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.
I'm terrible at big tech company interviews--kind of a generalist, read Cicero rather than Knuth in college, tend to start out problems kind of muddled, etc. After a while I concluded the only way to get into large SV companies was to sell a company to them. It's easier to go through due diligence than the corporate interview process in a lot of places.
I spent most of my college evening getting drunk with philosophy majors and pretending my math degree meant more than my CS fallback -- but I haven't found the corporate interview system to be that terrible.
I do however think it's a game that conflicts with certain personality types, including myself early in my career.
I'm always curious what you (or anyone else!) think could be done better.
On the other hand, if Facebook had hired him, it's unlikely he would have had enough freedom to create Whatsapp or anything like it. Even if Facebook knew what was going to happen, Facebook still made the right choice when they rejected him and later bought his company. Rejection can be a good thing for everyone.
There's something that I learned too about entrepreneur, once their company is bought, they usually don't stay long, often they only stay the length required by the contract. Sure money is a factor, but usually, an entrepreneur wants/needs more than a simple job.
Brian Acton himself left 3 after later, months before all his options vested. In his case it was about Whatsapp monetization, but it's in the same vein (lost of control of the company).
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.
This really highlights how hard it is to hire, at least in Tech. We come up with processes and fantastic lists of questions that verify how well a candidate knows minutia, and use that as proxy for how well he/she will do in a position where the primary required skill is speed of learning and growth.
I'll hire someone who knows how to find out what they are missing over someone who knows a lot of details but can't grow. But that is hard to justify and involves risk: what if I misread someone's capacity to learn and I just hired somone without the skills nor the ability to learn? Joke's on me!
So larger orgs will naturally go for process-driven hiring practices, so they can cover their behinds (and part of that is due to the requirement of applying the same standard to everyone—can't fault them for that).
But this is how small orgs can win, by taking chances on candidates that are very driven to grow, and can create impressive teams that will outlive the company: good teams always find a way to recombine at least partially in other companies.
So the corollary for candidates is: you have to reverse-engineer the hiring process of the large company you're trying to join. Or you can go for smaller companies* that do something you want to get deep into. Total comp is less but look at it in terms of you getting paid to learn. Then make yourself available so that large orgs come trying to hire you. When that happens, it will be on your terms.
———————————————
* Note: small companies don't have to be startups. While startups can be fantastic places for growth, they can also be sh*t shows since the entire company is trying to figure itself out, so be sure you properly interview their founders to get a feel for their integrity/sleaze.
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.
I think you have to take all interview feedback with a pinch of salt. People make emotional decisions then try and rationalise them. You will rarely hear what the emotional issue was.
Maybe its semantics but I only represent myself as rejected when I fail the interview loop. That’s a lot more frustrating, especially when you were stoked about the company.
This would be much easier to deal with if companies gave some reasonable feedback. With the way things work as an applicant you don't know if you were completely rejected or almost selected. It's the same.
And it can be completely subjective. I applied for a position and interviewed with two different teams there. I had a friend on the interview board. One team said that I seemed "inflexible" and the other team thought I was "too compliant" and potentially wishy-washy. So my feedback consisted of opposite perspectives.
Try getting rejected at the final executive approval (i.e., their magic eight-ball) after passing the in-person day and the hiring committee.
Once you've seen the inside of the hiring process, you'll never take this stuff personally again. It's utter garbage. At best, the process manages to select for a few traits that are probably useful, while de-selecting for others they didn't realize were crucial for ultimate success.
If you doubt this, ask yourself how one of the tightest hiring sieves in the world managed to produce Google+.
There was one company I applied to, for which I passed the screening and the technical interview, that I got a "Welcome Aboard" email from which also included paperwork for getting started. I just needed to meet the CEO as a last step, but they told me it was basically a formality and that I was hired.
I arrived on time and was told to wait outside the CEO's office. Through the wall, I could hear him talking to someone over the phone about football and what flavor chicken wings he wanted to have ordered and delivered to him. I sat there for 25 minutes hearing his muffled dudebro voice ramble on as if his schedule was clear for the day.
Finally, he let me in. At least he remembered my name. I told him why I wanted to work for Acme Corporation and the skills I planned on bringing to the table. He told me almost nothing and had me out of there in less than 10 minutes.
