Blaine Cook was "rejected" from Twitter after years of hard work. But he faced an insane scaling problem, and most of us would look bad if we faced the same set of problems.
Steve Jobs was "rejected" by Apple after years of hard work.
Or my all time favorite:
John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation (rather than the traditional animation techniques for which Disney was famous), then he became head of Pixar, which got bought by Disney, and which took over Disney's animation, and so now he is head of animation at Disney. They fired him, but now he is back, and now he is in charge, because he was right.
Lots of great people do great work and then get fired. Getting fired doesn't mean they were wrong. Sometimes it simply means they were too right, and nobody wanted to hear it.
Another common example that people like to use, but which also doesn't apply is the example of Brian Acton getting rejected from Facebook before starting WhatsApp. I have no doubt he would have been able to get hired as an engineer. All indications are that he was interviewing for an executive position, though (he had previously been a VP at Yahoo).
How many talented people have been fired or never hired, but you never hear about them because they don't make a spectacular come-back?
If hiring is as random as it seems to be, there's going to be a massive pool of wasted talent.
I'm now working for Google.
One thing I can tell for sure, specially after interviewing others. It's all random. Most of interviewers make their mind about the candidate in seconds. If you are a charming person you have a good chance. If you are not a very likable person you have a very small chance.
Interviewing, by definition, is not a standardized test with a standardized evaluation. On the spectrum of human interactions, it's closer to a date, than it's to a test.
In doing interview coaching/training for a living (http://interviewkickstart.com), I see this every day. It's frustrating to a certain degree, but also very powerful once understood.
Also see my Quora answer here: https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-biggest-mistakes-that-eng...
>There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “May be,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.
The point being that when you become so upset with being turned down for a certain job you are setting yourself up to be let down by missing the big picture. The reality of the big picture is you have no idea how something that might seem like a great success might lead to great failure, or great failure might lead to great success.
My example, out of few - breaking up with my longterm girlfriend (5 years, 6 months spent backpacking together in himalaya) seemed like a proper disaster. Few years rewind - I have the most amazing person imaginable beside me, to which I proposed (and she said yes) on top of Mont Blanc this May, after hard ski tour. Without prior hard breakup, and messing around a bit, I wouldn't be able to appreciate current one so much
(or another summary - looks is by far not enough for happy long term relationship, compatibility on many levels is necessary. but until you meet somebody with whom you "click" on almost all imaginable aspects, you don't even know how good such a state is, and how much peace it can bring to life)
If so, that's bullshit. The only reason we don't see any examples here of people who never get accepted is because they're invisible to the industry. Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. (I've contemplated both more than I care to admit in polite company.)
We can't all be winners.
(But by that logic, we can't all be losers all the time either. You're probably somewhere in between both extremes.)
I think it's true you'll eventually get accepted in a nice job if you work in IT/software development, have a decent level of competency, and keep at it without getting too discouraged. It's easy to feel crushed when you get rejected twice in a row, so I think this is valuable lesson: you can have decent skills and you'll still get rejected (sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes because it just wasn't your best day), and you shouldn't feel crushed because interviews are -- sadly -- highly random, and even great developers get rejected. That's the point of the website: your skills are likely not the reason you got rejected, so don't get too discouraged.
This isn't some feel good bullshit philosophy. It's true. Getting a job isn't about being a winner. If you have decent skills -- say, you have some experience and fizzbuzz isn't a stumbling block for you -- you are already marketable. You just need to have the combination of luck/being prepared/being in one of your best days.
Normally I don't either, but in my post above I was using it as a shorthand.
You can't win them all, and you probably won't lose them all, but there might be someone out there who does.
I take the odds as dating or finding a friend; in a large co., some times you may find the fit other times you may not.
I had a two-year unemployment spell from 2010 to 2012. I applied to tons of jobs, and I got a bunch of interviews, but all of them rejected me until that very last interview at the end. And when I did get a job at the very end, it ended up being with a very young startup that never stopped having serious problems until I left them at the end of 2014 [0].
I was... not in a good state. Halfway through those two years, I had a nervous breakdown where I alienated a lot of people and lost some friends. It set my gender transition back by three years (I didn't even start thinking about it again until a year and a half after I was employed again). I thought about ending it multiple times. In fact, when I finally got my job after two years of unemployment... the day after I accepted the offer (the day of my in-person interview, I was given the offer and immediately accepted it) was the day I found out that my extended unemployment benefits had reached their end. If I didn't get that job, I wouldn't have been able to make rent at the end of the month, and I can guarantee that I would've killed myself rather than become homeless.
It also fucked up my emotional state so much that I stuck with my next job longer than I should have, that I made myself accept the downright abusive way my employer treated me, because my two years of unemployment made me feel so worthless that I felt like I didn't deserve a better job than the one I had. In fact, I believed I was truly stuck with that job, that it would never be possible to get something better. It took years for me to break out of that and actually find something better. It wasn't until after I left that I realized I was in the same mental state as a victim in an abusive relationship.
