rejectedagain.lol
First time posting on Show HN. Spent two weeks over Christmas and new years to make this fun little full stack web app built with Next.js and Supabase PostgreSQL, hosted on Netlify
open to feedback and hope you enjoy it!
Aside from that one, the rejections that were the least self-esteem-damaging were ones that said "we've decided not to fill the position". Even if not true, it's a good "it's not you it's me" type of rejection.
That is: the litigation could probably happen in most countries and even not be summarily dismissed.
Having now been on the hiring side of things for technical interviews, I'll give feedback when asked, but I think that most people don't give feedback because its kind of a pain in the ass if you aren't organized.
Unfortunately a day later I got a notice from them that the role I was interviewing for was being closed down. They encouraged me to look for other roles I was interested in and we could continue from there. I sent two, and then right after new years was informed they were freezing all hiring until mid January when they finalized their new head count. Then they were among the number of companies announcing new layoffs in the last couple weeks.
Talk about disappointed but still being appreciative. I'm still excited about maybe getting on with the company one day simply because they treated the hiring process with a lot of respect and didn't waste my time. It wasn't a me thing, but just bad news coming down from higher up internally.
"We'd rather have no one than you!" seems like it should be more insulting, really. But I get it.
I don't want to be surrounded by people who can still brag about high school.
I paused and had to check with the recruiter to make sure I'd heard her correctly. (I had.)
It was also the single highest-density pool of talent that I've ever worked with, then or since. Our office manager had a PhD from Colgate.
https://www.futurescienceleaders.com/yvr1b/wp-content/upload...
https://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2009/08/least-surprising-cor...
Saying that SAT scores correlate closely with income in response to someone claiming that SAT scores measure IQ could be a statement of agreement or disagreement, depending on the relationships among the various measures.
Also, if you want to measure IQ, why not use an IQ test and not some arbitrary proxy?
[1] http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/papers/abs_mobility_p...
Those children might go on to score better on the SAT, leaving a correlation between parental income and SAT scores that would be unsurprising at each step.
Your point about inherited wealth is not demonstrated on the chart you showed, which was parental incomes (not wealth) and in ranges unlikely to be perturbed by vast inheritances.
> Also, if you want to measure IQ, why not use an IQ test and not some arbitrary proxy?
I don't want to; I suspect colleges and D. E. Shaw felt like SAT scores were an acceptable/practical proxy for whatever purpose it was that they had. I thought it was weird and slightly off-putting to be asked, but it seems to work for them.
[edit 1: added the below]
I don't think the best idea in the room wins - the most persuasive person's idea usually wins.
[edit 2: added the below]
Harvard's endowment in 2022 was apparently $50.9 billion.[1]
[1]https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...
[edit] I should have quoted de shaw's wealth
The weirdest ones were "we don't want you, but we will keep your data in the database just in case". Like, in which case? Do you have any other positions that you think I could match? Why not talk to me about them then? Do you expect to have them in some indefinite future and expect me to stay unemployed in the meanwhile? Or do you expect me to drop the position I just recently started in the meantime and jump to your company as soon as you call - because that's the kind of employee you're looking for? I'm just not sure what's the message here. Is it just general "we don't want to hire you, but don't worry, you're not a complete basket case, there's still a chance we might hire you eventually. Or maybe not". Confusing.
The recruiter actually got on the phone with me, and pointed out the signals (from notes from the hiring manager) that I was lacking for them. And how I could improve if I wanted to interview with them again.
It all felt very respectful. Good for them for going above and beyond.
That said I don't expect any company to tell me anything beyond "No thanks" after a failed interview.
"there is a hiring freeze put into place"
bro it's early Feb-Mar, the job advert is < 30 days, and budgets came out but a few weeks earlier -- hiring ain't frozen.
best guess was that it was a security-related tech company, and turning down people, esp. reasonably qualified ones, in a way that makes them mad is akin to drawing a target on your head. give custom feedback to those who got through the interview process so they feel like they are at least looked at, and shootdown the rest via something that feels impartial -- otherwise these wanna be blackhats will try to DDoS you.
It was particularly hurtful as it somehow re-enacted a scene from highschool. Which in retrospect now comes across as a brilliant troll.
It officially read ( and I paraphrase the important part ) :
Dear ionwake,
Thank you for your application. But we dont want you in our band.
Regards, xxxx Spotify
Just to be clear incase it isn’t the “xxxx” is a placeholder for what her name was - she was HR related.
Which is ironic as you would think HR would be polite.
This can't be an actual message from OpenAI though?
Thank you for considering OpenAI for your next career move. Amazing that you thought you had a chance. Try Microsoft.
My respect to the companies that care enough to offer us that swift closure.
