Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories | Hacker News Reader

Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

rejected.us

232 pointsjon_kuperman201 comments

I love this, but it could go even further:

Blaine Cook was "rejected" from Twitter after years of hard work. But he faced an insane scaling problem, and most of us would look bad if we faced the same set of problems.

Steve Jobs was "rejected" by Apple after years of hard work.

Or my all time favorite:

John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation (rather than the traditional animation techniques for which Disney was famous), then he became head of Pixar, which got bought by Disney, and which took over Disney's animation, and so now he is head of animation at Disney. They fired him, but now he is back, and now he is in charge, because he was right.

Lots of great people do great work and then get fired. Getting fired doesn't mean they were wrong. Sometimes it simply means they were too right, and nobody wanted to hear it.

That could be a different site though. Instead of "we were rejected" you can say "we were fired"...

This doesn't really apply. At the executive/management level things are hugely different. Politics, how well you work with others, investor perceptions, "vision", experience, communication skills, etc. all become more important than raw individual contribution skills.

Another common example that people like to use, but which also doesn't apply is the example of Brian Acton getting rejected from Facebook before starting WhatsApp. I have no doubt he would have been able to get hired as an engineer. All indications are that he was interviewing for an executive position, though (he had previously been a VP at Yahoo).

AFAIK Lasseter wasn't that senior when Disney fired him.

> John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation

It's possible that Lasseter was the animation equivalent of the programmer who has a job in a web design firm that traditionally does everything in Rails (or .NET or Django or whatever) and constantly says "let's use Haskell!!" when they're just building CRUD apps for clients.

The "works well with others" thing is important even for junior folks.

TBH, I don't think that Lasseter would be able to do what he did if he stayed at Disney. So one could argue that Disney's decisions were good for them in the long run.

That may be a selective interpretation.

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 was rejected by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Skype and many more companies. I got rejected by Apple 3 times and two times with Facebook and Google.

I'm now working for Google.

One thing I can tell for sure, specially after interviewing others. It's all random. Most of interviewers make their mind about the candidate in seconds. If you are a charming person you have a good chance. If you are not a very likable person you have a very small chance.

May I message you ?

I prefer to stay anonymous. I'll share my recent interview experiences with Google, Apple and Facebook here soon.

Being charming, likable or whatever you want to call it is important. Technical competency should be the biggest factor but there are plenty of people who have that and are personable too.

I passed 3 interviews with 6 interviewers for Booking (they even flew me to Amsterdam for that). 1 of them didn't seem to like me, even before I answered his questions. The rest were very impressed (as stated in the feedback). Got rejected.

At the risk of repeating what I commented below, I like to say the same thing differently, which seems to resonate with students in the class:

Interviewing, by definition, is not a standardized test with a standardized evaluation. On the spectrum of human interactions, it's closer to a date, than it's to a test.

In doing interview coaching/training for a living (http://interviewkickstart.com), 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...

This reminds me of an old zen tale:

>There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “May be,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.

The point being that when you become so upset with being turned down for a certain job you are setting yourself up to be let down by missing the big picture. The reality of the big picture is you have no idea how something that might seem like a great success might lead to great failure, or great failure might lead to great success.

I like this story - it was referenced in Charlie Wilson's War by Philip Seymour Hoffman's character. "We'll see."

I guess everybody can find such examples in their lives, usually when looking back hard enough.

My example, out of few - breaking up with my longterm girlfriend (5 years, 6 months spent backpacking together in himalaya) seemed like a proper disaster. Few years rewind - I have the most amazing person imaginable beside me, to which I proposed (and she said yes) on top of Mont Blanc this May, after hard ski tour. Without prior hard breakup, and messing around a bit, I wouldn't be able to appreciate current one so much

(or another summary - looks is by far not enough for happy long term relationship, compatibility on many levels is necessary. but until you meet somebody with whom you "click" on almost all imaginable aspects, you don't even know how good such a state is, and how much peace it can bring to life)

Eventually these folks got accepted though. I guess that's the moral we're supposed to take away from this: If you get rejected a lot, but you keep trying, you'll eventually be accepted?

If so, that's bullshit. The only reason we don't see any examples here of people who never get accepted is because they're invisible to the industry. Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. (I've contemplated both more than I care to admit in polite company.)

We can't all be winners.

(But by that logic, we can't all be losers all the time either. You're probably somewhere in between both extremes.)

I don't think it's bullshit. I also don't define people as "winners" or "losers" depending on whether they get cool jobs.

I think it's true you'll eventually get accepted in a nice job if you work in IT/software development, have a decent level of competency, and keep at it without getting too discouraged. It's easy to feel crushed when you get rejected twice in a row, so I think this is valuable lesson: you can have decent skills and you'll still get rejected (sometimes arbitrarily, sometimes because it just wasn't your best day), and you shouldn't feel crushed because interviews are -- sadly -- highly random, and even great developers get rejected. That's the point of the website: your skills are likely not the reason you got rejected, so don't get too discouraged.

This isn't some feel good bullshit philosophy. It's true. Getting a job isn't about being a winner. If you have decent skills -- say, you have some experience and fizzbuzz isn't a stumbling block for you -- you are already marketable. You just need to have the combination of luck/being prepared/being in one of your best days.

> I also don't define people as "winners" or "losers" depending on whether they get cool jobs.

Normally I don't either, but in my post above I was using it as a shorthand.

You can't win them all, and you probably won't lose them all, but there might be someone out there who does.

The takeaway (I believe) is that the process is _Random_

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.

Exactly. These people are all from the first-world countries, they have plenty of opportunities to get hired so eventually they do. I was rejected by dozens of "cool" companies, almost never even getting to the technical interview, because they'd rather not hire a foreigner. I had to find a local job which pays me a wage most people here would consider laughable.

Yep.

