Everyone’s been rejected – these are our stories

I love this, but it could go even further:<p>Blaine Cook was &quot;rejected&quot; 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.<p>Steve Jobs was &quot;rejected&quot; by Apple after years of hard work.<p>Or my all time favorite:<p>John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation (rather than the traditional animation techniques for which Disney was famous), then he became head of Pixar, which got bought by Disney, and which took over Disney&#x27;s animation, and so now he is head of animation at Disney. They fired him, but now he is back, and now he is in charge, because he was right.<p>Lots of great people do great work and then get fired. Getting fired doesn&#x27;t mean they were wrong. Sometimes it simply means they were too right, and nobody wanted to hear it.

I 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.<p>I&#x27;m now working for Google.<p>One thing I can tell for sure, specially after interviewing others. It&#x27;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.

This reminds me of an old zen tale:<p>&gt;There is a Taoist story of an old farmer who had worked his crops for many years. One day his horse ran away. Upon hearing the news, his neighbors came to visit. “Such bad luck,” they said sympathetically. “Maybe,” the farmer replied. The next morning the horse returned, bringing with it three other wild horses. “How wonderful,” the neighbors exclaimed. “May be,” replied the old man. The following day, his son tried to ride one of the untamed horses, was thrown, and broke his leg. The neighbors again came to offer their sympathy on his misfortune. “Maybe,” answered the farmer. The day after, military officials came to the village to draft young men into the army. Seeing that the son’s leg was broken, they passed him by. The neighbors congratulated the farmer on how well things had turned out. “Maybe,” said the farmer.<p>The point being that when you become so upset with being turned down for a certain job you are setting yourself up to be let down by missing the big picture. The reality of the big picture is you have no idea how something that might seem like a great success might lead to great failure, or great failure might lead to great success.

Eventually these folks got accepted though. I guess that&#x27;s the moral we&#x27;re supposed to take away from this: If you get rejected a lot, but you keep trying, you&#x27;ll eventually be accepted?<p>If so, that&#x27;s bullshit. The only reason we don&#x27;t see any examples here of people who <i>never</i> get accepted is because they&#x27;re invisible to the industry. Many of them probably ended up committing suicide or switching careers. (I&#x27;ve contemplated both more than I care to admit in polite company.)<p>We can&#x27;t all be winners.<p>(But by that logic, we can&#x27;t all be losers all the time either. You&#x27;re probably somewhere in between both extremes.)

I recently interviewed at very hot container startup. I had 1 phone screen, 6 on-sites, and 2 follow up phone calls. I did well in the phone screen to be invited onsite. Apparently, I did great on the 6 interviews onsite and then they wanted to have a follow up phone call with a manager (30 mins). That was positive too. But, the last phone call was set up with the SVP who determined that I was not a good &quot;culture fit&quot; after 30 mins on the phone. This in spite of me having had wonderful technical conversations and interviews (including coding) - which I apparently rocked- with 6 engineers and 2 managers, and having very highly relevant experience working in the cloud (orchestration and networking). The SVP just swooped in and decided I was not a good fit.<p>I simply don&#x27;t get interviews these days. Sigh! On to a better company.

Interview processes are more about social skills than technical skill (even in engineering interviews). There is a huge amount of randomness involved - Maybe the HR person just didn&#x27;t like your face!<p>It&#x27;s mostly about understanding the company culture, reading the interviewer&#x27;s face and trying to figure out what they want to hear as you go along (of course technical skills are a prerequisite).<p>The only time I didn&#x27;t get an offer was because I asked for too much money. I think asking for more money is a good idea though; it weeds out all the frugal companies.<p>I think that if your success rate is 90%, it means you&#x27;re not charging enough. You need to bring the price up and allow the success rate to drop - Then the average quality of offers will go up.

Companies keep files on candidates, which generally makes sense for tracking purposes, but they can be counter-productive at the big companies.<p>I go in and apply. I meet with 6 people out of thousands, representing 1-3 teams out of hundreds. It doesn&#x27;t work out, for any of &lt;n&gt; reasons, some of them just luck of the draw. But now my interview is in the system and will be forever referenced. I&#x27;m given a polite but non-informational &quot;it&#x27;s not a fit&quot; and sent off to a competitor.<p>Idea: Big companies shift to lighter-weight interviews which aren&#x27;t considered final. If you&#x27;re good enough to make it to on-site and it doesn&#x27;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.<p>This frequently happens with executive recruiting, but not at lower levels. At least, I haven&#x27;t seen it. Instead we get so many stories like on this website, where it should have been obvious just by CV&#x2F;portfolio alone that they were awesome developers.

