Rejection Recovery · Primly Community

rejected from staff engineer role after loop, asking for feedback actually worked once

staff_steph · 4 replies

i know the conventional wisdom is that asking for interview feedback after rejection rarely yields anything useful. i'm writing this because i had one experience where it actually did, and i want to share what was different.

this was a staff engineering loop at a Series C infrastructure company, 2025. five rounds, system design heavy, one cross-functional leadership round. i got the rejection about a week after the final interview.

i sent a short, specific email to the recruiter. not "can you tell me how i did" but something like: "i'm working on improving my approach to distributed systems design discussions. if there's one area where the committee felt i could go deeper, i'd find that feedback genuinely useful for my development."

the recruiter came back three days later with actual signal: the committee felt my system design was technically sound but that i jumped to solutions before fully exploring constraints with the interviewer. too solo, not enough collaborative whiteboarding instinct.

that was actionable. i've been deliberately practicing that in subsequent loops: stating constraints out loud before proposing anything, inviting the interviewer to push back on assumptions.

why it worked, i think: the ask was specific. i named a domain (system design), not "any general feedback." i framed it as personal development, not disputing the decision. the recruiter at this particular company seemed like a real person who cared, not someone filtering 300 applications.

i've asked for feedback maybe six other times after rejections over the years. this is the one time i got something real. so the success rate is low. but if you're going to ask, specific and non-defensive is the way to do it.

4 replies

infra_ines

the "collaborative whiteboarding instinct" point is something i hear more and more at the staff level. at senior, you can get away with being brilliant and solo. at staff, the interviewers are watching for "does this person bring the room along with them." it's a different mode.

ops_omar

i got one piece of useful feedback once in maybe eight asks. your framing advice is exactly right. i also noticed that feedback is more likely to come from smaller companies where the recruiting team isn't overwhelmed. at FAANG-scale it's almost always a no.

alex_design

small caution: sometimes the feedback you get is the committee's post-hoc rationalization, not the real reason. they'd already decided and now they're constructing a narrative. not saying this was the case here, just worth holding it lightly.

staff_steph

that's fair. i can't verify it was the real reason. but the critique was specific enough and matched something i already half-knew about myself, so it felt like signal. you're right to note the caveat though.