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 recently interviewed at very hot container startup. I had 1 phone screen, 6 on-sites, and 2 follow up phone calls. I did well in the phone screen to be invited onsite. Apparently, I did great on the 6 interviews onsite and then they wanted to have a follow up phone call with a manager (30 mins). That was positive too. But, the last phone call was set up with the SVP who determined that I was not a good "culture fit" after 30 mins on the phone. This in spite of me having had wonderful technical conversations and interviews (including coding) - which I apparently rocked- with 6 engineers and 2 managers, and having very highly relevant experience working in the cloud (orchestration and networking). The SVP just swooped in and decided I was not a good fit.

I simply don't get interviews these days. Sigh! On to a better company.

starts with D, btw.

Maybe you legitimately weren't a good fit? I'm not being facetious, but "the SVP was an idiot and made a terrible call despite all the evidence" is possible but not the most likely scenario.

Maybe someone with exactly your skillset and experience was hired, hated it, and quit after 6 months. Maybe one of the other people you interviewed with mentioned an offhand comment you made and it soured the SVP's expectation. Maybe they just got served divorce papers and were shitting on everyone that day?

It's so random that I don't even try to second-guess or deconstruct the non-technical side anymore. It happens or it doesn't.

Very possible. From the recruiter's rejection email, it seemed that the decision was really close. And you're right. Cannot really speculate about this.

> 6 on-sites

I don't understand the point of multiple (or very long) interviews. If they can't decide after the first 30 minutes if the candidate is hirarable, they probably won't.

It's an illusion to think that interview environments relate directly to workplace performance. Interviews are mostly useful for the subjective parts than for grilling candidates in hopes of avoiding a bad hire. Going through all the hoops and knowing all the things doesn't make for a good employee. Not unless you're being hired as a robot worked in some factory floor.

Also, unlike what seems to be the general idea elsewhere on this thread, soft skills are very important, I argue even more important than hard skills. If you have any ability to learn (which may be considered a soft skill) you can pick up almost any technology and implement almost any algorithm. Not so if you lack the ability to relate to you coworkers, work effectively as a team, or clearly communicate your ideas.

You can learn tools, but you either have the right attitude or you don't.

I agree. You cannot fake good nature and attitude during all day interviews. At least, I cannot. Soft skills and communication are really important in any team environment.

But, how would one go about determining whether someone is a quick learner? That beats me.

You don't determine it directly. But quick learning comes with other traits, like curiosity. You can determine those during a conversation if you're a good interviewer (which is the catch, interviewing is also a skill).

Sometimes you'll fail. But I've yet to see convincing proof that the alternative reduces failures (but it does reduce the willingness of people to admit failure).

> I recently interviewed at very hot container startup. I had 1 phone screen, 6 on-sites, and 2 follow up phone calls.

Seems to me like you dodged a bullet.

> But, the last phone call was set up with the SVP who determined that I was not a good "culture fit" after 30 mins on the phone.

Why is an SVP spending 30 minutes on the phone with candidates that have already done eight interviews with the troops on the ground? You definitely dodged a bullet.

Interview processes are more about social skills than technical skill (even in engineering interviews). There is a huge amount of randomness involved - Maybe the HR person just didn't like your face!

It's mostly about understanding the company culture, reading the interviewer's face and trying to figure out what they want to hear as you go along (of course technical skills are a prerequisite).

The only time I didn't get an offer was because I asked for too much money. I think asking for more money is a good idea though; it weeds out all the frugal companies.

I think that if your success rate is 90%, it means you're not charging enough. You need to bring the price up and allow the success rate to drop - Then the average quality of offers will go up.

Companies keep files on candidates, which generally makes sense for tracking purposes, but they can be counter-productive at the big companies.

I go in and apply. I meet with 6 people out of thousands, representing 1-3 teams out of hundreds. It doesn't work out, for any of <n> reasons, some of them just luck of the draw. But now my interview is in the system and will be forever referenced. I'm given a polite but non-informational "it's not a fit" and sent off to a competitor.

Idea: Big companies shift to lighter-weight interviews which aren't considered final. If you're good enough to make it to on-site and it doesn't work out (but there was lots of reasons to think it would have), then you get happily scheduled for another round in a few weeks or whenever, and Company tries to not leave you with a stigma of rejection.

This frequently happens with executive recruiting, but not at lower levels. At least, I haven't seen it. Instead we get so many stories like on this website, where it should have been obvious just by CV/portfolio alone that they were awesome developers.

This happens at the developer level too. Of course, occasionally there may be a candidate who is just not there yet. So companies ask you to wait, some for X months other for X years and then reapply. An engineering position is sometimes about the skill sets; my team looks for ML and Data folks. But sometimes it is also about solid engineering chops and some people just need to work more on those. That is not a bad thing; it is just a thing.

Are you sure?

At my previous company (a relatively small startup, admittedly), one of the indisputably best engineers (a 10xer if I've ever worked with one) was hired after such a "second shot". A few weeks is probably too rapid a turn around, given that a "failed" interview is a negative signal (or at least, should be That's the point, after all). But say, a year later for engineers in that wide fuzzy area between "Hire!" and "Oh god no!"? I think plenty of companies do do that.

Further anecdata: Friends who've been rejected from Google have told me that they were explicitly encouraged by their Google recruiter to re-apply in ~a year.

if you have competencies in areas A, B, C and apply for several positions and due to the vagaries of HR you get interviewed by team A which is not a good fit for some reason, why should you have to wait for a year to apply for teams B and C?

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.

afaik, you can interview for a different team/function right away, no need to wait one year. The one year waiting period is for re-applying to the same position.

