
Getting rejected - edo
http://cdixon.org/2010/09/12/getting-rejected/
======
edw519
_The reason this period was so useful was that it helped me develop a really
thick skin._

Another reason is that a high volume of rejections is just another form of
stepwise refinement. OP may not have realized it, but he probably got much
better over time. It's a good idea to not personalize rejections. It's a
better idea to use them as data in order to improve.

~~~
moondowner
"It's a good idea to not personalize rejections. It's a better idea to use
them as data in order to improve." \-- so true, but it's hard for some people
not to take stuff personally. When they succeed in doing that, they'll become
come successful, and better persons by the way.

~~~
andrewtbham
i agree, it is hard for some people to not take it personally... i have
struggled with this. my approach has been to focus on things i can control...
and you can't control if people reject you.

~~~
moondowner
Well true, if people are tight on finance or similar, they have mental
pressure on them and almost always take things personally. They can't clean
their head, refresh their thoughts and think strait.

------
pclark
I think this is partially right. The assumption that if dozens of VCs are
rejecting you it's because "you aren't ambitious enough" is probably a great
blog post title but poor advice for a startups execution ...

In reality it's because you don't check a checkbox, and the value for you is
to: a) develop resilience to rejection (always great) and b) ascertain what
you didn't articulate that meant that you didn't check the appropriate
checkbox. Finding out how is quite hard, but insanely valuable. (eg: we once
got rejected by an investor for reasons of our market being perceived as too
small, after hearing this it was obvious there was confusion in our story, we
iterated on our story a few times and that concern was removed)

The kind of rejection that'll make you give up is when users reject your
product, I'm blown away this isn't discussed ever here.

------
erikstarck
"If you’re aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t
ambitious enough."

Does that include getting downvotes on HN? ;)

~~~
ams6110
It actually would be really helpful if you got honest feedback about why you
were rejected... this has never happened in my experience; rather, you get
some sugar-coated rejection like "we were all very impressed with your
background and skills, but do not have a position that is a good match for
you."

Of course if that were true, and your resume was not embellished, you would
not have gotten past the first screening.

This is probably done for liability protection: any really honest reasons for
why you were rejected could be used as fodder for a lawsuit.

~~~
patio11
"You were sufficiently promising to pass our screening but after meeting you
we can definitely do better. Have a nice day." is not an easy thing to say
even in absence of legal issues. I could tap-dance on your face as an employer
without getting sued here, but that doesn't mean we sent applicants home with
a list of their inadequacies.

Of course, if you believe social science research, the reason is probably "You
failed in the first five seconds to connect with your interviewer, he rejected
you then, and he eventually found a reason to hang his hat on."

------
statelyegg
I've been rejected from every job I've ever wanted, and had to settle for
places that I ended up hating. I was just rejected this morning by Jane Street
Capital, after spending hours on the programming problems they had sent me,
trying to make them perfect. I had written and sent Python and Scheme
solutions along with my OCaml solutions too. I enjoyed reading this short
post, but I'm having trouble using this most recent rejection to my advantage.
I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. As much as I dream of working for
myself on my own ideas, it's almost become a life goal to get into an awesome
company, just because I've been rejected from them innumerable times.

Any advice? I'm young, 22, about to graduate in May. Should I just try to take
risks while I'm young and work for myself, or keep trying until I finally get
through an interview process for a place that I like? Part of me wants to keep
trying until I finally get accepted somewhere, but another part of me thinks
that it won't happen and I should just try to prove myself on my own.

~~~
strlen
> Any advice? I'm young, 22, about to graduate in May. Should I just try to
> take risks while I'm young and work for myself, or keep trying until I
> finally get through an interview process for a place that I like?

Contrary to most people here, I'd caution against "working for yourself". If
you work for yourself, only a small portion of what you do will be
programming. In addition, you won't learn about programming on a team (as
opposed to coding by yourself). That said, if your goal is to run your own
company, go for it; if your goal is just to write code in an environment you
love, starting a company (itself rewarding and something I want to do at one
point in my life) is neither the only, nor the best way of getting there.

Here's my suggestion: interview at a bunch of places, receive offers, "save
the best for last" (don't interview for your dream job first). You may not get
an offer for the perfect job, but you're also coming straight from college so
the bar is considerably higher, in that you don't have a resume.

Technical interviewing is a very imperfect art, it's just ( _much_ ) better
than the conventional approach of hiring warm bodies based on traditional
metrics (the name of the school they went to, etc...). There often isn't a
great correlation between one's interview score and one's performance on the
job, so once you have people who've worked with you and who can vouch for you,
along with examples of your work, you're much less likely to be passed over
because you didn't do well enough on a single whiteboard coding exercise.

Out of the offers you do receive, pick the one where the people who've
interviewed you seemed the smartest and most passionate: interested in same
things as you are, willing to mentor you. Disregard everything else.

Once you're working, don't settle. Don't give up on your asoirations, code
OCaml in your evenings, keep up with computer science, hack on open source
projects. In a year, try the companies you'd want to work at again.

