21 ms·

They Rejected Us

522 points by deepaksurti 8y ago

taneq 8y ago
Subtitled "A Compendium Of 'Ha! I Sure Showed you!'".
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  Well, sometimes that, and sometimes: > Anne-Gaelle Colom@agcolom jQuery > I was refused a reference by my supervisor in France who thought the male student on my team did all the work.
  - taneq 8y ago
    I didn't say it was always unjustified...
unkani 8y ago
I'm really surprised at how they managed to get so many big names from the open source community to share their stories. Maybe success isn't tied to grinding out a bunch of leetcode?
- beaconstudios 8y ago
  success is pretty tangential to being good at coding, at any large company. As long as you're good enough to get by.
- Chabs 8y ago
  Hot take: success is almost always accompanied by a healthy dose of survivor bias. For each of these success stories, there are a lot of good people who did the exact same thing, but it didn't pan out because of timing, location, or other similar factors.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  It's very fashionable for successful people to tell the story how they "failed" or got "rejected" but with enough persistence they found success. There is something to be learned from that but you never hear the stories of people who do the exactly the same thing but never succeed and keep getting rejected. There is a lot of survivorship bias in this.
  - andai 8y ago
    How I Failed and Am Still Failing to This Very Day
- dentemple 8y ago
  > I'm really surprised at how they managed to get so many big names from the open source community to share their stories. It helps that, it's pretty silly to claim that someone like Kyle Simpson "doesn't know Javascript" (when the title of his series is literally "You Don't Know JS"). I don't think it hurts his brand any to be open about his rejections.
dannykwells 8y ago
Maybe it's just me but it sure does seem like a lot of these people ended up at Twitter. And I don't see a lot of Google.
- lkbm 8y ago
  It seems like Google filters hard on whiteboarding, questions and Twitter filters on something at least somewhat orthogonal.
  - 4ndrewl 8y ago
    I guess you could argue that using Profitability as a metric as a guide to how succesful the hiring strategy was? I wouldn't, but you could...
    - ThrowMeDown01 8y ago
      Since the major component of Google's profitability is its search business you would have to filter for that. Much of the rest that they do isn't exactly a shiny example for profitability. Also, it's not exactly easy to say who and what exactly contributed to profitability, it is way too complex and environment also plays a role, as well as competitors (if they mess up big time, does that mean you are good?). Sure, an accountant will be able to give you an answer how one individual human or piece of equipment contributed to the result. It will be a different one depending on what you need the number for though (to calculate taxes? to make an investment decision? to allocate production resources?), and it is quite arbitrary.
- fenomas 8y ago
  The obvious explanation would be that the maintainer (who used to work there) hit up colleagues for stories, or because it circulated among Twitter employees for whatever other reason. It's not very likely to imply anything about Twitter's or Google's hiring.
  - egometry 8y ago
code_duck 8y ago
Seems like a lot of people went on to be hired by twitter after not satisfying some other hiring processes. What if this just means that twitter hires second rate people? Also, I wouldn’t have hired the guy who doesn’t use semicolons in his JavaScript, either.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- petermcneeley 8y ago
  "Also, I wouldn’t have hired the guy who doesn’t use semicolons in his JavaScript, either." This seems very similar to the c++ issue with single statement ifs. https://flaviocopes.com/javascript-automatic-semicolon-insertion/ https://flaviocopes.com/javascript-automatic-semicolon-inser...
  - P4ssw0rd 8y ago
    This is one of the interview questions they ask JS developers ... and it's idiotic. No-one in industry uses pure JS anymore. Literally everyone uses ES6 with eslint which will (with default rules) fail the build if you use such ambiguity.
- pcmaffey 8y ago
  I used to hate when I saw JS with semicolons too. "Get off my lawn" with that naked code! Not sure when or how it changed, but I'm on the other side of the fence now. Without semicolons (unless multi-statements on a single line), JS is so much cleaner. A line break is perfectly sufficient to signal the end of a statement.
  - logfromblammo 8y ago
    That is a perfectly reasonable opinion. However, as a grammar-nazi, I feel that proper punctuation is important. While certain poetic forms may take liberties with punctuation for the sake of the artistic expression, sentences end with a full stop--separated by a subsequent sentence in the same paragraph by two spaces--and lines of code end in an unambiguous visible token. Newline/return characters are whitespace tokens. Differentiating them from other whitespace tokens is the first step on the path to madness. What's next? Treating tabs differently from spaces? ~ (ha ha only serious)
projectramo 8y ago
Note to self: If I get rejected from a lot of companies, just apply to Twitter. They'll surely say yes. Addendum: there should be a companion site "Even twitter rejected me!"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- dreta 8y ago
  It does look like Twitter is for rejects if you only read the top entries.
- vikasg 8y ago
  The site was made by an ex-twitter engineer, so lots of the entires come from other Twitter engineers.
  - travisjungroth 8y ago
    That's a really interesting sort of survivor bias.
  - iseeyoubydesign 8y ago
    engineers at twitter are used to making useless websites ... jk, im not a billionaire. But I was accepted by twitter.
joshbetz 8y ago
Do practice interviews at companies you don't really want to work for. It takes the pressure off and makes the real interviews easier.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Who has time for that if you have a full time job? Do you spend all your vacation in interviewing?
  - rhinoceraptor 8y ago
    Your first job is your job, your second job is working on OSS on github to make yourself look good, and your third job is interviewing :^)
    - maxxxxx 8y ago
      Most interviews are during my work hours. Do you take a day off for each?
      - yardie 8y ago
        You have 2 choices. You can do it discretely; after work hours, no the may not contact my employer. Or, you can do it openly; multi-hour lunch breaks, lots of personal time off, and your LinkedIn profile is super active. The latter will either get you a salary increase or you'll be shown the door. Ask me how I know.
        vonmoltke 8y ago
        I haven't had an on-site yet that didn't require blocking off an entire day.
        maxxxxx 8y ago
        I have had half-days (my company does that too) which pretty much require a full day off.
Jmcdd 8y ago
>Rejected by Valve Software for a Software Engineer position because i was young. (when i was 19) Really? I wonder what the culture is like at Valve
- madspindel 8y ago
  https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
  - rc-1140 8y ago
    Don't link the handbook, it's not exactly how Valve operates. https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless-industry-politics/ https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless... https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...
- otras 8y ago
  My initial reaction is to assume that they were rejected because of a lack of experience, which is unfortunate but understandable. They may have mentally attributed it to only their age, but it's very easy to assume your own suspicions after getting a reason-free boilerplate rejection. That being said, I would love to see the rejection letter.
dijit 8y ago
This implies that there's a stigma to being "rejected" for a role. The answer is that you're not entitled to a role, just like a company is not entitled to have you. There's no stigma in saying "You're not exactly what we're looking for right now", even if it's the case that you might be _really great_ somewhere else or even ideal for that exact role in future. I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" personally, some of the comments are along the lines of: "Ha! sure showed them!" but really it's just like dating, sometimes you get passed up for no other reason than you weren't the person the other was looking for at the right time. Understand rejection, don't treat it like an enemy.
- untog 8y ago
  > I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" personally Probably because they've been personally rejected for a job. I get what you're saying in the context of one job, perhaps when you already have experience. But when you're just starting out and get rejected repeatedly, of course it's disheartening.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    Maybe things are different today but I remember applying to jobs out of school as being very much a numbers game. I'm sure I had dozens of rejections and those are just the ones that got back to me. By contrast, every subsequent job (well, all three of them) came from very narrow targeting and my personal network.
- sailfast 8y ago
  I totally agree with your sentiment and aspire to a more stoic / optimistic approach, but personally have found it difficult to avoid taking things like this a bit personally - especially when you're excited about the potential role, think you'd be a great fit and you believe the company may have gotten a bad read on you.
- cafard 8y ago
  Do you automatically reject about half of country music on the grounds that "you just weren't the person the other was looking for at the right time"? I'm not saying that a steady diet of heartbreak songs makes for the best listening, just that the impulse is widespread, and so arguably understandable.
dionian 8y ago
If there are two good candidates and I pick one of them, it doesn't necessarily mean you were 'rejected', you just weren't selected. I've been 'rejected' by plenty of companies but I try not to take it too personally.
- salawat 8y ago
  Passive voice. This is the type of weasel language that people try to use to make themselves feel better about what they did. Unless you cleverly redefine rejected to have some additional baggage, the phrase 'not selected' and 'rejected' are semantically equivalent. At least do the people you don't pick the courtesy of owning up to your decision.
  - Veen 8y ago
    It has nothing to do with the passive voice. “You were rejected” and “You were not selected” are both passive. “I was given an awesome job by Google” is passive. “Google gave me an awesome job” is active. They mean the same thing. The only difference is whether the sentence puts the emphasis on the entity getting or giving the job.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    There is a clear distinction in my opinion, I've outright rejected candidates because they simply didn't have the skills. And not selected a capable one because someone else edged them out. It's not semantics. There was a decision made based on the individual. The end result is the same but there is a distinct reason for the decision.
  - sjg007 8y ago
    You should reframe negative events like a job rejection.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  This would be much easier to deal with if companies gave some reasonable feedback. With the way things work as an applicant you don't know if you were completely rejected or almost selected. It's the same.
ryandrake 8y ago
As someone who's gotten rejected by more companies than I can even count or remember, I think this is great. I have a bitter, guilty fantasy that I could go back to some of those harsh rejections long ago and show them the updates to my resume since they declared me useless. I wonder if/how companies try to measure their false negative rate. Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one." Is that really true? I wonder how many big companies have thought about testing that assumption, maybe changing their selectivity and measuring the effect. Have they really measured how much it costs to hire/fire a bad performer and shown it to be greater than the productivity they'd get out of a good performer they are inclined to reject? Does their strategy of holding out for months, looking for that unicorn candidate instead of hiring someone who's "just fine" today really work? How do they know? Have they measured it? Are they even serious about their existing selectivity? Is it baked into their annual performance process too? How many of them apply their selectivity bar to their existing employees? One common thing I've seen at companies is many of their "old guard" long time folks would never pass today's interview hazing. The most difficult thing most people ever do at a company is pass the interview.