I have to say, after inheriting a code base from Max(@mxcl), its sad that anyone would reject him. Hes pretty much the guy that gave me the first sane introduction to cacoa programming. - That being said, I was rejected from a company because I hadn't used binutil in python. - I find I can pass any interview with a confident low voice more consistently than by showing my technical expertise. - People are interested in how well you assimilate into the culture of the workplace. Sometimes, that workplace culture needs to evoluve to include a more eclectic dev-background, or they risk alienating talented people. Alas, sometimes that evolution is not nessicary or its just to early for the company. - I've seen this happen to good devs and I've been on the receiving end of it. - Hiring isn't fun; you have to find someone who understands who you are. Inheriting trust is a lot faster then building trust and I find most companies don't have the time (sometimes ability ) to build that trust.

I agree. I was rejected not too long ago by a startup with a reason that they thought I belonged in a more corporate environment (I never indicated so). In my experience if a company really needs someone they are much more receptive, otherwise they just come up with a BS like that and worse.

> they thought I belonged in a more corporate environment

That's their way of saying they either can't afford you or you are too smart to be worked to death for 0.0001% stock.

That's a pretty generous grant, not everyone can be Employee #2.

Or a technical co-founder.

Can you speak more to what about his code base makes you say this? I very rarely hear people speak positively about former stewards of a codebase, so this sounds like a great learning opportunity for the rest of us.

It's interesting how in our current time, if you work at Twitter, facebook, google, or a famous start up, it is synonymous to "I made it".

Because it is. Once you land a position at the big 4 you're (potentially) on a multi decade gravy train that just keeps on giving.

Even a short stint and an "Ex-Googler" tag on your resume is enough to open doors and keep landing gigs years into the future.

Moreover the top firms are known for engineering the shit out of their software. You're much less likely to run into really bad code or stagnate.

So its definitely worth sacrificing a bit to try and get in.

> multi decade slave train

If you want to have "made it", go start a startup. Being an employee generally means working 40-60 hour weeks for other people's dreams.

Working for 2+ decades while making something like $150k+ a year on average over the long term , and retiring with substantial savings , without having worked 100 hour weeks on the startup lottery , sounds pretty awesome to me.

Don't know maybe I'm not elite founder material.

Different strokes for different folks. Some people use airplanes for transportation, others go skydiving. The start-up lottery is a very fast way to learn a lot and probably not earn much, think of it as a school rather than a money making machine and it makes a lot more sense. If you then later apply all that you learned during those years in a non-start-up context you may still come out ahead.

>>If you then later apply all that you learned during those years in a non-start-up context you may still come out ahead.

Unless the start up had something to do with politics, and you learned a lot about politics, you can't use any of your skills(related to actual work) to 'come out ahead' in a big company.

If all you learn in a start-up has to do with politics you're doing something very wrong.

Other companies pay great salaries. In Detroit, for example, you can make 100-130k with a much lower cost of living (even if you're living downtown or in one of the wealthy suburbs). I presume Chicago, Boston, ATL, etc., would be just as lucrative if not moreso. If the bar is based on salary and hours, you can make it in a lot of places.

Arguably if your goal as a software developer is to make as much money as possible and retire as soon as possible, you should probably work on HFT in the lowest-COL area that supports that field (maybe Chicago with a long train commute or something?)

I'm a team lead and make less than an entry level developer at any SF or NYC shop, but I'm willing to bet that I can save more and have more put away for retirement than most as well.

This is along the lines of what Mr. Money Mustache [0] recommends, minus the long commute. For anyone interested in early retirement through working hard and saving money, his blog is absolutely worth a read.

It could be a bit of a lifestyle change (or maybe you're already close and you don't know it!), but for people with software-developer-level salaries, early retirement is absolutely within reach.

[0] http://www.mrmoneymustache.com

Yeah, I am assuming that long train ride + cheap mortgage is probably cheaper than very short commute + downtown Chicago rent, which may not be the case everywhere. And quality of life goes down pretty quickly with increases in commute.

> 60 hour weeks

Or just move to a country that doesn't allow worker exploitation like that.

yeah, 60 hour weeks that are rule rather than a true exception mean that you have no/very little actual life. Yes, it helps in professional career, and for some this is their goal in life, but for most of us, we work to live.

what working for somebody else means is (among others) peace of mind - I do my hours, extra effort if necessary, but that's it. the moment i leave office, I can go climbing with my fiancee, take care of kids (not there yet), and generally do stuff I wil have fond memories of, rather than chasing gazillionth thing just to keep things running.

How is joining a startup working on your own dreams?

Starting a startup, not joining a startup.

Startup is not for everyone.

Not everyone wants to work on developing consumer App/Product, marketing and sales. There are people who would like to work on libraries, algorithms or just a large swat of data. I'm sure people developing React, Angular, Bootstrap, TensorFlow etc are happy with what they are doing.

That's always been the case since as long as history can go.

How do you they could get that many slaves to build the pyramids?

It happens the other way around also.

In an interview for a CTO type position a while ago, the only technical member of the interview panel was visibly aghast that I had never made a bootstrap theme - which, despite me explaining where that sort of task fits into the webapp ecosystem to the others, had already rubbed off on the rest of the panel. The extensive team/project building portfolio presented was irrelevant.

I thanked them for their time and didn't call back as I've had my fill of toxic work environments out there.

Being rejected from the top tier of technology companies and then landing in another top tier company doesn't seem so much like a genuine expression of angst over rejection but rather a bitter leer. But sure, the way work rejection is delivered is typically insensitive, and getting rejected sucks-- companies have no compassion for assets they don't want to use, and it's dehumanizing to realize you are utterly replaceable and plentiful as far as they are concerned.

Rejection as well failure is just feedback. We should not take it so personal but we build up expectations and project our selfs into that brand building stuff. The choosen ones must be selected and save the Zion or be part of it. What I've learned from my over 500+ jobs, accelerators, etc... Rejection is a fkin template! Move on fast and next time you'll reject them also ;)

The reason why there are so many rejections is because companies are trying to minimse the false positives instead of minimising the false negatives.

Plus, in many cases, it just doesn't click with the other person.

Interviewing is not a standardized test with a standardized evaluation. On the spectrum of human interactions, it's closer to a date, than it's to a test.

