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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

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.
- echevil 8y ago
  Totally agree. Technical hiring is already much more standardized than hiring in many other professions but essentially it still is predicting actual work performance based on a few short interviews. Even the best interview process still have false positive and false negative. Good companies are usually more tolerant of false negatives because the cost of wrong hires are high, but false negatives don’t matter as much.
- echevil 8y ago
  Also companies often want very different things. Not only from the technical perspective, but most of them also care about cultural match, and culture can mean very different thing in different companies. So getting offers from one good company and rejected by another is completely normal.
  - duxup 8y ago
    Personally I think beyond "can communicate / not a jerk" culture has just been a placeholder for personal bias.
    - rebeccaskinner 8y ago
      I think cultural fit is frequently used as a stand-in for bias, but there are other important cultural factors beyond just ability to communicate that can effect how well someone will do in a job. Legitimate cultural fit things usually have to do with how teams divide responsibility, how they collaborate on work, and preferences in styles of communication. If you have a team that tends to assign some individual work and communicates through PRs, that's going to be a cultural shock (and maybe a bad fit) for someone who comes from an environment with regular pairing / pair switching / mobbing and more in-person discussion of specific code decisions. In general, there's a balance between individual autonomy and team cohesion that I think can come down to cultural preferences, and it's good to find people who can fit well into a specific team's environment. As someone who highly values individual autonomy in things like tool and language choice, code style, etc. I've been put in teams that culturally were much more in favor of cohesion and I was deeply unhappy- and now I try to filter for that in all of my own interviews. None of that should have to do with candidates liking the same movies or beer as the exiting team, or any other sort of bias inducing "cultural fit" questions, and too often they end up conflated, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to cultural fit.
rb808 8y ago
Is facebook a good bar now? I was thinking facebook isn't so popular, you really want SpaceX or something "better" now. All you validation seekers have to move!
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  Despite their recent unpopularity, Facebook still has a high hiring bar and a talented software engineering workforce that will provide valuable career experience.
  - reaperducer 8y ago
    You have to wonder at what point an organization becomes so unpopular that it impacts someone's hiring prospects, even if they did a good job there. "June 2015 - May 2017: Migrated database to new platform, and re-engineered web presence for diversified global social network, resulting in 450% increase in engagement, and 23% ROI. Site: racistbastards.com"
    - rdl 8y ago
      Complicated question. Also depends on the role, how close you were to the “bad” part, how specialized and in demand the skill is, etc. Generally the USG was in the business of hanging nazis or at least imprisoning them at the time, but operation paperclip brought a bunch of great scientists, and much more secretively the same thing happened to the arguably-worse Japanese war criminals. I’d probably be fine with the guy handling ddos mitigation and keeping the site up for some random offensive racist or kitten-murdering website if it is just a technical challenge. Although there is also the negative PR impact from having hired such a person, since some people, including potential customers, would be less tolerant. Hard problem. Anonymity or pseudonymous markets is probably the solution here.
      - bendoernberg 8y ago
        Uhhh why would you be ok with someone who chooses to use their labor to work for a racist/kitten murdering website because it’s a “technical challenge”? I’m sure keeping the Daily Stormer up and running is difficult, but anyone who helps them do it is a nazi who deserves whatever they get.
ThrowMeDown01 8y ago
I on the other hand think being shown the randomness in hiring is beneficial.
kadendogthing 8y ago
The point is that the hiring process -- especially in programming -- isn't some golden, concise, dependable standard. It's quite messy, chaotic, and practically completely worthless. The best you can do is sort out the people you absolutely cannot use or don't want. The rest? The one's that you reject because of not matching some part of the interview process but largely are a good fit? They're probably fine, they're probably better than you think they are. In fact, statistically speaking it's probably better to have gambled on these people than the people you've hired and then had to fire. We don't have the industry standards, the experience, the data, or the worker pool to fuss around with these ridiculous interview processes some companies employ. In fact these interview processes actively filter for people who are only willing to go through with the process, not necessarily the best talent.
- softawre 8y ago
  If I am being honest, as an engineering manager, I really hate to have to fire people. I have done it a few times in my career and I still remember every 15 second block of time in each of the meetings. So my hiring bar is pretty high now. I've had my current team all for 4 years and they are all still doing great.
  - kadendogthing 8y ago
    It's hard to gauge what "high" is in these contexts. I'm specifically deriding the multi-week, extremely specific but not relevant exercises some companies have as their interview process. What does your interview process look like, if you care to share?
  - ergothus 8y ago
