You know you applied to a good company if they are willing to give you feedback.

I have never gotten an answer to that question. However when I was on the hiring side I did gave that answer multiple times. It was not uncommon for candidates we rejected to ask that question, and I would usually reply with specifics of their interview, we had them do a take home and had an interview going over that and some other topics, here are some examples that I remember (obviously I worded these a lot more politely, and sometimes mentioning that it wasn’t bad on its own, but other candidates were better):

• Your code didn’t have any tests, when asked about it your answer was dismissive towards the concept of TDD.

• There were several security issues with your code, none of which you were able to spot or discuss.

• Your code was illegible, variables and functions had no identifying name and functions had high cyclomatic complexity.

• Your code didn’t do what was asked for the take home, it was missing important parts, so it was impossible to properly evaluate you.

• Your code was excellent, but you couldn’t explain any of it, when asked to guide us through the flows you only read the functions line by line, never describing the flow in a big picture manner, even after several prompts from us.

Some of those might seem stupid, but this was a senior position and we had better candidates, so I tried to point to specific stuff that differentiated the candidate we hired from them.

There are also two special cases I want to point out, once a candidate didn’t had anything bad in it’s code but he was VERY annoying, as in refusing to answer anything, down talking to us for asking obvious questions, etc, luckily he didn’t asked why he wasn’t hired, because the answer would have got to be a generic “not a good fit culturally”. The other was a guy who had a very obvious SQL injection bug in an endpoint, that on its own would not disqualify him, since even senior engineers make mistakes, but we started our talk discussing security and specifically SQL injections, when we got to that endpoint I tried to prompt him to spot it, he didn’t, eventually I outright told him “there’s an SQL injection bug here, can you spot it” and his answer was “no there isn’t”, so I asked him to open his browser and access something like http://localhost:3000/endpoint/wrong and explain to me why he had gotten the answer he did (expecting him to realize that he was putting he table name directly into the SQL without parsing), he came up with an excuse that it was because wrong wasn’t a table and his code was correct and secure, so I built an url that would inject DROP ALL TABLES and asked him to open that and explain the response, he gave the same speech of that’s not a real table so my endpoint is correct, and then I asked him to look at his database now and explain why it was empty. That guy also didn’t ask why he wasn’t hired, but I’ll always remember the interaction, it felt so surreal to tell someone there’s a security flaw here and his answer being “no there isn’t” without even questioning if he was right, that’s not the sort of people you want in your team.

My buddy asked for feedback once. The recruiter said, “We passed because of the words you said.” That was it. 😐 Say better words next time guy.

One time. It was a niche photo development place in Orlando. They said they went with someone with more experience.

Apparently during my interview I went on a rant about my current boss and working conditions and that rubbed them the wrong way. I think they were asking me what I was looking for in a new role. ¯\(ツ)/¯

In some countries, including the United States, potential employers are not going to tell you why they didn’t hire you because they don’t want to open themselves to potential litigation. Any information they give you could be used if you decided to sue them for discriminatory hiring practices, even if they aren’t actually doing that. The less information you have, the safer they are. And it’s not a question of whether they would lose the lawsuit, but whether they would have to pay a lawyer thousands of dollars to fight it. So any smart employer will STFU.

Also, they have no duty or moral obligation to tell you anything. If you want to know why you didn’t get hired usually you can do so by talking to a friend or acquaintance who works in the field. Show them your resume and the job posting, and they can tell you if there are obvious weak points. If there aren’t any obvious weak points, either the job listing was vacuous or there were too many applicants. Or else the application process is set up like total shit in which case you don’t want to work for that company anyway.

Yes. And the reason was I mentioned wanting to go back to school in a couple years. They wanted someone who could give them a ten-year commitment.

The company shuttered eighteen months later.

The only time I have ever heard why I didnt get hired was as a teen when GameCrazy was still a thing and I knew the manager personally. He told me the system itself did shit and gave him basically 3 flags: Red for do not hire, Yellow for a maybe, and Green for hire them immediately. All my applications were yellow and corporate didn’t think they needed anyone new.

He at least gave me the commission he would have got when I talked a kid out of buying a used copy of Chromehounds for a brand new Steel Battalion, though.

I’ve been doing interviews for lots of years and in several companies. I give feedback to the hiring manager who is supposed to sugarcoat it a bit and forward it, but most of times there’s not much to say beyond “that’s not the right guy”.

I rejected good candidates just because I knew that the final interview would reject them anyway for some secondary aspect that happens to be valued a lot by a manager. I also rejected good candidates because I was convinced they would not like the job and leave in a year.

It’s not always a matter of skills and it’s not always something you can put in a formal reply.