The reason you don't get a reply (in the US anyways) is for legal reasons. If you say anything which could be even remotely (mis)interpreted as some sort of bias, your company could lose lots of money/time and potentially go bankrupt due to a discrimination lawsuit.
It's sadly safer to just not reject candidates at all. Don't hate the player, hate the game.
I'm pretty sure laziness would have more to do with not getting a proper rejection than the chance of triggering a lawsuit. If I'm applying to a small to medium sized business in my neck of the woods then nine times out of ten when I don't get a reply its because the hiring manager hasn't taken the time out of their week to get back to me.
When I applied to a local company the hiring manager kept emailing me about how he was "swamped" or some other variation of the word busy and would get back to me in the next few days. He did that for about two weeks before calling me and finding out I had accepted an offer somewhere else.
Heck when I applied to Google the recruiter (who contacted me first) took 5 months to get back to me after I sent in my CV and transcript, apologized profusely, and told me that the reason it took so long was because who ever was handling my case left abruptly without handing off the cases she was working on.
I know these are anecdotal but I have an extremely hard time believing that HR managers in the US are so worried about triggering a discrimination lawsuit that they choose inaction.
Very little, if anything, supports your claim. A quick search on the topic of why recruiters don't follow up with candidates reveals that the vast majority of people in the industry just have a really hard time with the hiring process. Its just plain broken.
Does your company not get back to candidates because they fear a discrimination lawsuit? Someone else's? I would love to know which companies' HR teams or recruiters have discrimination lawsuits at the top of their "things I'm really scared could happen if I reply to a job seeker" list.
Legal/compliance is a significant part of it. That rejection letter has zero upside to the employer and offers many opportunities to screw up.
If a company has: a mature HR process, people who know wtf they are doing, and give a crap, they'll do rejection letters. Most lack at least one of those things.
The guy at your SMB example is some jack of all trades, and dealing your resume is a priority-2 in a sea of P1's. He doesn't have a recruiting process. Google does, but even there it's still dependent on a human making a judgement call about what to write.
What you said about my resume being priority-2 in a sea of P1s is spot on in my opinion. However the OP's assertion about fearing a legal reprisal on the grounds of discrimination is farfetched to me. People don't just go around trying to sue people who send them nasty rejection letter. If the candidate could afford the legal fees then they probably wouldn't be looking for a job.
Also, you don't need to sue. You can file an EEOC or similar complaint to your state/local Human Rights Commission. The process is designed so that you do not need an attorney. You get assigned a hearing officer, they perform some sort of investigation and issues a finding, which can include a variety of remedies.
It's not something to be paranoid about, but when you're a bigger company interviewing alot of people, you want to tie up the loose ends.
This is merely a convenient excuse for companies behaving inconsiderately. Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails, it's clearly one of any number of other reasons why some companies neglect this basic courtesy. The silver lining is, you probably don't want to work for these companies anyway :)
>Since many companies in the U.S. do send rejection emails
Are you able to provide any kind of data backing up that claim?
I am strongly in the "don't hate the player, hate the game" camp on this issue.
This is NOT a basic courtesy but a business process that requires a lot of resources to be at least somewhat meaningful. How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate? Multiply that by 10-100 for every position.
Oh, and I've seen much more nasty replies and general insults than thank yous in response to rejection letters.
I would be in support of rejection letters if the process would be mandated by the hiring platform / shared culture / etc.
Try applying for a position at a large company with a reputation for a highly-engineered hiring process, eg. Google [0]. Rarely will you get specific feedback, but you can expect to get a notification when you are no longer under consideration.
[0] At Google's scale, some candidates fall through the cracks. But their recruiting process does mandate rejection notifications. It'd be great if a Google recruiter would back me up here :)
I interviewed at Google; they said they would give me a decision at some (soon) future point, and they did. They called me during work hours to do it... but they definitely did give me an explicit rejection.
My impression is that rejection letters are fairly common but they're almost universally in the form letter "no fit at this time. Will keep on file" vein.
Maybe some companies do more personalized responses but I've never seen it and I would think it would often be difficult. As with many other things, say picking talks for conferences, you're usually not so much rejecting as you're picking some other person or thing. And, yes, there are a lot of reasons the typical HR department would have issues with brutal honesty even aside from the effort it would take.