- ghaff 8y ago
  >Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one." It depends on the role. Sales tends to be pretty performance-oriented without a lot of leeway if you miss your numbers. But, for better or worse, the attitude for most roles at most companies is that, once they hire someone, they mostly don't want to fire them if they're doing an even halfway competent job so long as the company as a whole isn't doing layoffs.
  - vonmoltke 8y ago
    > they mostly don't want to fire them if they're doing an even halfway competent job so long as the company as a whole isn't doing layoffs This doesn't sound anything like the "bad hire" everyone claims to be paranoid about.
- gaius 8y ago
lowpro 8y ago
In response to these people being hired by twitter: I think all of these statements are being sourced from twitter, and the links to their names all point to twitter, so it makes sense that people working at twitter would more often say how they got there on the platform. Many others in the list never made it past the phone screen for twitter.
k__ 8y ago
How many people got rejected and ended up in a worse job than the one they applied for, or in no job at all?
- dentemple 8y ago
  The opposite happened to a colleague of mine. He got rejected by a company ("Not enough experience" was the reason given). Then, 7 months later, not only did he get accepted to the very same company, it was at 2x the asking price from before. It really goes to show that the hiring pipeline can get pretty schizophrenic sometimes.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  Shhht, don't break the spell. People enjoy complaining, more so in groups.
jakeinspace 8y ago
This is like It Gets Better, but for fragile software engineers who obviously are talented enough to make 6 figures some place else. I understand rejection can feel personal, especially when so much of your life and identity comes from the work you've put into mastering some field, but this doesn't seem like the healthiest mindset. I'm just leaving college now and don't have much of a perspective yet, but the application/rejection treadmill feels a lot like a continuation of academic external validation. Just substitute Google and Facebook for Harvard and Stanford.
- drharby 8y ago
  This is sage insight i feel many think "well duh" but sometimes still forget.
- mountainofdeath 8y ago
  Let me break it to you: This attitude exists everywhere. People compete to get into top companies, then compete for limited promotions to get into top positions, compete for the best spouses, etc.
  - EugeneOZ 8y ago
    Competition for the best spouse sounds like some reality show. Let me break it to you: when company can afford it, they compete for the best talents.
  - sbilstein 8y ago
    Finding a spouse is not like applying for a job unless you are on the bachelor. You meet the person one on one and you don’t compete with anyone but your best self. No one i ever dated with which I experienced some “competition” was a good match in the long run anyhow. YMMV I guess.
- duxup 8y ago
  I honestly don't see this as a "feel personal" but maybe speaks more to the randomness of hiring.
mountainofdeath 8y ago
The majority of these are "I was rejected from a tier-1 company, got a job at tier-2 company". I wouldn't read to deep into this. The second tier companies live and die by how much effluent from first tier companies they hire.
solarkraft 8y ago
The submissjon title is stupid.
VectorLock 8y ago
Seems like a lot of these people who are getting rejected end up at Twitter.
waterlemons 8y ago
I'm 36, recently moved to Berlin. I have 10 years of working experience from tiny to big companies working as android developer, front-end and interaction designer. For some reason I'm struggling a lot to find a job in Berlin. Most of the CVs I've sent never get an answer, those who get there ask me for a phone interview which that I never get through. They always answer me with a copy-pasted template from the Internet. This is some feedback I got from other people after checking my CV - I'm too creative for "normal jobs" but not creative enough for the creative ones - My last 2 years I worked as a freelancer and German companies don't like that - I don't show consistency in tech stack - I'm in the verge of getting old Whatever the reason is, it's very frustrating. Drains my energy and willingness to keep working in the sector. (update: formatting)
hammerton 8y ago
This is really wonderful. As someone who just landed a job after going through so many dehumanizing and demoralizing technical interviews, this makes me feel __a little__ better about my situation.
speeder 8y ago
I wonder how safe would be me post my own stories... Since I don't have a major company job, would it stop my hiring chances? But basically: one company rejected me because was against company policy hire people without experience... Except they wanted to be the first company in my country to hire someone for that role and wanted to hire a local. No wonder they even wrote magazine articles complaining of not finding anyone... Another rejection: person that was supposed to phone interview me didn't shown for work at all, they asked another person to interview me, that person had no idea what was going on, stuff didn't went well at all... Had to answer questions for coding language I didn't knew because the person didn't knew the language the job offer was for...
- eqdw 8y ago
  I have evidence to suggest that I have been subjected to illegal hiring discrimination in the past. However, I'm not going to share my story because I know a ton of HN people will defend the discrimination as justified (even though it's not, and even though it was illegal). But I don't give a fuck. A company wants to reject me on stupid grounds? I'll go get a different job at a better company. There's _tens of thousands_ of software employers in the bay area. If one decides they dislike me so much that they're willing to do this, it's probably a bullet dodged anyway
Flavius 8y ago
Looks like nobody knows enough JS...
- EugeneOZ 8y ago
  My first impression was "you don't actually need to know enough JS to work at Twitter".
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  This is interesting because in reality JS is supposed to be easy. Since I've switched to Typescript, I've forgotten tons about Javascript and I don't care. Obviously I'm refreshed every time I check under the transpiler hood to see what's going on, but that's rare. JS always felt to me like a language wherein you didn't want to memorize all of it's arcane weirdness anyhow.
  - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
    Typescript doesn’t do a lot of transpilation if your target is ES6.
    - sonnyblarney 8y ago
      True, but in TS I've found the code is structured differently, to the point where 'prototype' inheritance is effectively obfuscated. The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS? Who cares? I would probably object to any of my devs moving into JS weirdness unless it was totally necessary. You want simple, clean and readable solutions to business (or technical) problems, not something fancy pants. Every bit of oddity / less common stuff introduced just increases risk.
      - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
        ES6 supports classes, so it would be the same thing. > The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS? They are probably just bad interviewers, or the company really doesn't know what it wants. Esoteric knowledge questions are a warning signal that you probably don't want to work there.
swampthinker 8y ago
Max Howell's story really surprises me. You would figure that someone would've internally fast tracked a developer like him.
- hinkley 8y ago
  That one is famous. We had a quite lively discussion about it here shortly after the event. Edit: to this day I have no fucking idea what “inverting a binary tree” means, other than the interviewer was too proud to admit they made a mistake. Trees have two dimensions and “invert” is the one you can’t change.
  - gnulinux 8y ago
    It just means making 1 - 2 -- 4 -- 5 - 3 --7 into 7 - 3 -- 1 [union] 5 - 2 -- 1 [union] 4 - 2 -- 1 as one graph. I must say I'm surprised someone can't write this given enough time and proudly claim "they didn't hire me because I couldn't do this". Seems like CS 101 hw.
    - ghaff 8y ago
      As he says, he wasn't a CS major. I can totally relate. I had a pretty popular DOS shareware back in the day (along with some other things). But I wasn't a CS major and would not have been able to answer most algorithmic CS questions unless I had specifically studied them for the purpose of an interview.
      - gnulinux 8y ago
        Fine, but don't you think companies should have some filter to choose candidates? In my company I interview often, and most candidates don't know how to code. Asking CS hw questions is a signal that predicts if they can code or not. If you're not a CS major it's ok but in general if you can't figure this question in 15 mins I don't want you to push code to my codebase. Some level of competence is ok. And I don't even work in a FAANG this is a random no name startup in Boston.
known 8y ago
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw
athenot 8y ago
This really highlights how hard it is to hire, at least in Tech. We come up with processes and fantastic lists of questions that verify how well a candidate knows minutia, and use that as proxy for how well he/she will do in a position where the primary required skill is speed of learning and growth. I'll hire someone who knows how to find out what they are missing over someone who knows a lot of details but can't grow. But that is hard to justify and involves risk: what if I misread someone's capacity to learn and I just hired somone without the skills nor the ability to learn? Joke's on me! So larger orgs will naturally go for process-driven hiring practices, so they can cover their behinds (and part of that is due to the requirement of applying the same standard to everyone—can't fault them for that). But this is how small orgs can win, by taking chances on candidates that are very driven to grow, and can create impressive teams that will outlive the company: good teams always find a way to recombine at least partially in other companies. So the corollary for candidates is: you have to reverse-engineer the hiring process of the large company you're trying to join. Or you can go for smaller companies* that do something you want to get deep into. Total comp is less but look at it in terms of you getting paid to learn. Then make yourself available so that large orgs come trying to hire you. When that happens, it will be on your terms. ——————————————— * Note: small companies don't have to be startups. While startups can be fantastic places for growth, they can also be sh*t shows since the entire company is trying to figure itself out, so be sure you properly interview their founders to get a feel for their integrity/sleaze.
- sjg007 8y ago
  How do you determine "can't grow" ?
keepmesmall 8y ago
Salty software engineers :) It gave me a good laugh, it's comforting to find some people who are saltier than me. It made confronting my own saltiness easier.
wolco 8y ago
The lesson is you will be rejected for a variety of reasons but it has no reflection on your ability. Candidates with less ability will be hired before you. Not because of you because they are not good at finding the best. The best they can hope for is good enough to not look badly on them. How many places whiteboard an interview but once you are hired no whiteboards can be found. We are a far ways away from when companies start interviewing with specific questions that relate to the actual role. If that happens you can start taking rejection personally.
kelukelugames 8y ago
This isn't some collection of rags to rich story. I know some authors get dozens of rejections over years before being published. This isn't close.
Isamu 8y ago
Way back when you got actual rejection letters, I kept them and started to build a collection and would compare them (which was interesting in itself). Once I made a game of it, I could actually have a tiny bit of fun ("yay! another one down! keep going!) It still stings, but if you want to be truthful, you need to make a friend of failure if you are doing anything worthwhile.
codingdave 8y ago
I like rejection. Well, maybe 'like' is the wrong word, but I appreciate the results it brings to my life. I deeply believe that a healthy working environment only comes when both the employer and the employee are right for each other. I would rather fight through rejections to find a good home than have string of mediocre roles that aren't quite right.
- bitwize 8y ago