For many people, what matters is to get a job
> who cares what platitudes they give you
The person who can't use them to improve
Sometimes this is just true though, when it's not so niche. If the "narrowed down" stack is still to big to deal with, it's a bit of a crapshoot.
Worst was when a company told me they used my open-source project and wanted me to do 5 interview rounds, two of them being whiteboard-style. I didn’t expect that
If you don't go around with a portfolio, then yeah, you can expect employers to be skeptical, and subject you to coding on the whiteboard, or leetcode or something, which isn't really going to reflect your actual coding ability, but it's more geared toward weeding out fakers in interviews.
On the other hand, if you have a portfolio, especially a public one shared on GitHub or such, then you can directly point to it and take credit for a good, hopefully working project, and you can explain it at length, and your prospective employer should hopefully take this as a strong signal that your skills are commensurate with your CV.
I have no idea why people do this; but I suspect it might be to look good in interviews. No idea if it works - it’s pretty obvious if you look closer that they didn’t author any of the commits. But I wonder how many people are out there claiming credit for other people’s work to get hired.
I’ve done over 400 SWE interviews for a recruiting company. I’ve seen a steady stream of candidates who could talk the talk, but had incredibly weak programming skills when put to the test. And the reverse - I’ve seen plenty of candidates who were awkward socially but ask them a programming problem and they’re right at home.
If you’re hiring for a programming role, assess their programming skills. Not just their social skills. A conversation only tells you half the picture.
"Write a function that takes a list of numbers [array, list, or equivalent] and returns the average."
That's it. Wasn’t that they got hung up on the details of whether the average of ints should be an int, float, or double, or how to handle overflow, but just couldn't even get started at all in any language.
I was the third on-site interviewer. He'd BSed his way past the phone screen and two others and I caught a whiff of "Johnny can't code" and decided to check by asking him one of our (at the time) new college grad questions.
I’m not saying you may have thrown out competent coders and made a completely incorrect decision I’m saying many who interviewed me seemed to ( when they hadn’t checked my background ) and were quick to assume idiocy.
I only typed this out for you mate.
Let's apply Occam's razor.
You have someone who has been programming 8+ years professionally. Maybe they did good work or bad work, we don't know, but we know they've been programming as a profession getting paid to do it for 8+ years.
We also all know you can't really go through a week, or even usually a day, of programming without handling something as basic as an array or a list.
So, which is actually more likely:
a) Someone did 8+ years of programming without ever implementing an array loop
or
b) They know how to do it, but the test is flawed due to conditions (on a whiteboard in a high stress environment while being criticized).
A lot of people with deep expertise in programming are completely incapable of putting on a whiteboard performance under stress.
I can never believe the number of interviewers who go "Gotcha!! They don't know how to code despite doing it for years!" instead of considering the simple correct answer is usually (b).
c) they haven't been programming for 8 years
Reference check is done after the interviews, you ask the candidate for references (past managers and coworkers) and call them up. That takes a fair amount of other people's time, so it only makes sense to do it after you're fairly certain you want to make an offer.
Employment verification is simply getting a statement from past employers that this person worked there from date to date and held these titles. That's quick and easy.
Maybe at a real modern "software" company. But there are plenty of places where 50% of their so-called software engineers couldn't write a simple program from scratch.
In fact, as I think about the cases I've seen, it seems to get easier with senior "SWEs". They can exist going to meetings and delegating work until one day they forget themselves and apply at a company that actually expects SWEs to have a basic understanding of programming.
We don't know that! We know they submitted a resume that says they've been programming for 8+ years; we don't know whether that happened or not.
I can't remember exactly what it was that gave me a "this guy is actually full of shit" feeling, but other things in the interview gave me that feeling, so I pivoted the interview to check.
On that day and to this day, I have serious doubts that that particular candidate had ever held a professional software job for longer than a probationary period.
Sure we do. Or maybe you didn't that day, but it is easy to find out for sure.
While companies (at least in the US) will never give a formal recommendation, they will always issue a statement that such and such person worked for them from date to date and the title(s) they held, if you ask.
Sure, if they worked 8 years at Joe's Burger Shack as Senior IT, maybe that's not worth much.
But if they worked multiple years with a senior/lead software engineer title at any recognizable company, you know they really did. As I said above we can't know if they did a great job or a mediocre job, but we do know for sure they held that job with that title for so many years and did at least a good enough job to not get fired from a software engineering role.
Which in turn means they absolutely know how to write a loop over an array. Because even if they got rated "Just Barely Meets Expectations" for 8 years, that alone is enough to know they can loop over an array.
Therefore, if your test indicates they can't do it, it is guaranteed that the test is flawed.