    When I was a younger developer, I did an interview for a contractor and while the candidate was okay, I wasn't convinced (basically he hadn't shown any reason NOT to hire him, but he hadn't put himself in the MUST HIRE category). In follow-up I told the person I was worried by their lack of experience but would move forward with an offer, but I wanted to let them know in advance that I'd quickly move to let them go if it wasn't working. In my mind this was a great solution: we got to make the hire, he had a chance to prove himself, and we'd not get stuck with a bad match if he had flaws. By letting him know in advance I was ethically clear because he would enter into the situation with his eyes open. He turned it down and my boss was furious with me for saying all that. Now, some 15 years later, I realize how terrible my view was and how many bullets I blindly dodged. My best managers have all bent over backwards to make a problematic hire work out. Seeing that has always served as a soothing presence on my own occasional anxiety. And in the many interviews I've conducted, people that fall in the "I don't see why NOT to hire them" have outnumbered the "We should totally hire them" about 4:1. Frankly, the interview process is inadequate to give you a good impression of working with someone and their strengths/weaknesses. Heck, I routinely discover new surprises about co-workers after working with them for years. My past self had been pining for an easy way to fire someone in order to dodge responsibility for the hiring decision. Now I see the hiring decision as not "are they great?" but instead "will I be able to work something out if they aren't great?" because we can't dodge the responsibility nor can we actually reliably be correct in our evaluations. Unfortunately, my current view doesn't seem to match current hiring practices, where they want everyone to hit the ground running and magically resolve problems that are generally caused by non-technical issues (low staffing, contradictory customer pressures, etc).
eqdw 8y ago
Yeah it feels like they want medals for getting rejected at companies that haven't even bothered to give me a callback. We all get rejected from dozens of interviews. That's just life. Did anybody ever think it wasn't like this?
- ams6110 8y ago
  When I was a senior at university, my friends and I all had a wall at our apartments covered with our rejection letters. Back then (if they gave you the courtesy of a reply) they were sent on paper in the mail. So yes, it's always been that way. I myself have been on interview committees and voted to reject candidates who got hired, and turned out to be good. Why did I want to reject them? Don't really know, just got a bad vibe in the interview more than anything. We didn't do much technical screening at that company. Decisions were mostly based on past experience and references, and whether you seemed reasonably intelligent and sociable in the interview. I think that we hired a real dud maybe once, so it seemed to work.
  - patmcguire 8y ago
    Probably the most honest explanation of how companies actually hire I've seen.
    - dictum 8y ago
      It's stunning how much energy, ink and tongue movement is wasted trying to justify most decisions, in every aspect of life, when in practice they boil down to vibes.
      - jimmydddd 8y ago
        For large companies, I think the "justification" part is for documentation in case they get sued for discrimination, etc.
      - laumars 8y ago
        I’m a hiring manager and I think it’s a complete roll of the dice sometimes. There’s people who came off really well in the interview who turned out to be terrible hires. And equally there’s been people who seemed woefully inexperienced but I liked their honesty so took a gamble on them and they turned out to be some of my best hires. Then there is everyone in between. You have all of these processes in place to help your practical judgement but at the end of the day it’s really just a lot of luck because it’s trivially easy to game interviews and some really good engineers are often really bad at interviewing. So pulling those who interview well but are rubbish from those who don’t interview well but are brilliant is very difficult at times. Heck in one interview I got nervous and started rambling on about FreeBSD instead of Linux. I was easily qualified enough for that job but that was a terrible interview on my part and I honestly wouldn’t have hired me.
fredgrott 8y ago
exactly rejection is part of saleship if you are not selling than you have no rejection they go hand in hand
markbnj 8y ago
> 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 read it completely differently, like "See this has happened to us all at some point; it's not personal."
dumb_troll 8y ago
You're correct, but I'm a bitch (maybe because of school, parents, life, idk) ... this was somewhat comforting.
lubesGordi 8y ago
The perspective is, rejection is fairly arbitrary.
davnicwil 8y ago
Yeah, I like the idea of this site but was disappointed to find most of the entries being something like I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y but then eventually got a job at Fashionable BigCo Z Which is great, it really is, but not really all that interesting (sorry!). You've only been rejected in a very narrow sense. Everyone has an off day, or off interviews. You were actually accepted by the mainstream, eventually. It's like saying you were only accepted to 2 of the 5 world class universities you applied to. In what sense have you suffered rejection? I was hoping for more of this variety: I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y and Z. That path was obviously not going to work out for me. But I at least knew my own value. So, undeterred, I instead did awesome thing # There are a couple like that. That's interesting. Someone who holds their confidence and actually outperforms others' expectations, despite lacking conventional sources of validation.
- icebraining 8y ago
  I don't think the point is to be "interesting", just motivating to someone who just got rejected themselves.
- smoyer 8y ago
  Well ... doing a little mental statistics it looks to me like you should just apply to Twitter in the first place if you never want to get rejected during your job search.
  - noitsnot 8y ago
    The abundance of Twitter picking people up after rejections is really odd to say the least.
    - fenomas 8y ago
      It's not a random selection of stories, it's a list compiled by someone who used to work at Twitter, and presumably hit up friends and colleagues for stories. In general, best not to draw inferences from data that wasn't randomly selected.
kentm 8y ago
So let's take it as an assumption that the people that this is for are "fragile software engineers." How would you address that fragility? Certainly, having monetary success does not necessarily address feelings of inadequacy. It's also very difficult to bootstrap oneself out of such feelings. One way to address it is to share and know that you're not alone. That's exactly what this attempts to do. Simply dismissing these peoples' feelings because they are successful is not helpful. I do not like the trend of assuming people cannot have problems and are not worthy of help or compassion because they are privileged in some way.
- CommieBobDole 8y ago
  I don't know if this really counts as a trend; I'd think the trope of "Person who has more than you complaining about how bad they have it and getting only resentment in return" is as old as civilization itself.
johnfn 8y ago
Is HN really to the point where we are upvoting posts dismissing real people feeling real feelings of inadequacy over some suggestion of “fragility”? Everyone can feel bad. Just because someone could get a job somewhere else doesn’t mean rejection doesn’t sting. That’s like saying that a breakup shouldn’t hurt because you can just get another girlfriend.
- uxp100 8y ago