  You'll like it a lot less when you need a way to feed your family (or just yourself), and rejection is all you get. You can't pay your rent and grocery bills with rejection.
  - newguyintown2 8y ago
    Aye. I'm making $13 an hour while trying to apply to every job that I can, while building out my portfolio projects to improve my resume, and grinding LeetCode. Needless to say I can't really afford to socialize or eat out. It really sucks after a few weeks :/
myth_buster 8y ago
The best one I've come across yet is Brian Acton being rejected by Facebook [0] ends up creating Whatsapp and in turn selling it to Facebook for $19B. Talk about comebacks. [0] https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?lang=en https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?lang=en
- hodgesrm 8y ago
  This resonates. I'm terrible at big tech company interviews--kind of a generalist, read Cicero rather than Knuth in college, tend to start out problems kind of muddled, etc. After a while I concluded the only way to get into large SV companies was to sell a company to them. It's easier to go through due diligence than the corporate interview process in a lot of places. (That's how I got my current job.)
  - NotAnEconomist 8y ago
    I spent most of my college evening getting drunk with philosophy majors and pretending my math degree meant more than my CS fallback -- but I haven't found the corporate interview system to be that terrible. I do however think it's a game that conflicts with certain personality types, including myself early in my career. I'm always curious what you (or anyone else!) think could be done better.
    - hinkley 8y ago
      The all day interview process selects for a kind of person who is confortable with arduous processes. With poor scalability. IMO any team with an SLA should be avoiding these people like the plague, because they will tolerate bullshit manual processes that take all day. They have no motivation to make foolproof automated processes with good visibility and repeatability. The smartest of them will fight attempts to change the status quo because the status quo makes them look good and everybody else look like idiots. Three of my favorite bosses were from the Fire All Heroes school of management. Two actually gave a speech to that effect in front of the entire engineering dept. They helped me get out of the hero racket. It’s great to be needed. But it sucks being the bottleneck.
amelius 8y ago
Where is the proof that they were rejected at X and where is the proof that they were hired by Y?
teekert 8y ago
I don't understand what this page does, it shows normal examples for everyday life. There aren't even enough details to judge whether company A made a mistake not hiring a person now working for company B. Maybe the match was just poor. Everybody gets rejected, you probably rejected a lot of people and stuff yourself (if you didn't you should try it sometimes), who cares, get over it.
- Ensorceled 8y ago
  That is the point of the site. Everybody gets rejected; here's a bunch of people that got rejected and went to get great jobs and you can to.
  - teekert 8y ago
    Ok, I don't really see why there should be a site for this, I mean it's like making a site of people saying they fell a couple of times when they learned to walk.
    - Ensorceled 8y ago
      We all have different levels of resilience. This site isn't for you.
      - teekert 8y ago
        Hmm, maybe its something parents can take into account: prepare your kids for some inevitable failures. I could also be on the site btw, I was told during my first assessment interview that I might at some point be a decent supermarket stockboy, not now, but maybe over time.
        Ensorceled 8y ago
        When I was in university one of our dorm mates went home at thanksgiving only to find his parents had moved with no forwarding address. He tracked them down and his parents basically said "you're 18 now, leave us alone". He was traumatized. I said "Why doesn't he just tell them to fuck off" and one of my other dorm mates said "Parents who raise their kids to have the guts to tell them to fuck off also don't fuck them over". That has stuck with me ever since. So, it's too late?
sho 8y ago
I still can't get over the fact that Google rejected mxcl, author of homebrew, possibly the most important piece of software on OSX, because he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. Even though they all run it internally. If that isn't the purest, most concentrated form of arbitrary, blind, own-goal beaureaucratic corporate idiocy I don't know what is. And people actually try to emulate their interview practises.
- aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
  >Even though they all run it internally. I bet many Google projects also use `leftpad` internally.
- pmden 8y ago
  "possibly the most important piece of software on OSX" I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. Unless he was interviewing to be Google's next head of package management on OSX, I'm not sure why you think assessing him on something other than his useful side project is bad form. I'm also not certain how an answer being 'easily-googleable' makes it arbitrary or pointless. Someone had to write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire that guy.
  - electrograv 8y ago
    > I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you have no clue how much engineering effort and talent is actually required to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager that a huge number of people use. Being able to completely implement and support a sophisticated software product end-to-end is a FAR better indicator of engineering talent than isolated algorithm puzzles on a whiteboard. Whiteboard problems are used in interviews simply because individually executed complete projects are so rare (at all, let alone publicly visible). In fact, whiteboard interviews have all but been proven to be among the least useful at distinguishing good vs bad candidates. The only reason it works is because everyone knows it's a game, studies the game, and gets tested at the same game. It's essentially a disguised IQ test that you have to study for. The problem is, if you don't study for it specifically, you're at a huge disadvantage. This leads to famous engineers (clearly talented) getting rejected because they don't practice jumping through the particular hoops the company makes everyone jump through. It seems there are more than several cases where Google needs a high profile engineer more than that engineer needs Google, and as a result the engineer doesn't study the hoop-jumping Google wants. Google rejects them out of bureaucratic process, and loses out on a good hire. On the opposite side: I'm not a famous engineer, so I suck it up and practice whiteboard algorithm problems like most everyone else -- and as a result, I've never had a problem passing coding interviews. But just because most everyone jumps through hoops to play the game, doesn't mean everyone should have to.
downandout 8y ago
Interesting that Chris Wanstrath, a newly minted billionaire and the counfounder & CEO of Github, just chimed in on the site and said he was rejected for an engineering job at Yahoo. If the standard Valley screening/interview process isn't able to pickup on the abilities of someone obviously very talented, self-motivated, and entrepreneurial, doesn't it call into question the efficacy of such procedures? It seems like existing hiring procedures might be very broken.
- arnvald 8y ago
  There are many reasons why Chris might have been rejected. Maybe indeed Yahoo was not able to recognize his talent. But maybe the company was hiring for a specific role and found someone better? Maybe despite his skills he didn't perform well in that particular interview? Hiring is very difficult. Your have limited amount of time with the candidate and based on some coding task and a few hours of interview you need to predict whether that particular candidate is going to perform well in the role you're filling. It's hard, and I'm sure I passed on a few good candidates just because at that point of time I wasn't sure enough whether they'd be a good addition to the team or not.
corn_dog 8y ago
I'm starting to think institutionalizing this kind of convoluted hiring/hazing ritual also keeps developer salaries down. Imagine if whenever you interviewed, instead of getting say 1 offer in 5 you got 4 out of 5. Now you'd be in a better bargaining position when considering offers.
dtornabene 8y ago
whole lot of "suck it up" type of rationalization here, over a system that is quite obviously broken.
crimsonalucard 8y ago
Actually if you come to the bay area and just apply to startups... it will lift your spirits by a lot. It's way easier here.
Proven 8y ago
I rejected (so far two of) FANGs when they asked if I was interested.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
HugoDaniel 8y ago
tldr Millenials get frustrated when they get rejected after applying to be a cog at random big corps.
twoquestions 8y ago
This might be good, except there's no difference between "You're good but someone else was a bit better" to "You should get out of this industry and stop wasting your time. You aren't owed a living." which is generally the more correct thing. I wish people gave better signals for the latter, so you might know better whether you should keep applying, pivot careers, or check out.
throwaway5250 8y ago
Try getting rejected at the final executive approval (i.e., their magic eight-ball) after passing the in-person day and the hiring committee. Once you've seen the inside of the hiring process, you'll never take this stuff personally again. It's utter garbage. At best, the process manages to select for a few traits that are probably useful, while de-selecting for others they didn't realize were crucial for ultimate success. If you doubt this, ask yourself how one of the tightest hiring sieves in the world managed to produce Google+.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- ravenstine 8y ago
  There was one company I applied to, for which I passed the screening and the technical interview, that I got a "Welcome Aboard" email from which also included paperwork for getting started. I just needed to meet the CEO as a last step, but they told me it was basically a formality and that I was hired. I arrived on time and was told to wait outside the CEO's office. Through the wall, I could hear him talking to someone over the phone about football and what flavor chicken wings he wanted to have ordered and delivered to him. I sat there for 25 minutes hearing his muffled dudebro voice ramble on as if his schedule was clear for the day. Finally, he let me in. At least he remembered my name. I told him why I wanted to work for Acme Corporation and the skills I planned on bringing to the table. He told me almost nothing and had me out of there in less than 10 minutes. Not even an hour after I left did I receive an email from the same HR person who told me "Welcome Aboard!" that they wouldn't be moving me forward in the hiring process. It was one of the most devastating moments in my life because that initial email and the phone call I got after was a sign that my shitty life was finally going to turn around. It did help teach me a good lesson that I would learn multiple times(with much softer landings) later on, which is that most people involved in hiring don't know what the hell they're doing and that just because a company makes a lot of money doesn't mean that forms of insanity aren't baked into their processes. You've just got to let rejections roll off you.
  - cheez 8y ago
drbojingle 8y ago
This is an example of and response to the poor state of hiring that takes place in development. Rarely do I know why I'm rejected, even if I ask but it feels like it could be anything, like a keyword. Applying for jobs is basically Bumble but, less fun. Instead of pics of you on a horse, you have a CV. I bet if you combined up-front testing (like hackajob) or a boot camp course with short-term contractual work from various companies, you could create a decent hiring funnel too.
semitext 8y ago
Thanks for sharing this. I'm switching careers, and I've lost count of how many rejections I've received at this point. Probably my highwater mark so far was getting to Google for an onsite interview. The day after I was so proud for getting there, and not completely bombing the interviews (i.e. I was always able to at least arrive at a solution for the problems, if not always an optimized one). But ultimately that wasn't good enough, and it is back to square one. It is easy to say, "don't take it personally", but when you're starting from a non-traditional background, and therefore the amount of rejections you receive is probably higher than normal, it is really challenging not to let it get into your head and think maybe you're just not cut out for this line of work.
