
They Rejected Us - deepaksurti
https://rejected.us
======
myth_buster
The best one I've come across yet is Brian Acton being rejected by Facebook
[0] ends up creating Whatsapp and in turn selling it to Facebook for $19B.
Talk about comebacks.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?lang=en](https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?lang=en)

~~~
hathawsh
On the other hand, if Facebook had hired him, it's unlikely he would have had
enough freedom to create Whatsapp or anything like it. Even if Facebook knew
what was going to happen, Facebook still made the right choice when they
rejected him and later bought his company. Rejection can be a good thing for
everyone.

~~~
sjg007
Maybe.. but maybe he would have been on the Messenger team and made that
What's App.

~~~
nojvek
I doubt that. In most companies the Managerial chain kill bottom up
innovation.

There’s less than 1% chance Facebook messenger would be able to live to the
philosophy of “no ads, no gimmicks, secure messaging”

That’s why startups can disrupt. It really does reward bottom up innovation.

~~~
sjg007
We are talking about a startup that sold to Facebook for $19 billion dollars
whose founder was rejected by Facebook when he interviewed for a job there
before he started what's app. I know this is make believe world but had
Facebook hired him and had he worked on messaging I bet he would have beget a
similar product (in make believe land). The problem most of us Americans
didn't understand was that SMS cost money (in the rest of the world) and not
in the USA. Most American text plans were free and unlimited in the
beginning... that was until the US mobile networks caught on to the Europeans
and realized they could charge per text. So that what made what's app. And FB
could have saved themselves $19B.. still.. if you are right then he probably
would have left FB and started What's app on his own.

~~~
nojvek
There’s a reason why the founders quit even after Facebook bought them.

Facebook is a growth at any cost kind of company. They really wouldn’t have
listened to him even if he joined Facebook in the first place.

The messenger on Android sends all your text messages and phone logs to
Facebook. Mark approved that in the name of growth.

There’s absolute no way Whatsapp would have been invented at Facebook.
Facebook only bought it because it could have been a serious threat to their
dominance.

------
athenot
This really highlights how hard it is to hire, at least in Tech. We come up
with processes and fantastic lists of questions that verify how well a
candidate knows minutia, and use that as proxy for how well he/she will do in
a position where the primary required skill is speed of learning and growth.

I'll hire someone who knows how to find out what they are missing over someone
who knows a lot of details but can't grow. But that is hard to justify and
involves risk: what if I misread someone's capacity to learn and I just hired
somone without the skills nor the ability to learn? Joke's on me!

So larger orgs will naturally go for process-driven hiring practices, so they
can cover their behinds (and part of that is due to the requirement of
applying the same standard to everyone—can't fault them for that).

But this is how small orgs can win, by taking chances on candidates that are
very driven to grow, and can create impressive teams that will outlive the
company: good teams always find a way to recombine at least partially in other
companies.

So the corollary for candidates is: you have to reverse-engineer the hiring
process of the large company you're trying to join. Or you can go for smaller
companies* that do something you want to get deep into. Total comp is less but
look at it in terms of you getting paid to learn. Then make yourself available
so that large orgs come trying to hire you. When that happens, it will be on
your terms.

———————————————

* Note: small companies don't have to be startups. While startups can be fantastic places for growth, they can also be sh*t shows since the entire company is trying to figure itself out, so be sure you properly interview their founders to get a feel for their integrity/sleaze.

~~~
sjg007
How do you determine "can't grow" ?

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

~~~
dentemple
Still, it's pretty silly when a company says you're not knowledgeable enough
in X when you literally wrote the book on X.

Being told, "You obviously don't have experience" by a company when it's
literally untrue really grinds my gears.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
I think you have to take all interview feedback with a pinch of salt. People
make emotional decisions then try and rationalise them. You will rarely hear
what the emotional issue was.

~~~
dentemple
Yeah, I understand it. The _public_ reason for a rejection is rarely the same
as the _actual_ reason for a rejection.

It just grinds my gears when a company adds that little bit of insult at the
end of it, by somehow making it your fault in the end for supposedly lying to
them.

------
throwaway5250
Try getting rejected at the final executive approval (i.e., their magic eight-
ball) after passing the in-person day and the hiring committee.

Once you've seen the inside of the hiring process, you'll never take this
stuff personally again. It's utter garbage. At best, the process manages to
select for a few traits that are probably useful, while de-selecting for
others they didn't realize were crucial for ultimate success.

