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Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

• fensterblick 11y ago
  Thank you for this site! I am going through the interview process now and there are times where I feel like a fraud. Some call this impostor syndrome. It's encouraging to read others who have travelled the same path I've been on.
• neofrommatrix 11y ago
  I recently interviewed at very hot container startup. I had 1 phone screen, 6 on-sites, and 2 follow up phone calls. I did well in the phone screen to be invited onsite. Apparently, I did great on the 6 interviews onsite and then they wanted to have a follow up phone call with a manager (30 mins). That was positive too. But, the last phone call was set up with the SVP who determined that I was not a good "culture fit" after 30 mins on the phone. This in spite of me having had wonderful technical conversations and interviews (including coding) - which I apparently rocked- with 6 engineers and 2 managers, and having very highly relevant experience working in the cloud (orchestration and networking). The SVP just swooped in and decided I was not a good fit. I simply don't get interviews these days. Sigh! On to a better company.
  • neofrommatrix 11y ago
    starts with D, btw.
    • kagamine 11y ago
      Sounds like it ended with a D. Ba-Boom-tish!
  • pc86 11y ago
    Maybe you legitimately weren't a good fit? I'm not being facetious, but "the SVP was an idiot and made a terrible call despite all the evidence" is possible but not the most likely scenario. Maybe someone with exactly your skillset and experience was hired, hated it, and quit after 6 months. Maybe one of the other people you interviewed with mentioned an offhand comment you made and it soured the SVP's expectation. Maybe they just got served divorce papers and were shitting on everyone that day? It's so random that I don't even try to second-guess or deconstruct the non-technical side anymore. It happens or it doesn't.
    • neofrommatrix 11y ago
      Very possible. From the recruiter's rejection email, it seemed that the decision was really close. And you're right. Cannot really speculate about this.
  • CrLf 11y ago
    > 6 on-sites I don't understand the point of multiple (or very long) interviews. If they can't decide after the first 30 minutes if the candidate is hirarable, they probably won't. It's an illusion to think that interview environments relate directly to workplace performance. Interviews are mostly useful for the subjective parts than for grilling candidates in hopes of avoiding a bad hire. Going through all the hoops and knowing all the things doesn't make for a good employee. Not unless you're being hired as a robot worked in some factory floor. Also, unlike what seems to be the general idea elsewhere on this thread, soft skills are very important, I argue even more important than hard skills. If you have any ability to learn (which may be considered a soft skill) you can pick up almost any technology and implement almost any algorithm. Not so if you lack the ability to relate to you coworkers, work effectively as a team, or clearly communicate your ideas. You can learn tools, but you either have the right attitude or you don't.
    • neofrommatrix 11y ago
      I agree. You cannot fake good nature and attitude during all day interviews. At least, I cannot. Soft skills and communication are really important in any team environment. But, how would one go about determining whether someone is a quick learner? That beats me.
      • CrLf 11y ago
        You don't determine it directly. But quick learning comes with other traits, like curiosity. You can determine those during a conversation if you're a good interviewer (which is the catch, interviewing is also a skill). Sometimes you'll fail. But I've yet to see convincing proof that the alternative reduces failures (but it does reduce the willingness of people to admit failure).
  • TomBombadildoze 11y ago
    > I recently interviewed at very hot container startup. I had 1 phone screen, 6 on-sites, and 2 follow up phone calls. Seems to me like you dodged a bullet. > But, the last phone call was set up with the SVP who determined that I was not a good "culture fit" after 30 mins on the phone. Why is an SVP spending 30 minutes on the phone with candidates that have already done eight interviews with the troops on the ground? You definitely dodged a bullet.
• altonzheng 11y ago
  To be honest, this wouldn't make me feel much better after a rejection. I already know the process is sometimes arbitrary and up to luck.
• steven2012 11y ago
  Someone I know at Facebook said that they have something called "Overheard at Campus" or something like that, where people post funny things they hear on campus. They said that recently one of the posts was: "I am going into an interview. I am pissed. It's gonna be a reject from me." Which pretty much underscores how interviewing appears to be these days, especially at a company like Facebook.