StellaQueen 8y ago
After leaving my previous job 12 months ago, i've had some good luck to learn about this website which was a life-saver for me... They offer jobs for which people can work online from their house. My latest paycheck after working for them for 4 months was for $4500... Amazing thing about is that the only thing required is simple typing skills and access to internet...Read all about it here... http://Careers7.com/ http://Careers7.com/
lsschmidt 8y ago
Imagine looking at a website like this without being in the tech industry (or, more specifically, the "highly successful" tech industry). I can't imagine people in many other occupations looking at a site like this with any amounts of sympathy. We truly are in a fortunate "bubble" where we can sympathize with those who don't get exactly the top-paying job they were looking for and had to "settle" on Twitter, Microsoft, etc.
ryanwaggoner 8y ago
I applaud the sentiment, but isn't this just further reinforcing the underlying assumption? "Hey everyone, these massive corporations rejected me, making me feel bad about myself. But eventually, a massive corporation accepted me, so now I feel good about myself!"
drinchev 8y ago
Sometimes rejection comes from an inside company politics, like the person that is leaving is too stubborn to approve a replacement or something similar to "we decided not to hire her, because we think she won't fit our culture, but we can't legally justify it, so it's better to just write back that she can't code".
vonseel 8y ago
After reading through many of these, it felt a bit unhealthy and pointless. Something I’ve always been told about interviewing: getting in the door means you are at least qualified for the job on paper. The company would not waste its time talking to you if there wasn’t at least some chance they are going to hire you. Whether they hire you depends on how well you spin your story and how strong of a rapport you form with the interviewers. If someone does not like you, they will not hire you. This can make things difficult for introverts and socially-awkward people.
simonebrunozzi 8y ago
Why most of these people have been rejected and then landed at Twitter? Not sure this is a great signal for Twitter, just saying... Selection bias / confirmation bias might be at play.
ralmidani 8y ago
I graduated from Fullstack Academy, and I've been rejected outright by most companies I applied to; only a couple have given me over-the-phone interviews, and nobody brought me on-site. I have all but stopped applying, am doing freelance work to keep my skills sharp and pay the bills, and plan to start my own company in the future. My motto: If you can't join 'em, beat 'em. Edit: most companies I applied to are not of FAANG caliber. Also, I don't feel entitled to be hired; in most cases they didn't even deign to write a rejection email.
- mikekchar 8y ago
  A couple of pointers to help you forward. First, don't give up. Keep building up your experience and portfolio. To be honest, Fullstack Academy graduate means to me that you're completely entry level. That's fine, but when I'm hiring I almost never want entry level people. And even if I do want entry level people, I've got about 1000 CVs from people to choose from (and that is not an exaggeration). Landing that first job is really, really important. How do you land the first job? You have to stand out. It is possible (and even likely) that your CV is not great. The first thing I would do is to make sure to attend as many meetups as you can for areas relevant to your experience. Try to find a few experienced people and see if you can get some feedback on your CV. Reassure them that you aren't looking for an interview per se, you would like some independent feedback so that you can make your CV look better. When you get an over the phone interview, your attitude should be that the in person interview is nearly 100% guaranteed. There should only be 2 reasons for not getting the in person interview: the job is wrong for you (which you should be able to detect) or you have flubbed the phone interview. Without being too much of a pain, get to know some senior people in meetups and chat with them about technology. Try to get some honest feedback on what they think about your potential as a programmer based on those conversations. Over the phone interviews are a bit like that -- you should have the feeling of just kind of geeking out about your chosen field and chatting with like minded people. Practising conversations like that will help you a lot. Getting feedback is really important as well. Now, here's where it gets hard. When I'm in a big city and go to a meetup, I often find myself chatting with someone who is clearly not very strong as a programmer. Usually they are looking for work and usually I'm not interested in bringing them on board for an interview where I work. However, it's hard to give good feedback because you don't know the person and can't tell how they will react. It's important to pick up on that vibe, because of the next step. If you find that people aren't going out of their way to rush you to an interview, probably it's because you don't present yourself as being a solid enough candidate. So this means you need to figure out what your biggest weakness is and work on that. The biggest red flags I've found with really junior people (and sometimes even senior people) are: - they have funny ideas that they obviously haven't tried in realistic situations because they aren't going to work. e.g, "In my foobar server code I discovered that it runs faster if I name all my variables, a, b, c, etc." Maybe not quite so stupid, but often pretty close. - they have strong opinions on stuff despite having almost no experience "Ruby is the best programming language, OO sucks, Testing is stupid", etc, etc. - they regurgitate stuff they've heard or read and present it as gospel "Why isn't everybody using microservices? Super-programmer Sam says you are a dufus if you don't and I believe in Super-programmer Sam". - just generally clueless without realising it "I'm good at Rails. It's the best way to write front end apps". What I'm looking for in a junior developer is someone who knows a little bit, understands that they know only a little bit, is hungry to learn more, enjoys programming and demonstrates a knack for learning. Things that really impress me are people who meet me one time and if we get talking about TDD, for instance, will go away and at the next meeting flag me down and say, "I did this. Can I get your feedback on it?" Doing freelance work is great if you can manage it. However, you should also take the opportunity to build things that will help your life (even if it's just a TODO app, or even if somebody has already written something better). Use the opportunity to practice. Write it one way. Rewrite it a different way. Listen to senior people who tell you "X is amazing, you should use X" and then try it. Go back and say, "I tried X and I'm not sure that I understand how it's better. Can you have a quick look at my code and tell me if I'm doing it in a good way?" As strange as it sounds, this is exactly what I want in a junior person at work. I want them to be eager, humble, always learning, and engaging. I want them to bug me constantly about how to improve. I want them to listen closely to everything I say and to try to integrate my advice. People like that are gold for me and I will seek them out. But the biggest thing is that you need to be interacting regularly with people in the industries. Meetups are best. If you can't manage that (due to your location), then devote yourself to working on open source projects, hanging out on IRC, etc, etc. It sucks that you have to work so hard at the beginning of your career, but it will pay dividends! Anyway, good luck! As long as you are always thinking, "What can I do to become a better programmer", everything will fall into place.
partycoder 8y ago
You can reapply.
deadmik3 8y ago
this is silly. it's interesting when it's someone notable being rejected for the exact thing they're now notable for but a ton of these are just like people who just graduated saying "I didn't get this one job but now I have a job". great memoir kiddo
beezle 8y ago
At one time long ago I worked in IT before moving to another industry that was more who you know and personal rep (interviews were a formality). What sticks out to me here is the number of people who say they were 'escorted out' in the middle of an interview or otherwise had one abruptly terminated. Beyond the rudeness, it smacks of arrogance. Even if you sense the the person will not be a good match, there are ways of wrapping up a little quicker without being a *bag. And we wonder at the coarseness of our society today.
aligshow 8y ago
lol Google acquired our company and it was the worst experience of my life I didn't even apply and I was accepted this is after other worst experiences 1. getting accepted to Harvard 2. working at an enterprise software shop the only work experience that wasn't the worst experience in my life---up to that point in time---was working on a web tool for making reports from a database of student responses to a survey
flurdy 8y ago
Like most, I've been rejected by a few companies. It hurts but it is normal. I've had what I thought was great interviews but not got it, and on the other side been offered jobs after what I thought was a terrible interview. And I've been on the other side of the table many times and rejected good candidates simply because we had what we perceived to be better candidates. So it is often not even be your fault, just for some arbitrary ranking/preference done by the interviewers that day someone else got the role(s).
dominotw 8y ago
But how do you know where your bar is if you think your rejection is merely a result of companies not knowing any better. Maybe you are not really good enough to work at google.
crispinb 8y ago
If I could be bothered (which I can't quite) I'd set up an "I rejected them" alternative: all the companies I wouldn't choose to work for because they are unethical or corrupt or produce trivial crap that's not worth making.
lowercased 8y ago
Not hardly enough women in that list. Do they just not get rejected enough? Or are they not willing to speak up about being rejected? Were they not reached out to? Or is this a representative number of "women in tech", including rejections. Possibly... it's all of the above.
- andai 8y ago
  Yeah, we need more rejected women in tech.
SamvitJ 8y ago
From later down in the list: "Applied to the Harvard Business School as a Stanford honors grad with a 740 GMAT, no interview. Was rejected from Airbnb for a customer support role and later was passed over for a PM role at Google after 2 phone screens. I've cofounded Y Combinator startup (Ridejoy YC S11)... Today I'm a product manager at Etsy. Timing and fit are everything." This is literally the worst rejection story I've ever heard.
- pmiller2 8y ago
  Worst in what way?
  - SamvitJ 8y ago
    Not getting an interview from HBS as "a Stanford honors grad" is the worst rejection he's ever experienced? The whole post reeks of humble brag.
sebleon 8y ago
The Big Co interview process is a binary classifier (hire/no hire). It's actually reasonable to tune it to minimize false-positives, since a bad hire can be disastrous for all parties involved - imagine an employer changing their minds on you during your first few months. Tradeoff is that this will increase false-negatives, saying No to great people, and lead to stories in the link above. Other thing worth mentioning is that "culture fit" might make companies turn down excellent developers, who don't happen to have the founders' same personality type.
Johnny555 8y ago
You may not have been rejected because of your technical skills, but because of your soft-skills. A large part of our hiring process involves deciding if you think you can work with this person day to day and if you think they'll fit in the company culture.
HillaryBriss 8y ago
My favorite rejection story is the one by Adam Sontag
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
I’m far less worried that these companies reject a lot of people than I am worried that so many engineers are willing to accept idiotic open-plan offices, horribly dysfunctional management, pay that (while high) doesn’t fairly reflect a realistic fraction of the monetary value you actually contribute to the business. Jobs at most well-known tech companies are really dumpster fire terrible things, bad for basic psychological health. It’s sad that we consider getting these jobs a serious measure of any kind of success.
makeupsomething 8y ago
Having failed the on-site’s with several “big” companies this year these anecdotes resonate with me.
masonic 8y ago
Original posting from 2015, 206 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741560

