Accepted and ghosted: interviewing for a leadership position at Stripe

To the first point, of “I only need 20 minutes for this” that’s a classic get out of jail free card if they’ve decided you’re not a good fit or things aren’t going well. It manages your expectations and they can end the interview early.

So they start the interview by lying to you in case they need it later?

That's unacceptable, in my opinion.

I work at a company that grew more than 10x in under 2 years from a couple dozen engineers to hundreds. I personally interviewed well over 100 engineers. My time was valuable, but not so valuable that I couldn't spend an hour productively with each candidate. And certainly not by making them feel like it's an extended failure. On the super rare occasion that someone was gigantic "no", it's still possible to make the candidate feel valued.

One time, I had to shut down an interview cycle because a candidate was abusive to one of my reports. That's the only time I've cut a round short.

If somebody is a no-hire, what favour are you doing them by extending the interview loop to the end? You're just wasting their time at that point. (Though I've never heard of an interview slot being cut short like that based on a couple of questions. If the interviewers are habitually preparing for that, it is just insane.)

> It manages your expectations and they can end the interview early.

Do you mean they can end the interview earlier than 20 minutes, or that it actually takes more than 20 minutes but they can end it at 20 minutes mark?

Either case it doesn't sound good. If they said 20 minutes it shouldn't take much more or much less than 20 minutes.

This was also said in the post-loop interview. After I was approved and congratulated. Makes zero sense in my book.

I once interviewed someone, who clearly had no programming experience. They had someone else complete the screening take-home coding exercise for them.

We spent the whole hour interview making zero progress on the task assigned. I kinda wish I had setup some kind of get-out-of-jail situation so that I could have saved everyone the time, but I sat though the whole hour just out of the embarrassment of ending things early.

I interviewed someone once who refused to try my problem. I don't know what was going on for him that day, but after the quick intro to the problem, he didn't want to do it. I was the last one on his interview schedule, so I walked him out and got 30 minutes back.

I mean, I can imagine situations where it's appropriate, but like you said, I think it says more about the company if it's a common occurrence. For the types of interviews my company does, they're designed not to suck, even if you're not knocking it out of the park.

Most of the sessions are collaborative solution design exercises. The interviewer can drive the solution, if necessary, and hopefully it's at least educational. The remaining session is a behavioral interview centered on the candidates accomplishments. It's usually possible to set least draw out what the candidate is proud of from their career.

I always put some “wrap ups” in my interview. Logical points where, when they stall or give a terrible answer, you can ask, “is there anything else?”, let them say something else, and just say, “Thanks! I think that’s a great place to stop, is there anything you’d like to ask me?”. I practice saying it with a smile, and don’t diverge from the script. Makes it much easier to end bad interviews.

That is extremely unprofessional and a bad look for the interviewer. I have done over a 100 interviews including some really bad ones, never have I ever cut one short. When you are interviewing you are representing the company, whenever I interviewed someone even if I knew it was going to be a clear no, I tried to make them feel good about the process as what that person is going to go out and say directly reflects on the company and future hires. 20 mins of your time is a drop in the bucket in terms of impact of getting a bad reputation, not only are you potentially shooting yourself in the foot with other candidates but leaving a bad taste in the mouth of the one you are interviewing who might in the future would otherwise reapply at a different stage in their career if/when they become a stronger candidate.

Hm, sometimes when I’m interviewing someone who I know is a “no” it feels like I’m leading them on if I go through the full interview. I thought it would be more respectful of their time to let them know that early, but maybe I am wrong about that?

I’ve also heard (via HR) about candidates being surprised to not get the offer in cases where I kept the interview going and pretended things were going well.

Yes, I'd like to order a few truckloads of people like this guy for the workplace please.

And yes, I still name the company when I tell the story of my worst experience interviewing at a company, 30 years ago.

The interviewee already has their schedule booked off during that window, that extra 20 mins is not saving them any time. If your concern is their time, I would assume they'd "waste" more time stewing on an early interview exit and thinking about it rather than if it just ended normally.

that's unprofessional and shitty behavior. if the interview isn't going well and you want to cut it short, you can find some spine and say so.

Finish the interview, and provide feedback if asked why it was a 'no'.

Interviewing isn't just for fun, and even if you don't get the job, you can go through the interview to practice, and hopefully to figure out what went wrong.

If after 20 minutes they just say 'I think this is a no so go home' I wasted a lot more than 20 minutes and got nothing out of it.

I run a fast growing, succesful business. I only schedule first interviews for 30 minutes anyway and rarely use the whole time. It's just my nature, I get to the point of things quickly.

I agree that ending an interview early is a no-go. However if it's an onsite/process with multiple interviews, I think the fairest approach (and I've done this in the past) is to manage expectations ahead of time that the full interview sequence only happens if you pass each one.

This way you don't waste the candidate or your time if it's clearly a no after interview 1. They feel a bit bad because they obviously didn't pass, but if you've communicated ahead of time it's not a rug-pull.

Yes. When I was very inexperienced I still remember being interviewed by an extremely big dog in the open-source world (he was VP of engineering at a very successful startup). I was probably about a 3/10 in terms of quality of interview answers, and unsurprisingly didn't get the job.

Despite that, he still managed to make me feel good about the whole experience. At some points in the interview where I was close/slightly off he'd first coax "that's quite similar to X or Y, don't you think?" then if that didn't work he'd coach "here's how X works, elegant explanation, ok, let's talk about Y".

I remember this vividly years later with a smile. Just like I remember all the negative experiences where people were dismissive or ghosted.

Providing feedback is usually not a thing because of liability.