  • fitzgeraldthe1 11y ago
    Sounds like a joke.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• hmate9 11y ago
  The reason why there are so many rejections is because companies are trying to minimse the false positives instead of minimising the false negatives.
  • soham 11y ago
    Plus, in many cases, it just doesn't click with the other person. Interviewing is not a standardized test with a standardized evaluation. On the spectrum of human interactions, it's closer to a date, than it's to a test. In doing interview coaching/training for a living (http://interviewkickstart.com http://interviewkickstart.com), I see this every day. It's frustrating to a certain degree, but also very powerful once understood.
  • danieltillett 11y ago
    I am not sure why companies are so paranoid about false positives. Apart from the the lack of evidence that being extra picky is helpful, you can always fire if the candidate does not meet your standards. Be crystal clear about what you expect and cut if it is not met.
    • will_pseudonym 11y ago
      Hiring bad people is signaling to your existing, well functioning team, that you care about the bottom line more than their experience & happiness. It drives good people away, because firing bad apples is way harder than it should be...
      • danieltillett 11y ago
        I don't disagree with this, but being extra fussy at the interview stage does not mean you can avoid bad hires, or even that you will hire better people on average. Better to be clear about what you expect and serious enough to deal with it if you get it wrong.
        • will_pseudonym 11y ago
• jdoliner 11y ago
  > I was rejected at Amazon and other companies with no technical interviews because I wasn't a Java engineer. That one seems pretty legit to me.
  • sharpy 11y ago
    They hired me despite my not knowing any Java. I was there for close to 5 years and did my share of interviewing and I haven't seen a single instance where lack of specific programming language skill was brought up as a reason to reject the candidate. But yeh, the whole hiring process is more random than it should be.
  • philjohn 11y ago
    Depends. Is the person a polyglot with extensive experience in more than one language of a similar paradigm? If so ... it's just learning the syntax, libraries and idioms ... it's not rocket science.
• msoad 11y ago
  I was rejected by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Skype and many more companies. I got rejected by Apple 3 times and two times with Facebook and Google. I'm now working for Google. One thing I can tell for sure, specially after interviewing others. It's all random. Most of interviewers make their mind about the candidate in seconds. If you are a charming person you have a good chance. If you are not a very likable person you have a very small chance.
  • thewarrior 11y ago
    May I message you ?
    • msoad 11y ago
      I prefer to stay anonymous. I'll share my recent interview experiences with Google, Apple and Facebook here soon.
  • JFlash 11y ago
    Being charming, likable or whatever you want to call it is important. Technical competency should be the biggest factor but there are plenty of people who have that and are personable too.
  • anantzoid 11y ago
    I passed 3 interviews with 6 interviewers for Booking (they even flew me to Amsterdam for that). 1 of them didn't seem to like me, even before I answered his questions. The rest were very impressed (as stated in the feedback). Got rejected.
  • soham 11y ago
    At the risk of repeating what I commented below, I like to say the same thing differently, which seems to resonate with students in the class: Interviewing, by definition, is not a standardized test with a standardized evaluation. On the spectrum of human interactions, it's closer to a date, than it's to a test. In doing interview coaching/training for a living (http://interviewkickstart.com http://interviewkickstart.com), I see this every day. It's frustrating to a certain degree, but also very powerful once understood. Also see my Quora answer here: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-biggest-mistakes-that-engineers-make-when-they-interview-1/answer/Soham-Mehta-1 https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-biggest-mistakes-that-eng...
• kzhahou 11y ago
  Companies keep files on candidates, which generally makes sense for tracking purposes, but they can be counter-productive at the big companies. I go in and apply. I meet with 6 people out of thousands, representing 1-3 teams out of hundreds. It doesn't work out, for any of <n> reasons, some of them just luck of the draw. But now my interview is in the system and will be forever referenced. I'm given a polite but non-informational "it's not a fit" and sent off to a competitor. Idea: Big companies shift to lighter-weight interviews which aren't considered final. If you're good enough to make it to on-site and it doesn't work out (but there was lots of reasons to think it would have), then you get happily scheduled for another round in a few weeks or whenever, and Company tries to not leave you with a stigma of rejection. This frequently happens with executive recruiting, but not at lower levels. At least, I haven't seen it. Instead we get so many stories like on this website, where it should have been obvious just by CV/portfolio alone that they were awesome developers.
