The road to success is paved with rejection letters | Hacker News Reader

The road to success is paved with rejection letters

perceiving-systems.blog

281 pointscloudedcordial136 comments

Its true too of jobs. Everyone sees when someone gets a job but its much harder to know if someone effortlessly switched or spent years failing interviews every week. My last job hunt took 6 months and had dozens of failures. I'm still not sure if its normal or I'm below average quality.

If you're not getting rejected then you don't know where your ceiling is.

If you get rejected somewhere and then accepted somewhere slightly lesser, you know you pushed yourself as high as you could go.

If you apply and get accepted and just take that job... then who knows how much higher you could have aimed.

That assumes two things:

- there is an ordering between jobs

- one’s goal is to find the “highest” according to that ordering

I don’t think that either of those is true in my value system.

In fairness, for a lot of people, the ordering is "Who will pay me the most?"

Yea the SWE ego stroking shows quite a bit in anonymous settings. It's like they think they're doing valuable work only in the FAANGs.

1) I'm not anonymous am I - my user name is my real name.

2) I'm not at a FAANG.

I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption, even if the ordering is strictly personal (some people would take a job with better work-life balance instead of the better paying one, some would make a different choice, same thing with technology stacks etc.).

The second premise also seems to be true, though I would phrase it in a descriptive rather than prescriptive manners - the choices you make regarding job offers reveal your preferences ("the ordering of jobs").

Having no "job ordering" would result in people taking jobs based on a coin flip, wouldn't it?

This isn't true at all in my opinion. Hiring criteria are so vague, subjective, and interpersonal fit is also very subjective, that failure isn't a direct indication of one's ceiling.

> If you get rejected somewhere and then accepted somewhere slightly lesser, you know you pushed yourself as high as you could go.

No, you still don't know even that. For every person reading this comment, there exists at least one job "lesser" than their current one where, if they were to apply to today, they would get rejected (and not just on the basis that they're overqualified).

Your statement imputes way too much rationality and efficiency into society—a sort of just-world hypothesis applied to the narrow domain of the job market and those who hold the keys into any given organization. Organizations are made of people, and people can be dumb and irrational. The kinds of people who have the final say on whether to reject or hire aren't exempt from this. The decision to reject can be as uninformed and arbitrary as it is logically sound.

The same principle applies to successful hires, too. In fact, that's the reason why it's possible to get rejected even for jobs where the application process should result in a hire. Companies hire people, find them to be worse than expected, but keep them around anyway because, while the powers that be definitely wouldn't go back in time if the opportunity to do so were available and hire that person all over again just the same, it's still too much work (or it's perceived to be too much work—again, people do not make optimal decisions) to get rid of them. Good candidates who get rejected are a casualty of organizations hedging their bets to try to prevent this from happening too much to them.

Or you had some "in" at your current job that you may not have somewhere else.

I've done fine at my last two long-term jobs but I also very much got them because I knew very higher ups who answered an email right away.

It actually encourages me that a lot about the hiring system is pretty random. Otherwise the big tech employers would just skim the cream except for people who really don't want to work for those employers. As it is, there's enough randomness that lots of good people end up at other companies.

I’ve had the same experience. For every job I’ve landed (all of 2 spanning 8+ years) I spent 6+ months applying to hundreds and hundreds jobs and failing interviews until I landed something. It’s certainly not the optimal way to be getting jobs - most people network better, I imagine. But if you are not good at networking it’s a long process.

I sometimes think companies spend too much time assessing candidates. I just spent months interviewing with a two companies. Each company had me doing a hour zoom call nearly every week with someone new until eventually rejecting me. I’d reckon if the person seems reasonably competent in the first 1-2 interviews, has work artifacts in the public domain (academic papers, patents, etc),and has a background closely aligning with the posting then just taking the risk is probably a better use of everyone’s time. Truly wild out there trying to convince people you know something.

I'm not sure what field you're in but if you're reasonably competent, being transparent and honest with what gaps there are in your knowledge can be an attractive trait for a candidate. Someone who's forthcoming about things they're unsure about is someone you can train faster because they recognize that they don't know everything...and that trait keeps them open to learning and open to better solutions too. Sometimes people want to hear that you struggle with the same things.

All of this probably goes out the window in hyper-competitive fields but in my field for example (software engineering) where there's a labor shortage, I've found this to be the case anywhere outside of the companies that just want to test how well you remember your Computer Science degree.

I agree with you. I was rejected from a company in January after spending upwards of 40 hours on the process. 9-10 on the actual interview, talking to people, Zoom calls that blew through the scheduled times, and the rest on their code challenge/assessment. I could feel my motivation and even desire for the job tanking dramatically by the end of my 3rd 3-hour-long zoom call with their team. I didn't even want to do the code challenge at that point.