  But a web page that consisted of people saying "My partner dumped me, but now I'm dating someone much hotter" wouldn't be seen as particularly valuable. Not all diary entries should be public, even if the feelings expressed are "real."
  - paulddraper 8y ago
    Wouldn't it though? You kind of described r/relationship_advice
  - johnfn 8y ago
    "My partner dumped me, and I was miserable for a long time, but I managed to move on and now I'm in a happy relationship" is exactly the sort of advice you'd give someone who was struggling through a breakup.
  - CobrastanJorji 8y ago
    Magnify the emotions involved and time scale by a couple orders of magnitude, and you're describing It Gets Better, an effective and beloved project.
- dang 8y ago
  Dismissiveness and indignation routinely get upvoted. It's so reliable a pattern that I think it's hard-wired in people. Part of the task of moderating HN is to find ways to moderate that.
tathougies 8y ago
Seriously though. The issue is tying your self-worth to getting accepted be facebook, apple, google, etc. A healthy person, when rejected from a company, realizes that the company did not need their skills at this time. This says nothing about the quality of their skillset, just that it's unneeded. Sort of how, if Linus Torvalds himself showed up to a frontend development interview, he probably wouldn't get the job.
- gdy 8y ago
  A 'healthy person', to use your term, after rejection would realize where her skills are lacking and work or study hard to improve her skills, not delude herself like you suggest.
  - tathougies 8y ago
    That's only an appropriate reaction, if your skills are lacking. If your skills are not lacking, then they're likely unneeded by the people you applied to and you should find a better market fit. The issue here is that you've made 'get this job and only this job' as your goal. That is an unrealistic goal, because it is unnecessarily tied up with a particular company. My goal when looking for work is to find an opportunity where my skills fit into someone else's need, and then milk the economic differential until such time as my skills are no longer needed, or I have a buyer somewhere else. I suppose neither one is 'right' in the moral sense. But I think mine leads to greater happiness and satisfaction, so...
    - gdy 8y ago
      Don't you think that people usually apply for positions that match their skillset?
crunchlibrarian 8y ago
I'm pretty proud of how I got rejected from Google, how I laid into several of their products as bad and slow and missing important features. Now that they've incorporated most of my feedback into those products I go around and brag about how mad everyone got when I dared to criticize the holy Google during the interview.
- saagarjha 8y ago
  It really depends on how you spun your criticism. If you just started spouting assertions as to why the product your interviewer worked on is irredeemably horrible, you're not going to get a job.
- w0mbat 8y ago
  Never criticize the company or their products during the interview. Whatever company it is. Have some common sense.
dwaltrip 8y ago
s/fragile software engineers/human beings
PhasmaFelis 8y ago
I don't see any harm in helping freshly-graduated nerds feel less anxious about their job prospects. I agree it's hardly a vital service, but not everything has to be.
nitwit005 8y ago
It'd be nice if we never felt negative feelings about these things, but feeling nothing in this situation is probably diagnostic of a psychiatric disorder. If you're personally rejected by a group you wanted to join, you should probably feel bad.
yAak 8y ago
Yeah, I don't think it's particularly healthy if you only place value on the anecdotes because of the Big Name Companies involved. My rejection/acceptance stories are all with no-name companies, and yet I've found the successes I'd hoped for. However, I think there's some value to taken from it when thinking of it in terms of "hey, I got rejected for similar reasons, but that doesn't mean I can't bring value worth hiring me for."
dookahku 8y ago
I can provide some insight on this. For me, as an older programmer, it's not about 'self-worth'. It's about sunk cost, it's about our ability to provide for our families, it's about what we are doing with our lives when we have much fewer days ahead of us than behind us. What do I tell my kids or wife? I can't get hired because I didn't memorize enough JS functions, or the right one, or didn't grab onto the right tech stack? This isn't about a theoretical emotional idea: it's about survival today, into old age that is coming up on me quick, about providing for families.
- Haul4ss 8y ago
  Since I was an intern in college, I have seen older technical folks become harder and harder to employ. I've had good friends lose their job and because they're older/more expensive, they get rejected with all sorts of creative excuses. Well, guess what? Now I'm older and I'm more expensive. Thankfully I saw it coming, and I have been saving diligently along the way. I'm not rich, but my lifestyle costs are not insane and I can continue to save from now until the gravy train pulls into station. At that point, god willing and the creek don't rise, I can afford to work part-time, or take a big pay cut, or switch to consulting gigs.
  - ghaff 8y ago
    You become more expensive and you also typically get more specialized in the things that make you expensive. Even if you keep skills up in a variety of areas, you typically major on certain topics where you're really valued. There are a huge number of random things I could have been slotted into right out of school and I'd have done a good job. Today, my skills and compensation are much more specific.
    - unnouinceput 8y ago
      Exactly this. As becoming older you also get experience, experience very few have. I was at one meeting with several people from a company that hired me as external contractor and several people from their client company. And an issue arrived at the table, a technical issue none of their staffers or client's staffer could explain/solve (both technical and non-technical people were at that meeting). So they asked me to weight in my input. After a round of questions from my side I told the most technical people there I thought he could understand, to do XYZ. He did it and just like that the problem went away. XYZ was a very weird combination that none fully understood how that could be the solution. When they asked me how did I know that I said only one word "experience". That's what you pick up over the years, the truest form of knowledge, the one that makes you to be more expensive. Because just like that particular problem where they wasted at least 100 hours of different people trying to solve it and in itself the problem also made their process more expensive, having a person that can solve this type of problems is the make or break of a company.
part200 8y ago
You sound awesome! Hopefully I never have to work with someone like you.