Also, consider what you've learned doing programming problems Jane Street:
quite honestly, I am envious of having an excuse like that to solve
interesting puzzles in a language I love. That should give you a boost
interviewing at other places.

By the way, have you looked at: <http://cufp.org/jobs> ? There seem to be
several OCaml offerings there.

~~~
statelyegg
Thanks for all the advice. I think it's a good idea to interview at a bunch of
places to build up for a dream job. Although I'm on my third 6 month
internship through school, the managers basically lied about what the jobs
would entail to get me to accept (i.e. saying it's a software developer
position and I'm stuck doing performance testing all the time), so there's not
much I'm even proud to put on my resume. I've had to search far and wide for a
reason to write some code, and that's what I always list on my resume.

Maybe one big problem with interviewing at a bunch of places is that I'm most
proficient with Python and not Java. I learned to use it as my primary
language because a very intelligent friend of mine was using it all the time,
and he worked at Google. Although, the most technical interviews I've ever had
were with Amazon where they let you use whatever language you want to come up
with algorithms to answer their questions. It seems there aren't many
companies that use Python.

Anyhow, I'll definitely apply around to a bunch of places even if I don't find
them entirely appealing. They can't be much worse than what I've already
endured through my internships, and I've learned to make the best of my time
at my jobs by now anyway. I was thinking of doing the Y Combinator Common App
today, so maybe I'll do that.

And you're right, it was loads of fun having an actual reason to solve some
problems in OCaml. Actually, I'm not so passionate about the language, I just
thought it was really cool that they were looking for sysadmins who also knew
about functional programming. But I will check out that link anyway.

------
HectorRamos
Wish I had realized this and kept trying instead of settling for four years as
a corporate bank system architect.

~~~
ams6110
Four years is not so long. You certainly at least learned what you DONT want
to do for the the rest of your life. And four years experience with one
employer looks better on a resume than four separate one-year jobs (unless you
were a contractor) and also better than four years of unemployment.

~~~
HectorRamos
Yup. I think I learnt a lot in these four years, sometimes I look back and
wish I had focused on startups earlier but I realize I still had a long ways
to go back then.

I finally quit this past May and joined a former co-worker on his new startup,
so it all worked out in the end.

~~~
kelnos
I have a similar story -- 5 years at a company where I ended up being bored
and not caring about the work. But I learned a lot during those 5 years, and
was able to take advantage of several opportunities that may not have
otherwise been available to me.

And like you, I'm now at a startup, that I love (heh, most of the time), where
I've been for the past 11 months. It's all about timing, I guess.

------
lorenzsell
One of the best sales people I know once told me, "They either convince you
they don't need your product or you convince them they can't live without it."
I think about that every time I get rejected to make sure I never get
convinced :-)

~~~
edo
Isn't that a line in the movie Boiler Room? <http://goo.gl/IM7r>

~~~
ancornwell
Boiler Room is one of my favs. Even though Glengarry Glen Ross was relatively
boring, I like this line:

"It takes brass balls to sell real estate."

Then he turns around and he is holding brass balls. A-B-C is the best pitch
ever in a movie, after greed is good of course.

If you want a great example of how to deal with rejection, come to Haight
Ashbury and watch the homeless people ask for change. Sometimes if they have a
good enough pitch, I'll give them a dollar. There was one guy giving "bad
advice" and he told me to give him my credit card and to have unprotected sex
with an intravenous drug user.

I gave him a dollar.

~~~
prawn
A favourite saying of a friend of mine: 'No balls, no babies.'

------
udfalkso
This reminds of something a friend once said to me. He said, "If you've never
missed your flight, you're spending way too much time at the airport."

------
malloreon
I do this with girls!

And jokes aside...it works!

~~~
jseliger
Norah Vincent's book _Self-Made Man_ discusses these issues. In it, Vincent
spends a couple months dressing and acting like a man, and she goes around
living life as a "man": i.e. she makes male friends, goes on dates, and so
forth. The first time she approaches a group of women in an attempt to get to
know them, Vincent is shocked by their indifference and what to her eyes looks
anew like callousness. In this passage, her friend Curtis is in on the ruse
and takes her out to meet women):

 _"Simple enough, right? A brush-off. No biggie. But as I turned away and
slumped back across the room toward our table, I felt like the outcast kid in
the lunchroom who trips and dumps his tray on the linoleum in front of the
whole school. Rejection sucked.

"Rejection is a staple for guys," said Curtis, laughing as I crumpled into my
seat with a humiliated sigh. "Get used to it."

That was my first lesson in male courtship ritual. You had to take your knocks
and knock again. It was that or wait for some pitying act of God that would
never come. This wasn't some magic island in a beer commercial where all the
ladies would light up for me if only I drank the right brew.