On the flip side, the jobs I've held where the interview process is more centered around my past work, discussions about approach to teamwork & software development, and extracurriculars/interests have never failed to lead to something more enjoyable and long-term. The fastest way, in my experience, to destroy a candidate's interest in your company is to demoralize and dehumanize them by dragging out the process for weeks (I am "still waiting" to hear back on a job I applied for in December... if they end up getting back to me at this point, I just can't see myself wanting to continue the conversation.)

You cannot let companies get away with this. Its bad for everyone trying to get a job in the field, and it makes you look desperate.

This seems like the norm in the US, whereas it was quite easy to get a job with a company in a more lax jurisdiction. I wonder to what degree it correlates with employee protections (if there is a strong correlation, one would expect French companies to have the most demanding interviews, since it is almost impossible to fire someone).

The interviews are harder or more abstract and longer in California. It feels like no one is sure why they are hiring so they prolong the hiring process as a safeguard.

It's a great way not to attract talent.

> It's a great way not to attract talent.

Yet, California has had plenty of people moving in to the state from elsewhere, enough to cause an acute housing problem in some areas. Something feels off in your analysis.

Speaking from someone not in California but who has remotely interviewed with companies across the globe.

No one does 4, 5, 6 interviews if they know what they want and are worried about losing them. No one is worried because the candidate pool is so large and the position doesn't really need to be filled.

> one would expect French companies to have the most demanding interviews, since it is almost impossible to fire someone).

In my experience, it's not that hard. You have up to six months to fire the new hire for whatever reason you like. They can also leave during this time, of course, but people have a tendency not to.

Certainly despite the hate for PIP, I quite like the Amazon way. Make it easier to get a job then cut quite a few people in their first year.

Another thing about being rejected from a job is that you may have made a good impression but were not a good fit for the role you interviewed for. When a better-fitted role comes up, the company might ask you to come back and interview for that one.

If you had never tried, the company wouldn’t know about you and this kind of reconsideration wouldn’t happen. So at least rejection gets you on their radar.

"When a better-fitted role comes up, the company might ask you to come back and interview for that one."

I want to be optimistic. But realistically, how often does that actually happen, even in this hot market?

In my experience from the hiring side we never call back people but very often shuffle promising candidates between different roles. Like we are interviewing people because we need a Foo-guru and one candidate is kinda meh in Foo but shows promise as a Baz-person then we for sure let both the person and our recruiters and the Baz team know. And our team receives similar referals from other teams in the company too.

Yeah, I've definitely seen that shifting move before.

I was talking to a friend last week who got hired this way (initial rejection, then a position opened up that seemed a better fit). It does happen, I guess.

Just last month I was contact by a company I had interviewed for a whole 3 years ago. They actually made a great offer that I accepted.

But something like that has only happened one other time in the dozen or so interviews throughout my life so I would say it's pretty rare.

Wow, that's a long time!

Very Jr role. Hiring manager had a very specific role that the recruiter got me on. Rejected, but during the interview pushed me to the next round of a lesser role in his team. Recruiter was pretty amazed at the turn around since it closed so quickly.

It's a hard job and everyone at my level is a skill a notch or two up and much younger. But we do what we can to stay fit in the industry when peers are much more experienced and sharp. I got my foot in the door. It will take a lot of effort to shake off the sunk cost of training and replacement of me so I am here to get paid to learn and soak up what I can. Definitely high work load and high turnover either upwards or outwards for better opportunities

So if they have a budget, especially if they are a vendor with a paying client who needs a minimum level assigned consultant headcount type of metrics, I am good enough and my soft skills push me through.

Previous job (hired 5-6 years ago) I actually asked to be considered for the level above the one I originally applied to as they pulled me in for interviews. They hired me that week for the tech role as they likely had worse matches until I showed up.

You can't have a full strategy around it. But when you see a possible opportunity you snipe for it. Take the minimum amount of effort and just enough to set you apart and it might just be enough. It's a draw attention to yourself and make it feel like they won't find a better candidate. Play the fog of uncertainty every desperate employer has. Desperation can come from Recruiter delaying the first round because busy with a more important leadership fill, or low recruiter count in general, bad recruiter giving bad leads, etc.

Similar opportunities to me is sometimes just being the first result in a employer's search. engine.

I've had it happen a few times. Most recently a company told me at the time that they were impressed but it would've been a waste of my time and skillset to take the role they were hiring for (VP at BigCo). About a year later they reached out with a generous offer for a role they had created specifically for me, which genuinely was a better fit.

I've been on the other side of that conversation as well. It usually happens when someone really impresses and stands out but doesn't actually match what the role requires. If you have a limited hiring budget, you can't always squeeze in a person you'd love to hire in addition to someone that fills the critical role. Smart companies will invent a role for great talent, if they can make the budget work, but that often takes a lot of time to put together.