Not even an hour after I left did I receive an email from the same HR person who told me "Welcome Aboard!" that they wouldn't be moving me forward in the hiring process. It was one of the most devastating moments in my life because that initial email and the phone call I got after was a sign that my shitty life was finally going to turn around.
It did help teach me a good lesson that I would learn multiple times(with much softer landings) later on, which is that most people involved in hiring don't know what the hell they're doing and that just because a company makes a lot of money doesn't mean that forms of insanity aren't baked into their processes. You've just got to let rejections roll off you.
As someone who's gotten rejected by more companies than I can even count or remember, I think this is great. I have a bitter, guilty fantasy that I could go back to some of those harsh rejections long ago and show them the updates to my resume since they declared me useless.
I wonder if/how companies try to measure their false negative rate. Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one." Is that really true? I wonder how many big companies have thought about testing that assumption, maybe changing their selectivity and measuring the effect. Have they really measured how much it costs to hire/fire a bad performer and shown it to be greater than the productivity they'd get out of a good performer they are inclined to reject? Does their strategy of holding out for months, looking for that unicorn candidate instead of hiring someone who's "just fine" today really work? How do they know? Have they measured it?
Are they even serious about their existing selectivity? Is it baked into their annual performance process too? How many of them apply their selectivity bar to their existing employees? One common thing I've seen at companies is many of their "old guard" long time folks would never pass today's interview hazing. The most difficult thing most people ever do at a company is pass the interview.
Guys like Spolskey did enormous harm to the industry by pushing this inane meme that a single bad hire will destroy the company overnight. It just isn’t true. The vast majority of work doesn’t need a superstar, it just needs basic competence and a good attitude. And probably most of the candidates you interview can do the actual job.
Plus it just isn’t plausible that the finest developers in the world were flocking to work on a web based project management tool so how was he an authority anyway...
>Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one."
It depends on the role. Sales tends to be pretty performance-oriented without a lot of leeway if you miss your numbers.
But, for better or worse, the attitude for most roles at most companies is that, once they hire someone, they mostly don't want to fire them if they're doing an even halfway competent job so long as the company as a whole isn't doing layoffs.
I graduated from Fullstack Academy, and I've been rejected outright by most companies I applied to; only a couple have given me over-the-phone interviews, and nobody brought me on-site.
I have all but stopped applying, am doing freelance work to keep my skills sharp and pay the bills, and plan to start my own company in the future.
My motto: If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.
Edit: most companies I applied to are not of FAANG caliber. Also, I don't feel entitled to be hired; in most cases they didn't even deign to write a rejection email.
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 job is really, really important.
How do you land the first job? You have to stand out. It is possible (and even likely) that your CV is not great. The first thing I would do is to make sure to attend as many meetups as you can for areas relevant to your experience. Try to find a few experienced people and see if you can get some feedback on your CV. Reassure them that you aren't looking for an interview per se, you would like some independent feedback so that you can make your CV look better.
When you get an over the phone interview, your attitude should be that the in person interview is nearly 100% guaranteed. There should only be 2 reasons for not getting the in person interview: the job is wrong for you (which you should be able to detect) or you have flubbed the phone interview. Without being too much of a pain, get to know some senior people in meetups and chat with them about technology. Try to get some honest feedback on what they think about your potential as a programmer based on those conversations. Over the phone interviews are a bit like that -- you should have the feeling of just kind of geeking out about your chosen field and chatting with like minded people. Practising conversations like that will help you a lot. Getting feedback is really important as well.
Now, here's where it gets hard. When I'm in a big city and go to a meetup, I often find myself chatting with someone who is clearly not very strong as a programmer. Usually they are looking for work and usually I'm not interested in bringing them on board for an interview where I work. However, it's hard to give good feedback because you don't know the person and can't tell how they will react. It's important to pick up on that vibe, because of the next step.
If you find that people aren't going out of their way to rush you to an interview, probably it's because you don't present yourself as being a solid enough candidate. So this means you need to figure out what your biggest weakness is and work on that.
The biggest red flags I've found with really junior people (and sometimes even senior people) are:
- they have funny ideas that they obviously haven't tried in realistic situations because they aren't going to work. e.g, "In my foobar server code I discovered that it runs faster if I name all my variables, a, b, c, etc." Maybe not quite so stupid, but often pretty close.