If you doubt this, ask yourself how one of the tightest hiring sieves in the
world managed to produce Google+.

~~~
ravenstine
There was one company I applied to, for which I passed the screening and the
technical interview, that I got a "Welcome Aboard" email from which also
included paperwork for getting started. I just needed to meet the CEO as a
last step, but they told me it was basically a formality and that I was hired.

I arrived on time and was told to wait outside the CEO's office. Through the
wall, I could hear him talking to someone over the phone about football and
what flavor chicken wings he wanted to have ordered and delivered to him. I
sat there for 25 minutes hearing his muffled dudebro voice ramble on as if his
schedule was clear for the day.

Finally, he let me in. At least he remembered my name. I told him why I wanted
to work for Acme Corporation and the skills I planned on bringing to the
table. He told me almost nothing and had me out of there in less than 10
minutes.

Not even an hour after I left did I receive an email from the same HR person
who told me "Welcome Aboard!" that they wouldn't be moving me forward in the
hiring process. It was one of the most devastating moments in my life because
that initial email and the phone call I got after was a sign that my shitty
life was finally going to turn around.

It did help teach me a good lesson that I would learn multiple times(with much
softer landings) later on, which is that _most_ people involved in hiring
don't know what the hell they're doing and that just because a company makes a
lot of money doesn't mean that forms of insanity aren't baked into their
processes. You've just got to let rejections roll off you.

~~~
cheez
Or you can do what I did, rip them a new one and tell them that their process
is shit.

------
ryandrake
As someone who's gotten rejected by more companies than I can even count or
remember, I think this is great. I have a bitter, guilty fantasy that I could
go back to some of those harsh rejections long ago and show them the updates
to my resume since they declared me useless.

I wonder if/how companies try to measure their false negative rate. Despite
how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's
better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one." Is that really true? I
wonder how many big companies have thought about testing that assumption,
maybe changing their selectivity and measuring the effect. Have they really
measured how much it costs to hire/fire a bad performer and shown it to be
greater than the productivity they'd get out of a good performer they are
inclined to reject? Does their strategy of holding out for months, looking for
that unicorn candidate instead of hiring someone who's "just fine" today
really work? How do they know? Have they measured it?

Are they even serious about their existing selectivity? Is it baked into their
annual performance process too? How many of them apply their selectivity bar
to their existing employees? One common thing I've seen at companies is many
of their "old guard" long time folks would never pass today's interview
hazing. The most difficult thing most people ever do at a company is pass the
interview.

~~~
ghaff
>Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep
saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one."

It depends on the role. Sales tends to be pretty performance-oriented without
a lot of leeway if you miss your numbers.

But, for better or worse, the attitude for most roles at most companies is
that, once they hire someone, they mostly don't want to fire them if they're
doing an even halfway competent job so long as the company as a whole isn't
doing layoffs.

~~~
vonmoltke
> they mostly don't want to fire them if they're doing an even halfway
> competent job so long as the company as a whole isn't doing layoffs

This doesn't sound anything like the "bad hire" everyone claims to be paranoid
about.

------
ralmidani
I graduated from Fullstack Academy, and I've been rejected outright by most
companies I applied to; only a couple have given me over-the-phone interviews,
and nobody brought me on-site.

I have all but stopped applying, am doing freelance work to keep my skills
sharp and pay the bills, and plan to start my own company in the future.

My motto: If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.