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.

echevil 8y ago
Totally agree. Technical hiring is already much more standardized than hiring in many other professions but essentially it still is predicting actual work performance based on a few short interviews. Even the best interview process still have false positive and false negative. Good companies are usually more tolerant of false negatives because the cost of wrong hires are high, but false negatives don’t matter as much.
echevil 8y ago
Also companies often want very different things. Not only from the technical perspective, but most of them also care about cultural match, and culture can mean very different thing in different companies. So getting offers from one good company and rejected by another is completely normal.
- duxup 8y ago
  Personally I think beyond "can communicate / not a jerk" culture has just been a placeholder for personal bias.
  - rebeccaskinner 8y ago
    I think cultural fit is frequently used as a stand-in for bias, but there are other important cultural factors beyond just ability to communicate that can effect how well someone will do in a job. Legitimate cultural fit things usually have to do with how teams divide responsibility, how they collaborate on work, and preferences in styles of communication. If you have a team that tends to assign some individual work and communicates through PRs, that's going to be a cultural shock (and maybe a bad fit) for someone who comes from an environment with regular pairing / pair switching / mobbing and more in-person discussion of specific code decisions. In general, there's a balance between individual autonomy and team cohesion that I think can come down to cultural preferences, and it's good to find people who can fit well into a specific team's environment. As someone who highly values individual autonomy in things like tool and language choice, code style, etc. I've been put in teams that culturally were much more in favor of cohesion and I was deeply unhappy- and now I try to filter for that in all of my own interviews. None of that should have to do with candidates liking the same movies or beer as the exiting team, or any other sort of bias inducing "cultural fit" questions, and too often they end up conflated, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to cultural fit.

