One idea is to score candidates on many measures (100?) and make use guessed weights to guide initial hiring decisions. A decade later the organisation can compare the initial assessments against the hires subsequent progress up the organisation. This leads to a re-assessment of the weights.

Notice that the new weights were computed from the poputation of hires, not the population of candidates, and the hires were chosen using the old weights. The new weights are causing the organisation to hire people that it would have rejected in the past and it has no solid data on how those people would have performed in the organisation - it didn't hire them! There are other problems. The whole approach has too many parameters to calibrate it reliably from the data available. The linearity implicit in a weighted sum is implausible, a more sophisticated model with the number of variables squared or cubed is clearly required. The time scale on which the success of the hiring decisions becomes apparent is long, decades. It is the time scale on which things change. So the new scientific weights might be no better than rebooting the whole process with new, guessed weights.

My point is that organisations don't have substantial reasons for their hiring decisions. They have a process because they are forced to chose, and they consequently have procedural reasons for their hiring decisions.

A small organisation, such as Fog Creek, that has scientifically trained personnel, may be well aware that it hires the wrong people. Those in charge know that they hire the wrong people and that they cannot fix the problem. They also know that business is competitive, they only have to do better than their competitors, and since the problem is pretty much impossible, their competitors cannot fix it either.

The serious answer to the hiring question is "We don't know how to chose. We make wild guesses and then pretend that we have good reasons for them so that we don't feel too bad afterwards. The whole topic is really embarrassing. You shouldn't have asked."

It's different from how Joel presents his philosophy of business. For a person, it would be hypocrisy. For a company, it's more accurately described as inconsistency (because there's no evidence whatsoever that Joel had anything to do with HR's decision not to inform me). Which is probably inevitable when a large number of people are involved (moving parts -> inconsistency). I wouldn't hold this against any specific individual. I'm sure most of the individual people at FC are great.

I'm not asking for anyone to say anything "good" or "bad". There is no good or bad. There's the truth, and I'm asking for the basic courtesy of telling it straight. And yes, you can say "you came off as arrogant in your phone interview". I'm an adult; I can handle it.

There's not a whole lot of people who are going to like what a potential employer has to say about them if they have been rejected. They have no way of gauging how someone will react and there is virtually zero benefit to providing any feedback whatsoever. This has nothing to do with management style; it's just common sense.

All of your suppositions assume that the potential employer knows and understands all of your motivations! They don't. Maybe you're a wonderful, stand-up guy. But maybe you're not. They have no way of knowing for sure. So it's only natural for them to assume that some applicants may give them grief if they provide an "honest answer" as to why that particular applicant was not hired. Whether or not you, specifically would cause them grief is totally and completely irrelevant unless, perhaps, they have an explicit reason to believe that you, specifically wouldn't cause them grief. Can you provide any reason that you, specifically should be treated differently than all other applicants who they interview, including the ones who would cause them grief if they were told exactly why they were not hired?

On the topic of litigation, even if you didn't have a leg to stand on legally (which may or may not be true), even launching a frivolous legal claim against them can be annoying and costly to them. They still have to grab a lawyer to advise them on the matter and they still have to defend themselves against anything you may or may not bring forward, frivolous or not.

There's no benefit to helping out someone who applied to work at your company and might be doing something of interest to you in the future? Really?

Really! Fog Creek undoubtedly receives a veritable plethora of job applications. The chances that you specifically will be of great interest to them in the future outside the scope of being employed with their company is slim as a matter of probability, assuming that you don't already have some kind of working relationship with their company. If you do already have a working relationship with Fog Creek, you should take this issue up with them directly instead of on Hacker News.

Most companies don't call back. You can just assume that they had at least one candidate in the pipeline who was a better fit in terms of culture, location, salary expectations, or skills.

Oh, I'm sure of that, but it reflects badly on his company that, when a talented applicant-- someone you'd not want to piss off if you have any future-sight whatsoever-- wanted to know what he could do to make future applications more successful, they wouldn't even help me out in the slightest.

All joking aside.....from reading your posts, something seems a bit off about you. You seem to be introspective, but it really seems you have some deep seeded issues, maybe you should talk to someone about it?

I try to stay more upbeat about it though and work on a portfolio in the meantime so I'll get a competitive edge. Maybe you'll even see a startup by me in the near future ;-)

If being unemployed just out of college is such a problem for the young man (and that's not unreasonable), he should drop the attitude of "I'm pretty particular about what kind of work I want to be doing, and that makes me a poor fit for most jobs". If he doesn't want to work or only wants a very specific job and can't get it, that's reasonable. Just don't complain about it. Otherwise, this young man who believes himself highly qualified should take a job that's reasonably satisfactory as opposed to perfect until the "Worst Recession Ever" is over. There are a lot of people out there who'd kill to be in his position.

I'd just been laid off and my ex-boss was a friend of Joel's, which is why I said it was unprofessional not to inform me of the reason; declining to do so casts aspersion onto my ex-boss (although I checked my own references and he wasn't saying anything negative).