I 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&#x27;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&#x27;ve seen this happen to good devs and I&#x27;ve been on the receiving end of it. - Hiring isn&#x27;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&#x27;t have the time (sometimes ability ) to build that trust.

It&#x27;s interesting how in our current time, if you work at Twitter, facebook, google, or a famous start up, it is synonymous to &quot;I made it&quot;.

It happens the other way around also.<p>In an interview for a CTO type position a while ago, the only technical member of the interview panel was visibly aghast that I had never made a bootstrap theme - which, despite me explaining where that sort of task fits into the webapp ecosystem to the others, had already rubbed off on the rest of the panel. The extensive team&#x2F;project building portfolio presented was irrelevant.<p>I thanked them for their time and didn&#x27;t call back as I&#x27;ve had my fill of toxic work environments out there.

Being rejected from the top tier of technology companies and then landing in another top tier company doesn&#x27;t seem so much like a genuine expression of angst over rejection but rather a bitter leer. But sure, the way work rejection is delivered is typically insensitive, and getting rejected sucks-- companies have no compassion for assets they don&#x27;t want to use, and it&#x27;s dehumanizing to realize you are utterly replaceable and plentiful as far as they are concerned.

The reason why there are so many rejections is because companies are trying to minimse the false positives instead of minimising the false negatives.

I&#x27;m a recruiter and I sometimes say that &quot;recruiting is the business of rejection&quot;.<p>At any given moment I might have between 5 to 20 possible jobs that I&#x27;m searching for people for. In a given week I might receive 1,000 applicants.<p>It is <i>incredibly hard</i> to get anyone into a job and often great people are rejected for various reasons.<p>The Business of Rejection - that&#x27;s recruiting.

I live in Zurich and I used to code for a living. Now, I hire engineers for different startups in Switzerland.<p>As I got deeper into IT-recruiting, I realised that candidate filtering at the top of the funnel is fundamentally broken. Especially in Europe companies expect a CS degree and don&#x27;t appreciate self-taught skills as much as in the US.<p>I am trying to change this. If you look for a tech-job in the most liveable city in the world, check out my story &quot;8 reasons why I moved to Switzerland to work in IT&quot; on <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@iwaninzurich&#x2F;eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to-switzerland-to-work-in-it-c7ac18af4f90" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@iwaninzurich&#x2F;eight-reasons-why-i-moved-to...</a> or send me a mail to the mail-address in my HN-profile.

Being rejected a few times this week, this makes me feel a bit better. For one interview ... my brain decided to take the day off ... nerves I guess ... it was not pretty. Any who (sic) ... the show must go on ... back at it tomorrow morning wish me the best.

Twitter - where most of these rejected people ended up?..

Someone I know at Facebook said that they have something called &quot;Overheard at Campus&quot; or something like that, where people post funny things they hear on campus. They said that recently one of the posts was: &quot;I am going into an interview. I am pissed. It&#x27;s gonna be a reject from me.&quot; Which pretty much underscores how interviewing appears to be these days, especially at a company like Facebook.

Thank you for this site! I am going through the interview process now and there are times where I feel like a fraud. Some call this impostor syndrome. It&#x27;s encouraging to read others who have travelled the same path I&#x27;ve been on.

&gt; I was rejected at Amazon and other companies with no technical interviews because I wasn&#x27;t a Java engineer.<p>That one seems pretty legit to me.

It&#x27;s interesting how all these top companies insist on JS expertise, I didn&#x27;t know that it was so important for an interview and that&#x27;s something I need to work on.

I love how Facebook HR rejected one of my acquaintances and then after he asked &quot;Why?&quot;, the recruiter sent an email that was something along these lines: &quot;Ok, may I schedule a technical interview in a week?&quot;.<p>Eventually he ended up being an engineer there.<p>My experience and rejection also indicated there&#x27;s something arbitrary random going on in the interview process. Once a recruiter from Google commented my grades with a serious attidute, saying I should keep them as high (I was still a student) and I immediately realised that grades weren&#x27;t even checked because my grades were horrible (GPA&lt;3, ridiculous bible theology social classes ruined it for me) and if they cared I should get them higher.

