Ask HN: 50 job applications, 15 interviews, 7 onsites, and no offer – what next?

Talent x effort = skill

Skill x effort = achievement

Grit is required in life. Watch out for claims of otherwise

Grit is not just working hard, but sticking to it for months. Doing what you love and staying in love.

There's a pyramid of goals. Concrete ones on the bottom, like getting up at 8am. As you move up, it gets more abstract. The very top one is the ultimate goal. Grit is holding the same ultimate goal without changing for a very long time.

Grit means doing mid and lower level support goals. "Positive fantasizing" (not focusing on lower and middle level goals) is people without grit do. Short term payoff is feeling good with long term cost of failing.

Story of Buffet's advise: write down 25 career goals. Circle top 5 and do them. Actively ignore others as distractions. Point is time is limited.

Expect to change low level goals. Keep the ultimate goal in mind. Improvise, adapt, overcome.

Grit grows. 70 year olds grittier than 20 year olds. Grit can change.

Grit stages: interest (love doing), practice to be better (improve) than yesterday for years (zero in on weakness), purpose so that work matters (to me and others), and hope (in every stage) so that we get up when knocked down.

People are happier and perform better when their work fit their interest.

Practice: set a stretch goal in one weak area. Seek out challenges not yet met. Seek feedback on what's wrong. Repeat.

Deliberate practice at most one hour at a time, 3-5 hours per day. Deliberate practice is not the same as flow. Challenge above skill level. Requires a lot of effort.

Grittier people experience more deliberate practice and flow. Practice is not supposed to be fun. More effortful practice is more enjoyable (thrill of getting better).

Flow is when not analyzing because most feedback are positive. Deliberate practice is for preparation and flow is for performance.

Quality of deliberate practice is more important than length. 3-5 max hours per day.

Develop a habit of practice, a routine. The author describes rereading last days draft to start off the day. If there's a routine, getting started to practice is easy to start.

Don't be ashamed to make errors. Important to practicing. Emotion-free mistake making.

Purpose starts off selfish, but later must effect other people. Evolutionary roots in both for happiness. People who cooperate are more likely to survive than loners.

Reflect how work help society.

Hope in grit means believing my effort will make tomorrow better. Own efforts can improve the future. I resolve to make tomorrow better.

It isn't suffering that leads to hopelessness, it is suffering that one cannot control.

The optimist are just as likely to encounter bad events as pessimists. But optimists search for temporary causes for the suffering. Pessimists assume permanent causes to blame.

Pessimists say "I'm a loser", a permanent situation. Optimists say "I mismanaged my time," fixable issues.

Pessimists more likely to be depressed and less healthy.

Optimists think of failures as lessons.

Subjective interpretation to objective events give rise to feelings.

CBT aims to treat by helping people to think more objectives by observing self talk and change the bad behavior.

When you keep searching for ways to better the situation, you stand a better chance of finding them. When you stop searching, you are guaranteed to not find them.

Failure is a cue to try harder.

No road is without bumps. Having a growth mindset (believe intelligence is changeable), you believe you can learn to do better. Growth mindset students are much grittier. The opposite is a fixed mindset about intelligence.

People who believe it is their effort rather than natural talent are grittier.

People often have both mindsets. It's important to watch self when slipped up and bring the right mindset.

Grittierness requires recognizing that people get better.

The quote "what doesn't kill us makes us stronger" is only partially true. Only by believing we are in control to try to make things better is it the case. Finding a way out of the suffering is what makes us stronger.

Growth mentality leads to optimistic self talk, leading to perseverance over adversity. Starts with belief of being able to improve intelligence, which is proven true. Next is to practice optimistic self talk.

Best parenting style is authoritative and supportive.

Students with 2 years of the same extracurricular activity has higher grit and success later in life.

Rats that have to work to get food last longer at other harder tasks. Learned industrialness. Applies to humans.

Use group conformity to build grit by being around gritty people.

An interview process is a huge investment for a person, especially if it's face to face. We're talking hours, maybe days. Not giving feedback is really an insult.

A poor interview experience is a massive miss for a company. If they don't see that, then I'd take that as a bad sign. Equally, a good interview experience can be a huge positive.

Word will get around, and on Glassdoor. That's a very real risk, significantly more than the threat of litigation. This is expecially true in creative, engineering, etc roles.

The solution is good interview process and training, not a blanket no-feedback rule. That's a race to the bottom.

Candidates for product management, more than any of the other functions, are often strong but a wrong fit. PMs at B2B companies do very different tasks than PMs at consumer web companies. There are a lot of skills that go into product management, and different companies have very different opinions of their relative value. Look at the component skills: customer empathy, process refinement / project management, technical understanding, data manipulation skills, strategy/business, lateral/upwards management, and vision setting. For leaders, there's also org design and hiring. Almost nobody is super strong at all of these. Where are you strong and where are you weaker? What do the companies you're hiring for actually need?

I'd recommend getting tighter on your criteria for your next job. If you ruthlessly self evaluate, you'll probably realize there are only a few companies out there that can perfectly leverage your experience, so think about what you want to learn and consider lowering your "level" expectations (if you're looking at director positions, look at first-level manager or senior IC instead) to broaden your experience. 15 phone interviews to 7 onsites is solid, but 50 applications to 15 phone screens is low. Most companies are going to be very cautious when hiring external senior PM managers, so consider a stronger emphasis on networking to evaluate fit and the company's needs, so you can tailor your interview to demonstrate the right skills.

You said the feedback is often "interview for a different role". Did you interview for those other roles? What's different about those roles from the one you want?