I don’t know how many times I have to say this: you’re thinking about the average, neurotypical, able bodied persons when you assume things, but often logic or common sense does not work with disabled or neurodivergent people.
Please consider that next time maybe you can provide a second chance somehow with less stress. One thing is, if i have code in front of me, I can explain it pretty well I think. Maybe ask them to prepare samples and walk through them?
Edit: this was meant for the grand parent commenter
I think it's not reasonable/fair to other candidates to give a literal "second chance somehow", but it's entirely reasonable to adjust the format of the first chance to allow a non-neurotypical candidate a reasonable chance to succeed.
* I suspect you probably already know to do this; this is not meant as "advice to you" so much as "here's how it could be made workable and fair if that was the situation".
I have mixed success with telling people about my autism. Some places will take it as a sign I’ll be a unique problem and ghost me. I’ve learned mostly I have to mask as good as I can and hope it works. People only seem to be kind towards obviously autistic children, older men who are only low level autistic and can pass for “normal“ tend to be seen as dickheads regardless. I’m trying to be better at social stuff so I don’t seem an asshole, but my brain just can’t get some things down!
But maybe I should try to bring it up again next time I interview, honestly it’s been years since I’ve had to really interview hard, maybe people are kinder and more understanding today. Lucky for me I was laid off and can get that practice in now!
I once had something similar happen, but I'd been flown across country for a couple days of interviews. Day 1 morning someone met me and said "this is awkward, but...".
I couldn't be too mad, it was in an interesting city and I effectively got a short paid for vacation.
The crazy thing is like 10 months later I got hired as a contractor at that same company and asked one of the devs what happened to the manager I interviewed with last year.
They told me the woman was a bit of a firebrand and after several years at the company was fired because she was trying to hire more developers and upper management didn't have the money or resources to do so - but she went ahead anyways and tried to do it.
I was one of the casualties who didn't get hired because of her stunt.
The 8th guy looked at my resume and, without talking to me, decided I'm under-qualified. He cancelled the call 1 hour before it was scheduled. Qualifying 7 rounds before that, and getting positive reviews from 7 of his peers wasn't enough to instill confidence over my resume.
Now I thank my lucky stars. Because that's a representation of the minuscule level of trust and team cohesion that these people have in their peers. Good riddance.
I had two interviews with a smaller agency that I knew of and really wanted to work there because of their reputation and the work they were doing.
The last interview was with one of the founders of the company. She was really cool and we had a great rapport. The interview was about 90 mins and we covered a lot of ground. She said she would be reviewing my resume with the other devs I interviewed with and asked when I would be available to start.
I figured, cool, I got this in the bag.
A week goes by. . . .then another four days and now its been around two weeks since I heard from them. I practically checked out at my last job thinking I would be leaving and now I was getting nervous.
By sheer coincidence I run into one of the devs from the company at a conference that weekend. He was stoked to see me again since we had some common hobbies outside of development. I immediately asked WTF was going on, I hadn't heard anything from his company.
He looks at me and says, "Nobody called you to tell you what happened?" I said, "Yeah, no man, nobody called me, WTF happened?!" He does that nervous look around and then looks back and says in a hushed tone, "Two days after your interview, the founder you interviewed with? She sent an email to the other founders just saying, "I have to flee the country, and I've taken all the cash from the petty cash fund. I'll send back my phone and laptop when I'm in a safe country."
So yeah, I didn't get the job because one of the founders fled the country, took the companies petty cash fund along with their phone and laptop.
Then the HR contact reached out, to say they thought I'd be a great fit for the company, and would I be interested in any roles there in the future.
Then I learned that they'd had a surprise big org chart upset (maybe AI poaching).
I suppose it's reasonable that surprise changes high up the org chart can prompt a company to pause other changes, while they assess the new situation.
I've been rejected from a few jobs that I've applied to at this point. honestly, this was the only time I can remember that it was an email, let alone an email from a no-reply address. every other time I've been passed on after interviews, the recruiter at least had the decency to call and tell me over the phone.
"We have determined that our position isn't ideally suited to your talents...."
But sites like this make this hard to justify. Most of the ones I saw on the front page are standard generic responses. If that's what it takes to get on rejectedagain.lol then you're encouraging companies to just ghost you instead.
And yes, ghosting is very much on the table and likely to become more popular with time.
There's a reason why the hiring process is enshittified: it helps protect the organization.
A rejection doesn't need to be a reason to burn bridges. The candidate could be rejected for any reason, even when it's out of their control. By not having the decency to inform them of the rejection, you're effectively closing the door on them applying ever again. And word goes around about companies with shitty hiring practices, so it's probably not in the company's best long-term interest to treat rejected candidates unprofessionally.
