Sometimes rejection comes from an inside company politics, like the person that is leaving is too stubborn to approve a replacement or something similar to "we decided not to hire her, because we think she won't fit our culture, but we can't legally justify it, so it's better to just write back that she can't code".
They Rejected Us
191–200 of 385 posts
Re: They Rejected Us
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
Despite their recent unpopularity, Facebook still has a high hiring bar and a talented software engineering workforce that will provide valuable career experience.
You have to wonder at what point an organization becomes so unpopular that it impacts someone's hiring prospects, even if they did a good job there. "June 2015 - May 2017: Migrated database to new platform, and re-engineered web presence for diversified global social network, resulting in 450% increase in engagement, and 23% ROI. Site: racistbastards.com "
The best engineer I knew at my last gig (a unicorn company we all use daily) worked at the major adult entertainment company for many years haha. Dude was a total family man by the time I met him and the nicest sharpest tech lead.
Re: They Rejected Us
#193The 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
On the other hand, if Facebook had hired him, it's unlikely he would have had enough freedom to create Whatsapp or anything like it. Even if Facebook knew what was going to happen, Facebook still made the right choice when they rejected him and later bought his company. Rejection can be a good thing for everyone.
That's assuming that some other app wouldn't have filled the messaging space.
Re: They Rejected Us
#194Max Howell's story really surprises me. You would figure that someone would've internally fast tracked a developer like him.
That one is famous. We had a quite lively discussion about it here shortly after the event. Edit: to this day I have no fucking idea what “inverting a binary tree” means, other than the interviewer was too proud to admit they made a mistake. Trees have two dimensions and “invert” is the one you can’t change.
It just means making
1
- 2
-- 4
-- 5
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--7
into
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-- 1
[union]
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- 2
-- 1
[union]
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-- 1
as one graph. I must say I'm surprised someone can't write this given enough time and proudly claim "they didn't hire me because I couldn't do this". Seems like CS 101 hw.
Re: They Rejected Us
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
The all day interview process selects for a kind of person who is confortable with arduous processes. With poor scalability. IMO any team with an SLA should be avoiding these people like the plague, because they will tolerate bullshit manual processes that take all day. They have no motivation to make foolproof automated processes with good visibility and repeatability. The smartest of them will fight attempts to cha…
My problem is that it's all cargo cult, and none of it is rationally thought through to pursue desirable qualities in an engineer. Even within Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, you're usually being interviewed by a fresh-out-of-school 20-something who has no idea how to do much of anything, let alone evaluate candidates fairly. And yes, they "train" these kids -- but you basically can't train someone to do som…
I get itchy when I get asked to write code that I would veto in a code review.
My internal dialog when asked things like a linked list or a hash table is "Oh god, does this mean they like code like this? I bet some 'clever person' at this company wrote their own hash table/event queue/template engine* and forces everybody else to use it."
* Unfortunately my current employer is just like this but I didn't pick up on that in the interview process.
Re: They Rejected Us
#196After 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.
Re: They Rejected Us
#197This is like It Gets Better, but for fragile software engineers who obviously are talented enough to make 6 figures some place else. I understand rejection can feel personal, especially when so much of your life and identity comes from the work you've put into mastering some field, but this doesn't seem like the healthiest mindset. I'm just leaving college now and don't have much of a perspective yet, but the applica…
Let me break it to you: This attitude exists everywhere. People compete to get into top companies, then compete for limited promotions to get into top positions, compete for the best spouses, etc.
Finding a spouse is not like applying for a job unless you are on the bachelor. You meet the person one on one and you don’t compete with anyone but your best self.
No one i ever dated with which I experienced some “competition” was a good match in the long run anyhow. YMMV I guess.
Re: They Rejected Us
#198Why most of these people have been rejected and then landed at Twitter?
Not sure this is a great signal for Twitter, just saying... Selection bias / confirmation bias might be at play.
Re: They Rejected Us
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
"possibly the most important piece of software on OSX" I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. Unless he was interviewing to be Google's next head of package management on OSX, I'm not sure why you think assessing him on something other than his useful side project is bad form. I'm also not certain how an answer being 'easily-googleable' makes it arbitrary or pointless. So…
> I'm earnestly trying to avoid downplaying his work, but it's only a package manager. I don't really know what to tell you, except I feel like you may be new to software engineering or have forgotten much of what goes into it. The vast majority of engineers at Google will never lead a software project with the utility and breadth of use as the most popular package manager for mac OS for almost a decade. Most enginee…
I think you answered it yourself. His skill set (running, managing, community, etc) are not what Google needs (as they see it). They need someone who "will contribute to a small portion of software that will be run by a large fraction of the planet's computers, but owning the architecture, project management, testing, community support, and coding? No."
Re: They Rejected Us
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is interesting because in reality JS is supposed to be easy. Since I've switched to Typescript, I've forgotten tons about Javascript and I don't care. Obviously I'm refreshed every time I check under the transpiler hood to see what's going on, but that's rare. JS always felt to me like a language wherein you didn't want to memorize all of it's arcane weirdness anyhow.
Typescript doesn’t do a lot of transpilation if your target is ES6.
True, but in TS I've found the code is structured differently, to the point where 'prototype' inheritance is effectively obfuscated.
The other thing I find odd is why employers care that someone has deep and existential knowledge of JS? Who cares? I would probably object to any of my devs moving into JS weirdness unless it was totally necessary. You want simple, clean and readable solutions to business (or technical) problems, not something fancy pants. Every bit of oddity / less common stuff introduced just increases risk.