They Rejected Us

522 points by deepaksurti 8y ago

taneq 8y ago

Subtitled "A Compendium Of 'Ha! I Sure Showed you!'".

vanderZwan 8y ago
Well, sometimes that, and sometimes: > Anne-Gaelle Colom@agcolom jQuery > I was refused a reference by my supervisor in France who thought the male student on my team did all the work.
- taneq 8y ago
  I didn't say it was always unjustified...

unkani 8y ago

I'm really surprised at how they managed to get so many big names from the open source community to share their stories. Maybe success isn't tied to grinding out a bunch of leetcode?

beaconstudios 8y ago
success is pretty tangential to being good at coding, at any large company. As long as you're good enough to get by.
Chabs 8y ago
Hot take: success is almost always accompanied by a healthy dose of survivor bias. For each of these success stories, there are a lot of good people who did the exact same thing, but it didn't pan out because of timing, location, or other similar factors.
maxxxxx 8y ago
It's very fashionable for successful people to tell the story how they "failed" or got "rejected" but with enough persistence they found success. There is something to be learned from that but you never hear the stories of people who do the exactly the same thing but never succeed and keep getting rejected. There is a lot of survivorship bias in this.
- andai 8y ago
  How I Failed and Am Still Failing to This Very Day
dentemple 8y ago
> I'm really surprised at how they managed to get so many big names from the open source community to share their stories. It helps that, it's pretty silly to claim that someone like Kyle Simpson "doesn't know Javascript" (when the title of his series is literally "You Don't Know JS"). I don't think it hurts his brand any to be open about his rejections.

dannykwells 8y ago

Maybe it's just me but it sure does seem like a lot of these people ended up at Twitter. And I don't see a lot of Google.

lkbm 8y ago
It seems like Google filters hard on whiteboarding, questions and Twitter filters on something at least somewhat orthogonal.
- 4ndrewl 8y ago
  I guess you could argue that using Profitability as a metric as a guide to how succesful the hiring strategy was? I wouldn't, but you could...
  - ThrowMeDown01 8y ago
    Since the major component of Google's profitability is its search business you would have to filter for that. Much of the rest that they do isn't exactly a shiny example for profitability. Also, it's not exactly easy to say who and what exactly contributed to profitability, it is way too complex and environment also plays a role, as well as competitors (if they mess up big time, does that mean you are good?). Sure, an accountant will be able to give you an answer how one individual human or piece of equipment contributed to the result. It will be a different one depending on what you need the number for though (to calculate taxes? to make an investment decision? to allocate production resources?), and it is quite arbitrary.
fenomas 8y ago
The obvious explanation would be that the maintainer (who used to work there) hit up colleagues for stories, or because it circulated among Twitter employees for whatever other reason. It's not very likely to imply anything about Twitter's or Google's hiring.
- egometry 8y ago

code_duck 8y ago

Seems like a lot of people went on to be hired by twitter after not satisfying some other hiring processes. What if this just means that twitter hires second rate people? Also, I wouldn’t have hired the guy who doesn’t use semicolons in his JavaScript, either.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
petermcneeley 8y ago
"Also, I wouldn’t have hired the guy who doesn’t use semicolons in his JavaScript, either." This seems very similar to the c++ issue with single statement ifs. https://flaviocopes.com/javascript-automatic-semicolon-insertion/ https://flaviocopes.com/javascript-automatic-semicolon-inser...
- P4ssw0rd 8y ago
  This is one of the interview questions they ask JS developers ... and it's idiotic. No-one in industry uses pure JS anymore. Literally everyone uses ES6 with eslint which will (with default rules) fail the build if you use such ambiguity.
pcmaffey 8y ago
I used to hate when I saw JS with semicolons too. "Get off my lawn" with that naked code! Not sure when or how it changed, but I'm on the other side of the fence now. Without semicolons (unless multi-statements on a single line), JS is so much cleaner. A line break is perfectly sufficient to signal the end of a statement.
- logfromblammo 8y ago
  That is a perfectly reasonable opinion. However, as a grammar-nazi, I feel that proper punctuation is important. While certain poetic forms may take liberties with punctuation for the sake of the artistic expression, sentences end with a full stop--separated by a subsequent sentence in the same paragraph by two spaces--and lines of code end in an unambiguous visible token. Newline/return characters are whitespace tokens. Differentiating them from other whitespace tokens is the first step on the path to madness. What's next? Treating tabs differently from spaces? ~ (ha ha only serious)

projectramo 8y ago

Note to self: If I get rejected from a lot of companies, just apply to Twitter. They'll surely say yes. Addendum: there should be a companion site "Even twitter rejected me!"

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dreta 8y ago
It does look like Twitter is for rejects if you only read the top entries.
vikasg 8y ago
The site was made by an ex-twitter engineer, so lots of the entires come from other Twitter engineers.
- travisjungroth 8y ago
  That's a really interesting sort of survivor bias.
- iseeyoubydesign 8y ago
  engineers at twitter are used to making useless websites ... jk, im not a billionaire. But I was accepted by twitter.

joshbetz 8y ago

Do practice interviews at companies you don't really want to work for. It takes the pressure off and makes the real interviews easier.

maxxxxx 8y ago
Who has time for that if you have a full time job? Do you spend all your vacation in interviewing?
- rhinoceraptor 8y ago
  Your first job is your job, your second job is working on OSS on github to make yourself look good, and your third job is interviewing :^)
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    Most interviews are during my work hours. Do you take a day off for each?
    - yardie 8y ago
      You have 2 choices. You can do it discretely; after work hours, no the may not contact my employer. Or, you can do it openly; multi-hour lunch breaks, lots of personal time off, and your LinkedIn profile is super active. The latter will either get you a salary increase or you'll be shown the door. Ask me how I know.
      - vonmoltke 8y ago
        I haven't had an on-site yet that didn't require blocking off an entire day.
        maxxxxx 8y ago
        I have had half-days (my company does that too) which pretty much require a full day off.

Jmcdd 8y ago

>Rejected by Valve Software for a Software Engineer position because i was young. (when i was 19) Really? I wonder what the culture is like at Valve

madspindel 8y ago
https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...
- rc-1140 8y ago
  Don't link the handbook, it's not exactly how Valve operates. https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless-industry-politics/ https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless... https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/ https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...
otras 8y ago
My initial reaction is to assume that they were rejected because of a lack of experience, which is unfortunate but understandable. They may have mentally attributed it to only their age, but it's very easy to assume your own suspicions after getting a reason-free boilerplate rejection. That being said, I would love to see the rejection letter.

dijit 8y ago

This implies that there's a stigma to being "rejected" for a role. The answer is that you're not entitled to a role, just like a company is not entitled to have you. There's no stigma in saying "You're not exactly what we're looking for right now", even if it's the case that you might be _really great_ somewhere else or even ideal for that exact role in future. I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" personally, some of the comments are along the lines of: "Ha! sure showed them!" but really it's just like dating, sometimes you get passed up for no other reason than you weren't the person the other was looking for at the right time. Understand rejection, don't treat it like an enemy.

untog 8y ago
> I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" personally Probably because they've been personally rejected for a job. I get what you're saying in the context of one job, perhaps when you already have experience. But when you're just starting out and get rejected repeatedly, of course it's disheartening.
- ghaff 8y ago
  Maybe things are different today but I remember applying to jobs out of school as being very much a numbers game. I'm sure I had dozens of rejections and those are just the ones that got back to me. By contrast, every subsequent job (well, all three of them) came from very narrow targeting and my personal network.
sailfast 8y ago
I totally agree with your sentiment and aspire to a more stoic / optimistic approach, but personally have found it difficult to avoid taking things like this a bit personally - especially when you're excited about the potential role, think you'd be a great fit and you believe the company may have gotten a bad read on you.
cafard 8y ago
Do you automatically reject about half of country music on the grounds that "you just weren't the person the other was looking for at the right time"? I'm not saying that a steady diet of heartbreak songs makes for the best listening, just that the impulse is widespread, and so arguably understandable.

dionian 8y ago

If there are two good candidates and I pick one of them, it doesn't necessarily mean you were 'rejected', you just weren't selected. I've been 'rejected' by plenty of companies but I try not to take it too personally.

salawat 8y ago
Passive voice. This is the type of weasel language that people try to use to make themselves feel better about what they did. Unless you cleverly redefine rejected to have some additional baggage, the phrase 'not selected' and 'rejected' are semantically equivalent. At least do the people you don't pick the courtesy of owning up to your decision.
- Veen 8y ago
  It has nothing to do with the passive voice. “You were rejected” and “You were not selected” are both passive. “I was given an awesome job by Google” is passive. “Google gave me an awesome job” is active. They mean the same thing. The only difference is whether the sentence puts the emphasis on the entity getting or giving the job.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  There is a clear distinction in my opinion, I've outright rejected candidates because they simply didn't have the skills. And not selected a capable one because someone else edged them out. It's not semantics. There was a decision made based on the individual. The end result is the same but there is a distinct reason for the decision.
- sjg007 8y ago
  You should reframe negative events like a job rejection.
maxxxxx 8y ago
This would be much easier to deal with if companies gave some reasonable feedback. With the way things work as an applicant you don't know if you were completely rejected or almost selected. It's the same.

ryandrake 8y ago

As someone who's gotten rejected by more companies than I can even count or remember, I think this is great. I have a bitter, guilty fantasy that I could go back to some of those harsh rejections long ago and show them the updates to my resume since they declared me useless. I wonder if/how companies try to measure their false negative rate. Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one." Is that really true? I wonder how many big companies have thought about testing that assumption, maybe changing their selectivity and measuring the effect. Have they really measured how much it costs to hire/fire a bad performer and shown it to be greater than the productivity they'd get out of a good performer they are inclined to reject? Does their strategy of holding out for months, looking for that unicorn candidate instead of hiring someone who's "just fine" today really work? How do they know? Have they measured it? Are they even serious about their existing selectivity? Is it baked into their annual performance process too? How many of them apply their selectivity bar to their existing employees? One common thing I've seen at companies is many of their "old guard" long time folks would never pass today's interview hazing. The most difficult thing most people ever do at a company is pass the interview.