I once applied for a job and received a slightly jarring letter saying they were going to delete their record of my application. But when I read it more carefully, it turned out to be referring to another application I had made years earlier for a completely different job at the same company. They did hire me for the new job, but certainly not because they'd rummaged through their piles of old CVs and decided to initiate contact with that one special snowflake who might somehow still be sitting next to the phone holding his breath for years.

"... or I'm below average quality."

If you are, there's plenty of us there to keep you company. My career (10 years in) and skill has already peaked and is rapidly degrading.

How do you know your skill is degrading? Could it be the old "the more you know, the more you know you don't know"?

Not in my case. My company hasn't allowed me to settle into a steady type of work/language/stack. I used to be an expert in other systems/tech, but they outsourced and downsized those. So now I'm always working on different languages/systems/etc. I'm basically an entry level with 10 years experience and an MS who gets a bad rating because I'm slow.

> entry level with 10 years experience

This sounds like a toxic work environment. Get out while you can!

That's the thing. I think they purposely make people a jack of all trades so it's more difficult to leave (everyone wants an expert). I don't really have any options to leave (put in a few resumes, had an interview, but my location sucks for decent IT jobs).

I can relate, although I have fewer years of experience. I've switched from one sub software industry to another. My past experience is not valued or at least doesn't count as much. Which I understand. Small and medium companies want a person who knows their stack and who needs only a few weeks to adjust to the company but not someone who needs a full month or so of study to learn their stack. There isn't a lot of demand for generalists in my experience, which again is understandable.

I guess my point is that one has to think carefully about their career path and what they want to do beyond "Write code and build stuff".

Or above average quality. If you're talking about actual job competence and not interview cheesing skill.

maybe the gatekeepers are below average quality. how much about the world would that instantly explain?

Landing software jobs is hard when you go "up" in company quality/pay and "easier" when you move laterally or lower. If you were looking for step ups in your career it's reasonable to expect many failures.

Overtime I've developed the rule that if I'm not failing at least half my interviews, then I'm not really pushing myself.

I'm still not sure if its normal or I'm below average quality.

You may be below average at interviewing, but that doesn't say anything about your value as an engineer (or whatever your profession is).

The two skill sets (interviewing, real work) have precious little overlap, practically speaking.

It's pretty common. Interviewing is a messed up process.

I recently interviewed at a company, did really well, so much so that when they rejected me, the recruiter reached out to say, flat out, "you did really well; the hiring committee spent an hour debating between you and another candidate before finally going with that other candidate". Fair enough. I applied for other roles, got into one of those, that recruiter saw the notes from the prior interview and went "why the heck didn't we hire this person?!" got me to talk to the hiring manager...who was like "nah".

It really is getting pretty much universal thumbs up, and with a large panel that is statistically hard to do.

>and with a large panel that is statistically hard to do.

This. And with a large panel come lots of different biases where some random shit could work against you like having the wrong accent or looks.

I once was in an interview where it consisted of a 6 people Teams call with one dialing in from their car. Got rejected despite answering all their questions correctly.

I guess it depends, 6 months is actually not too bad. Weather dozens of rejections are normal or not depends on industry and region, and the jobs you apply to.

I had everything, from one application to get a job up to 8 (last time before my current job). Usually I did spend closer to 8 months than 6 to get there so. From experience, for whatever reason, I tend to be on the low end of applications. So I think around a dozen applications and 6 months seems kind of average, IMHO.

This may sound dumb, but how does one find so many opportunities to get rejected from? I'd love to be able to get myself in front of more people to be rejected more, but the real problem is getting the funnel in the first place. This is true both for business development and for job applications in anything but a very junior or well defined position. Getting rejected is relatively easy to take once you're in a groove (and usually it's possible to get a high conversion rate anyway). It's getting into the conversation in the first place that I find very challenging

There is a good thread here that has many current opportunities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515750

I remember feeling lost after I quit my job at the bank I used to work for. Remember seeing one of those threads and reading all the offers. End up sending my CV for 6 of them. 3 wrote back. 2 offered me a challenge. I've been working for 1 almost two years now. I'm happy with them and I like to think they're happy with me either. Great thread. Highly recommend.

How did you decide which ones to send your CV to? It's been so overwhelming for me as a career switcher (from actuarial science) to know what I would want to do.

I wanted to work with vanilla JavaScript, so I look for that in the job description. We do use React also, but I learned to like it.

Continually try to step up and the boundaries of what you're comfortable with. Keep growing and learning new things. Always seek and take opportunities that are slightly or greatly above whatever "level" you're currently at.

You have to put yourself out there, you have to connect with people, you have to be visible, and you have to be creating opportunities for yourself.

I know it sounds trite, but it really isn't. It is about visibility.

The old saying "It's not what you know, it's who you know" may ring true, but a truer phrase, "It isn't just who you know, but who knows you."