[0] Moving this to the end because it's long and ranty, but I need to get this off my chest. These serious problems include: being paid barely enough to stay afloat, no health insurance, no equity even for early employees, a verbally abusive boss who handled stress by taking it out on his employees, technical managers who made awful decisions because they had no management experience, a non-technical owner/CEO who refused to seek VC because he wanted to keep control so he had us constantly demo our product to rinky-dink angel investors over and over, an office in a building run by utterly terrible property managers (I have horror stories...), and management too cowardly to stand up for me when the property managers decided to discriminate against me for being transgender (I had to get the city involved, I did all the legwork myself, and I won despite our bumbling CEO almost accidentally sabotaging my case). I lived with all of this for almost three years because I honestly believed I was so broken that I didn't deserve a job at a company that wasn't abusive.
I simply don't get interviews these days. Sigh! On to a better company.
Seems to me like you dodged a bullet.
> But, the last phone call was set up with the SVP who determined that I was not a good "culture fit" after 30 mins on the phone.
Why is an SVP spending 30 minutes on the phone with candidates that have already done eight interviews with the troops on the ground? You definitely dodged a bullet.
I don't understand the point of multiple (or very long) interviews. If they can't decide after the first 30 minutes if the candidate is hirarable, they probably won't.
It's an illusion to think that interview environments relate directly to workplace performance. Interviews are mostly useful for the subjective parts than for grilling candidates in hopes of avoiding a bad hire. Going through all the hoops and knowing all the things doesn't make for a good employee. Not unless you're being hired as a robot worked in some factory floor.
Also, unlike what seems to be the general idea elsewhere on this thread, soft skills are very important, I argue even more important than hard skills. If you have any ability to learn (which may be considered a soft skill) you can pick up almost any technology and implement almost any algorithm. Not so if you lack the ability to relate to you coworkers, work effectively as a team, or clearly communicate your ideas.
You can learn tools, but you either have the right attitude or you don't.
But, how would one go about determining whether someone is a quick learner? That beats me.
Maybe someone with exactly your skillset and experience was hired, hated it, and quit after 6 months. Maybe one of the other people you interviewed with mentioned an offhand comment you made and it soured the SVP's expectation. Maybe they just got served divorce papers and were shitting on everyone that day?
It's so random that I don't even try to second-guess or deconstruct the non-technical side anymore. It happens or it doesn't.
It's mostly about understanding the company culture, reading the interviewer's face and trying to figure out what they want to hear as you go along (of course technical skills are a prerequisite).
The only time I didn't get an offer was because I asked for too much money. I think asking for more money is a good idea though; it weeds out all the frugal companies.
I think that if your success rate is 90%, it means you're not charging enough. You need to bring the price up and allow the success rate to drop - Then the average quality of offers will go up.
I go in and apply. I meet with 6 people out of thousands, representing 1-3 teams out of hundreds. It doesn't work out, for any of <n> reasons, some of them just luck of the draw. But now my interview is in the system and will be forever referenced. I'm given a polite but non-informational "it's not a fit" and sent off to a competitor.
Idea: Big companies shift to lighter-weight interviews which aren't considered final. If you're good enough to make it to on-site and it doesn't work out (but there was lots of reasons to think it would have), then you get happily scheduled for another round in a few weeks or whenever, and Company tries to not leave you with a stigma of rejection.
This frequently happens with executive recruiting, but not at lower levels. At least, I haven't seen it. Instead we get so many stories like on this website, where it should have been obvious just by CV/portfolio alone that they were awesome developers.
At my previous company (a relatively small startup, admittedly), one of the indisputably best engineers (a 10xer if I've ever worked with one) was hired after such a "second shot". A few weeks is probably too rapid a turn around, given that a "failed" interview is a negative signal (or at least, should be That's the point, after all). But say, a year later for engineers in that wide fuzzy area between "Hire!" and "Oh god no!"? I think plenty of companies do do that.
Further anecdata: Friends who've been rejected from Google have told me that they were explicitly encouraged by their Google recruiter to re-apply in ~a year.
This is like meeting a group of friends going on a first date with one of them, getting shot down and not being able to date any of the others for a whole year even if you could be a good fit for them instead.
We've seen here plenty of times however how we all consider the interview process pretty much random and broken, so it shouldn't be too surprising when companies are not operating efficiently and shrugging off false-negatives as if they don't matter, it's just basic human behavior, just like if you are extremely attractive you're going to be extremely picky and not care if you don't give somebody a shot because no matter what there will always be a line of potential suitors waiting at the door.
That's their way of saying they either can't afford you or you are too smart to be worked to death for 0.0001% stock.
Even a short stint and an "Ex-Googler" tag on your resume is enough to open doors and keep landing gigs years into the future.
Moreover the top firms are known for engineering the shit out of their software. You're much less likely to run into really bad code or stagnate.