At least that is some form of response. My experience with big tech firms is either a request for a phone screen or tumbleweeds. I'd prefer the courtesy of a one line email rejection instead of the application disappearing into a black hole.
As for me, I'm still waiting for a response from the SouthWest Research Institute. I know, I know, most people would have given up by now, since it's been 25 years, but the initial interview went so well....
> How long do you think it takes to write a rejection letter that provides useful, actionable data for the potential candidate?
I see nothing in the post nor this thread that indicates that's what people are looking for. An obvious form letter would be just fine. The point is that a candidate wants to know that the process is over, instead of being left hanging.
I have often found myself working _for_ people who had the same negative experiences at other companies, so not only do all bad hiring practices create negative reputation, they create an entire class of people who would be perfectly happy if you didn't exist at all. :)
On "Who is hiring", you can abstain from upvoting those companies where you had a negative experience (or even downvote them, if you feel that's justified).
I stated on the update about "Who is hiring" that there needs to be a way to track and review the interactions with these companies. Glassdoor doesn't really have a "these guys never bothered to reply to my job application" section. I just went and "reviewed" companies on "Who is hiring" as this community should try to promote those we'd recommend others try to apply and those we don't believe others should waste their time with. Eventually, we'd be left with only quality job postings.
Exactly! And modern HR tech makes rejection en masse so ridiculously easy. So if your company has an ATS that doesn't make it ridiculously easy to reject en masse with a boilerplate message, then you badly need to upgrade your ATS.
(LEGO even sent me a nicely formatted, well-branded letter within 7 business days despite not even making it to the phone screen stage.)
Yes this is all I want.
I track all my applications and what stage I'm at with each company. It makes it incredibly difficult when they can't even be bothered to send me a generic rejection email.
As other said there are plenty of companies that do notify you, personally majority of companies that I applied to do that.
I noticed though that my current company sometimes does it. It typically is when you did not do too well on an interview and effectively failed (or passed with flying colors but you are an international student, and they don't want to sponsor ), but they still won't notify in case they can't find anyone better. From my observation they generally never come back to those candidates.
Changing the port to something other than the default (even to something obvious like 22222) will get rid of all the log spam. You could also use something like fail2ban, but changing the port is much simpler.
oh yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to make it out like I was complaining. I log all blocked traffic, so I get data related to ports other than just SSH. I was more lamenting that people even want to attack my VPS, as there's really nothing interesting about it.
It's not people, though. It's bots! While changing the ssh port adds a comically small amount of security (if any), it isolates you from 99.99% of automated attacks and keeps those logs clean, so I'd recommend it for everyone.
Just remember that the port argument to `scp` is -P and not -p like it is for `ssh`. :p
Yeah, I whitelist IPs, and just drop all other packets, so I'm not really worried, but thanks for the advice, it's always good to get other peoples opinions on best practices.
In that case the suspects could be the ones buying it after it dropped $1, since it went up afterward.
As long as securities react to hacks, there will be a massive incentive to 1) hack, and 2) overstate the hack's significance. Furthermore, as bots become more sophisticated, confusing them becomes easier. If you know bots will short CompanyX when "CompanyX hacked" hits the headlines, then you have an unfair advantage just by being the first to know of the hack.
Some English dialects/accents are historically associated with lower-class people, or people perceived to be stupider/lazier/etc. Which creates all sorts of impressions on another person from the instant you open your mouth.
Many southern US accents have these kinds of connotations, for example, to such an extent that A) a lot of people won't take you seriously if you have such an accent and B) I'm glad mine got drilled out of me as a side effect of correcting for a lisp when I was a child.
You're not correct. There are accents strong enough in both SC and the UK to befuddle the other. Heck, even within SC it'd be hard for some northern transplants to understand rural drawls, and within the UK it's not unknown for Londoners to wonder at Glaswegians (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=91Tj7eezFJ8).
I don't know about that. I had difficulty understanding people from different parts of my own home state (Kentucky). I grew up in the Louisville area, and had difficulty understanding people from the eastern part of the state.
I have also had severe difficulty understanding some of my wife's family, who are from Maine.
And now I work with many people from the UK. I tend to find that if the person is from the south, I have few problems understanding them. The further north someone is from, the more difficulty I have with them. Some of my Scottish coworkers are, for me, almost impossible to understand.
