Failing the interview but getting the job

When PlanGrid reached out to me regarding an open position, I was almost done with my senior year of university and had a job offer in-hand for a company located in Washington DC. Most of my job search had been concentrated on the West coast since that was where I’m from, and I was trying hard to end up in San Francisco. I had visited SF a few times during an internship the summer before and loved it, plus I’d be lying if there wasn’t a facet of glamour associated with working in what I saw as the top tech city in the US at the time, so I accepted the offer to interview.

I was told that the position was a software engineer for their native Windows application. I had worked with iOS and Android previously and wasn’t enamored with mobile apps, but I figured that having a full OS to build upon would be better. We had a quick 45-minute phone screen and simple technical question (talk through binary search pseudocode) to assess fit, and decided to move forward to the main technical interview.

This consisted of an hour and half coding session remotely (since I was on the East coast for school) where I’d receive a problem from my interviewers and code up a mostly-working solution. The issue was that this team was looking for a C# engineer, which was a language I had only ever experienced in a semester of a game design club before I even knew how to program. Safe to say I did not know the slightest thing about C#.

The PlanGrid team was very understanding and worked with me on an interview schedule that would give me time to pick up some basics. The engineering contact I had there gave me a few weeks to practice and also supplied some helpful resources for learning. Unfortunately like I said, this was late senior year, so trying to learn a new coding language, on top of studying for my last set of midterms before finals, on top of trying to make the most of my last few months of university, didn’t work out super well.

The interview problem was very straightforward. I was asked to implement a popular and simple tabletop game that consisted of some different logic paths. Throughout the hour and a half, my interviewers were helpful when I got stuck, but I found myself repeatedly knowing what I wanted to do, but struggling to recall the basic syntax of C# to do it (I was working in mostly C and C++ at the time in classes so it was quite a different syntax).

After the interview I felt pretty meh - I didn’t think I bombed it and knew I pieced together some decent edge cases and sound logic, but definitely didn’t feel good about how I did. After a few days, I got a follow-up email from my contact in HR politely informing me that I had not passed. The text of the email is shown below:

Hi Brian,

Thank you for taking the time to interview with PlanGrid. It was a pleasure getting to know you, and you bring a lot to the table.

The team thought you were strong at keeping logic correct in spite of distractions and thinking through edge cases, but ultimately we need someone with more C# knowledge for where the team is right now. It was a difficult decision, and we wish you the best in your search.

[redacted]

As an aside, big props to PG for provided feedback on their decision without me even having to ask for it

Needless to say, I was pretty bummed and frustrated. I knew that if I just had a couple of weeks of no distractions or school to worry about I could easily learn what I needed to with respect to C#, and I felt very confident that I wouldn’t have any trouble picking up any new skills quickly. I also felt this would be a great job for me with a ton of upside in terms of personal growth, rather than working for a larger, more established company back East.

Because of all of this, I decided to take an incredibly long shot and reach back out. What follows is the email I responded with:

Hi [redacted],

While I’m obviously disappointed with the decision I can understand your position. However, I really would love to work for PlanGrid and know that I could make a positive impact if given the opportunity.

As you said, my C# skills could use some work since it isn’t one of the languages taught here at UVA. However, I am highly confident that, with the time I’ll finally have after my capstone project, finals and graduation, I will be able to pick it up quickly, just as I did with other languages like Java, C++, Python, etc.

I don’t expect you to reconsider your decision based solely on my assurances, so I’m happy to put my money where my mouth is, so to speak. If you would be willing to more thoroughly evaluate me over the course of three to six months in a temporary contract or internship role, I’m confident that you won’t be disappointed. Additionally, I would be willing to work for half the normal starting salary during this time to further lessen your risk.

I have surprised my supervisors in both of my previous internships with the level and quality of work I was able to perform right at the start. If you’d like, I can provide references from both jobs to substantiate this. Thank you for your further consideration. If at all possible, I would really appreciate a chance to prove myself.

Best, Brian

Besides being kind of awkwardly formal and stilted (I was only in college cut me some slack), it lays out a lot of concessions. I know many people would be appalled at what I offered, but like I said, I legitimately wasn’t concerned about my ability to follow through. I felt the opportunity was worth losing out on a lot of money for the first few months in order for the long-term benefit I felt I would get by working there. I also put myself in a good position in previous roles because the offer for recommendations was not empty - both of my previous employers had told me in no uncertain terms that I had ramped up much faster than they had expected.

Even if I didn’t give such drastic options, the offer for me to shoulder some of the risk showed them that I was serious about how much I’d like to work with them, which empty words in most emails won’t do.

I don’t know if I’d recommend something as steep as half-salary for any engineers with >0 years of professional experience, but I believe the short-term internship or a temporary contract role as an intermediate step to a full-time hire is a severely under-utilized tool for people who think they might have a very special opportunity and are willing to sacrifice short-term for a better long-term.

I can also be the first to admit that this sort of approach will probably fail 9 times out of 10. I got very lucky with the perfect combination of a just-good-enough interview, a startup still small enough to not have a super formal, concrete recruiting process, and some very talented people on the hiring end that were reasonable and trusting enough to take a chance on me.

PlanGrid ended up coming back to me with an offer of a “temporary full-time” position. This was a normal, full-time, exempt position with reduced pay and without benefits and stock. It also carried the expectation that I would be fired at three months unless I lived up to the expectations.

It took only 4 weeks for them to extend a formal full-time offer, and after 3 years of working there, I can easily say that PlanGrid was one of the greatest ways I could have started my career. I’m confident that the experience I have now and the amount I learned in three years would have taken at least double that time if I was working at a large corporation somewhere.

You’ll never know until you ask - what’s the worst that could happen?