So its definitely worth sacrificing a bit to try and get in.
If you want to have "made it", go start a startup. Being an employee generally means working 40-60 hour weeks for other people's dreams.
How do you they could get that many slaves to build the pyramids?
In an interview for a CTO type position a while ago, the only technical member of the interview panel was visibly aghast that I had never made a bootstrap theme - which, despite me explaining where that sort of task fits into the webapp ecosystem to the others, had already rubbed off on the rest of the panel. The extensive team/project building portfolio presented was irrelevant.
I thanked them for their time and didn't call back as I've had my fill of toxic work environments out there.
Interviewing is not a standardized test with a standardized evaluation. On the spectrum of human interactions, it's closer to a date, than it's to a test.
In doing interview coaching/training for a living (http://interviewkickstart.com), I see this every day. It's frustrating to a certain degree, but also very powerful once understood.
At any given moment I might have between 5 to 20 possible jobs that I'm searching for people for. In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants.
It is incredibly hard to get anyone into a job and often great people are rejected for various reasons.
The Business of Rejection - that's recruiting.
A vast amount of empirical data suggests that recruiters are very, very bad at this.
And many companies, when engaging candidates directly, aren't much better.
My funniest experience with a recruiter - he called me up and tried to recruit me to the same company I was working for at the time.
What tools do you use to manage that many applicants? Certainly not your inbox?
As I got deeper into IT-recruiting, I realised that candidate filtering at the top of the funnel is fundamentally broken. Especially in Europe companies expect a CS degree and don't appreciate self-taught skills as much as in the US.
I am trying to change this. If you look for a tech-job in the most liveable city in the world, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on http://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to... or send me a mail to the mail-address in my HN-profile.
I know from experience that a B.Sc. in Computer Science at the Technical University of Munich (considered a very good school) was harder to get before 2008 than it is now.
In the killer-subjects like discrete mathematics, theoretical computer science and algorithms we had failing-rates of 80%.
I can image the German government asked for "more CS grads" and after this the professors started to introduce one problem in each exam that anyone could pass who practised a bit and / or wasn't entirely stupid. The other two to three problems were still on a high level, and if you wanted a top-grade, you still had to solve those. As a result the failing-rate for the mentioned killer-subjects dropped from 80% to 20-30%.
It's the recruiting equivalent of buying IBM (or Microsoft I guess).
If the applicant pool is large enough any quick way to discriminate that skews positively for applicant capability is going to be used. It is also much easier to see if someone has a degree than to actually test if they have the required skills.
http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/embarrassing-code-i-w...
Also when your brain decided to shut down, just slow down, take a deep breath, and stop thinking about the overwhelming doubt growing in the back of your head. The interviewers won't fault you for that. Its kinda cheesy but I like Dune's matra "Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."
That one seems pretty legit to me.
The thing is, I think most interviewers ask for what they are most comfortable with, so they can evaluate. Which is why questions related to JS are probably so common for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. even if you don't actually need it or use it.
However, I would also point out that JS is pretty easy, if you know any of the standard languages you'll be fine. Although, I do find it humorous because JS is basically one of the worst constructed languages I know of (even though I use it daily...).
If you have awesome, expert, deep, deep JavaScript then firstly you might as well be a unicorn but secondly, you will get a job.
Not true. And weird, counterfactual statements like these are exactly why I don't like dealing with recruiters.
Bring on Web Assembly. Those who dislike what JS has become over the last 5-10 years will just use their own stuff and can finally just ignore JS completely.
Eventually he ended up being an engineer there.
My experience and rejection also indicated there's something arbitrary random going on in the interview process. Once a recruiter from Google commented my grades with a serious attidute, saying I should keep them as high (I was still a student) and I immediately realised that grades weren't even checked because my grades were horrible (GPA<3, ridiculous bible theology social classes ruined it for me) and if they cared I should get them higher.
I went to an on-site at a major company, and there was a guy who just wouldn't smile. He also led me down the wrong way on the tech part, which is easy when you make zero facial gestures and talk like a robot. I figured it out eventually, it wasn't hard, but he dinged me.
With the other people it was just a breeze. We chatted about various low level performance things, about how the work environment is, and so on. The tech parts were easy, because you could tell whether you'd actually understood the problem correctly.
It is sad that we still have to follow this broken process because of lack of any viable alternative.
The whole you rejected me, but haha I'm better off comes across as pretty self-centered and entitled.
-edit- removed question,more
How about thinking of those "hopeful young kids" before making statements about how hard it is to find tech talent? How many of those rejections came from said companies?
FYI I only read a few sours/entitled ones before making that statement. I'll edit it to make it less provocative.
8 years later the same chap was the first angel investor in the startup I co-founded and worked with us as Chairman for a number of years before the company was acquired.
I never did ask him if he remembered rejecting me!
You have to consider the time dimension and boom-bust cycle.
"I showed up at the store and they didn't let me in."
"Because it was closed!! You showed up at 3am!"