- they have strong opinions on stuff despite having almost no experience "Ruby is the best programming language, OO sucks, Testing is stupid", etc, etc.
- they regurgitate stuff they've heard or read and present it as gospel "Why isn't everybody using microservices? Super-programmer Sam says you are a dufus if you don't and I believe in Super-programmer Sam".
- just generally clueless without realising it "I'm good at Rails. It's the best way to write front end apps".
What I'm looking for in a junior developer is someone who knows a little bit, understands that they know only a little bit, is hungry to learn more, enjoys programming and demonstrates a knack for learning.
Things that really impress me are people who meet me one time and if we get talking about TDD, for instance, will go away and at the next meeting flag me down and say, "I did this. Can I get your feedback on it?"
Doing freelance work is great if you can manage it. However, you should also take the opportunity to build things that will help your life (even if it's just a TODO app, or even if somebody has already written something better). Use the opportunity to practice. Write it one way. Rewrite it a different way. Listen to senior people who tell you "X is amazing, you should use X" and then try it. Go back and say, "I tried X and I'm not sure that I understand how it's better. Can you have a quick look at my code and tell me if I'm doing it in a good way?"
As strange as it sounds, this is exactly what I want in a junior person at work. I want them to be eager, humble, always learning, and engaging. I want them to bug me constantly about how to improve. I want them to listen closely to everything I say and to try to integrate my advice. People like that are gold for me and I will seek them out.
But the biggest thing is that you need to be interacting regularly with people in the industries. Meetups are best. If you can't manage that (due to your location), then devote yourself to working on open source projects, hanging out on IRC, etc, etc. It sucks that you have to work so hard at the beginning of your career, but it will pay dividends!
Anyway, good luck! As long as you are always thinking, "What can I do to become a better programmer", everything will fall into place.
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 collaborate better, but it wasn't my first time coding or interacting with fellow coders.
-Most of the jobs I applied to are entry-level. If a company is looking for senior talent, they should state that clearly and not waste junior developers' time.
-When I get excited about a company, I put a lot of time and energy into my cover letter/introductory email. In return, most companies didn't even bother with a template rejection.
> What I'm looking for in a junior developer is someone who knows a little bit, understands that they know only a little bit, is hungry to learn more, enjoys programming and demonstrates a knack for learning.
I'd like to believe that describes me... now I just need to figure out how to better communicate that in my job apps.
The obvious explanation would be that the maintainer (who used to work there) hit up colleagues for stories, or because it circulated among Twitter employees for whatever other reason. It's not very likely to imply anything about Twitter's or Google's hiring.
>Recruiting is a time consuming task for all involved and for you to casually waste peoples time in that manner is horribly disrespectful
The argument cuts both ways. If the company rejects most people they bring for an on-site interview, then they are OK with wasting a lot of people's time. It is the company's responsibility to screen their candidates better.
Among the FAANG companies, 7 different recruiters contacted me this year (including multiple recruiters from the same company - for different divisions). I didn't apply to any of them. I got past their screen and they brought me on site.
Readit News
[0] https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/3109544383?lang=en
I'm terrible at big tech company interviews--kind of a generalist, read Cicero rather than Knuth in college, tend to start out problems kind of muddled, etc. After a while I concluded the only way to get into large SV companies was to sell a company to them. It's easier to go through due diligence than the corporate interview process in a lot of places.
(That's how I got my current job.)
I do however think it's a game that conflicts with certain personality types, including myself early in my career.
I'm always curious what you (or anyone else!) think could be done better.
https://twitter.com/brianacton/status/1895942068
Brian Acton himself left 3 after later, months before all his options vested. In his case it was about Whatsapp monetization, but it's in the same vein (lost of control of the company).
That there is a stunning amount of randomness in hiring is, I think, by design.
I'll hire someone who knows how to find out what they are missing over someone who knows a lot of details but can't grow. But that is hard to justify and involves risk: what if I misread someone's capacity to learn and I just hired somone without the skills nor the ability to learn? Joke's on me!