In doing interview coaching/training for a living (http://interviewkickstart.com), I see this every day. It's frustrating to a certain degree, but also very powerful once understood.

I am not sure why companies are so paranoid about false positives. Apart from the the lack of evidence that being extra picky is helpful, you can always fire if the candidate does not meet your standards. Be crystal clear about what you expect and cut if it is not met.

Hiring bad people is signaling to your existing, well functioning team, that you care about the bottom line more than their experience & happiness. It drives good people away, because firing bad apples is way harder than it should be...

I don't disagree with this, but being extra fussy at the interview stage does not mean you can avoid bad hires, or even that you will hire better people on average. Better to be clear about what you expect and serious enough to deal with it if you get it wrong.

If you'll notice, I never talked about any interviewing! :) We were talking about pre-hire as a state. It's just that usually that state and (formal) interviews go hand in hand. Interviews are a poor way to hire in general. I think having water cooler type experiences before people are hired, and doing away with formal interviews would be great. This works amazingly well for the most effective teams--the rich get richer in this way, too. Love talking about this stuff! Have a great day!

In an ideal world both employer and employee would have more time to learn if they are a compatible fit. In practice we have a pretend process where both sides lie to each other and it is only by chance that it works out. I would like to see a world where everyone was more honest about what they expected and where learning that they weren't a match did not mean that one party was wrong.

That's the world I'm striving to create! Email me if you ever want to work with someone with similar values. I know lots of people. I like to make my fiancé roll her eyes at me by telling people I'm the Kanye West of networking. ;) But seriously though, I love serving people and making others happy, and I'm an amazing long term recruiter...

Keeping bad people surely tells that (or that you are too stupid to even keep the bottom-line).

But hiring somebody bad by mistake, then recognizing that mistake and firing the person? How could that tell this?

I prefer the dating analogy. Why would a guy or a girl go into a relationship and terminate if standards aren't met as opposed to stopping post X dates? I want to work with a coworker who has my back in the trenches. If I don't get that vibe in an interview, why would I say yes?

Dating is a great analogy. Hiring someone is like going on a date, but companies are treating it like it is a marriage.

I'm a recruiter and I sometimes say that "recruiting is the business of rejection".

At any given moment I might have between 5 to 20 possible jobs that I'm searching for people for. In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants.

It is incredibly hard to get anyone into a job and often great people are rejected for various reasons.

The Business of Rejection - that's recruiting.

It doesn't have to be that way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10698392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10699997

Isn't it true in many things in life though? Shopping, buying a house etc (even dating sometimes) - most of us rarely select, we often reject and pick the one(s) that remains, isn't it? Not saying it is good or bad, just that it happens more often than we think.

Reject all you want, but at least be classy about it.

A vast amount of empirical data suggests that recruiters are very, very bad at this.

And many companies, when engaging candidates directly, aren't much better.

Dude I couldn't imagine telling a hopeful young person that they didn't get the job. Do you tell them why, so hopefully they can take that info and grow from it, or do you make something up so they don't feel like shit?

You are often not allowed/better off not saying anything due to legal risks of letting slip something that could get your sued.

Really? Is that a real thing? (I'm a tech recruiter in Chicago) If I recruit someone good I don't expect them to nail the first interview. Sometimes they do and that's great but more often then not it takes some fine tuning. I'm not going to give up on them after one interview.

Half of my job is helping developers with their soft skills. I see tons of guys who can do anything that's asked of them but they just cant interview well. Some people are really bad at telling interviewers what they want to hear, some people are bad at sounding excited about what they have been working on, and some people are really bad at talking to people they dont know.

After first round interviews I sit down with managers and ask specifically why they were a yes or a no. If he tells me it was a technical problem then I get as many specifics so the developer can fill in the gaps for the next interview. If it's a personality thing then I'll work with that developer so they can nail the next interview.

I've had maybe 2 managers ever be sheepish about telling me why a developer was a yes or a no.

In my experience, Google for example were not willing to tell me why I didn't pass an interview some years ago. I don't know what their actual reason is & can only speculate.

I didn't experience it often but it did occasionally happen with other companies too (I have been working as a programmer for the past 14 years & worked/interviewed with many companies).

That's the fear, though. If you say "We didn't hire you because X", people might think "I have X! So clearly you are unlawfully discriminating, and if I can make the argument that I do have X, then you must be lying about why you didn't hire me."

Besides, people apparently do make hiring decisions based on things like "culture fit", which is a pretty good proxy for race, age, and social status anyway, so...

In my experience, you have to separate 2 very different situations:

-- When I ask why I didn't got the job directly, I never get an answer. It only happened to me once, over a couple dozen interviews (I failed their silly test: debugging flow charts on paper). Even the companies who were polite enough to tell me of the rejection over email never replied when I asked why.

-- When someone else asks on my behalf (an acquaintance of the company, a recruiter, or whoever tried to sell my services when I work for a consulting company), they always get meaningful feedback.

If you're looking for a job, and keep getting rejected, try to go through recruiters. I've heard that constant pestering over the phone also works, but I never dared.

Most recruiters are terrible. The other day I was asked to fill a form (skills, work experience, personal details, the whole thing - in great detail) before the recruiter would even tell me the name of the company he is trying to hire for. I knew arguing with him is futile, so I didn't. Job search in general is a depressing experience, even when it is easy. Good recruiters are extremely rare :(

My funniest experience with a recruiter - he called me up and tried to recruit me to the same company I was working for at the time.

I'm a great recruiter! My approach is to help both sides understand the other side's needs completely before signing on the dotted line. I'm only happy when everyone else is. I also only work with people I would want to work with in the future, and that goes for both sides :)

Are you looking for something right now? If you are, I'll dig through your HN comment history and try to understand your needs and desires. If you aren't, I'm still going to, because good people are as hard to find as good recruiters! :)

That's creepy

Fun thought experiment: all this information is publicly available, and we're okay with it as evidenced by the fact that we're participating freely in the activity.

