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All my career rejections

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Re: All my career rejections

#7
We should all post ours here. I'll start:

* Google * Amazon/AWS (interviewed by Jeff Barr and tbh, I was starstruck) * Cloudflare * EdgeCast * Twitter * GitLab * GitHub * Linux Foundation * Wikimedia * DigitalOcean * Snyk

Re: All my career rejections

#8
I entered the professional workforce in the fall of 2008, as the recession was in full force. I had a college degree, but no experience or resume of which to speak - and frankly, didn't know very much outside of academia. I was lucky enough to land a job, but was laid off in fall of 2009. I was poor, sleeping on an air mattress, and in my early 20s, but determined to get a job as a software engineer, even if it meant taking a non software job for a while. This was before I knew that job-recruiters were a thing, or how to make connections with them, and before Linked-In had taken off. I made sure to apply for 10 jobs online, by going to companies "apply" pages, every-singly-day. I did this for two full months (weekends excluded). That's 400 applications. I only got 5 interviews, and only 1 job offer. That's 399 rejections.

I'm doing well now - but those were rough times for me. When my teenager feels rejected (e.g. not making the team), I always tell them that rejection is always a bummer, but not the end of the world. And I gently remind them of that story as a way of saying *"trust me, I'm not saying that as empty words; I do understand how it feels."

Re: All my career rejections

#9
Interesting to see the differences in people. I've had a long career with very few rejections, but it has a lot to do with the fact that I don't apply to places unless I am really confident I am definitely going to be the best candidate, and that's generally been true.

That said, I encourage folks on my team to interview regularly just to know how to value themselves and to see that there are other opportunities, and to just get practice interviewing and learning how other companies run the process.

My rejections:

- laid off from Red Hat post dot-bomb (I wasn't really trying to stay at the time) ~ 2003

- rejected for a sysadmin position at Blizzard in around 2003 or 4?

- rejected from a lot of PhD programs in Physics (I wasn't really trying that hard, see a theme, it's called cognitive dissonance!) ~ 2008

- fired from Quora (honestly really just ended up misaligned with my boss and career goals, they made the right call) ~ 2014

- rejected from Stripe with two personal referrals after the last stage of the interview. I was pretty bummed by this and had spent a month putting all my eggs in one basket to work there. This was 2014 so I also missed out on a nice bit of stock to be honest!

At my current company I feel like I finally had enough continuity to specialize a bit and become an expert in a field to feel comfortable with what ever may come next. I hope others can find that in their careers too.

Re: All my career rejections

#10
The essence of this article is wonderful!

I've been rejected quite a few times as well. This is in fact so inspiring that I will apply for another job that I most likely will be rejected from as well.

You cannot win if you don't play the game.

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