So larger orgs will naturally go for process-driven hiring practices, so they can cover their behinds (and part of that is due to the requirement of applying the same standard to everyone—can't fault them for that).
But this is how small orgs can win, by taking chances on candidates that are very driven to grow, and can create impressive teams that will outlive the company: good teams always find a way to recombine at least partially in other companies.
So the corollary for candidates is: you have to reverse-engineer the hiring process of the large company you're trying to join. Or you can go for smaller companies* that do something you want to get deep into. Total comp is less but look at it in terms of you getting paid to learn. Then make yourself available so that large orgs come trying to hire you. When that happens, it will be on your terms.
———————————————
* Note: small companies don't have to be startups. While startups can be fantastic places for growth, they can also be sh*t shows since the entire company is trying to figure itself out, so be sure you properly interview their founders to get a feel for their integrity/sleaze.
Being told, "You obviously don't have experience" by a company when it's literally untrue really grinds my gears.
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.
That is the candidate's decision to make, not the company's.
Dead Comment
Once you've seen the inside of the hiring process, you'll never take this stuff personally again. It's utter garbage. At best, the process manages to select for a few traits that are probably useful, while de-selecting for others they didn't realize were crucial for ultimate success.
If you doubt this, ask yourself how one of the tightest hiring sieves in the world managed to produce Google+.
I arrived on time and was told to wait outside the CEO's office. Through the wall, I could hear him talking to someone over the phone about football and what flavor chicken wings he wanted to have ordered and delivered to him. I sat there for 25 minutes hearing his muffled dudebro voice ramble on as if his schedule was clear for the day.
Finally, he let me in. At least he remembered my name. I told him why I wanted to work for Acme Corporation and the skills I planned on bringing to the table. He told me almost nothing and had me out of there in less than 10 minutes.
Not even an hour after I left did I receive an email from the same HR person who told me "Welcome Aboard!" that they wouldn't be moving me forward in the hiring process. It was one of the most devastating moments in my life because that initial email and the phone call I got after was a sign that my shitty life was finally going to turn around.
It did help teach me a good lesson that I would learn multiple times(with much softer landings) later on, which is that most people involved in hiring don't know what the hell they're doing and that just because a company makes a lot of money doesn't mean that forms of insanity aren't baked into their processes. You've just got to let rejections roll off you.
Deleted Comment
I wonder if/how companies try to measure their false negative rate. Despite how straightforward it is to fire someone in the U.S., they keep saying "it's better to reject a good candidate than hire a bad one." Is that really true? I wonder how many big companies have thought about testing that assumption, maybe changing their selectivity and measuring the effect. Have they really measured how much it costs to hire/fire a bad performer and shown it to be greater than the productivity they'd get out of a good performer they are inclined to reject? Does their strategy of holding out for months, looking for that unicorn candidate instead of hiring someone who's "just fine" today really work? How do they know? Have they measured it?
Are they even serious about their existing selectivity? Is it baked into their annual performance process too? How many of them apply their selectivity bar to their existing employees? One common thing I've seen at companies is many of their "old guard" long time folks would never pass today's interview hazing. The most difficult thing most people ever do at a company is pass the interview.
Plus it just isn’t plausible that the finest developers in the world were flocking to work on a web based project management tool so how was he an authority anyway...
It depends on the role. Sales tends to be pretty performance-oriented without a lot of leeway if you miss your numbers.
But, for better or worse, the attitude for most roles at most companies is that, once they hire someone, they mostly don't want to fire them if they're doing an even halfway competent job so long as the company as a whole isn't doing layoffs.
This doesn't sound anything like the "bad hire" everyone claims to be paranoid about.
I have all but stopped applying, am doing freelance work to keep my skills sharp and pay the bills, and plan to start my own company in the future.
My motto: If you can't join 'em, beat 'em.
Edit: most companies I applied to are not of FAANG caliber. Also, I don't feel entitled to be hired; in most cases they didn't even deign to write a rejection email.
How do you land the first job? You have to stand out. It is possible (and even likely) that your CV is not great. The first thing I would do is to make sure to attend as many meetups as you can for areas relevant to your experience. Try to find a few experienced people and see if you can get some feedback on your CV. Reassure them that you aren't looking for an interview per se, you would like some independent feedback so that you can make your CV look better.