On a quiet day, I get pinged with opportunities three or more times, many I quietly ignore or politely decline, others I'll let them run their natural course.

On a busy day, it is like swatting flies.

And whilst there are opportunities available, not all are worth pursuing because the price isn't right, or the problem isn't interesting, or, even though someone reached out to me, they then expect me to jump through their hoops and I've always been a lousy hoop jumper.

This is a description of being part of a gatekeeping network - not about sending applications and (maybe) receiving rejection letters. (Which is indeed very rare. Even a rejection letter signifies they feel some minimal level of obligation.)

I am not sure I follow your meaning with regard to "being part of a gatekeeping network."

By network, I mean opportunities being offered based on established relationships, rather than asking for opportunities or applying for postings. By gatekeeping, I mean the effect achieved when positions are filled like this.

I added "gatekeeping" for bite, but I realise there is no bad intention behind it.

Not criticising the behaviour either. It's just the state of things.

> On a quiet day, I get pinged with opportunities three or more times, many I quietly ignore or politely decline, others I'll let them run their natural course. On a busy day, it is like swatting flies.

To make OP feel better, not all these invites are useful. I have had loads of people saying "you look great, we'd love to have you work for us!", then when you reply they're like "send a resume", then get ghosted.

I agree, many are not useful. Those are usually the fly swatting days. And to re-emphasize, I am a lousy hoop jumper.

I might send a C.V. if we can get past some basic questions, e.g. compensation range, remote/on-site, type of work, whether this is yet another CRUD that is no more than a pretty UI on an SQL db, and so forth.

But generally I take the attitude "I've already got a job, and you asked me, convince me I should." I'm polite and professional (most of the time) but I'm not wasting my time on leads that will go nowhere.

If I'm the ugly duckling with twenty bucks in my pocket and I espy a hot lady at the bar, sashaying up to her and saying "you should buy me a drink" ain't gonna cut it.† Too many companies are the ugly duckling.

† Though... uh... now that I think about it that actually worked with my wife so maybe you shouldn't listen to my advice.

The road to failure is also paved with failures/rejections

Arguably there is no road to failure, just a road to success that you never get to the end of. The hard part is not that failure is some permanent state. The hard part is that without good feedback you don't know if you're actually on a trajectory to (eventual) success, or how long it will take, or what you need to change (or do more of) to get there.

Good feedback is essential and makes the difference between wandering around blindly with no idea where you're going, and walking an (albeit difficult) path to something that might eventually look like success.

I agree, but in my experience, recruiters and HR departments share total paranoia about giving feedback to applicants, most likely out of fear of being sued.

Sometimes (rarely) it's possible to obtain feedback from people you know at the place where you applied, but even then feedback is likely to be distorted and not tell the full story.

TL;DR There is no feedback when applying for jobs and most of us are flying blind.

You're absolutely right. I'm querying a novel to literary agents right now, and it's the same way. The official channels provide absolutely no feedback. That's exactly what's frustrating about it.

You need to look for feedback elsewhere. There's a risk of getting bad feedback if the person isn't actually involved with making decisions, but it's better than just talking to friends (or not talking to anyone at all). And if you're willing to iterate and experiment, you can figure out (at least indirectly) how good the feedback is by the results you achieve when you put it into practice.

I personally provide mentoring to junior members of my community (as a researcher in HPC) through conferences I attend. In my writing life, I look for feedback at writers conferences. I'm not sure what the equivalents would be in other parts of the job market, but something similar might help.

Feedback's tough. I sometimes sit on content committees for conferences. Sometimes for a given abstract my feedback would be along the lines of "Did you even try?" or "How many different events did you submit this generic abstract to?" But mostly it would be more along the lines of it's OK but there's a known person who is better plugged into this particular topic who also submitted and their abstract is sharper.

Conferences do often try to get new and more diverse speakers but you're still competing with people who do this sort of thing for a living. The bottom line is that a lot of feedback would be along the lines of "You were fine but someone else really grabbed us in one or more ways."

Feedback like "Did you even try" is just as useless as "You were fine but someone else was better." Why not simply state what's wrong with the abstract, and how it could be improved?

I get zero usable feedback. My trajectory will not lead to success.

There is an end to the road. You don't get to keep trying forever.

My college professor once said - 'If you are not facing constant rejections, then you are not aiming high enough'

I had a job where the CTO of the company said "obviously none of us want to be woken up at three in the morning for a production issue, but if we're never being paged then we're probably moving too slow." He was very big on the "it's ok to break production, just don't make same mistake twice" mantra, which I like.

"if we're never being paged then we're probably moving too slow"

Or you are at a company that respects your time at home and doesn't wake you at 3am. I personally might not even hear the phone.

I’ve got rejected from DeepMind, OpenAI and Tesla. At least aiming high ;) Gotta fund something on my own I guess.