  • eshvk 11y ago
    This happens at the developer level too. Of course, occasionally there may be a candidate who is just not there yet. So companies ask you to wait, some for X months other for X years and then reapply. An engineering position is sometimes about the skill sets; my team looks for ML and Data folks. But sometimes it is also about solid engineering chops and some people just need to work more on those. That is not a bad thing; it is just a thing.
  • akavi 11y ago
    Are you sure? At my previous company (a relatively small startup, admittedly), one of the indisputably best engineers (a 10xer if I've ever worked with one) was hired after such a "second shot". A few weeks is probably too rapid a turn around, given that a "failed" interview is a negative signal (or at least, should be That's the point, after all). But say, a year later for engineers in that wide fuzzy area between "Hire!" and "Oh god no!"? I think plenty of companies do do that. Further anecdata: Friends who've been rejected from Google have told me that they were explicitly encouraged by their Google recruiter to re-apply in ~a year.
    • 11y ago
• lordnacho 11y ago
  It seems to me like that best predictor of whether you'll get the thumbs up is social cues, rather than anything technical. I went to an on-site at a major company, and there was a guy who just wouldn't smile. He also led me down the wrong way on the tech part, which is easy when you make zero facial gestures and talk like a robot. I figured it out eventually, it wasn't hard, but he dinged me. With the other people it was just a breeze. We chatted about various low level performance things, about how the work environment is, and so on. The tech parts were easy, because you could tell whether you'd actually understood the problem correctly.
  • will_pseudonym 11y ago
    Yup! Also, would you really want to work with person A? I wouldn't, no matter how talented. Our scarcity mindset as employees has us asking for any job sometimes, no matter how awful the fit...
• napperjabber 11y ago
  I have to say, after inheriting a code base from Max(@mxcl), its sad that anyone would reject him. Hes pretty much the guy that gave me the first sane introduction to cacoa programming. - That being said, I was rejected from a company because I hadn't used binutil in python. - I find I can pass any interview with a confident low voice more consistently than by showing my technical expertise. - People are interested in how well you assimilate into the culture of the workplace. Sometimes, that workplace culture needs to evoluve to include a more eclectic dev-background, or they risk alienating talented people. Alas, sometimes that evolution is not nessicary or its just to early for the company. - I've seen this happen to good devs and I've been on the receiving end of it. - Hiring isn't fun; you have to find someone who understands who you are. Inheriting trust is a lot faster then building trust and I find most companies don't have the time (sometimes ability ) to build that trust.
  • neverminder 11y ago
    I agree. I was rejected not too long ago by a startup with a reason that they thought I belonged in a more corporate environment (I never indicated so). In my experience if a company really needs someone they are much more receptive, otherwise they just come up with a BS like that and worse.
    • jacquesm 11y ago
      > they thought I belonged in a more corporate environment That's their way of saying they either can't afford you or you are too smart to be worked to death for 0.0001% stock.
      • pc86 11y ago
        That's a pretty generous grant, not everyone can be Employee #2.
        • myth_buster 11y ago
          Or a technical co-founder.
• copperx 11y ago
  It's interesting how all these top companies insist on JS expertise, I didn't know that it was so important for an interview and that's something I need to work on.
  • lettergram 11y ago
    I've never had a job where I was required to code in JS. However, I have had one interview where I went headfirst into SCSS when the job actually only required C/C++ skills (it was work on a computer vision system). The thing is, I think most interviewers ask for what they are most comfortable with, so they can evaluate. Which is why questions related to JS are probably so common for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. even if you don't actually need it or use it. However, I would also point out that JS is pretty easy, if you know any of the standard languages you'll be fine. Although, I do find it humorous because JS is basically one of the worst constructed languages I know of (even though I use it daily...).
  • andrewstuart 11y ago
    If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting. If you have awesome, expert, deep, deep JavaScript then firstly you might as well be a unicorn but secondly, you will get a job.
    • saryant 11y ago
      This is very much not true.
    • HeyLaughingBoy 11y ago
      Should probably clarify that it's only important if you're looking for Web jobs :-) Sometimes people here forget there's more to software than the web.
