the senior vps let's call them e and here i'll pause to point out that we're going to have a couple of aliases here as requested by the listener Can we just make up names? Can we call this person Ebenezer?

Oh, that's exactly the same name I was just thinking. What? Yes. Oh, man. Okay, Ebenezer. That one's free then. One of the senior VPs, what if it turns out that Ebenezer is actually this person's name? We just do not, we don't know what their name is.

Yeah, we don't. So it's merely coincidence. Yes, the listener just used letters. Okay, one of the senior VPs, let's call them Ebenezer, sent out an email to the org asking people to reply to a newsletter survey so their team can be featured. a senior manager let's call him them okay okay we wait wait okay they're k we gotta see if we're thinking of the same thing at the at the same time again i'm gonna count down i'm gonna count one two three and then we have to say the name at the same time okay okay ready uh-huh one two

three crispy cream okay we weren't not this time krang from teenage maiden ninja turtles yeah i think so i should have thought of that geez now i feel like an idiot i just came up with a donut shop name okay a senior manager let's call him krang was upset his team wasn't featured but i informed him that he didn't reply to the original survey i explained to krang that he can still send me information for the next issue krang then replied back with something very condescending and has now made the newsletter a political device how should i proceed from here i think i died a little bit inside should i quit did krang reply i'll destroy your precious newsletter if it's the last thing i do

i haven't seen teenage mutant ninja turtles in a long time i'm i feel like he's the brain right the brain inside the guys the robot uh robot guy's stomach yeah i don't remember what he talks like but that's probably what he says i think he has like a really like voice kind of like okay we got it i gotta confirm this we will not be able to insert krang's audio due to copyright constraints i have youtube blocked on my computer for productivity reasons never mind success carry on success it worked it did work actually all right let's uh let's be productive and answer this question wow okay so krang is to'd that his team did not get featured in this month's newsletter and then replied back with something very condescending how do you proceed i mean just

keep going can krang shoot down the newsletter i mean what's i i can see how it would be unpleasant to have this this high muckety muck um supervillain upset at you and think that you're a loser i guess has made the newsletter a political device i don't know what exactly that means a weapon maybe they have a counter a counter newsletter that has like very stark propaganda imagery on it and it's like resist the i don't even know my brain resist unit testing yeah or it just says resist and then like a picture of your face on it i don't know i mean you could turn this right around on on krang and say okay well why don't you give me your info for next month's newsletter and then don't include

it in next month oh i'm sorry that must have slipped through the cracks we'll get you next month you could include like letters to the editor or like anonymous comments in your newsletter and just make them all be about krang the opinions include an advice column yeah yeah it's who cares about the cool products that the company launched here's the time to anonymously dish on each other i have never been in a situation this political in my career i feel like so i don't i don't really know what i would do i feel like people have always been acting with good intentions even if i didn't agree with their actions but i've never had to worry about like offending someone and then them being out to get me or anything it's just like i don't know they thought my idea was dumb

so they didn't want to do it instead of like they yeah they wanted to undermine my authority somehow aren't these just the horror stories though that make engineers not want to stick their necks out and do something cool you know yeah you're right there's a newsletter at my company but it's not it's it's not political at all you just like submit your thing and there's some group that i don't some shadowy power that decides if your thing goes in the newsletter or not and sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't and like that's fine i don't know i think what you just said is there's all kinds of politics going on you just don't know about them yeah maybe i just don't care i've yet to submit a thing to the newsletter so huh well what would you suggest in

this situation dave well so here we have a a senior leader in the company behaving badly is okay i assume that the senior vp ebenezer is technically above krang in the org chart because ebenezer is a senior vp and krang is a senior manager yes that makes sense to me so i mean i guess that's good right the the person who's driving it and backing it could technically just say like go away you lowly peon although they wouldn't but i don't know that you have the backing of someone you could i guess you could just forward the email to evan easer and be like hey just fyi i got some feedback for you yeah just collecting comments on the newsletter here's one how could you be so stupid as to not include my team's valuable confirmation

contributions here even though i didn't send them to you and then you're just like adding adding ebenezer to the thread i don't know that there's much you can do besides say i'm sorry well no you don't want to do a condescending fake apology either i'm sorry you didn't reply to the to the original survey that would just make them more mad i think you just have to remain calm and hope that that calms them down just say i i can't include things i don't know about and you didn't send it if you send it next time i'll make sure to to include it or consider it or whatever i would probably not reply at all i would just okay i would probably say look i have thick skin here's an example and

an opportunity for me to test my thick skin just let this wash under the bridge and then next month's newsletter you can either include you can reach out to them and say hey would you like me to include your content for this week i mean for this month and just pretend it never happened and just i would just move on and that i want to go ahead that senior manager will always wonder like whether that rude remark had any impact or not you know ah so it's like okay it's like the greatest revenge is leaving them in fear yep of like i don't know maybe they're gonna read into every newsletter you send from now on and see if you're if you're backstabbing them yep i want to watch a reality tv show about this newsletter that's what i want there's some meaty drama in here oh yeah

it's good stuff yeah i want to i want to know what happens but i don't i feel like i would do what dave said because i don't know what to do just ask dave and then do what he says just do what dave says i mean that's my go-to um what did we say earlier just ignore it and eventually it'll go away yeah okay yeah done i've ignored it already all right uh have we answered the question i think so i mean i know what i would do which is let it go move on and keep doing a good job don't let this scare you away from making a cool contribution to your organization's culture by having a cool newsletter you know yeah i mean it yeah kudos to you for doing that by the way i didn't say that i think that's a really cool idea it's awesome that you want to help um spread

information about cool things people are doing i agree all right where should people go if they have other um reality tv show pitches that they want to share with us go to soft skills dot audio and click on ask a question share your pitch there and any casting requirements that you have put those in there as well you can't have brad pitt play everyone he's but one man if you want to support the show click on support our show you can give us financial contribution using patreon we'd love it we appreciate you thank you so much you can follow us on twitter at soft skills eng where we tweet about episodes and occasionally share some interesting stuff so feel free to follow us there and our direct messages are open thank you

so much for listening we'll catch you next week bye