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They Rejected Us

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Re: They Rejected Us

#221

Post by sjg007 »

giarc wrote: post #156
sho wrote: post #103

I still can't get over the fact that Google rejected mxcl, author of homebrew, possibly the most important piece of software on OSX, because he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. Even though they all run it internally. If that isn't the purest, most concentrated form of arbitrary, blind, own-goal beaureaucratic corporate idiocy I don't know what is. And people actual…

Similar to this one. Sebastian McKenzie @sebmck Facebook Got rejected from a junior position at Atlassian for not knowing enough about JavaScript. Shortly after they now use the JavaScript compiler that I wrote across most of their JavaScript stack. Or Ian Devlin @iandevlin Trivago Rejected by the Google HTML5 Developer Expert programme for not knowing enough about HTML5. Apparently being one of the HTML5 Doctors, wr…

This shows how broken interviews are. I mean the biggest example is the What’s app founder who was rejected from Facebook and then sold his company to Facebook for a lot of billions.

Re: They Rejected Us

#222

Post by gaius »

hinkley wrote: post #82
swampthinker wrote: post #48

Max 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 means to reverse it left-to-right, like a mirror.

You will never have to implement this yourself for real.

Re: They Rejected Us

#223

Post by duxup »

rebeccaskinner wrote: post #190
duxup wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I think beyond "can communicate / not a jerk" culture has just been a placeholder for personal bias.

I think cultural fit is frequently used as a stand-in for bias, but there are other important cultural factors beyond just ability to communicate that can effect how well someone will do in a job. Legitimate cultural fit things usually have to do with how teams divide responsibility, how they collaborate on work, and preferences in styles of communication. If you have a team that tends to assign some individual work…

I find some of those items strange strange such as "how teams divide responsibility, how they collaborate on work, and preferences in styles of communication"

That's just doing the job. If company does X, then I do X.

I know folks have strong opinions on it but I've found there are many ways to do various tasks and as long as everyone works together in an expected manner... it's my job to do it that way.

Re: They Rejected Us

#224

Post by stagger87 »

dwild wrote: post #217
tlackemann wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's exactly why I would never apply for Google. Despite me having years of leading product teams and enterprise applications, the fact that I need to "study" for an interview is asinine.

> Despite me having years of leading product teams and enterprise applications, the fact that I need to "study" for an interview is asinine. You no longer study? You stopped any form of education? I have an hard time believing that's actually true, but if it is, I guess you aren't a good fit for them either. I read on new technologies constantly, I learn new languages constantly, I haven't gone to any formation yet (…

"You no longer study?" This is a straw man. It is clear from the context of the discussion that 'studying' refers to the study of algorithms/data structures/etc that is typically questioned in CS job interviews.

Re: They Rejected Us

#225

Post by sjg007 »

rb808 wrote: post #39
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…

Is facebook a good bar now? I was thinking facebook isn't so popular, you really want SpaceX or something "better" now. All you validation seekers have to move!

Work somewhere on something you would enjoy. Also build out your network.

Re: They Rejected Us

#226

Post by gaius »

ryandrake wrote: post #19

As someone who's gotten rejected by more companies than I can even count or remember, I think this is great. I have a bitter, guilty fantasy that I could go back to some of those harsh rejections long ago and show them the updates to my resume since they declared me useless. I wonder if/how companies try to measure their false negative rate. Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep say…

Guys like Spolskey did enormous harm to the industry by pushing this inane meme that a single bad hire will destroy the company overnight. It just isn’t true. The vast majority of work doesn’t need a superstar, it just needs basic competence and a good attitude. And probably most of the candidates you interview can do the actual job.

Plus it just isn’t plausible that the finest developers in the world were flocking to work on a web based project management tool so how was he an authority anyway...

Re: They Rejected Us

#227

Post by dwild »

voqv wrote: post #118
myth_buster wrote: post #90

The 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

It could mean though, that he's a very good tech entrepreneur, but Facebook was hiring him for software engineering, and he didn't meet the standards.

There's something that I learned too about entrepreneur, once their company is bought, they usually don't stay long, often they only stay the length required by the contract. Sure money is a factor, but usually, an entrepreneur wants/needs more than a simple job.

Brian Acton himself left 3 after later, months before all his options vested. In his case it was about Whatsapp monetization, but it's in the same vein (lost of control of the company).

Re: They Rejected Us

#228

Post by ghaff »

vonmoltke wrote: post #138
eqdw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it feels like they want medals for getting rejected at companies that haven't even bothered to give me a callback. We all get rejected from dozens of interviews. That's just life. Did anybody ever think it wasn't like this?

> We all get rejected from dozens of interviews. That's just life. Did anybody ever think it wasn't like this? Based on how this industry carries on about "talent shortages" and "lack of good engineers", yeah.

That and the fact that you get no shortage of people essentially making the claim that, if you have a pulse in Silicon Valley, you can send out a few emails and have a new job paying $300K by the next Monday morning.

Re: They Rejected Us

#229

Post by williamstein »

ams6110 wrote: post #70
eqdw wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah it feels like they want medals for getting rejected at companies that haven't even bothered to give me a callback. We all get rejected from dozens of interviews. That's just life. Did anybody ever think it wasn't like this?

When I was a senior at university, my friends and I all had a wall at our apartments covered with our rejection letters. Back then (if they gave you the courtesy of a reply) they were sent on paper in the mail. So yes, it's always been that way. I myself have been on interview committees and voted to reject candidates who got hired, and turned out to be good. Why did I want to reject them? Don't really know, just got…

I did this when I was a math undergrad applying for grad school. I applied to 15 graduate programs and got into 10, and rejected by 5. The surprising pattern was that I got into a graduate program if and only if it wasn't in the Northeast; selectivity of the program didn't seem too relevant. After graduate school, for my first job I ended up being on the graduate admissions committee at the Harvard Mathematics department and got to see things from the other side, where you receive 400 incredible applications, and can say yes to less than 1% of them. In that setting exactly what you wrote "Decisions were mostly based on..." applied just the same.

Re: They Rejected Us

#230

Post by tlackemann »

dwild wrote: post #217
tlackemann wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's exactly why I would never apply for Google. Despite me having years of leading product teams and enterprise applications, the fact that I need to "study" for an interview is asinine.

> Despite me having years of leading product teams and enterprise applications, the fact that I need to "study" for an interview is asinine. You no longer study? You stopped any form of education? I have an hard time believing that's actually true, but if it is, I guess you aren't a good fit for them either. I read on new technologies constantly, I learn new languages constantly, I haven't gone to any formation yet (…

> You no longer study? You stopped any form of education?

Oh please.

I've always taught myself new concepts and am constantly reading books and learning new languages. Hell, I went from working in "big corporate" to starting my own business building video games, something I knew virtually nothing about because I was driven to do so. I learned Rust on my own, I taught myself 3D programming, I've taken classes on public speaking. These are things I didn't need to prove to anyone, I just felt motivated to because I felt it would benefit my career.

> Studying to pass their interview process is no different than studying to apply X new principle.

The fact there are websites dedicated to helping you study for Google's interview process means something is broken. You should be able to gauge a person's motivation and willingness to learn beyond knowing seven different algorithms from memory. If they want someone who can adapt, look to experience and have questions ready to prove that experience. I shouldn't need to recall information like flash cards. Applying to Google feels like studying for the SATs all over again.

Two cents. Google isn't for me despite feeling I could make a big impact there knowing my motivation levels and work ethic. I highly discourage anyone from adapting a similar interview process.

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