      • dagw 11y ago
        I'm very much more on the data analysis side of things and decidedly not a web developer, but I still regularly get told "great work, can you display the data on a cool website?" In fact if I was hiring a new data analysis colleague I would very much prefer one who knew javascript for this very reason.
• andrewstuart 11y ago
  I'm a recruiter and I sometimes say that "recruiting is the business of rejection". At any given moment I might have between 5 to 20 possible jobs that I'm searching for people for. In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants. It is incredibly hard to get anyone into a job and often great people are rejected for various reasons. The Business of Rejection - that's recruiting.
  • sillysaurus3 11y ago
    It doesn't have to be that way. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698392 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10699997 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10699997
  • vijayr 11y ago
    Isn't it true in many things in life though? Shopping, buying a house etc (even dating sometimes) - most of us rarely select, we often reject and pick the one(s) that remains, isn't it? Not saying it is good or bad, just that it happens more often than we think.
  • kafkaesq 11y ago
    Reject all you want, but at least be classy about it. A vast amount of empirical data suggests that recruiters are very, very bad at this. And many companies, when engaging candidates directly, aren't much better.
    • vijayr 11y ago
      Most recruiters are terrible. The other day I was asked to fill a form (skills, work experience, personal details, the whole thing - in great detail) before the recruiter would even tell me the name of the company he is trying to hire for. I knew arguing with him is futile, so I didn't. Job search in general is a depressing experience, even when it is easy. Good recruiters are extremely rare :( My funniest experience with a recruiter - he called me up and tried to recruit me to the same company I was working for at the time.
• jqm 11y ago
  Looks like (so far) nearly half the people shown wound up at twitter. Apply to twitter first?
  • sotojuan 11y ago
    This project was created by a Twitter developer. Of course, he asked his Twitter friends to submit their stories first. Since there's few stories for now, it looks that way.
  • gotchange 11y ago
    A very interesting phenomenon indeed that all these, excuse my French, "rejects" wound up at TWTR, can we deduce something concrete from this about the company's hiring policy or offerings quality?
    • snegu 11y ago
      More likely that coworkers at Twitter are telling each other about this site and encouraging them to post.
      • skj 11y ago
        Exactly. The first question that should be asked when people try to make generalizations is if sampling bias is accounted for.
    • volkadav 11y ago
      Twitter didn't even send me a ping when a friend working there sent in my resume (for a role rhat at least on paper I'd be well suited for), but I'm moving through the interview process now with two of the GAFA constituents. shrug There's a big element of luck in this process, even if technical competence is a prerequisite.
  • tomcam 11y ago
    Not sure if kidding but logic is inescapable!
  • 11y ago
• cryoshon 11y ago
  Being rejected from the top tier of technology companies and then landing in another top tier company doesn't seem so much like a genuine expression of angst over rejection but rather a bitter leer. But sure, the way work rejection is delivered is typically insensitive, and getting rejected sucks-- companies have no compassion for assets they don't want to use, and it's dehumanizing to realize you are utterly replaceable and plentiful as far as they are concerned.
  • ddmma 11y ago
    Rejection as well failure is just feedback. We should not take it so personal but we build up expectations and project our selfs into that brand building stuff. The choosen ones must be selected and save the Zion or be part of it. What I've learned from my over 500+ jobs, accelerators, etc... Rejection is a fkin template! Move on fast and next time you'll reject them also ;)
• danharaj 11y ago
  I was rejected for grad school after submitting half-hearted applications and now work as a fullstack Haskell developer. I didn't even know I would find it as satisfying as research.
• andersonmvd 11y ago
  May be unrelated, but this is like my howihacked.info project that I launched three days ago, but with a different design and story focus. Anyway, I'm happy for that and these stories are cool as well. I'd suggest the story of the WhatsApp founder that wasn't hired by Facebook. Kudos :)
• lkrubner 11y ago
  I love this, but it could go even further: Blaine Cook was "rejected" from Twitter after years of hard work. But he faced an insane scaling problem, and most of us would look bad if we faced the same set of problems. Steve Jobs was "rejected" by Apple after years of hard work. Or my all time favorite: John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation (rather than the traditional animation techniques for which Disney was famous), then he became head of Pixar, which got bought by Disney, and which took over Disney's animation, and so now he is head of animation at Disney. They fired him, but now he is back, and now he is in charge, because he was right. Lots of great people do great work and then get fired. Getting fired doesn't mean they were wrong. Sometimes it simply means they were too right, and nobody wanted to hear it.
