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They Rejected Us

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Re: They Rejected Us

#341

Post by fenomas »

noitsnot wrote: post #316
smoyer wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well ... doing a little mental statistics it looks to me like you should just apply to Twitter in the first place if you never want to get rejected during your job search.

The abundance of Twitter picking people up after rejections is really odd to say the least.

It's not a random selection of stories, it's a list compiled by someone who used to work at Twitter, and presumably hit up friends and colleagues for stories.

In general, best not to draw inferences from data that wasn't randomly selected.

Re: They Rejected Us

#342

Post by sjg007 »

nojvek wrote: post #252
sjg007 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe.. but maybe he would have been on the Messenger team and made that What's App.

I doubt that. In most companies the Managerial chain kill bottom up innovation. There’s less than 1% chance Facebook messenger would be able to live to the philosophy of “no ads, no gimmicks, secure messaging” That’s why startups can disrupt. It really does reward bottom up innovation.

We are talking about a startup that sold to Facebook for $19 billion dollars whose founder was rejected by Facebook when he interviewed for a job there before he started what's app. I know this is make believe world but had Facebook hired him and had he worked on messaging I bet he would have beget a similar product (in make believe land). The problem most of us Americans didn't understand was that SMS cost money (in the rest of the world) and not in the USA. Most American text plans were free and unlimited in the beginning... that was until the US mobile networks caught on to the Europeans and realized they could charge per text. So that what made what's app. And FB could have saved themselves $19B.. still.. if you are right then he probably would have left FB and started What's app on his own.

Re: They Rejected Us

#343

Post by dang »

johnfn wrote: post #209
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 HN really to the point where we are upvoting posts dismissing real people feeling real feelings of inadequacy over some suggestion of “fragility”? Everyone can feel bad. Just because someone could get a job somewhere else doesn’t mean rejection doesn’t sting. That’s like saying that a breakup shouldn’t hurt because you can just get another girlfriend.

Dismissiveness and indignation routinely get upvoted. It's so reliable a pattern that I think it's hard-wired in people. Part of the task of moderating HN is to find ways to moderate that.

Re: They Rejected Us

#344

Post by gnulinux »

ghaff wrote: post #255
gnulinux wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As he says, he wasn't a CS major. I can totally relate. I had a pretty popular DOS shareware back in the day (along with some other things). But I wasn't a CS major and would not have been able to answer most algorithmic CS questions unless I had specifically studied them for the purpose of an interview.

Fine, but don't you think companies should have some filter to choose candidates? In my company I interview often, and most candidates don't know how to code. Asking CS hw questions is a signal that predicts if they can code or not. If you're not a CS major it's ok but in general if you can't figure this question in 15 mins I don't want you to push code to my codebase. Some level of competence is ok. And I don't even work in a FAANG this is a random no name startup in Boston.

Re: They Rejected Us

#345

Post by rifung »

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?

Besides iOS developers and maybe open source developers, people don't and aren't allowed to have code on their laptops at Google. You have to ssh into your desktop so presumably there's no reason to have Homebrew unless you're doing personal stuff.

Re: They Rejected Us

#346

Post by seanmcdirmid »

fenomas wrote: post #339
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It could also be that twitter has a better hiring process with fewer false negatives.

That's possible , sure, but the evidence here doesn't support that conclusion any more than it supports the reverse. When you have a small group of things that clearly weren't chosen at random, the safe bet is that they don't imply anything about the set from which they were selected.

The evidence doesn't support any conclusion really. We are just guessing. I'm merely calling what what A could be in A implies B.

Re: They Rejected Us

#347

Post by dehrmann »

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.

It's not just that. Candidates can be perfectly capable and qualified, but have work style, or even values, that don't align with the company.

Or they're not a good fit because the recruiter who found them isn't recruiting for a team where they'd be a good fit.

So it's not just they they weren't selected, they weren't selected for that role.

Re: They Rejected Us

#348

Post by hodgesrm »

mcguire wrote: post #329
hinkley wrote: post #144

Earlier 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…

The downsides of avoiding the algorithmic interview process is that you will end up hiring people who talk a very good game, but cannot write code to get out of a paper bag. One of the most painful interviews I have ever seen was a guy who had a resume listing a number of interesting projects. He could talk energetically and in detail about them. Then we asked him to write some code to solve a simple problem. He said…

This is a real problem. If you are hiring coders you have to have a couple people in the team go deep on coding chops to ferret out the charlatans. Personally I like to show people a piece of code from a big system they've never seen and let them walk me through what it does and what they would change to make it work better. Some teams I work with also give 'homework' exercises, which I believe is fairer than trying to do it in front of somebody else. (Unless that's how you actually write code on a day to day basis.)

Good interview processes reflect complementary broad and deep concerns. It's kind of analogous to the way a strong team is better than the sum its parts.

Re: They Rejected Us

#349

Post by nojvek »

sjg007 wrote: post #342
nojvek wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doubt that. In most companies the Managerial chain kill bottom up innovation. There’s less than 1% chance Facebook messenger would be able to live to the philosophy of “no ads, no gimmicks, secure messaging” That’s why startups can disrupt. It really does reward bottom up innovation.

We are talking about a startup that sold to Facebook for $19 billion dollars whose founder was rejected by Facebook when he interviewed for a job there before he started what's app. I know this is make believe world but had Facebook hired him and had he worked on messaging I bet he would have beget a similar product (in make believe land). The problem most of us Americans didn't understand was that SMS cost money (in…

There’s a reason why the founders quit even after Facebook bought them.

Facebook is a growth at any cost kind of company. They really wouldn’t have listened to him even if he joined Facebook in the first place.

The messenger on Android sends all your text messages and phone logs to Facebook. Mark approved that in the name of growth.

There’s absolute no way Whatsapp would have been invented at Facebook. Facebook only bought it because it could have been a serious threat to their dominance.

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