Edit: most companies I applied to are not of FAANG caliber. Also, I don't feel
entitled to be hired; in most cases they didn't even deign to write a
rejection email.

~~~
mikekchar
A couple of pointers to help you forward. First, don't give up. Keep building
up your experience and portfolio. To be honest, Fullstack Academy graduate
means to me that you're completely entry level. That's fine, but when I'm
hiring I almost never want entry level people. And even if I do want entry
level people, I've got about 1000 CVs from people to choose from (and that is
not an exaggeration). Landing that first job is really, really important.

How do you land the first job? You have to stand out. It is possible (and even
likely) that your CV is not great. The first thing I would do is to make sure
to attend as many meetups as you can for areas relevant to your experience.
Try to find a few experienced people and see if you can get some feedback on
your CV. Reassure them that you aren't looking for an interview per se, you
would like some independent feedback so that you can make your CV look better.

When you get an over the phone interview, your attitude should be that the in
person interview is nearly 100% guaranteed. There should only be 2 reasons for
not getting the in person interview: the job is wrong for you (which you
should be able to detect) or you have flubbed the phone interview. Without
being too much of a pain, get to know some senior people in meetups and chat
with them about technology. Try to get some honest feedback on what they think
about your potential as a programmer based on those conversations. Over the
phone interviews are a bit like that -- you should have the feeling of just
kind of geeking out about your chosen field and chatting with like minded
people. Practising conversations like that will help you a lot. Getting
feedback is really important as well.

Now, here's where it gets hard. When I'm in a big city and go to a meetup, I
often find myself chatting with someone who is clearly not very strong as a
programmer. Usually they are looking for work and usually I'm not interested
in bringing them on board for an interview where I work. However, it's hard to
give good feedback because you don't know the person and can't tell how they
will react. It's important to pick up on that vibe, because of the next step.

If you find that people aren't going out of their way to rush you to an
interview, probably it's because you don't present yourself as being a solid
enough candidate. So this means you need to figure out what your biggest
weakness is and work on that.

The biggest red flags I've found with really junior people (and sometimes even
senior people) are:

\- they have funny ideas that they obviously haven't tried in realistic
situations because they aren't going to work. e.g, "In my foobar server code I
discovered that it runs faster if I name all my variables, a, b, c, etc."
Maybe not quite so stupid, but often pretty close.

\- they have strong opinions on stuff despite having almost no experience
"Ruby is the best programming language, OO sucks, Testing is stupid", etc,
etc.

\- they regurgitate stuff they've heard or read and present it as gospel "Why
isn't everybody using microservices? Super-programmer Sam says you are a dufus
if you don't and I believe in Super-programmer Sam".

\- just generally clueless without realising it "I'm good at Rails. It's the
best way to write front end apps".

What I'm looking for in a junior developer is someone who knows a little bit,
understands that they know only a little bit, is hungry to learn more, enjoys
programming and demonstrates a knack for learning.

Things that really impress me are people who meet me one time and if we get
talking about TDD, for instance, will go away and at the next meeting flag me
down and say, "I did this. Can I get your feedback on it?"

Doing freelance work is great if you can manage it. However, you should also
take the opportunity to build things that will help your life (even if it's
just a TODO app, or even if somebody has already written something better).
Use the opportunity to practice. Write it one way. Rewrite it a different way.
Listen to senior people who tell you "X is amazing, you should use X" and then
try it. Go back and say, "I tried X and I'm not sure that I understand how
it's better. Can you have a quick look at my code and tell me if I'm doing it
in a good way?"

As strange as it sounds, this is exactly what I want in a junior person at
work. I want them to be eager, humble, always learning, and engaging. I want
them to bug me constantly about how to improve. I want them to listen closely
to everything I say and to try to integrate my advice. People like that are
gold for me and I will seek them out.

But the biggest thing is that you _need_ to be interacting regularly with
people in the industries. Meetups are best. If you can't manage that (due to
your location), then devote yourself to working on open source projects,
hanging out on IRC, etc, etc. It sucks that you have to work so hard at the
beginning of your career, but it will pay dividends!

Anyway, good luck! As long as you are always thinking, "What can I do to
become a better programmer", everything will fall into place.

~~~
ralmidani
Thank you for your honest advice! It's great to learn about the thought
processes going on at the "other side of the table."

Some more context which clarifies my decision to "pave my own road":

-Before Fullstack Academy, I founded/co-founded two startups (we succeeded in building the products, but failed at marketing). I've also taken some actual CS courses. Bootcamp filled gaps in my knowledge and taught me how to collaborate better, but it wasn't my first time coding or interacting with fellow coders.

-Most of the jobs I applied to are entry-level. If a company is looking for senior talent, they should state that clearly and not waste junior developers' time.

-When I get excited about a company, I put a lot of time and energy into my cover letter/introductory email. In return, most companies didn't even bother with a template rejection.

~~~
jazzdev
If you're willing to put the time in, use your network to find someone that
works at company X. LinkedIn is good for this. You can even send a link
request to someone on LinkedIn that works there. But don't use the default,
"I'd like to connect." Say, "Company X looks cool because ... - Do you have
time to meet for coffee and tell me how you wound up there?"

~~~
ralmidani
I got a few warm introductions. In those cases I sometimes got further in the
process, but never to an on-site.

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

~~~
fenomas
The obvious explanation would be that the maintainer (who used to work there)
hit up colleagues for stories, or because it circulated among Twitter
employees for whatever other reason. It's not very likely to imply anything
about Twitter's or Google's hiring.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
It could also be that twitter has a better hiring process with fewer false
negatives.

~~~
fenomas
That's _possible_ , sure, but the evidence here doesn't support that
conclusion any more than it supports the reverse. When you have a small group
of things that clearly weren't chosen at random, the safe bet is that they
don't imply anything about the set from which they were selected.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
The evidence doesn't support any conclusion really. We are just guessing. I'm
merely calling what what A could be in A implies B.