  • zitterbewegung 11y ago
    That could be a different site though. Instead of "we were rejected" you can say "we were fired"...
  • argonaut 11y ago
    This doesn't really apply. At the executive/management level things are hugely different. Politics, how well you work with others, investor perceptions, "vision", experience, communication skills, etc. all become more important than raw individual contribution skills. Another common example that people like to use, but which also doesn't apply is the example of Brian Acton getting rejected from Facebook before starting WhatsApp. I have no doubt he would have been able to get hired as an engineer. All indications are that he was interviewing for an executive position, though (he had previously been a VP at Yahoo).
    • _yosefk 11y ago
      AFAIK Lasseter wasn't that senior when Disney fired him.
      • pc86 11y ago
        > John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation It's possible that Lasseter was the animation equivalent of the programmer who has a job in a web design firm that traditionally does everything in Rails (or .NET or Django or whatever) and constantly says "let's use Haskell!!" when they're just building CRUD apps for clients. The "works well with others" thing is important even for junior folks.
• jondubois 11y ago
  Interview processes are more about social skills than technical skill (even in engineering interviews). There is a huge amount of randomness involved - Maybe the HR person just didn't like your face! It's mostly about understanding the company culture, reading the interviewer's face and trying to figure out what they want to hear as you go along (of course technical skills are a prerequisite). The only time I didn't get an offer was because I asked for too much money. I think asking for more money is a good idea though; it weeds out all the frugal companies. I think that if your success rate is 90%, it means you're not charging enough. You need to bring the price up and allow the success rate to drop - Then the average quality of offers will go up.
• paulftw 11y ago
  Twitter - where most of these rejected people ended up?..
  • namelezz 11y ago
    or Twitter - where most of these rejected people make awesome comebacks
    • im2w1l 11y ago
      Or, to account for the selection bias: People don't always come back after rejection. But when they do, they do it at twitter.
      • autotune 11y ago
        ...which just laid off a bunch of their staff.
    • siphor 11y ago
      or Twitter - where the most engineers tweet
    • fenomas 11y ago
      or even: Twitter - where the guy who made this site works, with some colleagues he presumably asked to contribute stories
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
• deleted 11y ago
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• devsquid 11y ago
  Getting turned down always feels shitty, but I try hard to not take it personally. The whole you rejected me, but haha I'm better off comes across as pretty self-centered and entitled. -edit- removed question,more
  • cthulhua 11y ago
    I read this as "we were rejected but it worked out ok, so don't feel too discouraged if you have a bad interview"
    • devsquid 11y ago
      Ok I like that, its just the term rejection has a common us versus them connotation in the US.
      • jon_kuperman 11y ago
        Creator here. Sorry if that wasn't clear! I only meant this to be inspiring for people to "keep trying" even when they face rejection!
        • devsquid 11y ago
          Yea its quite cute!(Not meant to be condescending) The site loads them in random order and I read about how someone was nervous during an interview and faults the interviewers and a few other more sour ones first. lol sorry.
      • marshray 11y ago
        I've lived in the US my whole life and I don't accept this connotation. 'Rejection' is just rejection. Sometimes it's personal, sometimes it's not.
        • devsquid 11y ago
          lol I'm from the US and have lived here for most of my life. Its probably true in most cultures. Hacker news has a pretty international audience, so I try to tailor my generalizations to my own home country.
• tofupup 11y ago
  Being rejected a few times this week, this makes me feel a bit better. For one interview ... my brain decided to take the day off ... nerves I guess ... it was not pretty. Any who (sic) ... the show must go on ... back at it tomorrow morning wish me the best.
  • lkrubner 11y ago
    If you'd like to feel better, you should read "Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview": http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/embarrassing-code-i-wrote-under-stress-at-a-job-interview http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/embarrassing-code-i-w...
