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They Rejected Us

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Re: They Rejected Us

#371

Post by unnouinceput »

ghaff wrote: post #334
unnouinceput wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. As becoming older you also get experience, experience very few have. I was at one meeting with several people from a company that hired me as external contractor and several people from their client company. And an issue arrived at the table, a technical issue none of their staffers or client's staffer could explain/solve (both technical and non-technical people were at that meeting). So they asked me t…

The flip side is that, if expertise in XYZ is no longer valued, that can be an issue. I've known people who were essentially the world experts in some narrow area of technology or business and that became irrelevant which was a tough situation to be in. It's easy to say that people should keep skills up-to-date but if you're truly a world-class expert in X, it's hard to transfer that level of skill to Y. That's a dif…

You misunderstood me. In my example XYZ was a combination of specific Windows API's to be called, not a technology. For the foreseeable future Windows is here to stay, and regardless of the programming language used if you learn its API's you'll be king.

Re: They Rejected Us

#372

Post by hinkley »

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…

I don’t think I’m against the algorithm part as strenuously as I am against the gauntlet part. You shouldn’t be locking someone in a room for 6-7 hours and then judging them on how they keep their cool, for many reasons, including those I mentioned above.

As I mentioned elsewhere I think you can ask questions that look like work but aren’t (go too far the other way and you’re into IP problems)

Re: They Rejected Us

#373

Post by hinkley »

fooddood wrote: post #367
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…

Can you please elaborate more on the Fire All Heroes philosophy? I looked into it and couldn't find anything describing it in depth

I’ve only met a couple people who say “fire”. That’s a little overwrought. The less dramatic version is “we are too big for heroes” which unpacks into something like this:

You don’t want an organization that relies on one or two or three people to swoop in and save the company every time there’s an emergency. A production issue should look like disaster preparedness. Document, train, drill, prevent.

More concretely, make the important parts as obvious as you can, as similar to production as you can, so anyone can set up a system and try to repro the problem. Config, build, and deploy should be push button (very robust scripts with every cheap sanity and safety check you can manage). No flakiness is okay. Nor obscurity. Everybody should understand how it works.

Document everywhere diagnostic data comes from and goes to. Don’t let your most senior people solve production issues; assign them to people one step down (and throw in some promising mid-level team members for diversity and longevity). Five why’s every outage and be sure your resolutions always involve making the problem easier to detect next time, not just prevent.

Re: They Rejected Us

#374

Post by tathougies »

gdy wrote: post #361
tathougies wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seriously though. The issue is tying your self-worth to getting accepted be facebook, apple, google, etc. A healthy person, when rejected from a company, realizes that the company did not need their skills at this time. This says nothing about the quality of their skillset, just that it's unneeded. Sort of how, if Linus Torvalds himself showed up to a frontend development interview, he probably wouldn't get the job.

A 'healthy person', to use your term, after rejection would realize where her skills are lacking and work or study hard to improve her skills, not delude herself like you suggest.

That's only an appropriate reaction, if your skills are lacking. If your skills are not lacking, then they're likely unneeded by the people you applied to and you should find a better market fit.

The issue here is that you've made 'get this job and only this job' as your goal. That is an unrealistic goal, because it is unnecessarily tied up with a particular company. My goal when looking for work is to find an opportunity where my skills fit into someone else's need, and then milk the economic differential until such time as my skills are no longer needed, or I have a buyer somewhere else.

I suppose neither one is 'right' in the moral sense. But I think mine leads to greater happiness and satisfaction, so...

Re: They Rejected Us

#375

Post by apersona »

vonmoltke wrote: post #369
dehrmann wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

> Candidates can be perfectly capable and qualified, but have work style, or even values, that don't align with the company. That is the candidate's decision to make, not the company's.

Why do you think it's not both? If you were running a startup (company), hiring people who match your team's work style and values is as important as capability.