"Try again, man," Curtis urged. "C'mon. Don't give up so easily." " _

She hadn't realized the sheer amount of rejection most men experience on a
day-to-day basis in interacting with women. I suspect most women don't; I also
suspect that most men don't understand how many implicit or explicit sexual
offers many women get every day, and how that can become wearying too. In
dealing with what I'd call the facts of dating life, Vincent says this:

 _"How do you handle all this fucking rejection?" I asked Curtis when we sat
back down for a postmortem.

"Let me tell you a story," he said. "When I was in college, there was this guy
Dean, who got laid all the time. I mean this guy had different women coming
out of his room every weekend and most weeknights, and he wasn't particularly
good looking. He was fat and kind of a slob. Nice guy, though, but nothing
special. I couldn't figure out how he did it, so one time I just asked him.
'How do you get so many girls to go out "with you?' He was a man of few words,
kind of Coolidge-esque, if you know what I mean. So all he said was: 'I get
rejected ninety percent of the time. But it's that ten percent.'"_

And this isn't true only of dating life, but of startup life and many other
fields (including my own: writing). I actually teach a chapter of Self-Made
Man to my freshmen (I'm a grad student in English at the U of Arizona), and
part of the reason I do it is for what she says about rejection (and about
empathy).

Most of the comparisons between men and women in startups, ability, and so
forth are, I think, complete bullshit. But I do wonder if men don't have an
advantage in persistence because of early dating experiences, where if they're
to have any success whatsoever they _must_ learn to accept and cope with
rejection. This isn't because men are somehow born to be more persistent, but
I think that, by the time they've been through at least a couple of
relationships in which they have to be the ones who make the first move, they
begin to get the idea that a) rejection is okay and b) they need a thick skin.

(See the Amazon link to Self-Made Man if you're curious:
[http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Year-
Disguised/dp...](http://www.amazon.com/Self-Made-Man-Womans-Year-
Disguised/dp/0143038702?ie=UTF8&tag=thstsst-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957)
. If you want the chapter I teach to my freshmen, from which the above quotes
are drawn, send me an e-mail -- seligerj [at] gmail [....dot...] com)

~~~
martey
This was an interesting comment, but I think it would be better to disclose
the fact that your Amazon link contains a referral tag. Now I am not sure
whether you posted some a big excerpt of the book because you genuinely
thought it was interesting, or if you wanted to make more money.

~~~
endlessvoid94
Who cares? He'll make, what, a dollar?

~~~
kingnothing
Unless they changed it, a referral to Amazon will get the referrer some
percentage of anything you buy during the next couple of days, regardless of
the original link.

------
loring
Great post!

I think this supports two of the most important qualities of a
entrepreneur..resilience and persistence.

You gotta get back up when you get knocked down and you gotta keep going after
you get up.

------
Everest
Are there areas outside of applying for jobs, biz dev partnerhips, etc.. where
this works?

Say you are a programmer, how any opportunities do you have to get rejected
100 times

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
Try asking women out.

~~~
lorenzsell
lol, don't you get rejected every time you unsuccessfully try fixing a bug?

------
mark_l_watson
There is however an opportunity cost for being rejected a 100 times: the time
spent applying could have been spent on starting a business or other
activities.

~~~
leot
Worse still, an opportunity is "spent" with each rejection.

~~~
dLuna
This is only a problem if you believe that there is a limit to opportunities.
There's always another opportunity around the corner that you haven't seen
yet. And sometimes you have to fail at the obvious ones to see what the
correct one is.

------
Swoopey
Totally agree and love this post. Rejection is what separates the winners from
the losers. Winners shake it off and losers internalize and quit.

------
contol-m
I can relate to this - even though I probably got more rejections than offers
from job interviews, I learned a lot from them. However, I wish companies
would give some interview feedback to candidates they rejected. Companies
don't do this for the fear of getting sued.

------
marze
The skiing corollary: if you aren't wiping out at least once each run you
aren't learning.

------
ryanwaggoner
Great post, seriously. I'm putting the headline somewhere where I'll see it
daily.

Also, just FYI, there's a typo in the title:

"If _you’re aren’t_ getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t
ambitious enough."

------
sahillavingia
It would be good to mention as an aside that getting rejected isn't always
good enough. Applying to college is a good example.

Just something to keep in mind.

~~~
markbao
Bro. You got into USC. You're doing quite well, at least better than me :)

~~~
sahillavingia
And I also got rejected from a bunch of places. :D haven't talked to you in a
while, I'll contact you soon.

------
hotmind
I designed a game called Rejection Therapy back in 2009 to encourage myself to
get out of my comfort zone more. It was amazingly effective and enlightening
(for as long as I did it).

If anyone wants to try it, it's here: <http://rejectiontherapy.com>

It's not finished, it's very stripped down, but it works.

~~~
pm
Stunningly elegant concept. I wish I'd thought of it. Trying it now.

~~~
hotmind
Your comment made my day pm. Thank you.

~~~
pm
No problem.

It works too, which is even better (though I failed to get a rejection
yesterday). Once I've thoroughly tested it, I'm going to introduce it to my
employees.

------
ajiw
ceeekk