rb808 8y ago

Is facebook a good bar now? I was thinking facebook isn't so popular, you really want SpaceX or something "better" now. All you validation seekers have to move!

ThrowawayR2 8y ago
Despite their recent unpopularity, Facebook still has a high hiring bar and a talented software engineering workforce that will provide valuable career experience.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  You have to wonder at what point an organization becomes so unpopular that it impacts someone's hiring prospects, even if they did a good job there. "June 2015 - May 2017: Migrated database to new platform, and re-engineered web presence for diversified global social network, resulting in 450% increase in engagement, and 23% ROI. Site: racistbastards.com"
  - rdl 8y ago
    Complicated question. Also depends on the role, how close you were to the “bad” part, how specialized and in demand the skill is, etc. Generally the USG was in the business of hanging nazis or at least imprisoning them at the time, but operation paperclip brought a bunch of great scientists, and much more secretively the same thing happened to the arguably-worse Japanese war criminals. I’d probably be fine with the guy handling ddos mitigation and keeping the site up for some random offensive racist or kitten-murdering website if it is just a technical challenge. Although there is also the negative PR impact from having hired such a person, since some people, including potential customers, would be less tolerant. Hard problem. Anonymity or pseudonymous markets is probably the solution here.
    - bendoernberg 8y ago
      Uhhh why would you be ok with someone who chooses to use their labor to work for a racist/kitten murdering website because it’s a “technical challenge”? I’m sure keeping the Daily Stormer up and running is difficult, but anyone who helps them do it is a nazi who deserves whatever they get.

ThrowMeDown01 8y ago

I on the other hand think being shown the randomness in hiring is beneficial.

kadendogthing 8y ago

The point is that the hiring process -- especially in programming -- isn't some golden, concise, dependable standard. It's quite messy, chaotic, and practically completely worthless. The best you can do is sort out the people you absolutely cannot use or don't want. The rest? The one's that you reject because of not matching some part of the interview process but largely are a good fit? They're probably fine, they're probably better than you think they are. In fact, statistically speaking it's probably better to have gambled on these people than the people you've hired and then had to fire. We don't have the industry standards, the experience, the data, or the worker pool to fuss around with these ridiculous interview processes some companies employ. In fact these interview processes actively filter for people who are only willing to go through with the process, not necessarily the best talent.

