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They Rejected Us

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Re: They Rejected Us

#301

Post by rococode »

giarc wrote: post #282
robocat wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Ian's case, maybe they found people with better HTML5 qualifications, or more likely they found people with the other x relevant skills needed for the programme.

I agree, this is definitely one of those times where we only have one side of the story. I think they are humorous but likely not a real commentary on hiring practices.

Right, it's easy to make fun of the interviewers, but it seems incredibly unlikely to me that they would miss something like that on a resume (or that the interviewee would fail to bring it up). It's more likely that they just wanted someone who met some very specific requirements, and the people who were rejected simply failed to meet those requirements, even though they were possibly overqualified in other aspects.

Re: They Rejected Us

#302

Post by saidajigumi »

davnicwil wrote: post #147
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…

Yeah, I like the idea of this site but was disappointed to find most of the entries being something like I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y but then eventually got a job at Fashionable BigCo Z Which is great, it really is, but not really all that interesting (sorry!). You've only been rejected in a very narrow sense. Everyone has an off day, or off interviews. You were actually accepted by the mainstream, ev…

Vital meta lesson from this:

I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y but then eventually got a job at Fashionable BigCo Z

When we see that repeated for many successful people, I hope the takeaway becomes: your interview process is probably not doing what you think it is. In some cases this extends to the entire work culture. E.g. workplaces that situate themselves in a mindset equivalent to "we must hire the best unicorns to possibly succeed". Other, better ones instead try to embody "we will continually improve our hires. we will help make them great. (oh, there are no unicorns.)"

Re: They Rejected Us

#303

Post by bradleyjg »

saidajigumi wrote: post #302
davnicwil wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I like the idea of this site but was disappointed to find most of the entries being something like I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y but then eventually got a job at Fashionable BigCo Z Which is great, it really is, but not really all that interesting (sorry!). You've only been rejected in a very narrow sense. Everyone has an off day, or off interviews. You were actually accepted by the mainstream, ev…

Vital meta lesson from this: I was rejected by Fashionable BigCo X and Y but then eventually got a job at Fashionable BigCo Z When we see that repeated for many successful people, I hope the takeaway becomes: your interview process is probably not doing what you think it is. In some cases this extends to the entire work culture. E.g. workplaces that situate themselves in a mindset equivalent to "we must hire the best…

Do you suggest always hiring the first person that applies? There has to be some choosing function.

Re: They Rejected Us

#304

Post by james_s_tayler »

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

But isn't that the optimal outcome because $19B dollars indicates it was clearly very valuable to Facebook and it's not likely he would have created it if he was working full time at Facebook.

That there is a stunning amount of randomness in hiring is, I think, by design.

Re: They Rejected Us

#305

Post by pedrosorio »

ghaff wrote: post #228
vonmoltke wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have seen several ex-colleagues do that sort of thing with no or very few rejections in the process.

They had to interview and receive offers from several companies though. I imagine the number of people that can just "send out a few emails" to get that result is very limited.

Re: They Rejected Us

#306

Post by monocasa »

gaius wrote: post #222
hinkley wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You won't because it's a toy problem, not because it something only greybeards did in libraries written decades ago.

Asking someone to describe the simplest possible transformations on one of the simplest data structures isn't a stretch, and this is coming from someone without a CS degree.

EDIT: And that's not to say Google doesn't have a screwed up hiring system. I know someone who implemented a dynamic programming problem correctly, with the appropriate big O complexity, but was rejected because the constant time factor was slightly higher than what the interviewer was looking for. That's a BS decision; Max Howell's was not.

Re: They Rejected Us

#308

Post by saagarjha »

crunchlibrarian wrote: post #235
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…

I'm pretty proud of how I got rejected from Google, how I laid into several of their products as bad and slow and missing important features. Now that they've incorporated most of my feedback into those products I go around and brag about how mad everyone got when I dared to criticize the holy Google during the interview.

It really depends on how you spun your criticism. If you just started spouting assertions as to why the product your interviewer worked on is irredeemably horrible, you're not going to get a job.

Re: They Rejected Us

#309

Post by saagarjha »

hartator wrote: post #262
yongjik wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he couldn't remember some useless piece of easily-googleable (ha) CS trivia on the spot. Or that's what he claimed. > Even though they all run it internally. That's what he claimed as well. But never heard of Homebrew while I was at Google, though I had a Macbook for 5+ years. (Well I can't definitely say my Macbook never ran Homebrew - after all, when you are in Google, all such things are handled by dedicated tea…

Hum, how can you do development work with HomeBrew? You install packages one-by-one?

There are other package managers on macOS, such as MacPorts and Fink. And you don't need to use a package manager to install software.

Re: They Rejected Us

#310

Post by hinkley »

gnulinux wrote: post #194
hinkley wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 - 3 --7 into 7 - 3 -- 1 [union] 5 - 2 -- 1 [union] 4 - 2 -- 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.

Reversing a tree (max element on the left) is absolutely CS homework (though probably 201). I'm sure I had to do that at least once or twice. But you can also avoid that most of the time by writing a second in-order traversal algorithm that runs from right to left.

But why would I need a data structure where I have the elements by the leaves instead of the roots? Make the nodes doubly linked (parent element) and you get the same effect without all the grandstanding.

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