While I know these are large companies, why do you think that is aiming high? Is it salary only? Do they treat folks better than other places? Is it just that they are a large company?

These are companies with probably the best AI talent. I don't think he's going for the highest salary here.

A counter point; because simple jobs/positions can be filled by almost anyone, they have many applicants and are usually reserved for the network.

Aiming higher means fewer candidates, and fewer competitors.

>Aiming higher means fewer candidates, and fewer competitors.

Aiming higher also means fewer opportunities, which means competition is tougher, as many people are also trying to move higher. Kind of like a game of music chairs.

The game of musical chairs exists at all levels, but at lower levels one has to leverage network, whereas at higher levels it is possible to leverage competence.

The advice stays the same, everyone should aim high, but rejection letters are not a meaningful signal.

Perseverance.

For some reason, we do not talk much about perseverance and grit. May be some of it is getting lost in the (what I perceive to be) increasingly cynical views on meritocracy (not that questioning the status quo on this topic is a bad idea, just that many seem to outright dismiss the idea of hard work and merit).

Barely half way through the interview with Apple for an internship position - which itself felt like a huge win after getting rejected by all the companies I had applied for - I was sweating profusely, couldn't say any coherent line, and was internally just praying for the embarrassment to end. After spending weeks in preparation for the interview, it was a huge blow. Also, since I didn't go to a top-100 (US) school, I didn't know if I could ever even get to the second round of interview with another H1-B sponsoring (~big) company ever again. Long story short, rejections continued but I eventually found a break in a small local company - which did wonders to boost my confidence after being able to write "real" code for money. Later, went on to do Masters in a public university where I could work as a TA - which meant so I didn't need to pay the (almost impossible out-of-state) tuition. And yes, found a job a H1B sponsoring company where I am quite happy now:).

Its not that my story is any special or anywhere close to the success of like the one mentioned in the post. I guess my point is we can only play the cards in front of us. Being able to find a joy in doing so well (which I think is a secret to persevere) goes a long way not just for success in career but in other aspects of life also.

As a long term JavaScript developer my view into the world of software is distorted to this slice of the industry, so that I what I am speaking to.

Perseverance is not rewarded in software, at least not in JavaScript. The key reason is that there is no trust. Employers do not trust the competency of the developers and the developers do not trust each other. The result is that the work is typically extremely beginner and developers are not expected to write original code aside from trivial React components. Everything else, I mean this literally, is a downloaded NPM package because there is substantially greater trust in anonymous strangers than your coworkers. If you are interested/capable of doing more you aren't compatible with current hiring trends and will not be hired.

In all fairness though if you can get hired in a low cost of living market for 170k knowing almost nothing about how the software or the platform really work doing beginner chores then why bother persevering with hard work to be anything more? Eventually most of these people will elevate to management where their technical experience is irrelevant anyways.

Well my coworkers don't write documentation. that's why I use packages.

It's really more of a management issue

What are you talking about?

Am I "not trusting myself" when I download an open source library instead of reimplementing the wheel? Should I ask a colleague to write a Javascript interpreter from scratch to show my "trust" in them? Should we collectively conspire to make developing software harder so that n00bs will be out of a job and everyone will have less software and services to use, at a more expensive price point?

It's one thing to lament the average quality of devs you're working with, it's another to suggest the problem is to go back to the 1980s and weed out all the beginners who couldn't code without open source libs.

> Should we collectively conspire to make developing software harder so that n00bs will be out of a job

Ideally, the goal of software is automation. When that actually does occur both the employer and engineer make more money as there are fewer mouths to feed.

This article reminds me a lot of the situation I'm currently in, albeit at a much smaller scale. After studying game-design and game-development for five years I wanted to to go to my local university for a bachelor.

Denied

While looking for options I started worked for a friend of the family in his lawfirm to save up a bit of money. During that time I applied to the university of Cologne, hoping that I have better chances there.

Denied in the second round (still stings)

Now a year into working for the lawfirm I met by chance the CEO of a small startup on an IT job fair who wasnt even presenting there. He saw potential in me that at that time I didnt even saw in myself and offered me a job as a Junior Frontend Developer, where I work now for a bit more than 3 months. Its an absolute dream job, and if any of the previous rejections didnt happen I wouldnt be now in this amazing situation I am in now.

"One door closing opens another" is now one of my favourite sayings.

In spite of the rejection, it helped greatly that the author is clearly very smart and competent. For people who are neither, it would be hopeless.

Do you agree that if someone is not smart nor competent, then following the authors advice is highly likely to result in more success than if they did the opposite of the authors advice?

I dunno. How many rejections does it take before you know to stop trying? You only hear of the successes. If you can compare your skills to your peers, that can at least help in determining if you are totally out of your league or not.

Yes his road to success is paved with both rejection and success. Its relatively normal actually. In fact I don't even consider this story to be one where the author encountered a ton of failure and got success through raw tenacity. It's fairly tame.

