Hi Jeremiah. I was the hiring manager here and I think there’s been something of a misunderstanding here: I don’t think this is an accurate summary of why we made the decision we did. It feels weird to discuss this in public, but I consent to you publishing the full rejection email we sent, if you would like.
I don’t particularly feel it would be a valuable use of anyone’s time to get into a drawn out public back-and-forth debate where we both nitpick the implications of various word choices. I’ll just say that if your intention was to communicate something other than “We prefer a candidate who is tightly value aligned” then there was a significant failure of communication and you shouldn’t have specifically used the phrase “tightly aligned” in the same sentence as the rejection.
If the issue is that CEA communicated poorly or you misunderstood the rejection, I agree that’s not necessarily worth getting into. But you’ve made a strong claim about how CEA makes decisions based on the contents of a message, whose author is willing to make public. It looks to me like you essentially have two choices:
Agree to make the message public, or
Onlookers interpret this as an admission that your claim was exaggerated.
I’m strongly downvoting the parent comment for now, since I don’t think it should be particularly visible. I’ll reverse the downvote if you release the rejection letter and it is as you’ve represented.
Hi Jeremiah. I was the hiring manager here and I think there’s been something of a misunderstanding here: I don’t think this is an accurate summary of why we made the decision we did. It feels weird to discuss this in public, but I consent to you publishing the full rejection email we sent, if you would like.
I don’t particularly feel it would be a valuable use of anyone’s time to get into a drawn out public back-and-forth debate where we both nitpick the implications of various word choices. I’ll just say that if your intention was to communicate something other than “We prefer a candidate who is tightly value aligned” then there was a significant failure of communication and you shouldn’t have specifically used the phrase “tightly aligned” in the same sentence as the rejection.
If the issue is that CEA communicated poorly or you misunderstood the rejection, I agree that’s not necessarily worth getting into. But you’ve made a strong claim about how CEA makes decisions based on the contents of a message, whose author is willing to make public. It looks to me like you essentially have two choices:
Agree to make the message public, or
Onlookers interpret this as an admission that your claim was exaggerated.
I’m strongly downvoting the parent comment for now, since I don’t think it should be particularly visible. I’ll reverse the downvote if you release the rejection letter and it is as you’ve represented.