Re: They Rejected Us

#376

Post by jazzdev »

ralmidani wrote: post #364
mikekchar wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A couple of pointers to help you forward. First, don't give up. Keep building up your experience and portfolio. To be honest, Fullstack Academy graduate means to me that you're completely entry level. That's fine, but when I'm hiring I almost never want entry level people. And even if I do want entry level people, I've got about 1000 CVs from people to choose from (and that is not an exaggeration). Landing that first…

Thank you for your honest advice! It's great to learn about the thought processes going on at the "other side of the table." Some more context which clarifies my decision to "pave my own road": -Before Fullstack Academy, I founded/co-founded two startups (we succeeded in building the products, but failed at marketing). I've also taken some actual CS courses. Bootcamp filled gaps in my knowledge and taught me how to c…

If you're willing to put the time in, use your network to find someone that works at company X. LinkedIn is good for this. You can even send a link request to someone on LinkedIn that works there. But don't use the default, "I'd like to connect." Say, "Company X looks cool because ... - Do you have time to meet for coffee and tell me how you wound up there?"

Re: They Rejected Us

#377

Post by IggleSniggle »

hinkley wrote: post #195
timr wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem is that it's all cargo cult, and none of it is rationally thought through to pursue desirable qualities in an engineer. Even within Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft, you're usually being interviewed by a fresh-out-of-school 20-something who has no idea how to do much of anything, let alone evaluate candidates fairly. And yes, they "train" these kids -- but you basically can't train someone to do som…

I get itchy when I get asked to write code that I would veto in a code review. My internal dialog when asked things like a linked list or a hash table is "Oh god, does this mean they like code like this? I bet some 'clever person' at this company wrote their own hash table/event queue/template engine* and forces everybody else to use it." * Unfortunately my current employer is just like this but I didn't pick up on t…

You and me both. And it feeds itself, too, because every line of code is an opportunity to reinvent the wheel or do something clever (it sometimes seems like they want to see that, or else this class of question wouldn’t be asked??).

Re: They Rejected Us

#378

Post by SamvitJ »

pmiller2 wrote: post #353
SamvitJ wrote: post #288

From later down in the list: "Applied to the Harvard Business School as a Stanford honors grad with a 740 GMAT, no interview. Was rejected from Airbnb for a customer support role and later was passed over for a PM role at Google after 2 phone screens. I've cofounded Y Combinator startup (Ridejoy YC S11)... Today I'm a product manager at Etsy. Timing and fit are everything." This is literally the worst rejection story…

Worst in what way?

Not getting an interview from HBS as "a Stanford honors grad" is the worst rejection he's ever experienced? The whole post reeks of humble brag.

Re: They Rejected Us

#379

Post by IggleSniggle »

ravenstine wrote: post #328
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your first job is your job, your second job is working on OSS on github to make yourself look good, and your third job is interviewing :^)

> your second job is working on OSS on github to make yourself look good Sounds good on paper. In practice, what people do on Github is worthless . I've only one company ever actually looked at what I made on GitHub. Otherwise, they'll never check out what I've done even if a project is listed on a resume. Nobody has the time or amount of shits to give to actually review your own code. Very few people I know who are…

I’m not frequently involved in hiring, but when I’m looking at a resume for a potential coworker I will check their github. If it’s shit, that doesn’t matter at all to me, but if it has some neat stuff I will look deeper, and the bar for “interview” and “hire” can be substantially lowered for the in-person interview.

Basically, I’m looking for good signal, but that can show in a lot of different ways for different people. If OSS or side project or whatever is something you enjoy doing, or if you’re not working full time and struggling to prove that you can bring the goods, these sorts of things can help you.

Re: They Rejected Us

#380

Post by gdy »

tathougies wrote: post #374
gdy wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 'healthy person', to use your term, after rejection would realize where her skills are lacking and work or study hard to improve her skills, not delude herself like you suggest.

That's only an appropriate reaction, if your skills are lacking. If your skills are not lacking, then they're likely unneeded by the people you applied to and you should find a better market fit. The issue here is that you've made 'get this job and only this job' as your goal. That is an unrealistic goal, because it is unnecessarily tied up with a particular company. My goal when looking for work is to find an opport…

Don't you think that people usually apply for positions that match their skillset?
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