ghaff 8y ago
>Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one." It depends on the role. Sales tends to be pretty performance-oriented without a lot of leeway if you miss your numbers. But, for better or worse, the attitude for most roles at most companies is that, once they hire someone, they mostly don't want to fire them if they're doing an even halfway competent job so long as the company as a whole isn't doing layoffs.
- vonmoltke 8y ago
  > they mostly don't want to fire them if they're doing an even halfway competent job so long as the company as a whole isn't doing layoffs This doesn't sound anything like the "bad hire" everyone claims to be paranoid about.
gaius 8y ago

lowpro 8y ago

In response to these people being hired by twitter: I think all of these statements are being sourced from twitter, and the links to their names all point to twitter, so it makes sense that people working at twitter would more often say how they got there on the platform. Many others in the list never made it past the phone screen for twitter.

k__ 8y ago

How many people got rejected and ended up in a worse job than the one they applied for, or in no job at all?

dentemple 8y ago
The opposite happened to a colleague of mine. He got rejected by a company ("Not enough experience" was the reason given). Then, 7 months later, not only did he get accepted to the very same company, it was at 2x the asking price from before. It really goes to show that the hiring pipeline can get pretty schizophrenic sometimes.
eeZah7Ux 8y ago
Shhht, don't break the spell. People enjoy complaining, more so in groups.

jakeinspace 8y ago

This is like It Gets Better, but for fragile software engineers who obviously are talented enough to make 6 figures some place else. I understand rejection can feel personal, especially when so much of your life and identity comes from the work you've put into mastering some field, but this doesn't seem like the healthiest mindset. I'm just leaving college now and don't have much of a perspective yet, but the application/rejection treadmill feels a lot like a continuation of academic external validation. Just substitute Google and Facebook for Harvard and Stanford.

drharby 8y ago
This is sage insight i feel many think "well duh" but sometimes still forget.
mountainofdeath 8y ago
Let me break it to you: This attitude exists everywhere. People compete to get into top companies, then compete for limited promotions to get into top positions, compete for the best spouses, etc.
- EugeneOZ 8y ago
  Competition for the best spouse sounds like some reality show. Let me break it to you: when company can afford it, they compete for the best talents.
- sbilstein 8y ago
  Finding a spouse is not like applying for a job unless you are on the bachelor. You meet the person one on one and you don’t compete with anyone but your best self. No one i ever dated with which I experienced some “competition” was a good match in the long run anyhow. YMMV I guess.
duxup 8y ago
I honestly don't see this as a "feel personal" but maybe speaks more to the randomness of hiring.

mountainofdeath 8y ago

The majority of these are "I was rejected from a tier-1 company, got a job at tier-2 company". I wouldn't read to deep into this. The second tier companies live and die by how much effluent from first tier companies they hire.

solarkraft 8y ago

The submissjon title is stupid.

VectorLock 8y ago

Seems like a lot of these people who are getting rejected end up at Twitter.

waterlemons 8y ago

I'm 36, recently moved to Berlin. I have 10 years of working experience from tiny to big companies working as android developer, front-end and interaction designer. For some reason I'm struggling a lot to find a job in Berlin. Most of the CVs I've sent never get an answer, those who get there ask me for a phone interview which that I never get through. They always answer me with a copy-pasted template from the Internet. This is some feedback I got from other people after checking my CV - I'm too creative for "normal jobs" but not creative enough for the creative ones - My last 2 years I worked as a freelancer and German companies don't like that - I don't show consistency in tech stack - I'm in the verge of getting old Whatever the reason is, it's very frustrating. Drains my energy and willingness to keep working in the sector. (update: formatting)

hammerton 8y ago

This is really wonderful. As someone who just landed a job after going through so many dehumanizing and demoralizing technical interviews, this makes me feel __a little__ better about my situation.

speeder 8y ago

I wonder how safe would be me post my own stories... Since I don't have a major company job, would it stop my hiring chances? But basically: one company rejected me because was against company policy hire people without experience... Except they wanted to be the first company in my country to hire someone for that role and wanted to hire a local. No wonder they even wrote magazine articles complaining of not finding anyone... Another rejection: person that was supposed to phone interview me didn't shown for work at all, they asked another person to interview me, that person had no idea what was going on, stuff didn't went well at all... Had to answer questions for coding language I didn't knew because the person didn't knew the language the job offer was for...

eqdw 8y ago
I have evidence to suggest that I have been subjected to illegal hiring discrimination in the past. However, I'm not going to share my story because I know a ton of HN people will defend the discrimination as justified (even though it's not, and even though it was illegal). But I don't give a fuck. A company wants to reject me on stupid grounds? I'll go get a different job at a better company. There's _tens of thousands_ of software employers in the bay area. If one decides they dislike me so much that they're willing to do this, it's probably a bullet dodged anyway

Flavius 8y ago

Looks like nobody knows enough JS...

EugeneOZ 8y ago
My first impression was "you don't actually need to know enough JS to work at Twitter".
sonnyblarney 8y ago
This is interesting because in reality JS is supposed to be easy. Since I've switched to Typescript, I've forgotten tons about Javascript and I don't care. Obviously I'm refreshed every time I check under the transpiler hood to see what's going on, but that's rare. JS always felt to me like a language wherein you didn't want to memorize all of it's arcane weirdness anyhow.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  Typescript doesn’t do a lot of transpilation if your target is ES6.
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    True, but in TS I've found the code is structured differently, to the point where 'prototype' inheritance is effectively obfuscated. The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS? Who cares? I would probably object to any of my devs moving into JS weirdness unless it was totally necessary. You want simple, clean and readable solutions to business (or technical) problems, not something fancy pants. Every bit of oddity / less common stuff introduced just increases risk.
    - seanmcdirmid 8y ago
      ES6 supports classes, so it would be the same thing. > The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS? They are probably just bad interviewers, or the company really doesn't know what it wants. Esoteric knowledge questions are a warning signal that you probably don't want to work there.

swampthinker 8y ago

Max Howell's story really surprises me. You would figure that someone would've internally fast tracked a developer like him.

hinkley 8y ago
That one is famous. We had a quite lively discussion about it here shortly after the event. Edit: to this day I have no fucking idea what “inverting a binary tree” means, other than the interviewer was too proud to admit they made a mistake. Trees have two dimensions and “invert” is the one you can’t change.
- gnulinux 8y ago
  It just means making 1 - 2 -- 4 -- 5 - 3 --7 into 7 - 3 -- 1 [union] 5 - 2 -- 1 [union] 4 - 2 -- 1 as one graph. I must say I'm surprised someone can't write this given enough time and proudly claim "they didn't hire me because I couldn't do this". Seems like CS 101 hw.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    As he says, he wasn't a CS major. I can totally relate. I had a pretty popular DOS shareware back in the day (along with some other things). But I wasn't a CS major and would not have been able to answer most algorithmic CS questions unless I had specifically studied them for the purpose of an interview.
    - gnulinux 8y ago
      Fine, but don't you think companies should have some filter to choose candidates? In my company I interview often, and most candidates don't know how to code. Asking CS hw questions is a signal that predicts if they can code or not. If you're not a CS major it's ok but in general if you can't figure this question in 15 mins I don't want you to push code to my codebase. Some level of competence is ok. And I don't even work in a FAANG this is a random no name startup in Boston.

known 8y ago

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

athenot 8y ago

This really highlights how hard it is to hire, at least in Tech. We come up with processes and fantastic lists of questions that verify how well a candidate knows minutia, and use that as proxy for how well he/she will do in a position where the primary required skill is speed of learning and growth. I'll hire someone who knows how to find out what they are missing over someone who knows a lot of details but can't grow. But that is hard to justify and involves risk: what if I misread someone's capacity to learn and I just hired somone without the skills nor the ability to learn? Joke's on me! So larger orgs will naturally go for process-driven hiring practices, so they can cover their behinds (and part of that is due to the requirement of applying the same standard to everyone—can't fault them for that). But this is how small orgs can win, by taking chances on candidates that are very driven to grow, and can create impressive teams that will outlive the company: good teams always find a way to recombine at least partially in other companies. So the corollary for candidates is: you have to reverse-engineer the hiring process of the large company you're trying to join. Or you can go for smaller companies* that do something you want to get deep into. Total comp is less but look at it in terms of you getting paid to learn. Then make yourself available so that large orgs come trying to hire you. When that happens, it will be on your terms. ——————————————— * Note: small companies don't have to be startups. While startups can be fantastic places for growth, they can also be sh*t shows since the entire company is trying to figure itself out, so be sure you properly interview their founders to get a feel for their integrity/sleaze.

sjg007 8y ago
How do you determine "can't grow" ?

keepmesmall 8y ago

Salty software engineers :) It gave me a good laugh, it's comforting to find some people who are saltier than me. It made confronting my own saltiness easier.

wolco 8y ago

The lesson is you will be rejected for a variety of reasons but it has no reflection on your ability. Candidates with less ability will be hired before you. Not because of you because they are not good at finding the best. The best they can hope for is good enough to not look badly on them. How many places whiteboard an interview but once you are hired no whiteboards can be found. We are a far ways away from when companies start interviewing with specific questions that relate to the actual role. If that happens you can start taking rejection personally.

kelukelugames 8y ago

This isn't some collection of rags to rich story. I know some authors get dozens of rejections over years before being published. This isn't close.

