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Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

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Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#21

Post by lkrubner »

I love this, but it could go even further:

Blaine Cook was "rejected" from Twitter after years of hard work. But he faced an insane scaling problem, and most of us would look bad if we faced the same set of problems.

Steve Jobs was "rejected" by Apple after years of hard work.

Or my all time favorite:

John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation (rather than the traditional animation techniques for which Disney was famous), then he became head of Pixar, which got bought by Disney, and which took over Disney's animation, and so now he is head of animation at Disney. They fired him, but now he is back, and now he is in charge, because he was right.

Lots of great people do great work and then get fired. Getting fired doesn't mean they were wrong. Sometimes it simply means they were too right, and nobody wanted to hear it.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#22

Post by volkadav »

gotchange wrote: post #11
jqm wrote: post #4

Looks like (so far) nearly half the people shown wound up at twitter. Apply to twitter first?

A very interesting phenomenon indeed that all these, excuse my French, "rejects" wound up at TWTR, can we deduce something concrete from this about the company's hiring policy or offerings quality?

Twitter didn't even send me a ping when a friend working there sent in my resume (for a role rhat at least on paper I'd be well suited for), but I'm moving through the interview process now with two of the GAFA constituents. shrug There's a big element of luck in this process, even if technical competence is a prerequisite.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#24

Post by kafkaesq »

andrewstuart wrote: post #3

I'm a recruiter and I sometimes say that "recruiting is the business of rejection". At any given moment I might have between 5 to 20 possible jobs that I'm searching for people for. In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants. It is incredibly hard to get anyone into a job and often great people are rejected for various reasons. The Business of Rejection - that's recruiting.

Reject all you want, but at least be classy about it.

A vast amount of empirical data suggests that recruiters are very, very bad at this.

And many companies, when engaging candidates directly, aren't much better.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#25

Post by kafkaesq »

andrewstuart wrote: post #5
copperx wrote: post #2

It's interesting how all these top companies insist on JS expertise, I didn't know that it was so important for an interview and that's something I need to work on.

If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting. If you have awesome, expert, deep, deep JavaScript then firstly you might as well be a unicorn but secondly, you will get a job.

If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting.

Not true. And weird, counterfactual statements like these are exactly why I don't like dealing with recruiters.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#26

Post by AznHisoka »

andrewstuart wrote: post #5
copperx wrote: post #2

It's interesting how all these top companies insist on JS expertise, I didn't know that it was so important for an interview and that's something I need to work on.

If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting. If you have awesome, expert, deep, deep JavaScript then firstly you might as well be a unicorn but secondly, you will get a job.

All those data science, machine learning, algorithms, database and devops engineers would disagree.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#27

Post by ddmma »

cryoshon wrote: post #6

Being rejected from the top tier of technology companies and then landing in another top tier company doesn't seem so much like a genuine expression of angst over rejection but rather a bitter leer. But sure, the way work rejection is delivered is typically insensitive, and getting rejected sucks-- companies have no compassion for assets they don't want to use, and it's dehumanizing to realize you are utterly replace…

Rejection as well failure is just feedback. We should not take it so personal but we build up expectations and project our selfs into that brand building stuff. The choosen ones must be selected and save the Zion or be part of it. What I've learned from my over 500+ jobs, accelerators, etc... Rejection is a fkin template! Move on fast and next time you'll reject them also ;)

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#28

Post by jondubois »

Interview processes are more about social skills than technical skill (even in engineering interviews). There is a huge amount of randomness involved - Maybe the HR person just didn't like your face!

It's mostly about understanding the company culture, reading the interviewer's face and trying to figure out what they want to hear as you go along (of course technical skills are a prerequisite).

The only time I didn't get an offer was because I asked for too much money. I think asking for more money is a good idea though; it weeds out all the frugal companies.

I think that if your success rate is 90%, it means you're not charging enough. You need to bring the price up and allow the success rate to drop - Then the average quality of offers will go up.

Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

#30

Post by techdragon »

andrewstuart wrote: post #13
techdragon wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good thing there's still going to be a future in non JavaScript web development. Bring on Web Assembly. Those who dislike what JS has become over the last 5-10 years will just use their own stuff and can finally just ignore JS completely.

Nothing wrong with JavaScript, as long as we are talking about ES2015. And even when WebAssembly comes along, the best language to program it in is one that naturally requires asynchronous programming, because web browsers are heavy on network traffic and UI interaction and both those things need asynchronous programming. Other languages like Python have asynch programming but I would suggest that the pervasive natur…

JavaScript is a perfectly fine language but...

I find the 'ecosystem' unpleasant.

Every time I turn to JavaScript for something, the barrier to entry for non trivial work rises. JavaScript feels to me... As a programmer working 8 hours a day in Python much significant portions of it doing Django, and a few hours a week learning Elixir, C and Rust...

Like the whole world is rolling up a giant katamari daciamacy ball, over the shiftiest powdery sand in an active earthquake zone. I try WebPack and its default behaviour is to turn my sass into JavaScript?! I stick with it and go looking for a plugin to keep the build products directory clean, I find one tiny plugin with a tiny documentation page that barely explains it, so I have to read the source code and experiment a bit before I discover how it works.

Then there is the mess of "which way do you load modules" mixed with the mountain of code that was written for global scope. "Oh just rewrite the code" ... I'm sorry I'm too busy writing new code to waste time rewriting all this other code just because everything is churning like sharks in a feeding frenzy.

/end js induced unhappiness rant

I'm really happy with my productivity pretty much everywhere else. JavaScript just gets more frustrating to work with every time I touch it. :-/ I actually enjoy writing pure stand alone browser JavaScript when I'm not working with any libraries, like I said it's a fine language, it's just the ecosystem that I have issues with.

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