I've had similar experiences. I once encountered a somewhat drunk Acadian man when I was in Texas. It was several minutes before I figured out that he was, in fact, speaking English.
Years after they left Georgia, my parents still liked to tell us about the time they were introduced to bald eggs: the third time the waiter asked very slowly, "Would you like some boiled eggs?"
I was born in Philadelphia and now live in Atlanta. Once while driving from Atlanta to Athens I picked up on the radio a man talking about how everyone should come down to the Wal-Mart parking lot and have some "bull penis". I knew that couldn't be what he was saying... it turned out he was talking about "boiled peanuts".
Will there be a way to buy a digital download of it?
I recently wanted to bootcamp my Macbook Pro to play some games Windows-only games. I went to Microsoft's website and looked at the options for buying Windows 8. The only options were a retail DVD which would be shipped (and I don't have a DVD drive) or to upgrade from Windows Vista/Windows 7 which I had neither of.
I ended up pirating it because I couldn't figure out how to get a legitimate copy that I could actually install. :(
I haven't used Windows since XP, and 8 is really nice. I'm legitimately excited for Windows 10 especially due to all the open sourcing of .NET-related code recently.
I would not recommend installing windows 10 on a Mac to play games at this moment, I did it using boot camp and it was horrible, poor driver support for my video card (rMBP) so I end up installing a windows 7 which gives me about 3 times more fps per game compared to w10, and about twice as fast as windows 8.1, also my mouse seems lagging when gaming in both 8.1 and 10, works perfect on 7 thought.
Thanks for the tip. I've been playing games on Windows 8.1 without any noticeable issues, but I will keep this in mind. I'll likely not upgrade this pirated copy of Windows 8.1 to 10 (since it literally only has Steam installed), but I will buy 10 to run it in a VM for development.
You can get a digital download of the Technical Preview now - I'd do that. They've announced that Windows 10 will be free to all Technical Preview participants. That way you can upgrade to the latest version and away you go.
I'm running the Windows 10 Technical Preview on a 2013 MacBook Air, solely for gaming. So far I've only played Halflife 2, and it's much better than under OSX. I had to force it to run windowed, rather than true full screen, because full screen had some issues. I don't notice the tiny window bar once I've started playing.
The Technical Preview is free and easy to setup with Bootcamp, so you may as well give it a shot.
Were these guys a very small shop? Any info on which exchanges they bidded on? The RTB company I worked at was considered "small" and we were handling around 300,000 requests/second with 15ms max time per request spent in our systems between just Google and Facebook's exchanges.
Maxmind - good. Not like there's many choices here, though. :)
Instead of "waking up to sync logs", consider using something like NSQ to emit events as they happen. You can scale the number of servers/processes generating messages and the number of workers consuming those messages (and committing them to your database) very easily.
You could also replace the writing of the transaction log with a NSQ event. It lets you avoid having to write and scale the log shipping stuff.
We precalculated which ads a given user was eligible for and a separate process was contacted when a bid request came in to get the info for the ad to show. We never had to do anything funky to do geotargeting exclusion at scale.
Instead of having your adserver connect to a database, have a separate process generate a working set (as JSON or whatever you fancy), compress it, and ship it to the adserver periodically. The adserver can just do a straight load from the file every minute or whatever interval you'd like. If the file's mtime is too old, raise an alert and stop serving ads if necessary. Keeping things separate and simple lets you scale more simply. Our working sets were on average about 2gb uncompressed and they could be loaded in a few seconds (C++/JSON and later Go + JSON).
Seems like it was a fun project and I hope you learned a lot!
Anycast will spread incoming requests out to N physical machines, then you can do your layer 3 load balancing, then you can do your SSL termination and HTTP load balancing.
We didn't use anycast, though. I suggested it to our CTO many times and it would have saved us over $5,000/mo in DNS costs, but it never got done.
Even if a single box would be capable to handle that many requests, you should never have just one box to be the main entry point to your server (failsafe).
I also suspect he refers to 300k distributed across multiple datacenters.
It's more like being mad at the owner of a particular newspaper for allowing/turning a blind eye to/actively encouraging certain kinds of content to be printed in said newspaper.
Your analogy would fit if Zed was directing his post at the creator of the "online forum" in general.
It's sadly safer to just not reject candidates at all. Don't hate the player, hate the game.