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.
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.)"
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.
In general, best not to draw inferences from data that wasn't randomly selected.
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.
I read it completely differently, like "See this has happened to us all at some point; it's not personal."
For me, as an older programmer, it's not about 'self-worth'. It's about sunk cost, it's about our ability to provide for our families, it's about what we are doing with our lives when we have much fewer days ahead of us than behind us.
What do I tell my kids or wife? I can't get hired because I didn't memorize enough JS functions, or the right one, or didn't grab onto the right tech stack?
This isn't about a theoretical emotional idea: it's about survival today, into old age that is coming up on me quick, about providing for families.
Well, guess what? Now I'm older and I'm more expensive. Thankfully I saw it coming, and I have been saving diligently along the way. I'm not rich, but my lifestyle costs are not insane and I can continue to save from now until the gravy train pulls into station.
At that point, god willing and the creek don't rise, I can afford to work part-time, or take a big pay cut, or switch to consulting gigs.
There are a huge number of random things I could have been slotted into right out of school and I'd have done a good job. Today, my skills and compensation are much more specific.
It's easy to say that people should keep skills up-to-date but if you're truly a world-class expert in X, it's hard to transfer that level of skill to Y. That's a different level from junior competency in one language picking up another language.
I know someone at a largely military sub talking about bringing in "geezers" to consult on some very specific classes of problems.
Luckily, I ended up somewhere that I actually like and am making more money than at my previous gig, so it all worked out, but those months spending down savings started to wear on me.
Ugh, I don't even have a family and the amount of time spent on phone screenings, pairing sessions, whiteboarding, and take-home code challenges becomes staggering. What sucks is the more places you apply to, the more the inefficiency of proving that you can program rears its head. I'm not against these things per se, but even spending just a few weeks applying to companies and doing those things gets tiring and demoralizing. I can't even imagine what this will be like in 10+ years when I'm older and have people depending on me.
Everyone can feel bad. Just because someone could get a job somewhere else doesn’t mean rejection doesn’t sting. That’s like saying that a breakup shouldn’t hurt because you can just get another girlfriend.
You kind of described r/relationship_advice
Simply dismissing these peoples' feelings because they are successful is not helpful. I do not like the trend of assuming people cannot have problems and are not worthy of help or compassion because they are privileged in some way.
We all get rejected from dozens of interviews. That's just life. Did anybody ever think it wasn't like this?
Which we know because of what? Sites like this let people know exactly that!
> Did anybody ever think it wasn't like this?
The common narrative is that if you work hard your efforts will be recognized. I don't normally hear "after a lot of people utterly fail to recognize them" unless you're talking about fiction writing.
> it feels like they want medals for getting rejected at companies that haven't even bothered to give me a callback.
I'm not sure why you draw that conclusion. Many of the messages I see are along the lines of "don't give up" and an implied "you can be skilled/capable without them recognizing it". Why do you think this is self-promotional rather than inspirational?
You're right, of course - failing to have ability recognized is very normal. But we tell our young people a very different message, and this site seems to be correcting that a little bit.
Experience :-)
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.
It often feels to me like people are using that as a justification of the quality of their hiring practice. What's interesting is hiring practices vary greatly across the board but mostly in aggregate seem to produce this "we only ever got a few duds" result.
My hypothesis has now shifted to "most people can do most jobs". Or to restate it "There are only a few duds. Period. And hiring processes produce mostly random results. That's why we see a few duds come through."
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.
There’s people who came off really well in the interview who turned out to be terrible hires. And equally there’s been people who seemed woefully inexperienced but I liked their honesty so took a gamble on them and they turned out to be some of my best hires.
Then there is everyone in between.
You have all of these processes in place to help your practical judgement but at the end of the day it’s really just a lot of luck because it’s trivially easy to game interviews and some really good engineers are often really bad at interviewing. So pulling those who interview well but are rubbish from those who don’t interview well but are brilliant is very difficult at times.
Heck in one interview I got nervous and started rambling on about FreeBSD instead of Linux. I was easily qualified enough for that job but that was a terrible interview on my part and I honestly wouldn’t have hired me.
It's almost like we're trying to solve a taylor series of work efficacy (of an individual on a given team) by capturing a very small number of data points in stressful situations (interviews) and doing a hell of a lot of extrapolation.
Based on how this industry carries on about "talent shortages" and "lack of good engineers", yeah.
They had to interview and receive offers from several companies though. I imagine the number of people that can just "send out a few emails" to get that result is very limited.