softawre 8y ago
If I am being honest, as an engineering manager, I really hate to have to fire people. I have done it a few times in my career and I still remember every 15 second block of time in each of the meetings. So my hiring bar is pretty high now. I've had my current team all for 4 years and they are all still doing great.
- kadendogthing 8y ago
  It's hard to gauge what "high" is in these contexts. I'm specifically deriding the multi-week, extremely specific but not relevant exercises some companies have as their interview process. What does your interview process look like, if you care to share?
- ergothus 8y ago
  When I was a younger developer, I did an interview for a contractor and while the candidate was okay, I wasn't convinced (basically he hadn't shown any reason NOT to hire him, but he hadn't put himself in the MUST HIRE category). In follow-up I told the person I was worried by their lack of experience but would move forward with an offer, but I wanted to let them know in advance that I'd quickly move to let them go if it wasn't working. In my mind this was a great solution: we got to make the hire, he had a chance to prove himself, and we'd not get stuck with a bad match if he had flaws. By letting him know in advance I was ethically clear because he would enter into the situation with his eyes open. He turned it down and my boss was furious with me for saying all that. Now, some 15 years later, I realize how terrible my view was and how many bullets I blindly dodged. My best managers have all bent over backwards to make a problematic hire work out. Seeing that has always served as a soothing presence on my own occasional anxiety. And in the many interviews I've conducted, people that fall in the "I don't see why NOT to hire them" have outnumbered the "We should totally hire them" about 4:1. Frankly, the interview process is inadequate to give you a good impression of working with someone and their strengths/weaknesses. Heck, I routinely discover new surprises about co-workers after working with them for years. My past self had been pining for an easy way to fire someone in order to dodge responsibility for the hiring decision. Now I see the hiring decision as not "are they great?" but instead "will I be able to work something out if they aren't great?" because we can't dodge the responsibility nor can we actually reliably be correct in our evaluations. Unfortunately, my current view doesn't seem to match current hiring practices, where they want everyone to hit the ground running and magically resolve problems that are generally caused by non-technical issues (low staffing, contradictory customer pressures, etc).

eqdw 8y ago

Yeah it feels like they want medals for getting rejected at companies that haven't even bothered to give me a callback. We all get rejected from dozens of interviews. That's just life. Did anybody ever think it wasn't like this?

ams6110 8y ago
When I was a senior at university, my friends and I all had a wall at our apartments covered with our rejection letters. Back then (if they gave you the courtesy of a reply) they were sent on paper in the mail. So yes, it's always been that way. I myself have been on interview committees and voted to reject candidates who got hired, and turned out to be good. Why did I want to reject them? Don't really know, just got a bad vibe in the interview more than anything. We didn't do much technical screening at that company. Decisions were mostly based on past experience and references, and whether you seemed reasonably intelligent and sociable in the interview. I think that we hired a real dud maybe once, so it seemed to work.
- patmcguire 8y ago
  Probably the most honest explanation of how companies actually hire I've seen.
  - dictum 8y ago
    It's stunning how much energy, ink and tongue movement is wasted trying to justify most decisions, in every aspect of life, when in practice they boil down to vibes.
    - jimmydddd 8y ago
      For large companies, I think the "justification" part is for documentation in case they get sued for discrimination, etc.
    - laumars 8y ago
      I’m a hiring manager and I think it’s a complete roll of the dice sometimes. There’s people who came off really well in the interview who turned out to be terrible hires. And equally there’s been people who seemed woefully inexperienced but I liked their honesty so took a gamble on them and they turned out to be some of my best hires. Then there is everyone in between. You have all of these processes in place to help your practical judgement but at the end of the day it’s really just a lot of luck because it’s trivially easy to game interviews and some really good engineers are often really bad at interviewing. So pulling those who interview well but are rubbish from those who don’t interview well but are brilliant is very difficult at times. Heck in one interview I got nervous and started rambling on about FreeBSD instead of Linux. I was easily qualified enough for that job but that was a terrible interview on my part and I honestly wouldn’t have hired me.

fredgrott 8y ago

exactly rejection is part of saleship if you are not selling than you have no rejection they go hand in hand

markbnj 8y ago

> 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 read it completely differently, like "See this has happened to us all at some point; it's not personal."