    • Xyik 11y ago
      thanks for sharing this. mirrors several interviews i've had
    • tofupup 11y ago
      wow - that was so similar to my experience.
  • devsquid 11y ago
    Lol or that feeling when you know your answer to a question didn't go over well with the interviewer. I've found to remain fairly neutral with interviewers and attempt to draw them out first. Once you sorta know their hand then you play yours. Also when your brain decided to shut down, just slow down, take a deep breath, and stop thinking about the overwhelming doubt growing in the back of your head. The interviewers won't fault you for that. Its kinda cheesy but I like Dune's matra "Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."
• saurabhjha 11y ago
  The tiny 1 hour slot is not enough to judge candidates. As an interviewer, the best I can do is check if they communicate their ideas well and have they got done something interesting on their own. It is sad that we still have to follow this broken process because of lack of any viable alternative.
• 5h 11y ago
  It happens the other way around also. In an interview for a CTO type position a while ago, the only technical member of the interview panel was visibly aghast that I had never made a bootstrap theme - which, despite me explaining where that sort of task fits into the webapp ecosystem to the others, had already rubbed off on the rest of the panel. The extensive team/project building portfolio presented was irrelevant. I thanked them for their time and didn't call back as I've had my fill of toxic work environments out there.
• fffrad 11y ago
  It's interesting how in our current time, if you work at Twitter, facebook, google, or a famous start up, it is synonymous to "I made it".
  • thewarrior 11y ago
    Because it is. Once you land a position at the big 4 you're (potentially) on a multi decade gravy train that just keeps on giving. Even a short stint and an "Ex-Googler" tag on your resume is enough to open doors and keep landing gigs years into the future. Moreover the top firms are known for engineering the shit out of their software. You're much less likely to run into really bad code or stagnate. So its definitely worth sacrificing a bit to try and get in.
    • kami8845 11y ago
      > multi decade slave train If you want to have "made it", go start a startup. Being an employee generally means working 40-60 hour weeks for other people's dreams.
      • thewarrior 11y ago
        Working for 2+ decades while making something like $150k+ a year on average over the long term , and retiring with substantial savings , without having worked 100 hour weeks on the startup lottery , sounds pretty awesome to me. Don't know maybe I'm not elite founder material.
        • jacquesm 11y ago
          Different strokes for different folks. Some people use airplanes for transportation, others go skydiving. The start-up lottery is a very fast way to learn a lot and probably not earn much, think of it as a school rather than a money making machine and it makes a lot more sense. If you then later apply all that you learned during those years in a non-start-up context you may still come out ahead.
• spooningtamarin 11y ago
  I love how Facebook HR rejected one of my acquaintances and then after he asked "Why?", the recruiter sent an email that was something along these lines: "Ok, may I schedule a technical interview in a week?". Eventually he ended up being an engineer there. My experience and rejection also indicated there's something arbitrary random going on in the interview process. Once a recruiter from Google commented my grades with a serious attidute, saying I should keep them as high (I was still a student) and I immediately realised that grades weren't even checked because my grades were horrible (GPA<3, ridiculous bible theology social classes ruined it for me) and if they cared I should get them higher.
• minikites 11y ago
  Oh no, highly skilled mostly white males experiencing temporary setbacks, won't anyone think about how hard they have it? They made it eventually and you can too! Never mind the dozens of stories without a happy ending as whole groups of people get funneled into the "discouraged worker" pool to keep them out of the U3 unemployment rate. I wish more effort like this was put into mentoring/training/recruiting underrepresented groups, but I guess that's too hard to put into a punchy website.
  • kagamine 11y ago
    There is a latino guy there. Did you not see him? Is not most of the western world populated by white people? I'm not apologizing for being a white, male developer, my grandfathers fought the Nazis so that I could sit in a warm office and write code.