Yes, that's who this is for.
The best you can do is sort out the people you absolutely cannot use or don't want. The rest? The one's that you reject because of not matching some part of the interview process but largely are a good fit? They're probably fine, they're probably better than you think they are. In fact, statistically speaking it's probably better to have gambled on these people than the people you've hired and then had to fire.
We don't have the industry standards, the experience, the data, or the worker pool to fuss around with these ridiculous interview processes some companies employ. In fact these interview processes actively filter for people who are only willing to go through with the process, not necessarily the best talent.
So my hiring bar is pretty high now. I've had my current team all for 4 years and they are all still doing great.
In my mind this was a great solution: we got to make the hire, he had a chance to prove himself, and we'd not get stuck with a bad match if he had flaws. By letting him know in advance I was ethically clear because he would enter into the situation with his eyes open. He turned it down and my boss was furious with me for saying all that.
Now, some 15 years later, I realize how terrible my view was and how many bullets I blindly dodged. My best managers have all bent over backwards to make a problematic hire work out. Seeing that has always served as a soothing presence on my own occasional anxiety. And in the many interviews I've conducted, people that fall in the "I don't see why NOT to hire them" have outnumbered the "We should totally hire them" about 4:1. Frankly, the interview process is inadequate to give you a good impression of working with someone and their strengths/weaknesses. Heck, I routinely discover new surprises about co-workers after working with them for years.
My past self had been pining for an easy way to fire someone in order to dodge responsibility for the hiring decision. Now I see the hiring decision as not "are they great?" but instead "will I be able to work something out if they aren't great?" because we can't dodge the responsibility nor can we actually reliably be correct in our evaluations.
Unfortunately, my current view doesn't seem to match current hiring practices, where they want everyone to hit the ground running and magically resolve problems that are generally caused by non-technical issues (low staffing, contradictory customer pressures, etc).
What does your interview process look like, if you care to share?
"June 2015 - May 2017: Migrated database to new platform, and re-engineered web presence for diversified global social network, resulting in 450% increase in engagement, and 23% ROI. Site: racistbastards.com"
I’d probably be fine with the guy handling ddos mitigation and keeping the site up for some random offensive racist or kitten-murdering website if it is just a technical challenge. Although there is also the negative PR impact from having hired such a person, since some people, including potential customers, would be less tolerant.
Hard problem. Anonymity or pseudonymous markets is probably the solution here.
And it still isn't. Do you have a different example in mind?
A healthy person, when rejected from a company, realizes that the company did not need their skills at this time. This says nothing about the quality of their skillset, just that it's unneeded. Sort of how, if Linus Torvalds himself showed up to a frontend development interview, he probably wouldn't get the job.
The issue here is that you've made 'get this job and only this job' as your goal. That is an unrealistic goal, because it is unnecessarily tied up with a particular company. My goal when looking for work is to find an opportunity where my skills fit into someone else's need, and then milk the economic differential until such time as my skills are no longer needed, or I have a buyer somewhere else.
I suppose neither one is 'right' in the moral sense. But I think mine leads to greater happiness and satisfaction, so...
If you're personally rejected by a group you wanted to join, you should probably feel bad.
Legitimate cultural fit things usually have to do with how teams divide responsibility, how they collaborate on work, and preferences in styles of communication. If you have a team that tends to assign some individual work and communicates through PRs, that's going to be a cultural shock (and maybe a bad fit) for someone who comes from an environment with regular pairing / pair switching / mobbing and more in-person discussion of specific code decisions.
In general, there's a balance between individual autonomy and team cohesion that I think can come down to cultural preferences, and it's good to find people who can fit well into a specific team's environment. As someone who highly values individual autonomy in things like tool and language choice, code style, etc. I've been put in teams that culturally were much more in favor of cohesion and I was deeply unhappy- and now I try to filter for that in all of my own interviews.
None of that should have to do with candidates liking the same movies or beer as the exiting team, or any other sort of bias inducing "cultural fit" questions, and too often they end up conflated, but we shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater when it comes to cultural fit.
That's just doing the job. If company does X, then I do X.
I know folks have strong opinions on it but I've found there are many ways to do various tasks and as long as everyone works together in an expected manner... it's my job to do it that way.
No one i ever dated with which I experienced some “competition” was a good match in the long run anyhow. YMMV I guess.
However, I think there's some value to taken from it when thinking of it in terms of "hey, I got rejected for similar reasons, but that doesn't mean I can't bring value worth hiring me for."