He is also white, male, not gay and has a Phd.

Many folks from marginalizes communities cant find a way past the rejection barriers the world throughs at them.

Exactly, I feel like "privilege" has become a misnomer for "no strife" when its use really just means "less distraction".

Less barriers on an already fraught path. Its honestly probably the wrong word for the phenomenon, but that ship has sailed.

What’s the evidence that being gay lowers job prospects?

I doubt you can pick out the gay people from looking at resumes and a 30 minute interview.

You would be surprised.

I’m one of those that is harder to pick out (but that is not true of many others), so I’ll make a subtle reference as early on as possible if the conversation allows (I don’t force it).

Better to discover a place you won’t advance, early in the process. More so for executive roles than IC.

Also have seen when raising capital.

It does, but not that obviously.

I'm a lesbian, and the main problems I've encountered are American culture/organizations acting as though everybody has a spouse (when you're homosexual, your dating pool is small enough that if there's nobody around, there's nobody around, but this hits single people in general), assuming that I could move or live anywhere (the suggestion to live in the middle of a rural area to save money was a lot more dicey for us a decade or two ago, and there are still a lot of places I can't/won't travel), and trying to be sure not to out myself on accident during interviews. I had to practice saying I had a boyfriend so I wouldn't slip up. That kind of thing.

That said, I also wasn't visibly gay until last year. I've never run the interview gauntlet as a butch woman, and I imagine that being a butch dyke or an effeminate male adds a new layer of issue.

They never TELL you they're rejecting you because you're gay (or a woman. Or too young. Or disabled). You just get fewer jobs than your peers.

How would a boyfriend or lack thereof even come up in an interview? Let alone so often as to be worth practicing such a thing? (I'm single, but I don't remember ever mentioning it in an interview. Though my memory is bad at this stuff so for all I know I've mentioned it every single time.)

The small talk will get you. It's less about the boyfriend and more about not letting them know I liked women. So I'd practice so I wouldn't accidentally say, "My interest in X started when my girlfriend and I went to Y." Or when someone mentions their wife/husband and then asks you about yours/your kids. (VERY common if you're a woman above 25; my impression is that men are not expected to divulge their childed status or lack thereof immediately socially [including in professional contexts], whereas women are).

Also you have to go over your bag, clothes, car, etc. and get rid of anything that could out you.

I eventually landed on "I don't date" as my official presentation, but after about 25, that starts looking really weird too. If I ever have to go back into the closet now, I'd probably claim to be divorced or widowed. "Traumatized by a bad marriage" is still easier for lots of people than "rug muncher".

Why would you want to work somewhere where you are rejected for what you are ? Just say you've got a girlfriend if it's coming in the conversation and if you don't get the job because of it, well, you just avoided working for years in a toxic environment.

Because I was in my 20s with no financial support and being in the closet at work beat being homeless. Especially as a visually impaired female. That's a one way ticket to ending up raped in a ditch. Pass.

Thanks for explaining. I guess if you ever decide to become a foreign spy, you can point to this as "relevant experience" in THAT job interview. Or something.

This is antidotal but when I was in elementary school my 4th grade teacher was fired when she came out. She told us on her last day she was moving to a different state b/c she was black listed from the school district.

Companies have been tripping over themselves to hire from "marginalized" communities for years now. At this point it's a handicap. At my tiny startup people are overtly talking about not hiring any more "white guys". Which is offensively discriminatory.

Same for colleges by the way, more likely to accept and graduate minorities. In this blind push for equity, white men are being deliberately left behind.

Similar situation here. I've been in a staff meeting where the principle openly told the managers that they needed to place females into specific roles.

That's so insulting, as a female.

If I found out I got any job or role due to my genitals, I'm immediately quitting because that's a terrible way to run a company. For so many reasons.

Then you'll "love" my EU country that suddenly turned woke on hiring, as many tech jobs say they will prioritize hiring females over males provided equal competency levels, in order to fix gander equality.

Ugh. Setting aside the moral questions, I just can't get over how that solution COMPLETELY IGNORES all the variables that might result in differing competencies and applicant pools.

Which is what I think bugs me the most about the intellectually lazy wokedom: Stop taking genuinely interesting, nuanced problems and making them boring!

Recently we were forced to watch an "ethics" video that essentially told everyone "picking White men for your team is wrong, don't do that." I guess now that Whites are becoming minorities in most of their countries the bigotry is going the other way.

The trick is to just be better than everyone else or use the rules in a way that others don't or can't, which in a way makes you better than everyone else.

Don't cry about it, there's always a way nowadays if you're intelligent and driven.

Voting me down instead of explaining how I'm wrong is both lazy and cowardly. I am a single data point, sure but I've lived it.

The plural of ancedote is not data.