I don't see anything wrong with going beyond the generic rejection letter and being honest about why they were rejected. This doesn't mean you need to be negative or go into too much detail, but most decent people would appreciate the honesty. Those who don't, and start arguing, or post that kind of rejection on Reddit or a .lol site are just boosting the signal of why they indeed shouldn't have been hired. And the same goes for the people who ridicule such companies.
Being unprofessional and shitty is worthy of ridicule. Not honesty and transparency.
The generic rejection letter over four months later is just callousness.
This is true feedback a manager might have, or the team has voiced. For most people sending that verbatim is scary as hell. Wording it respectfully but also staying honest takes a lot of mental energy and is still scary. Over the years you build some muscle memory and thicker skin for it, but some copy paste templates of respectfully written rejection letters would be a great resource for hiring managers.
Whilst still a student in university I messaged Valve my resume, I knew they only hired wizards or people with extreme seniority, but I really liked what I knew about the company and I said hey I'd be really cool. I received a rejection in ample time, sent by an account that has an actual person's name (not just hiring@company.name). The message was a few paragraphs long of (what seemed like) personalized non-auto reply text about what skills I lack, what Valve looks for in a hire, and how the people at Valve acquired their knowledge.
Checking back on the details of the person I now see it wasn't even just an HR person, but an actual engineer. And I do need to say I applied to a lot of considerably smaller (in number of people) companies than them and never have I received such a nice experience.
It is not enough to say that after dealing with hundreds of rejections that one was actually the first uplifting one I ever received. And also the only. So for that I want to thank that person @Valve.
I know multiple people who keep a "good candidates" file of some sort.
Agree sometimes it may be meaningless boilerplate.
> It was a pleasure to learn more about your skills and accomplishments; however, I'm afraid that after careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we do not have any positions that are a fit for your experience and skills at this time.
I guess Palantir doesn't have the same reputation for capability.
This can't be real.
> "Sorry, we're on a hiring freeze"
I pressed my contact to reach out to the guy who interviewed me. He said, 'Yeah. I like the guy. I gave a positive feedback' (I would've been his manager, actually).
So, what really happened?
> Sorry, we're only looking for women candidates for this position.
(My name can apply to both genders. The recruiter called and heard my voice before scheduling the interview.)
there are companies that don't respond to your application at all, and i have started to feel that it is ironically a better approach.
funnily enough, one time i applied for a role in a company, which i never heard back from. however, someone else in there looked at my CV and sent me another job offer, which I ended up getting in the end.
What is the real reason behind this site?
the mobile display needs work ;)
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I applied to a large newspaper (I won't say the name but you've definitely heard of it) as a software engineer. They made me do some idiotic Myers-Briggs style test that took me about two hours to do, which was annoying, but the pay seemed like it would be ok and I was unemployed anyway.
Outside of an ITIL certification that I had to get for college, my resume is extremely technical, as I've only ever done engineering. I have bullet points about different tech I've used, programs I've written, and basic tasks I did for the company. I've had a ton of jobs so the resume is long, and basically devolves into a bunch of software engineering buzzwords. We can argue all day on whether it's good or not, but I don't think anyone would claim it's not technical [1].
Nowhere on my resume (outside of one line that said I mentored some junior and mid-level engineers and some lecturing I did for two semesters) does it say that I've done any kind of "people management", but the response I got from the recruiter was as follows:
> Does not show technical keywords or statements in his resume. Showing to be more of a PM and not a hands-on coder. Not see enough Java experience. I don't see him as a focused Java developer like the other candidate you've sent us. Needs someone who can write the code.
I think what happened is that the hiring manager already knew who they wanted for the job, but for legal and/or bureaucratic reasons they had to have a pretense of "trying to find the best candidate". I suspect that they never even looked at my resume, had some basic boilerplate rejection text that had some vague plausibility, and was just going to reject every candidate sent to them.
That's fine, but I really wish they had done this before I had to spend multiple hours trying to get a read on my personality. I think a lot of hiring managers are sociopaths.
[1] https://gitlab.com/tombert/Resume/-/blob/master/resume.pdf?r...
I suppose another potential thing that happened is that they did send the wrong feedback, the hiring manager was embarrassed and just doubled down as a sign of bravado. Hard to say for sure.
I dislike corpos as much as the next guy, but there's no reason to treat these as anything other than completely made up by randos on the internet.
Personally I'd anticipate a string of defamation lawsuits from something like this. And dick pics. I'm actually surprised that so far there's only a bunch of garbage and not dick pics.
These e-mails are all templated waffle, crafted to avoid legal liability. Don’t ever take it personally.
I find it very entertaining to read the real and the fake ones.