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All my career rejections

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Re: All my career rejections

#151

Post by simonebrunozzi »

Interesting blog post; a far more interesting aspect, for me and my personal career at least, is the companies and interviews where the company did a really poor job and essentially wasted my time and/or pissed me off.

Without naming names, here's a couple of examples:

1) FAANG company: interviewed and received offers at two distinct times, which I rejected. Both offers where missing exactly what I had asked at the beginning of the interview cycle (salary was lower than my current; seniority level wasn't what I expected).

Third cycle of interviews, years later - rejected because they thought I didn't have enough experience in that specific role (been doing it very successfully for 8+ years at that point). Close friends in the industry couldn't believe it.

2) fast-growing startup: first interview with CMO, hoping to get a CTO-like, executive position (not to brag but please trust me that I abundantly had all the necessary skills and experience). Then I get to an interview with a very junior lady. After 30 minutes in the interview, I realize that something is wrong. I ask her if this is intended to be an interview for a job where I would report to her... Someone just fresh out of college, with a couple of years of working experience in a non-relevant field/company. WTF.

3) Three very, very successful YC companies: applying for a job and not even receiving an opportunity to interview, despite the obvious good match between my profile and the job itself.

4) Flew to an interview with company in Silicon Valley (soon to be acquired by FAANG-like), on my own dime, from another state in the US (domestic flight, a couple hundred bucks, took an entire day off for that). The motherf-er who was supposed to interview me didn't even show up, and never apologized.

Please, don't read the above as me being arrogant or have too high an opinion of my skills or my profile (you're still free to think so); these were really situations where it was far too obvious that the company and/or the interviewer didn't have any idea of what they were doing, or did a really poor job at handling the job process.

In fact, I also had my fair share of situations where I was rejected, etc, in which I happily admitted to myself that the company didn't do anything wrong, and that perhaps I wasn't a good match there after all.

I can easily think of a few more situations like the above. These things used to piss me off so much. Now, in hindsight, I see these as ways in which I have learned more about the IT industry, and how appearances often don't match reality. Not at cool startups; not at FAANG-like companies.

Re: All my career rejections

#152

Post by mr_gibbins »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #151

Interesting blog post; a far more interesting aspect, for me and my personal career at least, is the companies and interviews where the company did a really poor job and essentially wasted my time and/or pissed me off. Without naming names, here's a couple of examples: 1) FAANG company: interviewed and received offers at two distinct times, which I rejected. Both offers where missing exactly what I had asked at the b…

Often I remind myself that interviews are a two-way street - companies forget this, to their detriment. You are there to impress them, but they are also there to impress you - do you want to spend the next few years with them?

Companies who forget this by putting obstacles in the way - e.g. several, progressively more absurd, interview cycles, arbitrary whiteboard examinations and so on simply put off the most qualified and experienced.

Worst interview question I ever had? 'What is your opinion of the actor Kevin Bacon?'. What, are we in primary school? I thanked them for their time and ended the interview early.

Re: All my career rejections

#153

Post by dijit »

c-c-c-c-c wrote: post #129
dijit wrote: post #126

Here’s a weird anecdote. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a job I applied for (with the exception of my current job which I suspect was tailored for me and a colleague.) Nearly every job offer I ever got I was reached out to by a recruiter. It seems like, if I apply, I get blacklisted, but if I don’t apply a recruiter reaches out later and I often end up with an offer. This has happened with small and large companies.…

How do the recruiters find you on the internet?

Linkedin, mostly.

Re: All my career rejections

#154

Post by Aeolun »

CBLT wrote: post #149
Aeolun wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't have to have an optimal solution first. The problem is that they still want that optimal solution in the 30 minutes given to you. There’s no point in thinking about it unless you already know what they are looking for. Whoever thought up that alghorithm the first time certainly didn’t do it in 30 minutes during an interview.

> The problem is that they still want that optimal solution in the 30 minutes given to you. This is only half true in my opinion. A lot of the interview questions I've gotten are pretty straightforward, for example given two lists of length M and N, brute force searching their product space is O(M*N), but if you sort one list the complexity reduces to O(NlogN + MlogN). I get the impression that the interviewer did ex…

> I don't think this is easy, but it's not as impossible as you make it out to be.

How fast are you going to come up with sorting one or two lists if you don’t already know this is an option?

If I ever run into a situation where I need to do it in real life, it takes me all of two seconds to find, so the only thing being tested is if I’ve ever done that before (and still remember).