You're not bothered by algorithms (maybe you are, but you're not writing about it, so from this context you're less bothered) that can analyze data and language and patterns of communication, but you do have a problem with a human trying to understand the needs and desires of another human in the aim of helping that person land a job they would live?

Like I said, it's a thought experiment. I'd love to hear your thoughts. I'm always learning. Unless I'm an algorithm--they never learn. Or do they? Maybe you're just a poor Turing Test judge?! ;)

To be more formal, there are two possiblities that I see:

1) You are RecruiterBot born from the forge of a brillant engineer smarting from rejection and trained to communicate using audio samples from bugs placed in business schools.

- The announced intent to harvest data is a flaw in the algorithm because it is known that humans find overt monitoring "creepy". My response is to submit a ticket to your maker using the contact info, with steps to reproduce and other data.

- I assume the monitoring itself is rational because my priors tell me the marginal cost is likely low enough to be worth it.

2) You are a real person

- In this case your decision to stalk the above user represents a significant economic investment. The idea that you will spend 30 minutes? or more following stranger on the internet shows to be an imbalance in your economic incentives. I begin to wonder, are you a rational actor?

- In the interest of safety I will avoid you because the data points I have do not fit human models of behavior. My percieved risk is much higher because your economic incentives do not appear to align with mine. Therefore it is unlikely that trade is worth the opportunity cost when I know of others who do align AND have lower risk assements.

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this! To give you some insight into my behavior--I have an intuition about who is naughty or nice (maybe I'm Santa!), and I don't spend any time on awful folks unless I'm learning from the experience. That means I can put more wood behind fewer arrows so to speak.

It absolutely seems creepy to read about my behavior, but I promise that with the people I reach out to, my batting average for them responding positively is probably around 0.600. I need to crunch those numbers--that'll be a neat piece of data to use to demonstrate that I'm effective at communicating with new people, which means my fat butt is worth it's weight in gold to companies who want to reach new clients and partners.

I think you might find that high touch sales is much more like what I've described above, than not. I love when someone treats me like I've described, because it demonstrates listening and understanding! Which is equivalent to them demonstrating that they respect me and my time.

I absolutely respect your space and won't stalk you (mostly because I don't think it'll be a mutually beneficial relationship). I would say though that if you met me on the street, you'd find that I radiate a positive aura and leave nearly every human interaction with both of us better off. I know what I'm doing is Right because of the evidence of the reactions in my life to what in putting out. And to quote the song Forrest Whitaker, "You ain't gotta love me!" :)

Have a great day, and best of luck to you!!

Just some things I wanted to add: * loved learning about your threat/opportunity evaluation algorithm as it played out in evaluating me. I'm def gonna steal this when working with folks who are analytical like yourself! * the business school quip was quite entertaining. * your attitude of economic incentives not aligning, so that's why we shouldn't work together, meshes 100% with my beliefs and values. Not sure if that fits under the umbrella of irony, but...

Anyway, thanks again for the convo, you're a good person in my book!

> Fun thought experiment: all this information is publicly available, and we're okay with it as evidenced by the fact that we're participating freely in the activity.

Spoken like a true stalker.

> You're not bothered by algorithms (maybe you are, but you're not writing about it, so from this context you're less bothered) that can analyze data and language and patterns of communication, but you do have a problem with a human trying to understand the needs and desires of another human in the aim of helping that person land a job they would live?

There is a difference between machines aggregating large datasets and individuals directly targeting other individuals.

> There is a difference between machines aggregating large datasets and individuals directly targeting other individuals.

Could you help me understand the difference? Don't humans have access to the incredible output of those algorithms?

> 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. I had that too once. She apologized and asked not to tell the company :-)

> In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants.

What tools do you use to manage that many applicants? Certainly not your inbox?

I live in Zurich and I used to code for a living. Now, I hire engineers for different startups in Switzerland.

As I got deeper into IT-recruiting, I realised that candidate filtering at the top of the funnel is fundamentally broken. Especially in Europe companies expect a CS degree and don't appreciate self-taught skills as much as in the US.

I am trying to change this. If you look for a tech-job in the most liveable city in the world, check out my story "8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT" on http://medium.com/@iwaninzurich/eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to... or send me a mail to the mail-address in my HN-profile.

Could the difference be due to education being cheaper and thus there being fewer reasons to forego it?

No, it just saves a bunch of time and you later won't hear (when someone messes up) 'he doesn't even have a degree, what did you expect'?

It's the recruiting equivalent of buying IBM (or Microsoft I guess).

If the applicant pool is large enough any quick way to discriminate that skews positively for applicant capability is going to be used. It is also much easier to see if someone has a degree than to actually test if they have the required skills.

> If the applicant pool is large enough any quick way to discriminate that skews positively for applicant capability is going to be used.

I think a lot of self-taught developers (myself too earlier in my career) fail to realize this.

If you've got 1,000 applicants and your job is to schedule 10 interviews from that pool, you will do anything that won't absolutely destroy candidate quality. It's not about the finding the best, it's about finding someone who wants the job and will be able to do it. The name of the game is not minimizing false negatives (disregarding good people), but minimizing false positives (interviewing shitbirds).

So if you work for BigCo you say the person need three years of corporate experience. You're down to 800 applicants. One year of experience in the JavaScripts. 750 applicants. Maybe the phrase "SQL Server" has to be on their resume. 400 applicants. College degree. 320 applicants. Computer Science degree. 120 applicants. Maybe you want to filter by your preferred recruiter, because they only charge you 11% of base salary instead of 18% like that other firm. 22 applicants. Now you can actually read the resumes and pick the top half to interview. Anyone who actually wrote a cover letter and is in this pile is pretty much guaranteed an interview.

That might make sense, but why the difference between Europe and the US, if in fact it exists as the grandparent claimed?

