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They Rejected Us

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Re: They Rejected Us

#21

Post by sailfast »

dijit wrote: post #10

This implies that there's a stigma to being "rejected" for a role. The answer is that you're not entitled to a role, just like a company is not entitled to have you. There's no stigma in saying "You're not exactly what we're looking for right now", even if it's the case that you might be _really great_ somewhere else or even ideal for that exact role in future. I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" pers…

I totally agree with your sentiment and aspire to a more stoic / optimistic approach, but personally have found it difficult to avoid taking things like this a bit personally - especially when you're excited about the potential role, think you'd be a great fit and you believe the company may have gotten a bad read on you.

Re: They Rejected Us

#22

Post by k__ »

How many people got rejected and ended up in a worse job than the one they applied for, or in no job at all?

Re: They Rejected Us

#23

Post by ghaff »

untog wrote: post #12
dijit wrote: post #10

This implies that there's a stigma to being "rejected" for a role. The answer is that you're not entitled to a role, just like a company is not entitled to have you. There's no stigma in saying "You're not exactly what we're looking for right now", even if it's the case that you might be _really great_ somewhere else or even ideal for that exact role in future. I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" pers…

> I don't understand people who take a "no thank you" personally Probably because they've been personally rejected for a job. I get what you're saying in the context of one job, perhaps when you already have experience. But when you're just starting out and get rejected repeatedly, of course it's disheartening.

Maybe things are different today but I remember applying to jobs out of school as being very much a numbers game. I'm sure I had dozens of rejections and those are just the ones that got back to me. By contrast, every subsequent job (well, all three of them) came from very narrow targeting and my personal network.

Re: They Rejected Us

#24

Post by jakeinspace »

This 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 application/rejection treadmill feels a lot like a continuation of academic external validation. Just substitute Google and Facebook for Harvard and Stanford.

Re: They Rejected Us

#25

Post by mountainofdeath »

The majority of these are "I was rejected from a tier-1 company, got a job at tier-2 company". I wouldn't read to deep into this. The second tier companies live and die by how much effluent from first tier companies they hire.

Re: They Rejected Us

#26

Post by Chabs »

unkani wrote: post #3

I'm really surprised at how they managed to get so many big names from the open source community to share their stories. Maybe success isn't tied to grinding out a bunch of leetcode?

Hot take: success is almost always accompanied by a healthy dose of survivor bias. For each of these success stories, there are a lot of good people who did the exact same thing, but it didn't pan out because of timing, location, or other similar factors.

Re: They Rejected Us

#27

Post by salawat »

dionian wrote: post #15

If there are two good candidates and I pick one of them, it doesn't necessarily mean you were 'rejected', you just weren't selected. I've been 'rejected' by plenty of companies but I try not to take it too personally.

Passive voice. This is the type of weasel language that people try to use to make themselves feel better about what they did. Unless you cleverly redefine rejected to have some additional baggage, the phrase 'not selected' and 'rejected' are semantically equivalent.

At least do the people you don't pick the courtesy of owning up to your decision.

Re: They Rejected Us

#28

Post by pcmaffey »

code_duck wrote: post #5

Seems like a lot of people went on to be hired by twitter after not satisfying some other hiring processes. What if this just means that twitter hires second rate people? Also, I wouldn’t have hired the guy who doesn’t use semicolons in his JavaScript, either.

I used to hate when I saw JS with semicolons too. "Get off my lawn" with that naked code!

Not sure when or how it changed, but I'm on the other side of the fence now. Without semicolons (unless multi-statements on a single line), JS is so much cleaner. A line break is perfectly sufficient to signal the end of a statement.

Re: They Rejected Us

#29

Post by drharby »

jakeinspace wrote: post #24

This 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…

This is sage insight i feel many think "well duh" but sometimes still forget.

Re: They Rejected Us

#30

Post by mountainofdeath »

jakeinspace wrote: post #24

This 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.
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