> I was rejected at Amazon and other companies with no technical interviews because I wasn't a Java engineer.
That one seems pretty legit to me.
Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
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Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#72I was rejected by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Skype and many more companies. I got rejected by Apple 3 times and two times with Facebook and Google.
I'm now working for Google.
One thing I can tell for sure, specially after interviewing others. It's all random. Most of interviewers make their mind about the candidate in seconds. If you are a charming person you have a good chance. If you are not a very likable person you have a very small chance.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#73I love this, but it could go even further: Blaine Cook was "rejected" from Twitter after years of hard work. But he faced an insane scaling problem, and most of us would look bad if we faced the same set of problems. Steve Jobs was "rejected" by Apple after years of hard work. Or my all time favorite: John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation (rather than…
TBH, I don't think that Lasseter would be able to do what he did if he stayed at Disney. So one could argue that Disney's decisions were good for them in the long run.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#74Companies keep files on candidates, which generally makes sense for tracking purposes, but they can be counter-productive at the big companies.
I go in and apply. I meet with 6 people out of thousands, representing 1-3 teams out of hundreds. It doesn't work out, for any of reasons, some of them just luck of the draw. But now my interview is in the system and will be forever referenced. I'm given a polite but non-informational "it's not a fit" and sent off to a competitor.
Idea: Big companies shift to lighter-weight interviews which aren't considered final. If you're good enough to make it to on-site and it doesn't work out (but there was lots of reasons to think it would have), then you get happily scheduled for another round in a few weeks or whenever, and Company tries to not leave you with a stigma of rejection.
This frequently happens with executive recruiting, but not at lower levels. At least, I haven't seen it. Instead we get so many stories like on this website, where it should have been obvious just by CV/portfolio alone that they were awesome developers.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#75It seems to me like that best predictor of whether you'll get the thumbs up is social cues, rather than anything technical.
I went to an on-site at a major company, and there was a guy who just wouldn't smile. He also led me down the wrong way on the tech part, which is easy when you make zero facial gestures and talk like a robot. I figured it out eventually, it wasn't hard, but he dinged me.
With the other people it was just a breeze. We chatted about various low level performance things, about how the work environment is, and so on. The tech parts were easy, because you could tell whether you'd actually understood the problem correctly.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#76I was rejected by Adobe, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Skype and many more companies. I got rejected by Apple 3 times and two times with Facebook and Google. I'm now working for Google. One thing I can tell for sure, specially after interviewing others. It's all random. Most of interviewers make their mind about the candidate in seconds. If you are a charming person you have a good cha…
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Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#77The reason why there are so many rejections is because companies are trying to minimse the false positives instead of minimising the false negatives.
I am not sure why companies are so paranoid about false positives. Apart from the the lack of evidence that being extra picky is helpful, you can always fire if the candidate does not meet your standards. Be crystal clear about what you expect and cut if it is not met.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#78I have to say, after inheriting a code base from Max(@mxcl), its sad that anyone would reject him. Hes pretty much the guy that gave me the first sane introduction to cacoa programming. - That being said, I was rejected from a company because I hadn't used binutil in python. - I find I can pass any interview with a confident low voice more consistently than by showing my technical expertise. - People are interested in how well you assimilate into the culture of the workplace. Sometimes, that workplace culture needs to evoluve to include a more eclectic dev-background, or they risk alienating talented people. Alas, sometimes that evolution is not nessicary or its just to early for the company. - I've seen this happen to good devs and I've been on the receiving end of it. - Hiring isn't fun; you have to find someone who understands who you are. Inheriting trust is a lot faster then building trust and I find most companies don't have the time (sometimes ability ) to build that trust.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you have no JavaScript these days then largely you can forget job hunting. If you have awesome, expert, deep, deep JavaScript then firstly you might as well be a unicorn but secondly, you will get a job.
Should probably clarify that it's only important if you're looking for Web jobs :-) Sometimes people here forget there's more to software than the web.
I'm very much more on the data analysis side of things and decidedly not a web developer, but I still regularly get told "great work, can you display the data on a cool website?" In fact if I was hiring a new data analysis colleague I would very much prefer one who knew javascript for this very reason.
Re: Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories
#80I'm a recruiter and I sometimes say that "recruiting is the business of rejection". At any given moment I might have between 5 to 20 possible jobs that I'm searching for people for. In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants. It is incredibly hard to get anyone into a job and often great people are rejected for various reasons. The Business of Rejection - that's recruiting.
Reject all you want, but at least be classy about it. A vast amount of empirical data suggests that recruiters are very, very bad at this. And many companies, when engaging candidates directly, aren't much better.
Most recruiters are terrible. The other day I was asked to fill a form (skills, work experience, personal details, the whole thing - in great detail) before the recruiter would even tell me the name of the company he is trying to hire for. I knew arguing with him is futile, so I didn't. Job search in general is a depressing experience, even when it is easy. Good recruiters are extremely rare :(
My funniest experience with a recruiter - he called me up and tried to recruit me to the same company I was working for at the time.