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

~~~
maxxxxx
Who has time for that if you have a full time job? Do you spend all your
vacation in interviewing?

~~~
rhinoceraptor
Your first job is your job, your second job is working on OSS on github to
make yourself look good, and your third job is interviewing :^)

~~~
ravenstine
> your second job is working on OSS on github to make yourself look good

Sounds good on paper. In practice, what people do on Github is _worthless_.

I've only one company ever actually looked at what I made on GitHub.
Otherwise, they'll never check out what I've done even if a project is listed
on a resume. Nobody has the time or amount of shits to give to actually review
your own code. Very few people I know who are working as software engineers
even have any serious projects or contributions on GitHub.

As much as I love _doing_ side projects, the idea that companies care what I
do on GitHub is some of the worst advice I've encountered. Now my profile is
full of trash I've forked along the way and it hasn't made a lick of
difference as to how many interviews I've gotten.

~~~
IggleSniggle
I’m not frequently involved in hiring, but when I’m looking at a resume for a
potential coworker I will check their github. If it’s shit, that doesn’t
matter at all to me, but if it has some neat stuff I will look deeper, and the
bar for “interview” and “hire” can be substantially lowered for the in-person
interview.

Basically, I’m looking for good signal, but that can show in a lot of
different ways for different people. If OSS or side project or whatever is
something you enjoy doing, or if you’re not working full time and struggling
to prove that you can bring the goods, these sorts of things can help you.

------
lsschmidt
Imagine looking at a website like this without being in the tech industry (or,
more specifically, the "highly successful" tech industry). I can't imagine
people in many other occupations looking at a site like this with any amounts
of sympathy.

We truly are in a fortunate "bubble" where we can sympathize with those who
don't get exactly the top-paying job they were looking for and had to "settle"
on Twitter, Microsoft, etc.

------
sebleon
The Big Co interview process is a binary classifier (hire/no hire). It's
actually reasonable to tune it to minimize false-positives, since a bad hire
can be disastrous for all parties involved - imagine an employer changing
their minds on you during your first few months. Tradeoff is that this will
increase false-negatives, saying No to great people, and lead to stories in
the link above.

Other thing worth mentioning is that "culture fit" might make companies turn
down excellent developers, who don't happen to have the founders' same
personality type.

------
keepmesmall
Salty software engineers :)

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

------
semitext
Thanks for sharing this. I'm switching careers, and I've lost count of how
many rejections I've received at this point. Probably my highwater mark so far
was getting to Google for an onsite interview. The day after I was so proud
for getting there, and not completely bombing the interviews (i.e. I was
always able to at least arrive at a solution for the problems, if not always
an optimized one). But ultimately that wasn't good enough, and it is back to
square one.

It is easy to say, "don't take it personally", but when you're starting from a
non-traditional background, and therefore the amount of rejections you receive
is probably higher than normal, it is really challenging not to let it get
into your head and think maybe you're just not cut out for this line of work.

------
flurdy
Like most, I've been rejected by a few companies. It hurts but it is normal.
I've had what I thought was great interviews but not got it, and on the other
side been offered jobs after what I thought was a terrible interview.

And I've been on the other side of the table many times and rejected good
candidates simply because we had what we perceived to be better candidates.

So it is often not even be your fault, just for some arbitrary
ranking/preference done by the interviewers that day someone else got the
role(s).

------
speeder
I wonder how safe would be me post my own stories... Since I don't have a
major company job, would it stop my hiring chances?

But basically: one company rejected me because was against company policy hire
people without experience... Except they wanted to be the first company in my
country to hire someone for that role and wanted to hire a local. No wonder
they even wrote magazine articles complaining of not finding anyone...

Another rejection: person that was supposed to phone interview me didn't shown
for work at all, they asked another person to interview me, that person had no
idea what was going on, stuff didn't went well at all... Had to answer
questions for coding language I didn't knew because the person didn't knew the
language the job offer was for...

~~~
eqdw
I have evidence to suggest that I have been subjected to illegal hiring
discrimination in the past. However, I'm not going to share my story because I
know a ton of HN people will defend the discrimination as justified (even
though it's not, and even though it was illegal).

But I don't give a fuck. A company wants to reject me on stupid grounds? I'll
go get a different job at a better company. There's _tens of thousands_ of
software employers in the bay area. If one decides they dislike me so much
that they're willing to do this, it's probably a bullet dodged anyway

------
dijit
This implies that there's a stigma to being "rejected" for a role.

The answer is that you're not entitled to a role, just like a company is not
entitled to have you. There's no stigma in saying "You're not exactly what
we're looking for right now", even if it's the case that you might be _really
great_ somewhere else or even ideal for that exact role in future.

I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" personally, some of the
comments are along the lines of: "Ha! sure showed them!" but really it's just
like dating, sometimes you get passed up for no other reason than you weren't
the person the other was looking for at the right time. Understand rejection,
don't treat it like an enemy.