It's true that it's costly and hard to test one's skills. The trouble with grades though is some people cheat brilliantly on their tests and others, some of them really good, test badly (if they're bored they don't prep, screw the grade average, etc) and some of the latter are actually extremely pragmatic on the job. I don't quite understand it but it's there.

More people have degrees in Europe as it does not cost money. Also, the standard of education dropped and the exams are easier to pass.

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%.

> As a result the failing-rate for the mentioned killer-subjects is dropped from 80% to 20-30%.

Do you have any links to back that up?

I'm not studying at TUM but I'd be really surprised if there's a 80% pass rate for those subjects.

Around 2008 Prof. Mayr stopped teaching discrete mathematics. After that in most of the midterms there was a solvable problem. Often it was something like "Use the Dijkstra's algorithm to find the shortest paths in this graph. 10 Points" (and the exam had like 32 points).

> the professors started to introduce one problem in each exam that anyone could pass who practised a bit and / or wasn't entirely stupid.

What is considered a passing grade at one of these schools?

At my private liberal arts college in the US it was usually (but ultimately up to professor discretion):

  00-59% - Fail (0.0 for GPA)
  60-67% - D    (1.0)
  68-69% - D+   (1.3)
  70-72% - C-   (1.7)
  73-77% - C    (2.0)
  78-79% - C+   (2.3)
  80-82% - B-   (2.7)
  83-87% - B    (3.0)
  88-89% - B+   (3.3)
  90-92% - A-   (3.7)
  93+    - A    (4.0)

You could count any class with a D or better toward graduation, but to actually graduate you needed a 2.0 or better GPA. If you did not have it you could take additional courses to bring your GPA up, but adding on 3-credit courses when you've got 120 credits built up with a sub-2.0 GPA is typically a losing proposition. Most transferred if they were sub-2.0 by the end of their Sophomore year.

I've seen other grading scales with E's in addition to/instead of F, or minor variations on the percentages. It seems popular to give Honors courses an extra point (e.g. an A- is 4.7 instead of 3.7), particularly in US High Schools.

Works similarly in Germany, with the difference that 4.0 is the lowest passing grade and 1.0 is the highest.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_grading_in_Germany

I don't see how one professor makes the entire program.

FWIW I did my masters there and in my opinion the way they evaluate students is suboptimal anyway - but I don't know if that's a TUM thing or a German thing.

He doesn't; I just gave the example of one course but the pattern happend for other courses, too.

similar story of "greatest filter in whole CS 5 year path quietly removed" here, albeit ours was actually non-programming related. It was theoretical electronics, don't ask me why we had to go through that guy - actually other students, focused on electronics had much nicer guys. the guy was firing people out of school with passion (literally for a single dot missing in Fourier equations at one place, often with deep personal insults, nobody liked him, not even from professors.

yeah, my uni was pretty bad, all the useful stuff I learned and use daily came from my own learning, none from university. campus was a fun place and great experience though :)

Hey Iwan - I just shot you an email over at your fastmail address. Looking forward to start a discussion there.

Being rejected a few times this week, this makes me feel a bit better. For one interview ... my brain decided to take the day off ... nerves I guess ... it was not pretty. Any who (sic) ... the show must go on ... back at it tomorrow morning wish me the best.

Lol or that feeling when you know your answer to a question didn't go over well with the interviewer. I've found to remain fairly neutral with interviewers and attempt to draw them out first. Once you sorta know their hand then you play yours.

Also when your brain decided to shut down, just slow down, take a deep breath, and stop thinking about the overwhelming doubt growing in the back of your head. The interviewers won't fault you for that. Its kinda cheesy but I like Dune's matra "Fear is the mind killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration."

If you'd like to feel better, you should read "Embarrassing code I wrote under stress at a job interview":

http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/embarrassing-code-i-w...

thanks for sharing this. mirrors several interviews i've had

wow - that was so similar to my experience.

Twitter - where most of these rejected people ended up?..

or Twitter - where most of these rejected people make awesome comebacks

Or, to account for the selection bias: People don't always come back after rejection. But when they do, they do it at twitter.

...which just laid off a bunch of their staff.

or Twitter - where the most engineers tweet

or even: Twitter - where the guy who made this site works, with some colleagues he presumably asked to contribute stories

Someone I know at Facebook said that they have something called "Overheard at Campus" or something like that, where people post funny things they hear on campus. They said that recently one of the posts was: "I am going into an interview. I am pissed. It's gonna be a reject from me." Which pretty much underscores how interviewing appears to be these days, especially at a company like Facebook.

Sounds like a joke.

Thank you for this site! I am going through the interview process now and there are times where I feel like a fraud. Some call this impostor syndrome. It's encouraging to read others who have travelled the same path I've been on.

> I was rejected at Amazon and other companies with no technical interviews because I wasn't a Java engineer.

That one seems pretty legit to me.

They hired me despite my not knowing any Java. I was there for close to 5 years and did my share of interviewing and I haven't seen a single instance where lack of specific programming language skill was brought up as a reason to reject the candidate. But yeh, the whole hiring process is more random than it should be.

Depends. Is the person a polyglot with extensive experience in more than one language of a similar paradigm? If so ... it's just learning the syntax, libraries and idioms ... it's not rocket science.

It's interesting how all these top companies insist on JS expertise, I didn't know that it was so important for an interview and that's something I need to work on.

If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting.

If you have awesome, expert, deep, deep JavaScript then firstly you might as well be a unicorn but secondly, you will get a job.

Should probably clarify that it's only important if you're looking for Web jobs :-) Sometimes people here forget there's more to software than the web.

Is that really true? In the page some report that Google and other companies that aren't ALL web require you to know JS.

Not at all. In Google interviews you can choose the language.

I know very little about js. It wasn't an issue when I interviewed with Google and it hasn't been an issue working there.