It seems to me like that best predictor of whether you&#x27;ll get the thumbs up is social cues, rather than anything technical.<p>I went to an on-site at a major company, and there was a guy who just wouldn&#x27;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&#x27;t hard, but he dinged me.<p>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&#x27;d actually understood the problem correctly.

I was rejected for grad school after submitting half-hearted applications and now work as a fullstack Haskell developer. I didn&#x27;t even know I would find it as satisfying as research.

I just want to confirm the sentiment about how subjective interviewing is. I recently switched to using a coding challenge instead of a traditional interview loop. I would take candidates out for coffee pitch them the team and position, ask them some questions about themselves and then explain how the challenge would work. The first time I did this I decided to give everyone the challenge, even people I was sure were going to eat it, just to give myself some good data about how tough the challenge was and if it needed to be tuned. I was shocked by how bad my tech-radar really was. Not so much on the upper end, I can spot the winners still. However some of the people who I thought would eat it did a lot better than I thought they would. It made me realize how subjective interview loops really are, with little to no chance of the interviewer to be shaken out of their biases if they don&#x27;t want to be. Not that coding challenges are perfect, but I&#x27;m never going back. I will refuse to participate in interview loops now - on either end.

I&#x27;d guess that over my nearly 20 year career, I&#x27;ve been rejected from more companies than most HNers have even applied to. I&#x27;ve listened to tons of employers tell me what they think I&#x27;m not capable of, and that was back when you would actually get personalized feedback from a failed interview. My grades, my lack of a &quot;prestigious&quot; education, my technical skills, my people skills, my background, my previous employment history, my potential, and, of course, the catch-all &quot;cultural fit&quot; have all been used as reasons that Company X was sure I&#x27;m an idiot. I don&#x27;t let interview rejections bother me for even a millisecond anymore--it doesn&#x27;t mean anything whatsoever, and I&#x27;m convinced getting hired at any given company is more of a dice roll than anything else.

May be unrelated, but this is like my howihacked.info project that I launched three days ago, but with a different design and story focus. Anyway, I&#x27;m happy for that and these stories are cool as well. I&#x27;d suggest the story of the WhatsApp founder that wasn&#x27;t hired by Facebook. Kudos :)

The tiny 1 hour slot is not enough to judge candidates. As an interviewer, the best I can do is check if they communicate their ideas well and have they got done something interesting on their own.<p>It is sad that we still have to follow this broken process because of lack of any viable alternative.

Looks like (so far) nearly half the people shown wound up at twitter. Apply to twitter first?

As a current job seeker, this is doing wonders in helping me keep my head up.

It seems to me chasing &#x27;high profile&#x27; Tech company employment is setting yourself up for failure. Competing against thousand of applicants should not be viewed as &#x27;failure&#x27; it&#x27;s a mostly a number&#x27;s game. Not saying you shouldn&#x27;t apply to these companies, but you should also consider your odds and adjust your expectations accordingly. Also, we seem to identify way too much with the company we work for ... taking a step back from that helps balance your outlook.

Getting turned down always feels shitty, but I try hard to not take it personally.<p>The whole you rejected me, but haha I&#x27;m better off comes across as pretty self-centered and entitled.<p>-edit- removed question,more

Many years ago I had an interview for a job I really wanted - all day event with chats with multiple people including the CEO. Pretty sure it was my chat with the CEO that killed my application. I was absolutely gutted.<p>8 years later the same chap was the first angel investor in the startup I co-founded and worked with us as Chairman for a number of years before the company was acquired.<p>I never did ask him if he remembered rejecting me!

I can&#x27;t help noticing that a lot of people are from Twitter.

Rejected in 2009 != rejected in 2015<p>You have to consider the time dimension and boom-bust cycle.<p>&quot;I showed up at the store and they didn&#x27;t let me in.&quot;<p>&quot;Because it was closed!! You showed up at 3am!&quot;

To be honest, this wouldn&#x27;t make me feel much better after a rejection. I already know the process is sometimes arbitrary and up to luck.