Isamu 8y ago

Way back when you got actual rejection letters, I kept them and started to build a collection and would compare them (which was interesting in itself). Once I made a game of it, I could actually have a tiny bit of fun ("yay! another one down! keep going!) It still stings, but if you want to be truthful, you need to make a friend of failure if you are doing anything worthwhile.

codingdave 8y ago

I like rejection. Well, maybe 'like' is the wrong word, but I appreciate the results it brings to my life. I deeply believe that a healthy working environment only comes when both the employer and the employee are right for each other. I would rather fight through rejections to find a good home than have string of mediocre roles that aren't quite right.

bitwize 8y ago
You'll like it a lot less when you need a way to feed your family (or just yourself), and rejection is all you get. You can't pay your rent and grocery bills with rejection.
- newguyintown2 8y ago
  Aye. I'm making $13 an hour while trying to apply to every job that I can, while building out my portfolio projects to improve my resume, and grinding LeetCode. Needless to say I can't really afford to socialize or eat out. It really sucks after a few weeks :/

myth_buster 8y ago

The best one I've come across yet is Brian Acton being rejected by Facebook [0] ends up creating Whatsapp and in turn selling it to Facebook for $19B. Talk about comebacks. [0] https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?lang=en https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?lang=en

hodgesrm 8y ago
This resonates. I'm terrible at big tech company interviews--kind of a generalist, read Cicero rather than Knuth in college, tend to start out problems kind of muddled, etc. After a while I concluded the only way to get into large SV companies was to sell a company to them. It's easier to go through due diligence than the corporate interview process in a lot of places. (That's how I got my current job.)
- NotAnEconomist 8y ago
  I spent most of my college evening getting drunk with philosophy majors and pretending my math degree meant more than my CS fallback -- but I haven't found the corporate interview system to be that terrible. I do however think it's a game that conflicts with certain personality types, including myself early in my career. I'm always curious what you (or anyone else!) think could be done better.
  - hinkley 8y ago
    The all day interview process selects for a kind of person who is confortable with arduous processes. With poor scalability. IMO any team with an SLA should be avoiding these people like the plague, because they will tolerate bullshit manual processes that take all day. They have no motivation to make foolproof automated processes with good visibility and repeatability. The smartest of them will fight attempts to change the status quo because the status quo makes them look good and everybody else look like idiots. Three of my favorite bosses were from the Fire All Heroes school of management. Two actually gave a speech to that effect in front of the entire engineering dept. They helped me get out of the hero racket. It’s great to be needed. But it sucks being the bottleneck.

amelius 8y ago

Where is the proof that they were rejected at X and where is the proof that they were hired by Y?

teekert 8y ago

I don't understand what this page does, it shows normal examples for everyday life. There aren't even enough details to judge whether company A made a mistake not hiring a person now working for company B. Maybe the match was just poor. Everybody gets rejected, you probably rejected a lot of people and stuff yourself (if you didn't you should try it sometimes), who cares, get over it.

Ensorceled 8y ago
That is the point of the site. Everybody gets rejected; here's a bunch of people that got rejected and went to get great jobs and you can to.
- teekert 8y ago
  Ok, I don't really see why there should be a site for this, I mean it's like making a site of people saying they fell a couple of times when they learned to walk.
  - Ensorceled 8y ago
    We all have different levels of resilience. This site isn't for you.
    - teekert 8y ago
      Hmm, maybe its something parents can take into account: prepare your kids for some inevitable failures. I could also be on the site btw, I was told during my first assessment interview that I might at some point be a decent supermarket stockboy, not now, but maybe over time.
      - Ensorceled 8y ago
        When I was in university one of our dorm mates went home at thanksgiving only to find his parents had moved with no forwarding address. He tracked them down and his parents basically said "you're 18 now, leave us alone". He was traumatized. I said "Why doesn't he just tell them to fuck off" and one of my other dorm mates said "Parents who raise their kids to have the guts to tell them to fuck off also don't fuck them over". That has stuck with me ever since. So, it's too late?

sho 8y ago

I still can't get over the fact that Google rejected mxcl, author of homebrew, possibly the most important piece of software on OSX, because he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. Even though they all run it internally. If that isn't the purest, most concentrated form of arbitrary, blind, own-goal beaureaucratic corporate idiocy I don't know what is. And people actually try to emulate their interview practises.

aaaaaaaaaab 8y ago
>Even though they all run it internally. I bet many Google projects also use `leftpad` internally.
pmden 8y ago
"possibly the most important piece of software on OSX" I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. Unless he was interviewing to be Google's next head of package management on OSX, I'm not sure why you think assessing him on something other than his useful side project is bad form. I'm also not certain how an answer being 'easily-googleable' makes it arbitrary or pointless. Someone had to write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire that guy.
- electrograv 8y ago
  > I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you have no clue how much engineering effort and talent is actually required to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager that a huge number of people use. Being able to completely implement and support a sophisticated software product end-to-end is a FAR better indicator of engineering talent than isolated algorithm puzzles on a whiteboard. Whiteboard problems are used in interviews simply because individually executed complete projects are so rare (at all, let alone publicly visible). In fact, whiteboard interviews have all but been proven to be among the least useful at distinguishing good vs bad candidates. The only reason it works is because everyone knows it's a game, studies the game, and gets tested at the same game. It's essentially a disguised IQ test that you have to study for. The problem is, if you don't study for it specifically, you're at a huge disadvantage. This leads to famous engineers (clearly talented) getting rejected because they don't practice jumping through the particular hoops the company makes everyone jump through. It seems there are more than several cases where Google needs a high profile engineer more than that engineer needs Google, and as a result the engineer doesn't study the hoop-jumping Google wants. Google rejects them out of bureaucratic process, and loses out on a good hire. On the opposite side: I'm not a famous engineer, so I suck it up and practice whiteboard algorithm problems like most everyone else -- and as a result, I've never had a problem passing coding interviews. But just because most everyone jumps through hoops to play the game, doesn't mean everyone should have to.

downandout 8y ago

Interesting that Chris Wanstrath, a newly minted billionaire and the counfounder & CEO of Github, just chimed in on the site and said he was rejected for an engineering job at Yahoo. If the standard Valley screening/interview process isn't able to pickup on the abilities of someone obviously very talented, self-motivated, and entrepreneurial, doesn't it call into question the efficacy of such procedures? It seems like existing hiring procedures might be very broken.

arnvald 8y ago
There are many reasons why Chris might have been rejected. Maybe indeed Yahoo was not able to recognize his talent. But maybe the company was hiring for a specific role and found someone better? Maybe despite his skills he didn't perform well in that particular interview? Hiring is very difficult. Your have limited amount of time with the candidate and based on some coding task and a few hours of interview you need to predict whether that particular candidate is going to perform well in the role you're filling. It's hard, and I'm sure I passed on a few good candidates just because at that point of time I wasn't sure enough whether they'd be a good addition to the team or not.

corn_dog 8y ago

I'm starting to think institutionalizing this kind of convoluted hiring/hazing ritual also keeps developer salaries down. Imagine if whenever you interviewed, instead of getting say 1 offer in 5 you got 4 out of 5. Now you'd be in a better bargaining position when considering offers.

dtornabene 8y ago

whole lot of "suck it up" type of rationalization here, over a system that is quite obviously broken.

crimsonalucard 8y ago

Actually if you come to the bay area and just apply to startups... it will lift your spirits by a lot. It's way easier here.

Proven 8y ago

I rejected (so far two of) FANGs when they asked if I was interested.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

HugoDaniel 8y ago

tldr Millenials get frustrated when they get rejected after applying to be a cog at random big corps.

twoquestions 8y ago

This might be good, except there's no difference between "You're good but someone else was a bit better" to "You should get out of this industry and stop wasting your time. You aren't owed a living." which is generally the more correct thing. I wish people gave better signals for the latter, so you might know better whether you should keep applying, pivot careers, or check out.

throwaway5250 8y ago

Try getting rejected at the final executive approval (i.e., their magic eight-ball) after passing the in-person day and the hiring committee. Once you've seen the inside of the hiring process, you'll never take this stuff personally again. It's utter garbage. At best, the process manages to select for a few traits that are probably useful, while de-selecting for others they didn't realize were crucial for ultimate success. If you doubt this, ask yourself how one of the tightest hiring sieves in the world managed to produce Google+.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
ravenstine 8y ago
There was one company I applied to, for which I passed the screening and the technical interview, that I got a "Welcome Aboard" email from which also included paperwork for getting started. I just needed to meet the CEO as a last step, but they told me it was basically a formality and that I was hired. I arrived on time and was told to wait outside the CEO's office. Through the wall, I could hear him talking to someone over the phone about football and what flavor chicken wings he wanted to have ordered and delivered to him. I sat there for 25 minutes hearing his muffled dudebro voice ramble on as if his schedule was clear for the day. Finally, he let me in. At least he remembered my name. I told him why I wanted to work for Acme Corporation and the skills I planned on bringing to the table. He told me almost nothing and had me out of there in less than 10 minutes. Not even an hour after I left did I receive an email from the same HR person who told me "Welcome Aboard!" that they wouldn't be moving me forward in the hiring process. It was one of the most devastating moments in my life because that initial email and the phone call I got after was a sign that my shitty life was finally going to turn around. It did help teach me a good lesson that I would learn multiple times(with much softer landings) later on, which is that most people involved in hiring don't know what the hell they're doing and that just because a company makes a lot of money doesn't mean that forms of insanity aren't baked into their processes. You've just got to let rejections roll off you.
- cheez 8y ago

drbojingle 8y ago

This is an example of and response to the poor state of hiring that takes place in development. Rarely do I know why I'm rejected, even if I ask but it feels like it could be anything, like a keyword. Applying for jobs is basically Bumble but, less fun. Instead of pics of you on a horse, you have a CV. I bet if you combined up-front testing (like hackajob) or a boot camp course with short-term contractual work from various companies, you could create a decent hiring funnel too.

semitext 8y ago

Thanks for sharing this. I'm switching careers, and I've lost count of how many rejections I've received at this point. Probably my highwater mark so far was getting to Google for an onsite interview. The day after I was so proud for getting there, and not completely bombing the interviews (i.e. I was always able to at least arrive at a solution for the problems, if not always an optimized one). But ultimately that wasn't good enough, and it is back to square one. It is easy to say, "don't take it personally", but when you're starting from a non-traditional background, and therefore the amount of rejections you receive is probably higher than normal, it is really challenging not to let it get into your head and think maybe you're just not cut out for this line of work.

