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my interview experience with hashicorp

Stardate 2022-06-14

I figured I would write about my relatively recent experience interviewing at Hashicorp.

I had a friend who referred me to an open position at Hashicorp and figured I would apply just to see what the job would be like. For context, my current employment is great and I had zero sense of urgency to move to a different company. Having said that, I figured it might be fun to go through the interview process at a well known SV tech company and who knows, maybe it would be something I was really excited about.

Spoiler: I didn't make it very far.

I had a very nice chat with one of their recruiters. Everything seemed to line up -- they almost always do at this stage -- and so I moved on to the next part of the interview.

The next stage was to chat with a product manager. I liked him, we got along very well and seemed to have a great conversation. It eventually came out that the position I was applying for was primarily front-end (which is a strength of mine) and their FE stack is all ember.js (not a strength of mine). I'm not sure if this part of the conversation took a turn for the worse, but he didn't really ask me any follow up questions about my experience with ember. I did remember saying something to the effect of:

The recruiter mentioned that I could use react for the technical challenge so I figured at least some of the codebase was using react.

To which he responded:

No it's all in ember.

At this point I definitely lost some interest in the position and upon reflection wonder if my demeanor changed and that's the reason for the rejection? Regardless, I figured they were not picky about technology choices since they offered alternatives to ember during the technical interview. The interview ended and I went about my day.

I didn't hear anything from them for a couple of days -- which is usually a bad sign when they have a team dedicated to hiring. I eventually received a call from the recruiter saying they were *not* going to move me forward to the next step. I asked for feedback, she didn't have any to give. Whenever you get rejected it's never a great feeling but I always force myself to perceive the experience as an opportunity to improve. Whether it's my communication style, the way I answered questions, or the questions I should have asked. I want to be my best self and feedback, even though it's hard to hear sometimes, is an invaluable aspect of self-improvement.

I decided to reach back out to my friend who works there to let him know I was rejected. I indicated that they didn't have any feedback for me and he took it upon himself to figure out what happened. A couple of hours later I received a message:

So they didn't want to say why they rejected you but you should feel free to apply again at a later date.

I don't get why companies are so apprehensive to provide constructive feedback. Simply "we are looking at other, more qualified applicants" or "you are a react fanboi" would be sufficient. There was no reason provided and they were being a little secretive about it. Maybe it's about liability or they don't want any opportunity for the applicant to be confrontational? It was nice to get a rejection phone call even though an email would be sufficient since it was pretty clear that they wanted to cut off all further communication.

Hashicorp is doing some amazing things in the open source community and I would have enjoyed being part of it. Having said that, after the two phone calls I had with the company, it was becoming more clear that this wasn't the right company for me. It was too large of an organization for my taste and the entire process felt very rigid. Also the way they responded to me asking for feedback was awkward and off-putting.

To Hashicorp and other companies that are hiring: Please provide constructive feedback to your applicants. Even if they get the job, providing constructive feedback is such a valuable mechanism for growth on both sides. I learn a lot both when providing and receiving feedback. When providing feedback, it requires me to really understand my rationale and clearly communicate it. When receiving feedback, it requires me to have patience and mental dexterity to be better.

Want to chat? email me at gemlog@erock.io

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