Until a week ago, the only reason I needed to know Javascript was for my own side projects. I have never done anything requiring the web professionally until about 4 days ago.

I've been in software for over 20 years!

I'm very much more on the data analysis side of things and decidedly not a web developer, but I still regularly get told "great work, can you display the data on a cool website?" In fact if I was hiring a new data analysis colleague I would very much prefer one who knew javascript for this very reason.

Good thing there's still going to be a future in non JavaScript web development.

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.

Nothing wrong with JavaScript, as long as we are talking about ES2015.

And even when WebAssembly comes along, the best language to program it in is one that naturally requires asynchronous programming, because web browsers are heavy on network traffic and UI interaction and both those things need asynchronous programming.

Other languages like Python have asynch programming but I would suggest that the pervasive nature of asynch in JavaScript will continue to make it a leader in WebAssembly.

JavaScript is a perfectly fine language but...

I find the 'ecosystem' unpleasant.

Every time I turn to JavaScript for something, the barrier to entry for non trivial work rises. JavaScript feels to me... As a programmer working 8 hours a day in Python much significant portions of it doing Django, and a few hours a week learning Elixir, C and Rust...

Like the whole world is rolling up a giant katamari daciamacy ball, over the shiftiest powdery sand in an active earthquake zone. I try WebPack and its default behaviour is to turn my sass into JavaScript?! I stick with it and go looking for a plugin to keep the build products directory clean, I find one tiny plugin with a tiny documentation page that barely explains it, so I have to read the source code and experiment a bit before I discover how it works.

Then there is the mess of "which way do you load modules" mixed with the mountain of code that was written for global scope. "Oh just rewrite the code" ... I'm sorry I'm too busy writing new code to waste time rewriting all this other code just because everything is churning like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

/end js induced unhappiness rant

I'm really happy with my productivity pretty much everywhere else. JavaScript just gets more frustrating to work with every time I touch it. :-/ I actually enjoy writing pure stand alone browser JavaScript when I'm not working with any libraries, like I said it's a fine language, it's just the ecosystem that I have issues with.

No wonder people keep churning out new js libraries - it's their attempt to cope with the churn, actually creating more churn in the process.

It's the C++ of the web.

> As a programmer working 8 hours a day in Python much significant portions of it doing Django, and a few hours a week learning Elixir, C and Rust

I think that you've already made your priorities loud and clear and JS isn't one of them.

omg praise the day. WASM is days off tho, so don't hold your breath for it or anything.

I've switched to Dart, couldn't be happier. No more confusing JS bullshit :)

If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting.

Not true. And weird, counterfactual statements like these are exactly why I don't like dealing with recruiters.

Sorry I should have qualified - it's true for all the jobs I search for. Other cities might still have jobs that are purely back end or pure games or something but here in Melbourne the jobs I see all have a web UI component.

All those data science, machine learning, algorithms, database and devops engineers would disagree.

This is very much not true.

This is nonsense. I recently applied to a bunch of companies and my language of choice for the interviews was C. They never cared about my language that I used.

Dude you'll always have to do something with HTML/CSS/JS. Even if its not your main gig. Luckily all three are fairly simple. Just go make a simple webapp without any libraries and from that you'll pick up 99% of what you'd need to know.

Don't know why this is being downvoted, it certainly resonates with my experience. I write C by day, but I found that making a webapp that compared offers w/ cost of living and tax treatment to be an eye opener. I learned a great deal about how the internet works from just that weekend project, and I would heartily recommend making a webapp. Like it or not, HTML/CSS/JS is about as cross platform as C (don't do anything fancy and you will be fine).

It's "Dude you'll always have to do something with HTML/CSS/JS." that is attracting the downvotes. That is a thoroughly web-centric view of of the world. Some people never write software with graphical interfaces at all, let alone a web-based one. I never touched a GUI (LabView doesn't count :P) until about nine months ago, and I have been writing code full-time for over seven years and intermittently for over thirteen.

The comment about how easy it is to learn is spot on, in my experience. I was very surprised at how fast I ramped up on vanilla JavaScript and Angular.

I'm not a web developer and it seems a pretty common experience among application developers. Its certainly been mine.

"That is a thoroughly web-centric view of of the world." oh geezzz..... ◔_◔

I've never had to write a single line of HTML/CSS/JS at work.

There's a lot of software in the world that isn't web based. Hardware, operating systems, databases, AI, libraries, languages, compilers. There isn't a computer on this planet that functions without these things.

I'm not a web developer and it seems a pretty common experience among application developers. Its certainly been mine.

I've never had a job where I was required to code in JS. However, I have had one interview where I went headfirst into SCSS when the job actually only required C/C++ skills (it was work on a computer vision system).

The thing is, I think most interviewers ask for what they are most comfortable with, so they can evaluate. Which is why questions related to JS are probably so common for companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, etc. even if you don't actually need it or use it.

However, I would also point out that JS is pretty easy, if you know any of the standard languages you'll be fine. Although, I do find it humorous because JS is basically one of the worst constructed languages I know of (even though I use it daily...).

Author of project is part of JS community on Twitter.

I love how Facebook HR rejected one of my acquaintances and then after he asked "Why?", the recruiter sent an email that was something along these lines: "Ok, may I schedule a technical interview in a week?".

Eventually he ended up being an engineer there.

My experience and rejection also indicated there's something arbitrary random going on in the interview process. Once a recruiter from Google commented my grades with a serious attidute, saying I should keep them as high (I was still a student) and I immediately realised that grades weren't even checked because my grades were horrible (GPA<3, ridiculous bible theology social classes ruined it for me) and if they cared I should get them higher.

It seems to me like that best predictor of whether you'll get the thumbs up is social cues, rather than anything technical.

I went to an on-site at a major company, and there was a guy who just wouldn't smile. He also led me down the wrong way on the tech part, which is easy when you make zero facial gestures and talk like a robot. I figured it out eventually, it wasn't hard, but he dinged me.

