They Rejected Us

The best one I've come across yet is Brian Acton being rejected by Facebook [0] ends up creating Whatsapp and in turn selling it to Facebook for $19B. Talk about comebacks.

[0] https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?lang=en

This really highlights how hard it is to hire, at least in Tech. We come up with processes and fantastic lists of questions that verify how well a candidate knows minutia, and use that as proxy for how well he/she will do in a position where the primary required skill is speed of learning and growth.

I'll hire someone who knows how to find out what they are missing over someone who knows a lot of details but can't grow. But that is hard to justify and involves risk: what if I misread someone's capacity to learn and I just hired somone without the skills nor the ability to learn? Joke's on me!

So larger orgs will naturally go for process-driven hiring practices, so they can cover their behinds (and part of that is due to the requirement of applying the same standard to everyone—can't fault them for that).

But this is how small orgs can win, by taking chances on candidates that are very driven to grow, and can create impressive teams that will outlive the company: good teams always find a way to recombine at least partially in other companies.

So the corollary for candidates is: you have to reverse-engineer the hiring process of the large company you're trying to join. Or you can go for smaller companies* that do something you want to get deep into. Total comp is less but look at it in terms of you getting paid to learn. Then make yourself available so that large orgs come trying to hire you. When that happens, it will be on your terms.

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* Note: small companies don't have to be startups. While startups can be fantastic places for growth, they can also be sh*t shows since the entire company is trying to figure itself out, so be sure you properly interview their founders to get a feel for their integrity/sleaze.

If there are two good candidates and I pick one of them, it doesn't necessarily mean you were 'rejected', you just weren't selected. I've been 'rejected' by plenty of companies but I try not to take it too personally.

Try getting rejected at the final executive approval (i.e., their magic eight-ball) after passing the in-person day and the hiring committee.

Once you've seen the inside of the hiring process, you'll never take this stuff personally again. It's utter garbage. At best, the process manages to select for a few traits that are probably useful, while de-selecting for others they didn't realize were crucial for ultimate success.

If you doubt this, ask yourself how one of the tightest hiring sieves in the world managed to produce Google+.

As someone who's gotten rejected by more companies than I can even count or remember, I think this is great. I have a bitter, guilty fantasy that I could go back to some of those harsh rejections long ago and show them the updates to my resume since they declared me useless.

I wonder if/how companies try to measure their false negative rate. Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one." Is that really true? I wonder how many big companies have thought about testing that assumption, maybe changing their selectivity and measuring the effect. Have they really measured how much it costs to hire/fire a bad performer and shown it to be greater than the productivity they'd get out of a good performer they are inclined to reject? Does their strategy of holding out for months, looking for that unicorn candidate instead of hiring someone who's "just fine" today really work? How do they know? Have they measured it?

Are they even serious about their existing selectivity? Is it baked into their annual performance process too? How many of them apply their selectivity bar to their existing employees? One common thing I've seen at companies is many of their "old guard" long time folks would never pass today's interview hazing. The most difficult thing most people ever do at a company is pass the interview.

I graduated from Fullstack Academy, and I've been rejected outright by most companies I applied to; only a couple have given me over-the-phone interviews, and nobody brought me on-site.

I have all but stopped applying, am doing freelance work to keep my skills sharp and pay the bills, and plan to start my own company in the future.

My motto: If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.

Edit: most companies I applied to are not of FAANG caliber. Also, I don't feel entitled to be hired; in most cases they didn't even deign to write a rejection email.

Maybe it's just me but it sure does seem like a lot of these people ended up at Twitter. And I don't see a lot of Google.

Do practice interviews at companies you don't really want to work for. It takes the pressure off and makes the real interviews easier.

Imagine looking at a website like this without being in the tech industry (or, more specifically, the "highly successful" tech industry). I can't imagine people in many other occupations looking at a site like this with any amounts of sympathy.

We truly are in a fortunate "bubble" where we can sympathize with those who don't get exactly the top-paying job they were looking for and had to "settle" on Twitter, Microsoft, etc.