My lived experience is the opposite of yours: All those nice tests that put me in the top 0.01% of IQ + problem solving ability and the drive that got me through 2 degrees and cross-continental moves with zero support completely deserted me when I had my first MS relapse. I couldn't will my body into staying awake, or not being in excruciating pain.

The idea that being intelligent means you can't or won't be slapped down by life is a coping mechanism.

I should've said barring exceptional circumstances like medical conditions. how about now, how do you deal with the MS?

The problem is you can dump anything that doesn't meet your initial post into the 'exceptional circumstances' bucket.

For other examples from my life, my being female and homosexual aren't really issues now, but my femaleness made my stepmother disapprove of my tech interests, and my father started pressuring me to give it up as a teenager because she was more important to him. I also don't have to worry about having the crap beaten out of me anymore for being a dyke, but 15-20 years ago when I was making my career and educational decisions, I was pretty restricted in where I felt safe living.

I lucked out and have 'benign' MS, so the MS is less of an ongoing problem than the Brazilian (in the Terry Gilliamesque sense) system we have in this country for health care. My meds cost 300k+/yr for life; health insurance and care dictate a LOT of my decisions. But it blows up a lot of conventional advice. Try making 'responsible' saving/retirement planning decisions when you have no idea how long you'll be able to work.

And that's why I'm pretty sympathetic to people who are affected by circumstances beyond their control: You never know when it's going to be your turn. It benefits all of us to extend grace, lest we be the the one penniless in a hospital bed in the future.

Well I think it's reasonable to dump most of whatever isn't mentioned in conventional advice into the 'exceptional circumstances' bucket. They are anything that brings you off of the conventional happy path of normal income, normal job, normal career and life progression that isn't the result of your decisions after adulthood.

You seem intelligent - It looks like you've figured out how to compensate for the less than optimal hand that you were dealt. It's up to everyone else to figure it out as well. I have little sympathy for anyone who can't and I'd expect the same for anyone's opinion of my situation if something horrible and unforeseen were to happen to me.

There's two related, but slightly different, things that we're discussing here I think.

I think that, broadly speaking, such people do deserve sympathy from society as a whole. That is a different question as to whether or not they deserve your particular sympathy or attention. Much like how I agree that fire fighters are a good idea, but would look at you as though you were brain damaged if you suggested I run in and fight fires. People can be entitled to sympathy and understanding and you are also allowed to have your own boundaries, strengths, etc. (Or even just not like supporting people emotionally. That's fine.) Or hell, maybe this topic is just boring to you and you're sick of it taking over everything. That's also understandable.

> I'd expect the same for anyone's opinion of my situation if something horrible and unforeseen were to happen to me.

I don't often tell people their views of themselves are wrong (because how the hell would I know?), but this made me wince, because it's like talking to myself 10 years ago. It's one thing to say this, it's another when it actually happens.

I'll also submit that it's easy to say that about yourself, but it's going to be much harder if it's say, something horrible and unforeseen happening to (for example) your child or spouse. Basically, life is a giant game of Russian Roulette, and while some of us have guns with more bullets in the chamber, nobody has zero.

I'm not so sure how accurate that is in today's tech world. I've often told my wife she ought to consider switching to coding as a career because my company will pay a premium to get female software developers.

This is just a hacker news myth told by men, not real life experienced of women.

Source: I'm a female developer

>The Road to Success Is Paved with Rejection Letters

The same can be said with many things in life we strive for. On the path to those things there will be a lot of rejection and failure, but you need to pick yourself up and try again.

Lol @ me who received a rejection letter 2 weeks ago, and haven't been able to pull myself up again. I know it's on me and my mental health, but I just wish there was a silver bullet that I could get hit with that can stop me from taking rejections so hard.

I can sympathize with you.

Not academia, but of the 40 job applications I've sent out in the last couple months, 7 rejected me outright, 4 moved to interviews, and all of those have ended in rejections or ghosting. Finding the energy to keep going every day is hard enough, not to mention maintaining self-worth and happiness.

Keep going. 10% isn't great but you can make it up in volume. Interviews are random..

6 years ago I got rejected from every grad school program I applied for, and also couldn't find a job in the industry I wanted (biotech). After a very long 2 years of unemployment or low wage jobs I threw my hands up and became an English teacher in China. Was the best experience of my life and I was way more employable when I came back, partly because of the experience and partly that I made an app for my students when I was there. You'll find a way for it to work out; the hardest part is managing your own emotions, but you're far from alone in your situation.

I can relate and I was actually doing the same thing about 9years ago. I was more lucky as I had a job in biotech and wanted to go back to grad school but got rejection after rejection. I was so frustrated that I took anything (Bad PhD lab not the topic I wanted etc) and ended up hating grad school. Left it - for good. Studied another topic (tech) went down a different career path. Today I am more than happy and get chased weekly by headhunters.