When you get an over the phone interview, your attitude should be that the in person interview is nearly 100% guaranteed. There should only be 2 reasons for not getting the in person interview: the job is wrong for you (which you should be able to detect) or you have flubbed the phone interview. Without being too much of a pain, get to know some senior people in meetups and chat with them about technology. Try to get some honest feedback on what they think about your potential as a programmer based on those conversations. Over the phone interviews are a bit like that -- you should have the feeling of just kind of geeking out about your chosen field and chatting with like minded people. Practising conversations like that will help you a lot. Getting feedback is really important as well.
Now, here's where it gets hard. When I'm in a big city and go to a meetup, I often find myself chatting with someone who is clearly not very strong as a programmer. Usually they are looking for work and usually I'm not interested in bringing them on board for an interview where I work. However, it's hard to give good feedback because you don't know the person and can't tell how they will react. It's important to pick up on that vibe, because of the next step.
If you find that people aren't going out of their way to rush you to an interview, probably it's because you don't present yourself as being a solid enough candidate. So this means you need to figure out what your biggest weakness is and work on that.
The biggest red flags I've found with really junior people (and sometimes even senior people) are:
- they have funny ideas that they obviously haven't tried in realistic situations because they aren't going to work. e.g, "In my foobar server code I discovered that it runs faster if I name all my variables, a, b, c, etc." Maybe not quite so stupid, but often pretty close.
- they have strong opinions on stuff despite having almost no experience "Ruby is the best programming language, OO sucks, Testing is stupid", etc, etc.
- they regurgitate stuff they've heard or read and present it as gospel "Why isn't everybody using microservices? Super-programmer Sam says you are a dufus if you don't and I believe in Super-programmer Sam".
- just generally clueless without realising it "I'm good at Rails. It's the best way to write front end apps".
What I'm looking for in a junior developer is someone who knows a little bit, understands that they know only a little bit, is hungry to learn more, enjoys programming and demonstrates a knack for learning.
Things that really impress me are people who meet me one time and if we get talking about TDD, for instance, will go away and at the next meeting flag me down and say, "I did this. Can I get your feedback on it?"
Doing freelance work is great if you can manage it. However, you should also take the opportunity to build things that will help your life (even if it's just a TODO app, or even if somebody has already written something better). Use the opportunity to practice. Write it one way. Rewrite it a different way. Listen to senior people who tell you "X is amazing, you should use X" and then try it. Go back and say, "I tried X and I'm not sure that I understand how it's better. Can you have a quick look at my code and tell me if I'm doing it in a good way?"
As strange as it sounds, this is exactly what I want in a junior person at work. I want them to be eager, humble, always learning, and engaging. I want them to bug me constantly about how to improve. I want them to listen closely to everything I say and to try to integrate my advice. People like that are gold for me and I will seek them out.
But the biggest thing is that you need to be interacting regularly with people in the industries. Meetups are best. If you can't manage that (due to your location), then devote yourself to working on open source projects, hanging out on IRC, etc, etc. It sucks that you have to work so hard at the beginning of your career, but it will pay dividends!
Anyway, good luck! As long as you are always thinking, "What can I do to become a better programmer", everything will fall into place.
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 collaborate better, but it wasn't my first time coding or interacting with fellow coders.
-Most of the jobs I applied to are entry-level. If a company is looking for senior talent, they should state that clearly and not waste junior developers' time.
-When I get excited about a company, I put a lot of time and energy into my cover letter/introductory email. In return, most companies didn't even bother with a template rejection.
> What I'm looking for in a junior developer is someone who knows a little bit, understands that they know only a little bit, is hungry to learn more, enjoys programming and demonstrates a knack for learning.
I'd like to believe that describes me... now I just need to figure out how to better communicate that in my job apps.
(Also, this feels like it even started as a twitter thread.)
I wouldn't, but you could...
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
The job candidates didn't create this problem.
The argument cuts both ways. If the company rejects most people they bring for an on-site interview, then they are OK with wasting a lot of people's time. It is the company's responsibility to screen their candidates better.
Among the FAANG companies, 7 different recruiters contacted me this year (including multiple recruiters from the same company - for different divisions). I didn't apply to any of them. I got past their screen and they brought me on site.