StellaQueen 8y ago

After leaving my previous job 12 months ago, i've had some good luck to learn about this website which was a life-saver for me... They offer jobs for which people can work online from their house. My latest paycheck after working for them for 4 months was for $4500... Amazing thing about is that the only thing required is simple typing skills and access to internet...Read all about it here... http://Careers7.com/ http://Careers7.com/

lsschmidt 8y ago

Imagine looking at a website like this without being in the tech industry (or, more specifically, the "highly successful" tech industry). I can't imagine people in many other occupations looking at a site like this with any amounts of sympathy. We truly are in a fortunate "bubble" where we can sympathize with those who don't get exactly the top-paying job they were looking for and had to "settle" on Twitter, Microsoft, etc.

ryanwaggoner 8y ago

I applaud the sentiment, but isn't this just further reinforcing the underlying assumption? "Hey everyone, these massive corporations rejected me, making me feel bad about myself. But eventually, a massive corporation accepted me, so now I feel good about myself!"

drinchev 8y ago

Sometimes rejection comes from an inside company politics, like the person that is leaving is too stubborn to approve a replacement or something similar to "we decided not to hire her, because we think she won't fit our culture, but we can't legally justify it, so it's better to just write back that she can't code".

vonseel 8y ago

After reading through many of these, it felt a bit unhealthy and pointless. Something I’ve always been told about interviewing: getting in the door means you are at least qualified for the job on paper. The company would not waste its time talking to you if there wasn’t at least some chance they are going to hire you. Whether they hire you depends on how well you spin your story and how strong of a rapport you form with the interviewers. If someone does not like you, they will not hire you. This can make things difficult for introverts and socially-awkward people.

simonebrunozzi 8y ago

Why most of these people have been rejected and then landed at Twitter? Not sure this is a great signal for Twitter, just saying... Selection bias / confirmation bias might be at play.

ralmidani 8y ago

I graduated from Fullstack Academy, and I've been rejected outright by most companies I applied to; only a couple have given me over-the-phone interviews, and nobody brought me on-site. I have all but stopped applying, am doing freelance work to keep my skills sharp and pay the bills, and plan to start my own company in the future. My motto: If you can't join 'em, beat 'em. Edit: most companies I applied to are not of FAANG caliber. Also, I don't feel entitled to be hired; in most cases they didn't even deign to write a rejection email.

mikekchar 8y ago
A couple of pointers to help you forward. First, don't give up. Keep building up your experience and portfolio. To be honest, Fullstack Academy graduate means to me that you're completely entry level. That's fine, but when I'm hiring I almost never want entry level people. And even if I do want entry level people, I've got about 1000 CVs from people to choose from (and that is not an exaggeration). Landing that first job is really, really important. How do you land the first job? You have to stand out. It is possible (and even likely) that your CV is not great. The first thing I would do is to make sure to attend as many meetups as you can for areas relevant to your experience. Try to find a few experienced people and see if you can get some feedback on your CV. Reassure them that you aren't looking for an interview per se, you would like some independent feedback so that you can make your CV look better. When you get an over the phone interview, your attitude should be that the in person interview is nearly 100% guaranteed. There should only be 2 reasons for not getting the in person interview: the job is wrong for you (which you should be able to detect) or you have flubbed the phone interview. Without being too much of a pain, get to know some senior people in meetups and chat with them about technology. Try to get some honest feedback on what they think about your potential as a programmer based on those conversations. Over the phone interviews are a bit like that -- you should have the feeling of just kind of geeking out about your chosen field and chatting with like minded people. Practising conversations like that will help you a lot. Getting feedback is really important as well. Now, here's where it gets hard. When I'm in a big city and go to a meetup, I often find myself chatting with someone who is clearly not very strong as a programmer. Usually they are looking for work and usually I'm not interested in bringing them on board for an interview where I work. However, it's hard to give good feedback because you don't know the person and can't tell how they will react. It's important to pick up on that vibe, because of the next step. If you find that people aren't going out of their way to rush you to an interview, probably it's because you don't present yourself as being a solid enough candidate. So this means you need to figure out what your biggest weakness is and work on that. The biggest red flags I've found with really junior people (and sometimes even senior people) are: - they have funny ideas that they obviously haven't tried in realistic situations because they aren't going to work. e.g, "In my foobar server code I discovered that it runs faster if I name all my variables, a, b, c, etc." Maybe not quite so stupid, but often pretty close. - they have strong opinions on stuff despite having almost no experience "Ruby is the best programming language, OO sucks, Testing is stupid", etc, etc. - they regurgitate stuff they've heard or read and present it as gospel "Why isn't everybody using microservices? Super-programmer Sam says you are a dufus if you don't and I believe in Super-programmer Sam". - just generally clueless without realising it "I'm good at Rails. It's the best way to write front end apps". What I'm looking for in a junior developer is someone who knows a little bit, understands that they know only a little bit, is hungry to learn more, enjoys programming and demonstrates a knack for learning. Things that really impress me are people who meet me one time and if we get talking about TDD, for instance, will go away and at the next meeting flag me down and say, "I did this. Can I get your feedback on it?" Doing freelance work is great if you can manage it. However, you should also take the opportunity to build things that will help your life (even if it's just a TODO app, or even if somebody has already written something better). Use the opportunity to practice. Write it one way. Rewrite it a different way. Listen to senior people who tell you "X is amazing, you should use X" and then try it. Go back and say, "I tried X and I'm not sure that I understand how it's better. Can you have a quick look at my code and tell me if I'm doing it in a good way?" As strange as it sounds, this is exactly what I want in a junior person at work. I want them to be eager, humble, always learning, and engaging. I want them to bug me constantly about how to improve. I want them to listen closely to everything I say and to try to integrate my advice. People like that are gold for me and I will seek them out. But the biggest thing is that you need to be interacting regularly with people in the industries. Meetups are best. If you can't manage that (due to your location), then devote yourself to working on open source projects, hanging out on IRC, etc, etc. It sucks that you have to work so hard at the beginning of your career, but it will pay dividends! Anyway, good luck! As long as you are always thinking, "What can I do to become a better programmer", everything will fall into place.

partycoder 8y ago

You can reapply.

deadmik3 8y ago

this is silly. it's interesting when it's someone notable being rejected for the exact thing they're now notable for but a ton of these are just like people who just graduated saying "I didn't get this one job but now I have a job". great memoir kiddo

beezle 8y ago

At one time long ago I worked in IT before moving to another industry that was more who you know and personal rep (interviews were a formality). What sticks out to me here is the number of people who say they were 'escorted out' in the middle of an interview or otherwise had one abruptly terminated. Beyond the rudeness, it smacks of arrogance. Even if you sense the the person will not be a good match, there are ways of wrapping up a little quicker without being a *bag. And we wonder at the coarseness of our society today.

aligshow 8y ago

lol Google acquired our company and it was the worst experience of my life I didn't even apply and I was accepted this is after other worst experiences 1. getting accepted to Harvard 2. working at an enterprise software shop the only work experience that wasn't the worst experience in my life---up to that point in time---was working on a web tool for making reports from a database of student responses to a survey

flurdy 8y ago

Like most, I've been rejected by a few companies. It hurts but it is normal. I've had what I thought was great interviews but not got it, and on the other side been offered jobs after what I thought was a terrible interview. And I've been on the other side of the table many times and rejected good candidates simply because we had what we perceived to be better candidates. So it is often not even be your fault, just for some arbitrary ranking/preference done by the interviewers that day someone else got the role(s).

dominotw 8y ago

But how do you know where your bar is if you think your rejection is merely a result of companies not knowing any better. Maybe you are not really good enough to work at google.

crispinb 8y ago

If I could be bothered (which I can't quite) I'd set up an "I rejected them" alternative: all the companies I wouldn't choose to work for because they are unethical or corrupt or produce trivial crap that's not worth making.

lowercased 8y ago

Not hardly enough women in that list. Do they just not get rejected enough? Or are they not willing to speak up about being rejected? Were they not reached out to? Or is this a representative number of "women in tech", including rejections. Possibly... it's all of the above.

andai 8y ago
Yeah, we need more rejected women in tech.

SamvitJ 8y ago

From later down in the list: "Applied to the Harvard Business School as a Stanford honors grad with a 740 GMAT, no interview. Was rejected from Airbnb for a customer support role and later was passed over for a PM role at Google after 2 phone screens. I've cofounded Y Combinator startup (Ridejoy YC S11)... Today I'm a product manager at Etsy. Timing and fit are everything." This is literally the worst rejection story I've ever heard.

pmiller2 8y ago
Worst in what way?
- SamvitJ 8y ago
  Not getting an interview from HBS as "a Stanford honors grad" is the worst rejection he's ever experienced? The whole post reeks of humble brag.

sebleon 8y ago

The Big Co interview process is a binary classifier (hire/no hire). It's actually reasonable to tune it to minimize false-positives, since a bad hire can be disastrous for all parties involved - imagine an employer changing their minds on you during your first few months. Tradeoff is that this will increase false-negatives, saying No to great people, and lead to stories in the link above. Other thing worth mentioning is that "culture fit" might make companies turn down excellent developers, who don't happen to have the founders' same personality type.

Johnny555 8y ago

You may not have been rejected because of your technical skills, but because of your soft-skills. A large part of our hiring process involves deciding if you think you can work with this person day to day and if you think they'll fit in the company culture.

HillaryBriss 8y ago

My favorite rejection story is the one by Adam Sontag

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

I’m far less worried that these companies reject a lot of people than I am worried that so many engineers are willing to accept idiotic open-plan offices, horribly dysfunctional management, pay that (while high) doesn’t fairly reflect a realistic fraction of the monetary value you actually contribute to the business. Jobs at most well-known tech companies are really dumpster fire terrible things, bad for basic psychological health. It’s sad that we consider getting these jobs a serious measure of any kind of success.

makeupsomething 8y ago

Having failed the on-site’s with several “big” companies this year these anecdotes resonate with me.

masonic 8y ago

Original posting from 2015, 206 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741560