The setup for this - the clause saying that if you didn't sign an exit agreement within sixty days the company would reclaim your equity - was in the equity plan and grant documents: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1791584341669396560
Hey! I'm the article author, and I didn't write about what the Media Lab was thinking to give them "cover". As I put it in the article, the Media Lab's actions were so horrific that it brings into question the whole philosophy behind anonymous donations. So why take a close look at their justifications? Well, a couple reasons. Firstly, I think it's interesting when smart people argue themselves into incredibly bad decisions that anyone could've warned them against. It's an easy failure mode to fall into, and looking in gruesome detail at some cases where other people fell into it has taught me a lot about how these failures happen.
Secondly, I think that condemnation hits harder when it's the result of sincere engagement with someone's justifications. Yep, I listened to you when you said why you did it. And you were wrong. It's not always worth taking that step, of course, but in a big case like this, I think it is.
Hey HN, I'm the author of this article (also the precursor predicting this, which was on the front page yesterday). My impression is that the best place to look for an explanation is actually the facebook post by Luciano Floridi: https://www.facebook.com/floridi/posts/10157226054696031. My sources at Google just couldn't see the panelists constructively working together on a panel at this point. Obviously, protests by Google employees played a role too.
So the thing is, I think arrogance is typically reflected in actual deficiencies in interview performance. If it isn't - if it's just a vibe that the interviewer got with no concrete implications for how they work with others, solve problems, or communicate - then I worry taking it into account is introducing bias. If I can't think of a concrete implication that the arrogance had, then I don't think I want to take it into account. (You almost always can identify concrete effects, though.)
We don't have the project track anymore, because most candidates weren't willing to do it and it wasn't successfully predicting hires. (There's actually a blog post about this upcoming). We have generalist, front-end and mobile tracks but none of them involve take-home work anymore.No matter which one you do, the feedback will be a lot more thorough than we were able to be two years ago.
For arrogant, I'd try to make the feedback as concrete and specific as possible - "sometimes you gave confidently wrong answers. If you're guessing, it's better to tell your interviewer that. Interviewers typically won't hold it against you if you guess and guess rightly, but if you don't acknowledge you're guessing and get things wrong, it raises questions about whether you know what you don't know." or "sometimes it's great to ignore the spec because you have something better in mind, but on an interview it's typically better to demonstrate your creativity and knowledge while still building to the spec - it makes it easier for us to evaluate you" or "when talking about your last company, you said some things that came across as disdainful about your coworkers. It'd be better to highlight your achievements."
All of those are ways being arrogant can manifest, but they're much more actionable than 'you were arrogant' and unsurprisingly get received a lot better.
I wouldn't comment on smell - yes, that's valuable feedback a candidate really ought to hear from someone, but the risk of really angering them is too high for me to feel comfortable with it.
All the ways I discussed in the article - more nuanced, more thorough, more detailed, more focused on constructive advice you can take to your next interview. Plus, we've just improved our process in general so you aren't tested on skills you don't need. It's easier to give constructive feedback about an interview process you have a lot of confidence in, and much of the work we've put in as a company over the last few years has been designing an interview we think really works.
Yeah, another disadvantage of feedback is that some people really resent suggestions on how to improve - they can come across as condescending. I definitely would rather get feedback to someone who wants it even if this annoys someone who didn't, but I think lots of companies are making the opposite tradeoff - and that's part of why feedback is so rare in the industry.
I did a degree in symbolic systems (CS + philosophy + linguistics; I have some CS background but less than I'd have gotten from a CS degree), I did one software internship, and Triplebyte was my first job when I graduated. I'm sure every candidate I send feedback is a stronger engineer than I am, but I do have some technical background. Most engineers want to write code all day, not emails, but I think a technical background does help us do our jobs.
I think it's a pretty good starting point. I also like Cracking the Coding Interview and I think there's definitely a place for timed coding challenge sites like leetcode - especially if you've been in a role where you're mostly working on larger-scale problems rather than on producing smart, working code quickly on the fly.
My understanding is that as long as you're not discriminating against candidates on the basis of race, gender or some other protected category membership, and as long as your feedback reflects that by being focused on the technical abilities the candidate demonstrated during the interview, you're not actually at all that much risk. Of course, if you are illegally discriminating, or if your feedback suggests that you are by giving feedback on candidate appearance or something (never do that), then you're absolutely better off not sending it.
Article author - I'm on the writing team at Triplebyte. Most of what we do is summarize candidates' technical performance for their introduction to companies, but we also send feedback to everyone who takes our two-hour interview. I took this responsibility over from our first engineer, who built a bunch of software to make the process faster - it lets me quickly autogenerate emails by clicking all the resources I want to include, and then highlights the things that require more careful review. (So the people who accuse me of being a robot are half-right, I guess.)
No engineer taking a role like this is going to expect an onboarding process. Many of them are specifically drawn by the idea they'll get to sit down and solve a problem on day 1.
> "opponents have argued that prisoners do need real wages to be able to buy basic necessities other than food in the prisons"
This seems like a problem even if prisoner wages are raised. If we incarcerate people, we should provide them with toothbrushes even if they can't/won't risk their lives fighting fires for a pittance.