The Big Co interview process is a binary classifier (hire/no hire). It's actually reasonable to tune it to minimize false-positives, since a bad hire can be disastrous for all parties involved - imagine an employer changing their minds on you during your first few months. Tradeoff is that this will increase false-negatives, saying No to great people, and lead to stories in the link above.

Other thing worth mentioning is that "culture fit" might make companies turn down excellent developers, who don't happen to have the founders' same personality type.

Salty software engineers :)

It gave me a good laugh, it's comforting to find some people who are saltier than me. It made confronting my own saltiness easier.

Thanks for sharing this. I'm switching careers, and I've lost count of how many rejections I've received at this point. Probably my highwater mark so far was getting to Google for an onsite interview. The day after I was so proud for getting there, and not completely bombing the interviews (i.e. I was always able to at least arrive at a solution for the problems, if not always an optimized one). But ultimately that wasn't good enough, and it is back to square one.

It is easy to say, "don't take it personally", but when you're starting from a non-traditional background, and therefore the amount of rejections you receive is probably higher than normal, it is really challenging not to let it get into your head and think maybe you're just not cut out for this line of work.

Like most, I've been rejected by a few companies. It hurts but it is normal. I've had what I thought was great interviews but not got it, and on the other side been offered jobs after what I thought was a terrible interview.

And I've been on the other side of the table many times and rejected good candidates simply because we had what we perceived to be better candidates.

So it is often not even be your fault, just for some arbitrary ranking/preference done by the interviewers that day someone else got the role(s).

I wonder how safe would be me post my own stories... Since I don't have a major company job, would it stop my hiring chances?

But basically: one company rejected me because was against company policy hire people without experience... Except they wanted to be the first company in my country to hire someone for that role and wanted to hire a local. No wonder they even wrote magazine articles complaining of not finding anyone...

Another rejection: person that was supposed to phone interview me didn't shown for work at all, they asked another person to interview me, that person had no idea what was going on, stuff didn't went well at all... Had to answer questions for coding language I didn't knew because the person didn't knew the language the job offer was for...

This implies that there's a stigma to being "rejected" for a role.

The answer is that you're not entitled to a role, just like a company is not entitled to have you. There's no stigma in saying "You're not exactly what we're looking for right now", even if it's the case that you might be _really great_ somewhere else or even ideal for that exact role in future.

I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" personally, some of the comments are along the lines of: "Ha! sure showed them!" but really it's just like dating, sometimes you get passed up for no other reason than you weren't the person the other was looking for at the right time. Understand rejection, don't treat it like an enemy.

The lesson is you will be rejected for a variety of reasons but it has no reflection on your ability. Candidates with less ability will be hired before you. Not because of you because they are not good at finding the best. The best they can hope for is good enough to not look badly on them.

How many places whiteboard an interview but once you are hired no whiteboards can be found. We are a far ways away from when companies start interviewing with specific questions that relate to the actual role. If that happens you can start taking rejection personally.

Way back when you got actual rejection letters, I kept them and started to build a collection and would compare them (which was interesting in itself).

Once I made a game of it, I could actually have a tiny bit of fun ("yay! another one down! keep going!)

It still stings, but if you want to be truthful, you need to make a friend of failure if you are doing anything worthwhile.

I'm really surprised at how they managed to get so many big names from the open source community to share their stories.

Maybe success isn't tied to grinding out a bunch of leetcode?

I'm starting to think institutionalizing this kind of convoluted hiring/hazing ritual also keeps developer salaries down. Imagine if whenever you interviewed, instead of getting say 1 offer in 5 you got 4 out of 5. Now you'd be in a better bargaining position when considering offers.

This might be good, except there's no difference between "You're good but someone else was a bit better" to "You should get out of this industry and stop wasting your time. You aren't owed a living." which is generally the more correct thing.

I wish people gave better signals for the latter, so you might know better whether you should keep applying, pivot careers, or check out.

In response to these people being hired by twitter: I think all of these statements are being sourced from twitter, and the links to their names all point to twitter, so it makes sense that people working at twitter would more often say how they got there on the platform.

Many others in the list never made it past the phone screen for twitter.

This is really wonderful. As someone who just landed a job after going through so many dehumanizing and demoralizing technical interviews, this makes me feel __a little__ better about my situation.