dumb_troll 8y ago

You're correct, but I'm a bitch (maybe because of school, parents, life, idk) ... this was somewhat comforting.

lubesGordi 8y ago

The perspective is, rejection is fairly arbitrary.

davnicwil 8y ago

Yeah, I like the idea of this site but was disappointed to find most of the entries being something like I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y but then eventually got a job at Fashionable BigCo Z Which is great, it really is, but not really all that interesting (sorry!). You've only been rejected in a very narrow sense. Everyone has an off day, or off interviews. You were actually accepted by the mainstream, eventually. It's like saying you were only accepted to 2 of the 5 world class universities you applied to. In what sense have you suffered rejection? I was hoping for more of this variety: I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y and Z. That path was obviously not going to work out for me. But I at least knew my own value. So, undeterred, I instead did awesome thing # There are a couple like that. That's interesting. Someone who holds their confidence and actually outperforms others' expectations, despite lacking conventional sources of validation.

icebraining 8y ago
I don't think the point is to be "interesting", just motivating to someone who just got rejected themselves.
smoyer 8y ago
Well ... doing a little mental statistics it looks to me like you should just apply to Twitter in the first place if you never want to get rejected during your job search.
- noitsnot 8y ago
  The abundance of Twitter picking people up after rejections is really odd to say the least.
  - fenomas 8y ago
    It's not a random selection of stories, it's a list compiled by someone who used to work at Twitter, and presumably hit up friends and colleagues for stories. In general, best not to draw inferences from data that wasn't randomly selected.

kentm 8y ago

So let's take it as an assumption that the people that this is for are "fragile software engineers." How would you address that fragility? Certainly, having monetary success does not necessarily address feelings of inadequacy. It's also very difficult to bootstrap oneself out of such feelings. One way to address it is to share and know that you're not alone. That's exactly what this attempts to do. Simply dismissing these peoples' feelings because they are successful is not helpful. I do not like the trend of assuming people cannot have problems and are not worthy of help or compassion because they are privileged in some way.

CommieBobDole 8y ago
I don't know if this really counts as a trend; I'd think the trope of "Person who has more than you complaining about how bad they have it and getting only resentment in return" is as old as civilization itself.

johnfn 8y ago

Is HN really to the point where we are upvoting posts dismissing real people feeling real feelings of inadequacy over some suggestion of “fragility”? Everyone can feel bad. Just because someone could get a job somewhere else doesn’t mean rejection doesn’t sting. That’s like saying that a breakup shouldn’t hurt because you can just get another girlfriend.

uxp100 8y ago
But a web page that consisted of people saying "My partner dumped me, but now I'm dating someone much hotter" wouldn't be seen as particularly valuable. Not all diary entries should be public, even if the feelings expressed are "real."
- paulddraper 8y ago
  Wouldn't it though? You kind of described r/relationship_advice
- johnfn 8y ago
  "My partner dumped me, and I was miserable for a long time, but I managed to move on and now I'm in a happy relationship" is exactly the sort of advice you'd give someone who was struggling through a breakup.
- CobrastanJorji 8y ago
  Magnify the emotions involved and time scale by a couple orders of magnitude, and you're describing It Gets Better, an effective and beloved project.
dang 8y ago
Dismissiveness and indignation routinely get upvoted. It's so reliable a pattern that I think it's hard-wired in people. Part of the task of moderating HN is to find ways to moderate that.

tathougies 8y ago

Seriously though. The issue is tying your self-worth to getting accepted be facebook, apple, google, etc. A healthy person, when rejected from a company, realizes that the company did not need their skills at this time. This says nothing about the quality of their skillset, just that it's unneeded. Sort of how, if Linus Torvalds himself showed up to a frontend development interview, he probably wouldn't get the job.