Re: All my career rejections

#155

Post by PhillyG »

beforeolives wrote: post #127
rd07 wrote: post #121

I have been working professionally for 3+ years in a single company. I've been lucky to have got this job without a test nor interview ( I was an intern there, and they offered me the job before my intern period was up). Recently, I feel bored there and tried to apply to another company. Currently, I am in the last stage of the test and it seems I will be able to pass it. But, I feel nervous to actually change my job…

> I don't know if I will actually be accepted there (there is a probation period of 3 months). Depending on where you live 3-6 month probation periods can be completely standard. If you get the job, you are accepted there. The probation period is just a window in which you and the company can separate with less friction. In most places it's a formality that you shouldn't worry about unless you're extremely underperfo…

Some companies, that struggle to get candidates, seem to use the probation period as a way of being able to hire people without properly testing skills first.

Re: All my career rejections

#156

Post by Aeolun »

p1esk wrote: post #139
Aeolun wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think that’s unbelievable? I’ve literally had a company recruiter tell me that I should probably spend a few hours on leetcode and hackerrank before the interview. That turned out to be predictive, because they rejected me mostly based on my inability to do well on those kinds of tests. I got a life people. Between taking care of my son, wife and work, where am I supposed to find ‘a few hours’ to spend on somethi…

You think that’s unbelievable? Google and Facebook recruiters told everyone at my university they expected people to spend 2-3 months of several hours a day leetcode type practice before applying. This was said in a panel type "how to get a job at FAANG" seminar for graduating seniors, with actual Google/FB SWEs present, and all nodding in agreement that this is the norm.

Lol, you win ;)

That sounds terrifying.

Re: All my career rejections

#157

Post by danjac »

120bits wrote: post #109

I did something similar last year after getting rejected by FAANGs and few more other tech companies. - Google rejected 3 times. - Facebook 2 times. - Amazon(AWS) 1 times. - Adobe 1 Times. - Twitter, Github, stripe and others won't even consider me good enough for an interview. - Dozens others companies, who do FAANG style interviewing. I fear rejections, no matter how much I "try" to act normal. I was looking forwar…

Small startup doing FAANG style interviews is like a small startup adopting microservices for their 3-developer team. More red flags than a Soviet May Day parade.

Re: All my career rejections

#158

Post by neilv »

Dzugaru wrote: post #148
neilv wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That time investment sounds like a tragic loss of open source development and random curious exploration by students. Maybe also quite a few lost innovative startups, which might've been spun out of students making things they want to make, rather than grinding just to prepare for interview rituals.

It can be a massive fun too. Ive never interviewed at FAANG, but solving some leetcode problems (mostly medium-hard though) was so cool for me and some of my friends. We were into olympic math at school, and I don't consider that a waste of time as well.

Good point. Practicing those exercises for sports-like competitions sounds great for people who want to do that for its own sake.

But there seems to be a large societal opportunity cost to everyone spending several months practicing doing that on a whiteboard, specifically for job interviews.

Re: All my career rejections

#159

Post by joelbluminator »

120bits wrote: post #109

I did something similar last year after getting rejected by FAANGs and few more other tech companies. - Google rejected 3 times. - Facebook 2 times. - Amazon(AWS) 1 times. - Adobe 1 Times. - Twitter, Github, stripe and others won't even consider me good enough for an interview. - Dozens others companies, who do FAANG style interviewing. I fear rejections, no matter how much I "try" to act normal. I was looking forwar…

Do u feel u improve or just get less confident after a failed interview? I sometimes actually improve after a bad technical interview but if the interviewer is impatient/nasty it can really decimate my confidence and hurt the chances I'll try again soon.

Re: All my career rejections

#160

Post by CBLT »

Aeolun wrote: post #154
CBLT wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that they still want that optimal solution in the 30 minutes given to you. This is only half true in my opinion. A lot of the interview questions I've gotten are pretty straightforward, for example given two lists of length M and N, brute force searching their product space is O(M*N), but if you sort one list the complexity reduces to O(NlogN + MlogN). I get the impression that the interviewer did ex…

> I don't think this is easy, but it's not as impossible as you make it out to be. How fast are you going to come up with sorting one or two lists if you don’t already know this is an option? If I ever run into a situation where I need to do it in real life, it takes me all of two seconds to find, so the only thing being tested is if I’ve ever done that before (and still remember).

> How fast are you going to come up with sorting one or two lists if you don’t already know this is an option?

Why would I not know this is an option? The word "sorting" appears in every single study guide I've seen. It's used as part of a solution in a large number of practice problems. I'm legitimately curious about what study materials you've used that leaves you uncomfortable with sorting.

EDIT: I might've misunderstood your question. When Amazon asked me this interview question, I'd never seen it before and didn't know beforehand what to do to solve it. I thought to try sorting a list within the first minute of working on it, because that's what you do with Leetcode style problems. I had prepared before the interview, so "let's try sorting" was not a stroke of brilliance it was a basic attempt to use a common tool.

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