~~~
untog
> I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" personally

Probably because they've been personally rejected for a job.

I get what you're saying in the context of one job, perhaps when you already
have experience. But when you're just starting out and get rejected
repeatedly, of course it's disheartening.

~~~
ghaff
Maybe things are different today but I remember applying to jobs out of school
as being very much a numbers game. I'm sure I had dozens of rejections and
those are just the ones that got back to me. By contrast, every subsequent job
(well, all three of them) came from very narrow targeting and my personal
network.

------
wolco
The lesson is you will be rejected for a variety of reasons but it has no
reflection on your ability. Candidates with less ability will be hired before
you. Not because of you because they are not good at finding the best. The
best they can hope for is good enough to not look badly on them.

How many places whiteboard an interview but once you are hired no whiteboards
can be found. We are a far ways away from when companies start interviewing
with specific questions that relate to the actual role. If that happens you
can start taking rejection personally.

------
Isamu
Way back when you got actual rejection letters, I kept them and started to
build a collection and would compare them (which was interesting in itself).

Once I made a game of it, I could actually have a tiny bit of fun ("yay!
another one down! keep going!)

It still stings, but if you want to be truthful, you need to make a friend of
failure if you are doing anything worthwhile.

------
unkani
I'm really surprised at how they managed to get so many big names from the
open source community to share their stories.

Maybe success isn't tied to grinding out a bunch of leetcode?

~~~
maxxxxx
It's very fashionable for successful people to tell the story how they
"failed" or got "rejected" but with enough persistence they found success.
There is something to be learned from that but you never hear the stories of
people who do the exactly the same thing but never succeed and keep getting
rejected. There is a lot of survivorship bias in this.

~~~
andai
_How I Failed and Am Still Failing to This Very Day_

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

------
twoquestions
This might be good, except there's no difference between "You're good but
someone else was a bit better" to "You should get out of this industry and
stop wasting your time. You aren't owed a living." which is generally the more
correct thing.

I wish people gave better signals for the latter, so you might know better
whether you should keep applying, pivot careers, or check out.

------
lowpro
In response to these people being hired by twitter: I think all of these
statements are being sourced from twitter, and the links to their names all
point to twitter, so it makes sense that people working at twitter would more
often say how they got there on the platform.

Many others in the list never made it past the phone screen for twitter.

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

------
beezle
At one time long ago I worked in IT before moving to another industry that was
more who you know and personal rep (interviews were a formality). What sticks
out to me here is the number of people who say they were 'escorted out' in the
middle of an interview or otherwise had one abruptly terminated.

Beyond the rudeness, it smacks of arrogance. Even if you sense the the person
will not be a good match, there are ways of wrapping up a little quicker
without being a *bag. And we wonder at the coarseness of our society today.

------
drbojingle
This is an example of and response to the poor state of hiring that takes
place in development.

Rarely do I know why I'm rejected, even if I ask but it feels like it could be
anything, like a keyword. Applying for jobs is basically Bumble but, less fun.
Instead of pics of you on a horse, you have a CV.

I bet if you combined up-front testing (like hackajob) or a boot camp course
with short-term contractual work from various companies, you could create a
decent hiring funnel too.

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

~~~
vanderZwan
Well, sometimes that, and sometimes:

> _Anne-Gaelle Colom@agcolom jQuery_

> _I was refused a reference by my supervisor in France who thought the male
> student on my team did all the work._

~~~
taneq
I didn't say it was always unjustified...

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

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

~~~
bitwize
You'll like it a lot less when you need a way to feed your family (or just
yourself), and rejection is all you get. You can't pay your rent and grocery
bills with rejection.

~~~
newguyintown2
Aye. I'm making $13 an hour while trying to apply to every job that I can,
while building out my portfolio projects to improve my resume, and grinding
LeetCode. Needless to say I can't really afford to socialize or eat out. It
really sucks after a few weeks :/

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

~~~
dentemple
The opposite happened to a colleague of mine.

He got rejected by a company ("Not enough experience" was the reason given).

Then, 7 months later, not only did he get accepted to the very same company,
it was at 2x the asking price from before.

It really goes to show that the hiring pipeline can get pretty schizophrenic
sometimes.

