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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?

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> We all get rejected from dozens of interviews.

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.

> Which we know because of what?

Experience :-)

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.

Probably the most honest explanation of how companies actually hire I've seen.

It's stunning how much energy, ink and tongue movement is wasted trying to justify most decisions, in every aspect of life, when in practice they boil down to vibes.

For large companies, I think the "justification" part is for documentation in case they get sued for discrimination, etc.

I’m a hiring manager and I think it’s a complete roll of the dice sometimes.

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.

So that's the issue - you're hiring someone and you have no idea which version of them showed up to the meeting, and which one will be coming to work every day.

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.

As a nice twist on the rejection postings, while in college I visited a friend at Yale. He and his roommates had hung all three of their Harvard acceptance letters next to each other on the wall.

Maybe it’s just the fact that it’s written out in text but this sounds insufferable, not “nice”.

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.

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.

It seems to me anecdata suggest the average hiring process lets through only a few duds.

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."

In the 90s we’d have a nice chat, review the resume, and then get “can you start Monday?” Now with twenty years experience it’s a twelve-hour marathon to prove I’m not a fraud, at every single lead. It’s just not scalable, when it takes dozens of leads to score an offer.

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

Based on how this industry carries on about "talent shortages" and "lack of good engineers", yeah.

That and the fact that you get no shortage of people essentially making the claim that, if you have a pulse in Silicon Valley, you can send out a few emails and have a new job paying $300K by the next Monday morning.

I have seen several ex-colleagues do that sort of thing with no or very few rejections in the process.

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.

Thing is: Majority of failed interviews can be probably traced back to a relatively small pool of mediocre engineers, who get rejected by dozens of companies, before they finaly land a job. And then they loose that job 3-12 months later, because they coulndn't keep up with their employer expectations. So, at least in theory, both "there's talent shortage" and "it is so hard to land a job" can be true at the same time, just for different groups of people.

On the other hand, if you ever have to set up a hiring process or run interviews, it's worth remembering that a bunch of qualified engineers get rejected for silly reasons like not using semicolons and not knowing jQuery off by heart.

> Did anybody ever think it wasn't like this?

Yes, that's who this is for.

Yes, that's life. So what wrong with trying to make life a little less bitter by reminding people that a rejection letter isn't the end of the world (which is what it can feel like)?

I mean...I know bunches of people for whom it isn't like this, so I'm not convinced it's not like this.

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