With the other people it was just a breeze. We chatted about various low level performance things, about how the work environment is, and so on. The tech parts were easy, because you could tell whether you'd actually understood the problem correctly.

Yup! Also, would you really want to work with person A? I wouldn't, no matter how talented. Our scarcity mindset as employees has us asking for any job sometimes, no matter how awful the fit...

I was rejected for grad school after submitting half-hearted applications and now work as a fullstack Haskell developer. I didn't even know I would find it as satisfying as research.

I just want to confirm the sentiment about how subjective interviewing is. I recently switched to using a coding challenge instead of a traditional interview loop. I would take candidates out for coffee pitch them the team and position, ask them some questions about themselves and then explain how the challenge would work. The first time I did this I decided to give everyone the challenge, even people I was sure were going to eat it, just to give myself some good data about how tough the challenge was and if it needed to be tuned. I was shocked by how bad my tech-radar really was. Not so much on the upper end, I can spot the winners still. However some of the people who I thought would eat it did a lot better than I thought they would. It made me realize how subjective interview loops really are, with little to no chance of the interviewer to be shaken out of their biases if they don't want to be. Not that coding challenges are perfect, but I'm never going back. I will refuse to participate in interview loops now - on either end.

I'd guess that over my nearly 20 year career, I've been rejected from more companies than most HNers have even applied to. I've listened to tons of employers tell me what they think I'm not capable of, and that was back when you would actually get personalized feedback from a failed interview. My grades, my lack of a "prestigious" education, my technical skills, my people skills, my background, my previous employment history, my potential, and, of course, the catch-all "cultural fit" have all been used as reasons that Company X was sure I'm an idiot. I don't let interview rejections bother me for even a millisecond anymore--it doesn't mean anything whatsoever, and I'm convinced getting hired at any given company is more of a dice roll than anything else.

May be unrelated, but this is like my howihacked.info project that I launched three days ago, but with a different design and story focus. Anyway, I'm happy for that and these stories are cool as well. I'd suggest the story of the WhatsApp founder that wasn't hired by Facebook. Kudos :)

The tiny 1 hour slot is not enough to judge candidates. As an interviewer, the best I can do is check if they communicate their ideas well and have they got done something interesting on their own.

It is sad that we still have to follow this broken process because of lack of any viable alternative.

Looks like (so far) nearly half the people shown wound up at twitter. Apply to twitter first?

A very interesting phenomenon indeed that all these, excuse my French, "rejects" wound up at TWTR, can we deduce something concrete from this about the company's hiring policy or offerings quality?

More likely that coworkers at Twitter are telling each other about this site and encouraging them to post.

Exactly. The first question that should be asked when people try to make generalizations is if sampling bias is accounted for.

Twitter didn't even send me a ping when a friend working there sent in my resume (for a role rhat at least on paper I'd be well suited for), but I'm moving through the interview process now with two of the GAFA constituents. shrug There's a big element of luck in this process, even if technical competence is a prerequisite.

Not sure if kidding but logic is inescapable!

The developer who created the site works at Twitter, so naturally, he probably just asked his coworkers first.

This project was created by a Twitter developer. Of course, he asked his Twitter friends to submit their stories first. Since there's few stories for now, it looks that way.

As a current job seeker, this is doing wonders in helping me keep my head up.

It seems to me chasing 'high profile' Tech company employment is setting yourself up for failure. Competing against thousand of applicants should not be viewed as 'failure' it's a mostly a number's game. Not saying you shouldn't apply to these companies, but you should also consider your odds and adjust your expectations accordingly. Also, we seem to identify way too much with the company we work for ... taking a step back from that helps balance your outlook.

Getting turned down always feels shitty, but I try hard to not take it personally.

The whole you rejected me, but haha I'm better off comes across as pretty self-centered and entitled.

-edit- removed question,more

I read this as "we were rejected but it worked out ok, so don't feel too discouraged if you have a bad interview"

Ok I like that, its just the term rejection has a common us versus them connotation in the US.

Creator here. Sorry if that wasn't clear! I only meant this to be inspiring for people to "keep trying" even when they face rejection!

Yea its quite cute!(Not meant to be condescending)

The site loads them in random order and I read about how someone was nervous during an interview and faults the interviewers and a few other more sour ones first. lol sorry.

I've lived in the US my whole life and I don't accept this connotation.

'Rejection' is just rejection. Sometimes it's personal, sometimes it's not.

lol I'm from the US and have lived here for most of my life. Its probably true in most cultures. Hacker news has a pretty international audience, so I try to tailor my generalizations to my own home country.

It's celebrating small to big time failures... that's what startup land is all about and these people are working at the biggest startups on the planet.

lol most of them work for Twitter, which is no longer a start up. But yea I see that now, I just centered in on the more negative ones that loaded in first for me. I realize they are random now.

I think that's just because I work at Twitter so most of the early contributions were coworkers! :D

Cool! :D Do you like your job?

> Show some class guys, why not imagine what it takes to be the person that has to reject tons of hopeful young kids.

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?

Sorry you lost me, what company are we talking about?

FYI I only read a few sours/entitled ones before making that statement. I'll edit it to make it less provocative.

Many years ago I had an interview for a job I really wanted - all day event with chats with multiple people including the CEO. Pretty sure it was my chat with the CEO that killed my application. I was absolutely gutted.

8 years later the same chap was the first angel investor in the startup I co-founded and worked with us as Chairman for a number of years before the company was acquired.

I never did ask him if he remembered rejecting me!

I can't help noticing that a lot of people are from Twitter.

Rejected in 2009 != rejected in 2015

You have to consider the time dimension and boom-bust cycle.

"I showed up at the store and they didn't let me in."

"Because it was closed!! You showed up at 3am!"

To be honest, this wouldn't make me feel much better after a rejection. I already know the process is sometimes arbitrary and up to luck.

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