My take away: It is a journey. Don’t be affraid to push for what you believe in and I can say that as I applied to more than 500jobs in the last 10 years… But I am now down to narrowing a handful applications with nearly 80-90percent success rate (Sr Manager and Director level positions).

For me, it wasn’t getting better at taking rejection, but quitting putting emotional investment into job applications (or whatever else) on the front end. Quit fantasizing about how great the work/your coworkers/the comp will be and just treat it like the roll of the dice it is.

I got a physical rejection letter in the mail some years ago, many months after the application. I couldn't believe any organization would waste somebody's time to print out a form letter, stuff an envelope, and mail it when they could notify me over email. I consider these bullets dodged because there's more organizational anachronisms you don't want to deal with as an employee.

I got rejected by my dream company a few weeks ago. Seeing the rejection letter first thing that morning crushed me.

I was at a friend’s place that morning and I excused myself to go home in the afternoon. They understood that I needed time alone. While at home, I tried to not distract myself with any kind of work.

While surfing through YouTube, I stopped, switched off the TV and just stayed with myself for a few moments. Tears ensued. I started grieving the loss just like one would grieve any other.

10 minutes later, I felt much better. A day later, I didn’t think about it nearly as much.

Find out how you like to grieve and make yourself the space to do so. It helps immeasurably. Lightens the burden.

This is an awesome reply. yes, learning how to grieve is important

The first time you smash your thumb with the hammer you curse out loud, put ice on it, watch the blood darken under your nail and suck air in every time you try to curl it after.

The fourth or fifth time, you cuss when it happens, shake your hand off and keep at it.

By the tenth time, you start using a pair of pliers to hold the nail in place.

I went on a hundred dates before meeting my fiancé. I sent out a hundred applications before getting my current job.

Being good is great and all, but the recipe for success is perseverance and improvement.

> The people I met at Yale seemed to understand the world and its opportunities in a way that other people didn't. They had a confidence in their ability to shape that world like I'd never seen. My Yale education went far beyond the academic.

I'd love to hear more about this.

"Well suppose" — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — "Suppose I were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to try?"

....

"Well I'd try every darn one," Rader tells Lyle.

....

Lyle never whispers, but it's just about the same. "Then you are willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key."

Sending a rejection letter (email) out is a nice gesture. Too often companies just ghost you, even if you've spent time with them in their office during interviews and lunch.

I hate that an inspirational story like this has to start with an inb4 "Im white. Im straight. Im privileged". Its 2022 and I thought we'd be colorblind by now, but its never been a bigger issue. At least for some very loud people.

The road to failure is also paved with rejection letters so I’m not sure it’s a terribly helpful observation.

Very encouraging post! Like many others, I've been dreaming to work in the USA for quite some time now.

I've always imagined that my CV would stand out and that it would be easy to send out a few applications and get an internship abroad. Well... turns out it's not. At least for me.

Posts like these remind me, that we should speak about our rejections more open and regularly. They are also part of the process, a source of motivation, and usually an opportunity to learn.

I'm bad at defining success, so I define it as the opposite of failure. In the last few years I've dodged some bullets because I was honest about my expectations. My advice is that you challenge recruiters about the culture and working conditions at your potential new job, and do your best at getting rejected if it sounds crappy. You will find a Good One eventually.

Rejection (the ability to learn and grow from it) is a core competency in business and life. There was a guy who even made rejection into a game: https://www.wnyc.org/story/an-invisibilia-favorite-rejection...

When I was starting out, the ratio I would get for callbacks was on the order of 20:1, and the conversion to offer was on the order of 50-60:1, and those are extremely generous numbers.

I think a lot of people have seen the million jobs that I've had (and the fact that I have not been unemployed for more than a month in almost a decade) and just assume that I'm some expert interviewer, and yeah I've gotten better, but in reality I still get rejected far more often than getting an offer. My ratio now is probably closer to 20:1. Obviously I'm not the pinnacle of success or anything, but I think I've done pretty well as an engineer (particularly since the first decade of me doing this I didn't even have a degree).

I think a lot of things in life boil down to a numbers game. Million-to-one odds aren't so bad if you plan on doing something a million times.

In 2009, my application to the Stanford graduate program was rejected. In 2011, I was selling my tech to Stanford because it was better than theirs. I'm still bitter, though.

Some rejection letters I've received (scroll down to Game Publisher Rejection Letters):

https://classicempire.com/

You inspired me to make a list of my failures and share it publicly in an article.

And compare it to my list of successes to see how each and every failure led to a success.

It's true. If all you get is acceptance and never rejection, you have set your sights too low.

Thank you for sharing this.

Amazing story! I am so waiting for so many 'another' stories.

lol, or even plain muteness.

Wait -- you're planning to make meth with AI?

Is there actually a college course for that?

Sadly, the hero image for this site doesn't appear to have anything to do with the subject for this post.

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