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

------
projectramo
Note to self: If I get rejected from a lot of companies, just apply to
Twitter. They'll surely say yes.

Addendum: there should be a companion site "Even twitter rejected me!"

~~~
vikasg
The site was made by an ex-twitter engineer, so lots of the entires come from
other Twitter engineers.

~~~
travisjungroth
That's a really interesting sort of survivor bias.

------
Flavius
Looks like nobody knows enough JS...

~~~
sonnyblarney
This is interesting because in reality JS is supposed to be easy.

Since I've switched to Typescript, I've forgotten tons about Javascript and I
don't care. Obviously I'm refreshed every time I check under the transpiler
hood to see what's going on, but that's rare.

JS always felt to me like a language wherein you didn't want to memorize all
of it's arcane weirdness anyhow.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Typescript doesn’t do a lot of transpilation if your target is ES6.

~~~
sonnyblarney
True, but in TS I've found the code is structured differently, to the point
where 'prototype' inheritance is effectively obfuscated.

The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and
existential knowledge of JS? Who cares? I would probably object to any of my
devs moving into JS weirdness unless it was totally necessary. You want
simple, clean and readable solutions to business (or technical) problems, not
something fancy pants. Every bit of oddity / less common stuff introduced just
increases risk.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
ES6 supports classes, so it would be the same thing.

> The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and
> existential knowledge of JS?

They are probably just bad interviewers, or the company really doesn't know
what it wants. Esoteric knowledge questions are a warning signal that you
probably don't want to work there.

~~~
sonnyblarney
Most companies, even the best do this.

As for TS I'm thinking interfaces, generics etc.

~~~
seanmcdirmid
I wish! Wouldn't that make the interview much easier. Nope, instead they ask
you to whiteboard up some code (in whatever language you want) and discuss how
you would design something you never saw before.

------
vonseel
After reading through many of these, it felt a bit unhealthy and pointless.

Something I’ve always been told about interviewing: getting in the door means
you are at least qualified for the job on paper. The company would not waste
its time talking to you if there wasn’t at least some chance they are going to
hire you. Whether they hire you depends on how well you spin your story and
how strong of a rapport you form with the interviewers.

If someone does not like you, they will not hire you. This can make things
difficult for introverts and socially-awkward people.

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

~~~
arnvald
There are many reasons why Chris might have been rejected. Maybe indeed Yahoo
was not able to recognize his talent. But maybe the company was hiring for a
specific role and found someone better? Maybe despite his skills he didn't
perform well in that particular interview?

Hiring is very difficult. Your have limited amount of time with the candidate
and based on some coding task and a few hours of interview you need to predict
whether that particular candidate is going to perform well in the role you're
filling. It's hard, and I'm sure I passed on a few good candidates just
because at that point of time I wasn't sure enough whether they'd be a good
addition to the team or not.

------
mlthoughts2018
I’m far less worried that these companies reject a lot of people than I am
worried that so many engineers are willing to accept idiotic open-plan
offices, horribly dysfunctional management, pay that (while high) doesn’t
fairly reflect a realistic fraction of the monetary value you actually
contribute to the business.

Jobs at most well-known tech companies are really dumpster fire terrible
things, bad for basic psychological health.

It’s sad that we consider getting these jobs a serious measure of any kind of
success.

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

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

~~~
hinkley
That one is famous. We had a quite lively discussion about it here shortly
after the event.

Edit: to this day I have no fucking idea what “inverting a binary tree” means,
other than the interviewer was too proud to admit they made a mistake.

Trees have two dimensions and “invert” is the one you can’t change.

~~~
gaius
It means to reverse it left-to-right, like a mirror.

You will _never_ have to implement this yourself for real.

~~~
monocasa
You won't because it's a toy problem, not because it something only greybeards
did in libraries written decades ago.

Asking someone to describe the simplest possible transformations on one of the
simplest data structures isn't a stretch, and this is coming from someone
without a CS degree.

EDIT: And that's not to say Google doesn't have a screwed up hiring system. I
know someone who implemented a dynamic programming problem correctly, with the
appropriate big O complexity, but was rejected because the constant time
factor was slightly higher than what the interviewer was looking for. That's a
BS decision; Max Howell's was not.

------
waterlemons
I'm 36, recently moved to Berlin. I have 10 years of working experience from
tiny to big companies working as android developer, front-end and interaction
designer.

For some reason I'm struggling a lot to find a job in Berlin. Most of the CVs
I've sent never get an answer, those who get there ask me for a phone
interview which that I never get through. They always answer me with a copy-
pasted template from the Internet.

