Comment by davnicwil | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davnicwil | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Vital meta lesson from this:

I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y but then eventually got a job at Fashionable BigCo Z

When we see that repeated for many successful people, I hope the takeaway becomes: your interview process is probably not doing what you think it is. In some cases this extends to the entire work culture. E.g. workplaces that situate themselves in a mindset equivalent to "we must hire the best unicorns to possibly succeed". Other, better ones instead try to embody "we will continually improve our hires. we will help make them great. (oh, there are no unicorns.)"

Do you suggest always hiring the first person that applies? There has to be some choosing function.

No. But I think many of our filters are bogus. Some of these are easy: "Did you complete a traditional four-year CS degree at <highly respected university>?" should be considered downright obscene as a front-line filtering function. It robs your team of great talent, and destroys any attempt to hire diverse candidates. And by "diverse" I mean invaluable team members who will bring fresh perspective to your problems, your understanding of your users, and more. There have always been many "alternative" paths into computing, now moreso than ever.

A concrete example: A place I interviewed in my last search uses pair programming extensively in their day-to-day (and have lovely twinned monitor/keyboard hardware setups to support this!) They use that in their tech interviews as well. You and a candidate sit and talk about code. It's a lovely experience, and far more grounded in the work than just about any whiteboard interview.

Pair-programming isn't the takeaway here. It's that this org built an interview model which was virtually identical to their actual working model.

I agree 100%. I myself don’t have a CS degree. I thought though with your emphasis on training great employees rather than finding them you were talking about hiring people that maybe aren’t the great programmers. It’s hard enough to design a selection process for exactly what you are looking for (i.e. programming ability), I have no idea how one would go about identifying candidates with great potential that can’t already program.

Any hiring process will result in some good employees being rejected and bad employees being accepted. If your candidate pool is very large compared to the open positions, as is the case for the Fashionable BigCos, it makes sense to "tighten the mesh" in order to avoid the false positives better.

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.

The abundance of Twitter picking people up after rejections is really odd to say the least.

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.

Agreed ... I purposely called it "mental statistics" to indicate that there was no math involved, too small a sample size and no controls against bias.

I don't think the point is to be "interesting", just motivating to someone who just got rejected themselves.

Here's one for you:

I was rejected by a startup for being a "big picture thinker" and not a "builder" after flying to big city for a full day of interviewing. Shortly after that I started a business helping local people align their business operations with technology.

I like the variety in hats I wear now and it has open doors for roles that aren't just engineering and more oriented towards my strengths.

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