  • tarsinge 11y ago
    Let's start by not stressing race/gender
    • minikites 11y ago
      We still live in a very racist society, how is that helped by pretending otherwise? http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 http://www.nber.org/papers/w9873 > The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. > We find little evidence that our results are driven by employers inferring something other than race, such as social class, from the names. These results suggest that racial discrimination is still a prominent feature of the labor market. And as for gender: http://phys.org/news/2006-05-female-name-chat-users-malicious-messages.html http://phys.org/news/2006-05-female-name-chat-users-maliciou... > A study by the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering found that chat room participants with female usernames received 25 times more threatening and/or sexually explicit private messages than those with male or ambiguous usernames. > Female usernames, on average, received 163 malicious private messages a day in the study. These are two narrow examples of course, but pretending everyone has a fair shot is extremely naïve.
• s3nnyy 11y ago
  I live in Zurich and I used to code for a living. Now, I hire engineers for different startups in Switzerland. As I got deeper into IT-recruiting, I realised that candidate filtering at the top of the funnel is fundamentally broken. Especially in Europe companies expect a CS degree and don't appreciate self-taught skills as much as in the US. I am trying to change this. If you look for a tech-job in the most liveable city in the world, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on http://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90 http://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to... or send me a mail to the mail-address in my HN-profile.
  • _yosefk 11y ago
    Could the difference be due to education being cheaper and thus there being fewer reasons to forego it?
    • jacquesm 11y ago
      No, it just saves a bunch of time and you later won't hear (when someone messes up) 'he doesn't even have a degree, what did you expect'? It's the recruiting equivalent of buying IBM (or Microsoft I guess). If the applicant pool is large enough any quick way to discriminate that skews positively for applicant capability is going to be used. It is also much easier to see if someone has a degree than to actually test if they have the required skills.
      • pc86 11y ago
        > If the applicant pool is large enough any quick way to discriminate that skews positively for applicant capability is going to be used. I think a lot of self-taught developers (myself too earlier in my career) fail to realize this. If you've got 1,000 applicants and your job is to schedule 10 interviews from that pool, you will do anything that won't absolutely destroy candidate quality. It's not about the finding the best, it's about finding someone who wants the job and will be able to do it. The name of the game is not minimizing false negatives (disregarding good people), but minimizing false positives (interviewing shitbirds). So if you work for BigCo you say the person need three years of corporate experience. You're down to 800 applicants. One year of experience in the JavaScripts. 750 applicants. Maybe the phrase "SQL Server" has to be on their resume. 400 applicants. College degree. 320 applicants. Computer Science degree. 120 applicants. Maybe you want to filter by your preferred recruiter, because they only charge you 11% of base salary instead of 18% like that other firm. 22 applicants. Now you can actually read the resumes and pick the top half to interview. Anyone who actually wrote a cover letter and is in this pile is pretty much guaranteed an interview.
• kagamine 11y ago
  (S)he's not very likable so I wouldn't bother if were you.
  • pinkunicorn 11y ago
    When HN turned into Reddit
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • kagamine 11y ago
      You have my apologies.
  • dang 11y ago
    Please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News. We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10743094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10743094 and marked it off-topic.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• arethuza 11y ago
  Many years ago I had an interview for a job I really wanted - all day event with chats with multiple people including the CEO. Pretty sure it was my chat with the CEO that killed my application. I was absolutely gutted. 8 years later the same chap was the first angel investor in the startup I co-founded and worked with us as Chairman for a number of years before the company was acquired. I never did ask him if he remembered rejecting me!
• pinkunicorn 11y ago
  I can't help noticing that a lot of people are from Twitter.
• f0rgot 11y ago
  As a current job seeker, this is doing wonders in helping me keep my head up.
• sarciszewski 11y ago
  Eventually these folks got accepted though. I guess that's the moral we're supposed to take away from this: If you get rejected a lot, but you keep trying, you'll eventually be accepted? If so, that's bullshit. The only reason we don't see any examples here of people who never get accepted is because they're invisible to the industry. Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. (I've contemplated both more than I care to admit in polite company.) We can't all be winners. (But by that logic, we can't all be losers all the time either. You're probably somewhere in between both extremes.)