This is some feedback I got from other people after checking my CV

    
    
      - I'm too creative for "normal jobs" but not creative enough for the creative ones
    
      - My last 2 years I worked as a freelancer and German companies don't like that
    
      - I don't show consistency in tech stack
    
      - I'm in the verge of getting old
    

Whatever the reason is, it's very frustrating. Drains my energy and
willingness to keep working in the sector.

(update: formatting)

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

------
Johnny555
You may not have been rejected because of your technical skills, but because
of your soft-skills.

A large part of our hiring process involves deciding if you think you can work
with this person day to day and if you think they'll fit in the company
culture.

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

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

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

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

Possibly... it's all of the above.

~~~
andai
Yeah, we need more rejected women in tech.

------
ryanwaggoner
I applaud the sentiment, but isn't this just further reinforcing the
underlying assumption?

 _" Hey everyone, these massive corporations rejected me, making me feel bad
about myself. But eventually, a massive corporation accepted me, so now I feel
good about myself!"_

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

~~~
eqdw
Yeah it feels like they want medals for getting rejected at companies that
haven't even bothered to give me a callback.

We all get rejected from dozens of interviews. That's just life. Did anybody
ever think it wasn't like this?

~~~
ams6110
When I was a senior at university, my friends and I all had a wall at our
apartments covered with our rejection letters. Back then (if they gave you the
courtesy of a reply) they were sent on paper in the mail. So yes, it's always
been that way.

I myself have been on interview committees and voted to reject candidates who
got hired, and turned out to be good. Why did I want to reject them? Don't
really know, just got a bad vibe in the interview more than anything. We
didn't do much technical screening at that company. Decisions were mostly
based on past experience and references, and whether you seemed reasonably
intelligent and sociable in the interview. I think that we hired a real dud
maybe once, so it seemed to work.

~~~
williamstein
I did this when I was a math undergrad applying for grad school. I applied to
15 graduate programs and got into 10, and rejected by 5. The surprising
pattern was that I got into a graduate program if and only if it wasn't in the
Northeast; selectivity of the program didn't seem too relevant. After graduate
school, for my first job I ended up being on the graduate admissions committee
at the Harvard Mathematics department and got to see things from the other
side, where you receive 400 incredible applications, and can say yes to less
than 1% of them. In that setting exactly what you wrote "Decisions were mostly
based on..." applied just the same.

~~~
ghaff
Over the years I've known various undergrad admissions people at another
Boston area school. At least the way they used to do things was to basically
have a matrix with quantitive academics/test scores on one axis and a score
for soft stuff on the other axes.

Admit the "no brainers" in the upper right. Reject the "no ways" in the lower
left. Then take a harder look at those in the middle. But the reality is that
you could probably take an arbitrary subset of the middle group and they'd
probably do nearly as well/contribute as much/etc. as the final selection you
sweated over.

I've also been on the selection committee for various conferences over the
years and that also often ends up working the same way to a significant
degree.

------
masonic
Original posting from 2015, 206 comments:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741560](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10741560)

------
simonebrunozzi
Why most of these people have been rejected and then landed at Twitter?

Not sure this is a great signal for Twitter, just saying... Selection bias /
confirmation bias might be at play.

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

And people actually try to emulate their interview practises.

~~~
pmden
"possibly the most important piece of software on OSX"

I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package
manager. Unless he was interviewing to be Google's next head of package
management on OSX, I'm not sure why you think assessing him on something other
than his useful side project is bad form. I'm also not certain how an answer
being 'easily-googleable' makes it arbitrary or pointless. Someone had to
write that answer on Stack Overflow, and the chances are you'd rather hire
that guy.

~~~
electrograv
_> I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package
manager._

I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying your comment, but you sound like you
have _no clue_ how much engineering effort and talent is _actually_ required
to build and maintain a reliable, functional, production-grade package manager
that a huge number of people use.

Being able to completely implement and support a sophisticated software
product end-to-end is a FAR better indicator of engineering talent than
isolated algorithm puzzles on a whiteboard. Whiteboard problems are used in
interviews simply because individually executed complete projects are so rare
(at all, let alone publicly visible).

In fact, whiteboard interviews have all but been proven to be among the least
useful at distinguishing good vs bad candidates. The only reason it works is
because everyone knows it's a game, studies the game, and gets tested at the
same game. It's essentially a disguised IQ test that you have to study for.

The problem is, if you don't study for it specifically, you're at a huge
disadvantage. This leads to famous engineers (clearly talented) getting
rejected because they don't practice jumping through the particular hoops the
company makes everyone jump through.

It seems there are more than several cases where Google needs a high profile
engineer more than that engineer needs Google, and as a result the engineer
doesn't study the hoop-jumping Google wants. Google rejects them out of
bureaucratic process, and loses out on a good hire.

On the opposite side: I'm not a famous engineer, so I suck it up and practice
whiteboard algorithm problems like most everyone else -- and as a result, I've
never had a problem passing coding interviews. But just because most everyone
jumps through hoops to play the game, doesn't mean everyone should have to.