At one time long ago I worked in IT before moving to another industry that was more who you know and personal rep (interviews were a formality). What sticks out to me here is the number of people who say they were 'escorted out' in the middle of an interview or otherwise had one abruptly terminated.

Beyond the rudeness, it smacks of arrogance. Even if you sense the the person will not be a good match, there are ways of wrapping up a little quicker without being a *bag. And we wonder at the coarseness of our society today.

This is an example of and response to the poor state of hiring that takes place in development.

Rarely do I know why I'm rejected, even if I ask but it feels like it could be anything, like a keyword. Applying for jobs is basically Bumble but, less fun. Instead of pics of you on a horse, you have a CV.

I bet if you combined up-front testing (like hackajob) or a boot camp course with short-term contractual work from various companies, you could create a decent hiring funnel too.

Subtitled "A Compendium Of 'Ha! I Sure Showed you!'".

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." --George Bernard Shaw

I like rejection. Well, maybe 'like' is the wrong word, but I appreciate the results it brings to my life. I deeply believe that a healthy working environment only comes when both the employer and the employee are right for each other. I would rather fight through rejections to find a good home than have string of mediocre roles that aren't quite right.

How many people got rejected and ended up in a worse job than the one they applied for, or in no job at all?

If I could be bothered (which I can't quite) I'd set up an "I rejected them" alternative: all the companies I wouldn't choose to work for because they are unethical or corrupt or produce trivial crap that's not worth making.

Note to self: If I get rejected from a lot of companies, just apply to Twitter. They'll surely say yes.

Addendum: there should be a companion site "Even twitter rejected me!"

Looks like nobody knows enough JS...

After reading through many of these, it felt a bit unhealthy and pointless.

Something I’ve always been told about interviewing: getting in the door means you are at least qualified for the job on paper. The company would not waste its time talking to you if there wasn’t at least some chance they are going to hire you. Whether they hire you depends on how well you spin your story and how strong of a rapport you form with the interviewers.

If someone does not like you, they will not hire you. This can make things difficult for introverts and socially-awkward people.

Interesting that Chris Wanstrath, a newly minted billionaire and the counfounder & CEO of Github, just chimed in on the site and said he was rejected for an engineering job at Yahoo. If the standard Valley screening/interview process isn't able to pickup on the abilities of someone obviously very talented, self-motivated, and entrepreneurial, doesn't it call into question the efficacy of such procedures? It seems like existing hiring procedures might be very broken.

I’m far less worried that these companies reject a lot of people than I am worried that so many engineers are willing to accept idiotic open-plan offices, horribly dysfunctional management, pay that (while high) doesn’t fairly reflect a realistic fraction of the monetary value you actually contribute to the business.

Jobs at most well-known tech companies are really dumpster fire terrible things, bad for basic psychological health.

It’s sad that we consider getting these jobs a serious measure of any kind of success.

But how do you know where your bar is if you think your rejection is merely a result of companies not knowing any better. Maybe you are not really good enough to work at google.

Max Howell's story really surprises me. You would figure that someone would've internally fast tracked a developer like him.

I'm 36, recently moved to Berlin. I have 10 years of working experience from tiny to big companies working as android developer, front-end and interaction designer.

For some reason I'm struggling a lot to find a job in Berlin. Most of the CVs I've sent never get an answer, those who get there ask me for a phone interview which that I never get through. They always answer me with a copy-pasted template from the Internet.

This is some feedback I got from other people after checking my CV

  - I'm too creative for "normal jobs" but not creative enough for the creative ones

  - My last 2 years I worked as a freelancer and German companies don't like that

  - I don't show consistency in tech stack

  - I'm in the verge of getting old

Whatever the reason is, it's very frustrating. Drains my energy and willingness to keep working in the sector.

(update: formatting)

whole lot of "suck it up" type of rationalization here, over a system that is quite obviously broken.

You may not have been rejected because of your technical skills, but because of your soft-skills.

A large part of our hiring process involves deciding if you think you can work with this person day to day and if you think they'll fit in the company culture.

Seems like a lot of these people who are getting rejected end up at Twitter.