  • the_af 11y ago
    I don't think it's bullshit. I also don't define people as "winners" or "losers" depending on whether they get cool jobs. I think it's true you'll eventually get accepted in a nice job if you work in IT/software development, have a decent level of competency, and keep at it without getting too discouraged. It's easy to feel crushed when you get rejected twice in a row, so I think this is valuable lesson: you can have decent skills and you'll still get rejected (sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes because it just wasn't your best day), and you shouldn't feel crushed because interviews are -- sadly -- highly random, and even great developers get rejected. That's the point of the website: your skills are likely not the reason you got rejected, so don't get too discouraged. This isn't some feel good bullshit philosophy. It's true. Getting a job isn't about being a winner. If you have decent skills -- say, you have some experience and fizzbuzz isn't a stumbling block for you -- you are already marketable. You just need to have the combination of luck/being prepared/being in one of your best days.
    • sarciszewski 11y ago
      > I also don't define people as "winners" or "losers" depending on whether they get cool jobs. Normally I don't either, but in my post above I was using it as a shorthand. You can't win them all, and you probably won't lose them all, but there might be someone out there who does.
  • pc86 11y ago
    > Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. If you honestly think about committing suicide even for a moment (as in, seriously consider it) because you didn't get a Big 4 CS job, you have serious mental health issues and should probably be under constant supervision.
• kelvin0 11y ago
  It seems to me chasing 'high profile' Tech company employment is setting yourself up for failure. Competing against thousand of applicants should not be viewed as 'failure' it's a mostly a number's game. Not saying you shouldn't apply to these companies, but you should also consider your odds and adjust your expectations accordingly. Also, we seem to identify way too much with the company we work for ... taking a step back from that helps balance your outlook.
• rekoros 11y ago
  Rejected in 2009 != rejected in 2015 You have to consider the time dimension and boom-bust cycle. "I showed up at the store and they didn't let me in." "Because it was closed!! You showed up at 3am!"
• laotzu 11y ago
  This reminds me of an old zen tale: >There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “May be,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer. The point being that when you become so upset with being turned down for a certain job you are setting yourself up to be let down by missing the big picture. The reality of the big picture is you have no idea how something that might seem like a great success might lead to great failure, or great failure might lead to great success.
  • dceddia 11y ago
    I like this story - it was referenced in Charlie Wilson's War by Philip Seymour Hoffman's character. "We'll see."
  • saiya-jin 11y ago
    I guess everybody can find such examples in their lives, usually when looking back hard enough. My example, out of few - breaking up with my longterm girlfriend (5 years, 6 months spent backpacking together in himalaya) seemed like a proper disaster. Few years rewind - I have the most amazing person imaginable beside me, to which I proposed (and she said yes) on top of Mont Blanc this May, after hard ski tour. Without prior hard breakup, and messing around a bit, I wouldn't be able to appreciate current one so much (or another summary - looks is by far not enough for happy long term relationship, compatibility on many levels is necessary. but until you meet somebody with whom you "click" on almost all imaginable aspects, you don't even know how good such a state is, and how much peace it can bring to life)
• hacknat 11y ago
  I just want to confirm the sentiment about how subjective interviewing is. I recently switched to using a coding challenge instead of a traditional interview loop. I would take candidates out for coffee pitch them the team and position, ask them some questions about themselves and then explain how the challenge would work. The first time I did this I decided to give everyone the challenge, even people I was sure were going to eat it, just to give myself some good data about how tough the challenge was and if it needed to be tuned. I was shocked by how bad my tech-radar really was. Not so much on the upper end, I can spot the winners still. However some of the people who I thought would eat it did a lot better than I thought they would. It made me realize how subjective interview loops really are, with little to no chance of the interviewer to be shaken out of their biases if they don't want to be. Not that coding challenges are perfect, but I'm never going back. I will refuse to participate in interview loops now - on either end.
• ryandrake 11y ago
  I'd guess that over my nearly 20 year career, I've been rejected from more companies than most HNers have even applied to. I've listened to tons of employers tell me what they think I'm not capable of, and that was back when you would actually get personalized feedback from a failed interview. My grades, my lack of a "prestigious" education, my technical skills, my people skills, my background, my previous employment history, my potential, and, of course, the catch-all "cultural fit" have all been used as reasons that Company X was sure I'm an idiot. I don't let interview rejections bother me for even a millisecond anymore--it doesn't mean anything whatsoever, and I'm convinced getting hired at any given company is more of a dice roll than anything else.