~~~
godot
To add to your points, the problem is not just missing good engineers because
they don't study and play the game, but also hiring bad engineers because they
study and play the game.

I personally know of people who habitually study FAANG interview questions,
and make it their career to jump ship every few years for salary boosts. I've
worked with some of these people; while they are nice and friendly folks and I
consider some of them good friends of mine, they are much less-good engineers
compared to many others I know, who stay in smaller startups and want to get
things done and don't want to play the interview game.

~~~
diracpam
I'm one such 'engineer' who is good at whiteboarding algorithms. I can do well
on 'system design' questions but dont feel confident at all about really
designing such a system from ground up. I, for one, am glad that I can find
gainful employment by memorizing 200 pages.

~~~
vanderZwan
I'm happy for you, but I hope you're also that honest with yourself and your
employers about your limits when they want you to built something that you
know is over your head

------
HillaryBriss
My favorite rejection story is the one by Adam Sontag

------
Jmcdd
>Rejected by Valve Software for a Software Engineer position because i was
young. (when i was 19)

Really? I wonder what the culture is like at Valve

~~~
madspindel
[https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployee...](https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/apps/valve/Valve_NewEmployeeHandbook.pdf)

~~~
rc-1140
Don't link the handbook, it's not _exactly_ how Valve operates.

[https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-
ruthless...](https://www.pcgamer.com/ex-valve-employee-describes-ruthless-
industry-politics/)

[https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/valve/comments/8zmp07/former_valve_employee_tweets_his_experience_at/)

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

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

~~~
Ensorceled
That is _the point_ of the site. Everybody gets rejected; here's a bunch of
people that got rejected and went to get great jobs and _you_ can to.

~~~
teekert
Ok, I don't really see why there should be a site for this, I mean it's like
making a site of people saying they fell a couple of times when they learned
to walk.

~~~
Ensorceled
We all have different levels of resilience. This site isn't for you.

~~~
teekert
Hmm, maybe its something parents can take into account: prepare your kids for
some inevitable failures.

I could also be on the site btw, I was told during my first assessment
interview that I might at some point be a decent supermarket stockboy, not
now, but maybe over time.

~~~
Ensorceled
When I was in university one of our dorm mates went home at thanksgiving only
to find his parents had moved with no forwarding address. He tracked them down
and his parents basically said "you're 18 now, leave us alone". He was
traumatized.

I said "Why doesn't he just tell them to fuck off" and one of my other dorm
mates said "Parents who raise their kids to have the guts to tell them to fuck
off also don't fuck them over". That has stuck with me ever since.

So, it's too late?

------
deadmik3
this is silly. it's interesting when it's someone notable being rejected for
the exact thing they're now notable for but a ton of these are just like
people who just graduated saying "I didn't get this one job but now I have a
job". great memoir kiddo

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

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

------
partycoder
You can reapply.

------
HugoDaniel
tldr

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

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

This is literally the worst rejection story I've ever heard.

~~~
pmiller2
Worst in what way?

~~~
SamvitJ
Not getting an interview from HBS as "a Stanford honors grad" is the worst
rejection he's ever experienced? The whole post reeks of humble brag.

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

~~~
pcmaffey
I used to hate when I saw JS with semicolons too. "Get off my lawn" with that
naked code!

Not sure when or how it changed, but I'm on the other side of the fence now.
Without semicolons (unless multi-statements on a single line), JS is so much
cleaner. A line break is perfectly sufficient to signal the end of a
statement.

~~~
logfromblammo
That is a perfectly reasonable opinion. However, as a grammar-nazi, I feel
that proper punctuation is important. While certain poetic forms may take
liberties with punctuation for the sake of the artistic expression, sentences
end with a full stop--separated by a subsequent sentence in the same paragraph
by _two_ spaces--and lines of code end in an unambiguous visible token.

Newline/return characters are whitespace tokens. Differentiating them from
other whitespace tokens is the first step on the path to madness. What's next?
Treating tabs differently from spaces?

~ (ha ha only serious)

~~~
code_duck
I feel very serious about this