gdy 8y ago
A 'healthy person', to use your term, after rejection would realize where her skills are lacking and work or study hard to improve her skills, not delude herself like you suggest.
- tathougies 8y ago
  That's only an appropriate reaction, if your skills are lacking. If your skills are not lacking, then they're likely unneeded by the people you applied to and you should find a better market fit. The issue here is that you've made 'get this job and only this job' as your goal. That is an unrealistic goal, because it is unnecessarily tied up with a particular company. My goal when looking for work is to find an opportunity where my skills fit into someone else's need, and then milk the economic differential until such time as my skills are no longer needed, or I have a buyer somewhere else. I suppose neither one is 'right' in the moral sense. But I think mine leads to greater happiness and satisfaction, so...
  - gdy 8y ago
    Don't you think that people usually apply for positions that match their skillset?

crunchlibrarian 8y ago

I'm pretty proud of how I got rejected from Google, how I laid into several of their products as bad and slow and missing important features. Now that they've incorporated most of my feedback into those products I go around and brag about how mad everyone got when I dared to criticize the holy Google during the interview.

saagarjha 8y ago
It really depends on how you spun your criticism. If you just started spouting assertions as to why the product your interviewer worked on is irredeemably horrible, you're not going to get a job.
w0mbat 8y ago
Never criticize the company or their products during the interview. Whatever company it is. Have some common sense.

dwaltrip 8y ago

s/fragile software engineers/human beings

PhasmaFelis 8y ago

I don't see any harm in helping freshly-graduated nerds feel less anxious about their job prospects. I agree it's hardly a vital service, but not everything has to be.

nitwit005 8y ago

It'd be nice if we never felt negative feelings about these things, but feeling nothing in this situation is probably diagnostic of a psychiatric disorder. If you're personally rejected by a group you wanted to join, you should probably feel bad.

yAak 8y ago

Yeah, I don't think it's particularly healthy if you only place value on the anecdotes because of the Big Name Companies involved. My rejection/acceptance stories are all with no-name companies, and yet I've found the successes I'd hoped for. However, I think there's some value to taken from it when thinking of it in terms of "hey, I got rejected for similar reasons, but that doesn't mean I can't bring value worth hiring me for."

dookahku 8y ago

I can provide some insight on this. For me, as an older programmer, it's not about 'self-worth'. It's about sunk cost, it's about our ability to provide for our families, it's about what we are doing with our lives when we have much fewer days ahead of us than behind us. What do I tell my kids or wife? I can't get hired because I didn't memorize enough JS functions, or the right one, or didn't grab onto the right tech stack? This isn't about a theoretical emotional idea: it's about survival today, into old age that is coming up on me quick, about providing for families.

Haul4ss 8y ago
Since I was an intern in college, I have seen older technical folks become harder and harder to employ. I've had good friends lose their job and because they're older/more expensive, they get rejected with all sorts of creative excuses. Well, guess what? Now I'm older and I'm more expensive. Thankfully I saw it coming, and I have been saving diligently along the way. I'm not rich, but my lifestyle costs are not insane and I can continue to save from now until the gravy train pulls into station. At that point, god willing and the creek don't rise, I can afford to work part-time, or take a big pay cut, or switch to consulting gigs.
- ghaff 8y ago
  You become more expensive and you also typically get more specialized in the things that make you expensive. Even if you keep skills up in a variety of areas, you typically major on certain topics where you're really valued. There are a huge number of random things I could have been slotted into right out of school and I'd have done a good job. Today, my skills and compensation are much more specific.
  - unnouinceput 8y ago
    Exactly this. As becoming older you also get experience, experience very few have. I was at one meeting with several people from a company that hired me as external contractor and several people from their client company. And an issue arrived at the table, a technical issue none of their staffers or client's staffer could explain/solve (both technical and non-technical people were at that meeting). So they asked me to weight in my input. After a round of questions from my side I told the most technical people there I thought he could understand, to do XYZ. He did it and just like that the problem went away. XYZ was a very weird combination that none fully understood how that could be the solution. When they asked me how did I know that I said only one word "experience". That's what you pick up over the years, the truest form of knowledge, the one that makes you to be more expensive. Because just like that particular problem where they wasted at least 100 hours of different people trying to solve it and in itself the problem also made their process more expensive, having a person that can solve this type of problems is the make or break of a company.

part200 8y ago

You sound awesome! Hopefully I never have to work with someone like you.