(Under the advisement of my lawyer (ChatGPT) I won't say the company's name).
It has really annoyed me; I ended up doing three interviews over the course of four weeks, and I'm pretty confident that I got the technical questions right. It could be that my resume is too "jumpy", which is fair, but they could have read my resume before they wasted my time and theirs with three multi-hour interviews.
The only thing I can think of is that they just didn't like my personality during the interviews, which is honestly the most frustrating. If I had messed up the technical portion then that would be a goal to work towards by learning more technical stuff, but I'm not 100% sure what about my personality is screwing up these interviews, and even less sure on how I'm supposed to change anything about it.
It's hard to stay motivated but I guess I don't have much of a choice since I still need to pay my mortgage, so I was curious if anyone here had any advice on how to best tune my personality to do better in interviews? Preferably I'd prefer to stay honest (if for no other reason than I'm a pretty terrible liar).
In the most common case where I see engineers who say they struggle with the soft skills parts of interviewing, the underlying issue is a lack of skill in communication - working out what's important, stating it clearly and concisely, and in a way appropriate to the audience. I read some of your blog and found it pleasantly chatty, well structured, and obviously technical. If you communicate like you do in writing, there is obviously no problem there. I have no doubt that your account of performing well on technical questions is correct. However...
After some quick google searches, what I did find in your digital footprint is:
- A relatively high number of online posts complaining about employers in general across several years
- A tweet from a few years ago where you say you're fed up of software engineering but are forced to stick with it
- (as you stated) a jumpy work history
My best guess is that you're failing the digital footprint check. If I was hiring and post interview was doing a little more digging on candidates to help do a final pick, I would look at the short tenures, the outwardly directed frustration at employers, the stated lack of desire to be a software engineer at all, and pass on you.
As for why this is happening after several technical interviews? Most likely that's when you undergo final background checks and get cut out of the process. If you are burned out, sick of workplace social narratives, and don't want to work as a software engineer, I sincerely empathise for you. However: don't let me, a random hacker news commenter, find that out in under 2 minutes of time spent on Google.
The posts on LinkedIn should probably go too.
I'll probably one seperate ones for my own handles that are not attached to my name to monitor them as well. The panopticon never sleeps.
It's impossible to know how many jobs I've been turned down for due to my online presence and edgy takes; most of my takes really aren't that edgy or even that out there, but they might be enough make a potential employer think twice.
I just deleted my old Twitter, my Reddit account, and most of my posts on LinkedIn. I don't think any of them were really that bad but I don't really need them haunting me for forever.
Occasionally I shed a username and start a new one.
The admins here seem not to mind as long as I'm not voting more than once or ban evading, and the same goes for most sites.
I used to be really into comedy -- it's perfectly possible to have a persona that doesn't tie back to you, but you need to be diligent -- separate email, phone number etc.
Some of these opinions are ones I don't really hold anymore so deleting isn't a big deal. I will admit that some of the ones I am deleting upset me because I still do think that way.
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I took down most of the posts on my blog that were personal as a result. Most of the stuff on there now is just technical stuff that I'm not too worried about being attached to my name.
[1] To be clear, the blog post was only talking about prescribed medication, I've never done any illegal drugs and I've never been an alcoholic, I'm not speaking in code for "self medicating".
If I'm hiring someone, I want to like working with them, and if I find them ranting online, I just mark them as negative and pessimistic. I can't help it - that's human nature
It's awful. I think the best thing is maybe a fake profile you touch once a year.
And, as others have said... this rejection might have nothing to do with you. If they had 1000 applications, and you were their choice above 998 of them, you still get the rejection because they hired the person who was above 999 of them.
Still overall I think I agree with you. I think most techy people tend to like me if they talk to me for awhile, but I can be kind of abrasive with initial impressions.
I'm just psychoanalyzing myself at this point; overall good advice...thanks!
We had been working together for two years. But not in the same department. I just started talking to her one day in the parking lot and she finally said “are you going to stop staring at me and ask for my number”.
I was not thinking about dating at the time. I had just come out of a bad situation less than a year earlier and I was trying to get my financial house in order - it was 2011 and I had made some bad real estate decisions before the housing crash and I was trying to get my career on track.
I was happy with just hanging out with my long term female friends at the time and they provided all of the emotional and companionship needs I had with no complications. My friends and I traveled together, went out on “dates” (do you call it that when you are just doing date like things with no emotional or physical expectations?) etc.
When I told my now wife all I was going through it didn’t scare her away. She was just as up front with me. We were married seven months later. 15 years in, I still don’t feel like she kept anything from me that I didn’t know about her during the first two weeks and vice versa.
This though is horrible general advice as far as dating. I wasn’t pursuing her. We knew of each other from work so I wasn’t a complete stranger and we were both in our mid 30s and divorced then and she had two boys.
I wasn’t in the headspace to seriously be in the “dating scene” then.
I know how to small talk now and have studied conversational skills for my career. If I were out there now, I would do things differently.
This has never been my experience. Quirkyness in the interview loops have never dictated my on the job experience. And having been pulled in to conduct interviews, I can say that its all so last minute and unplanned, that it reinforces how little it matters. Judge a company all you want, just get the offer first.
You’ll probably never talk with the hiring manager or that recruiter again. You’ll probably be working with a different PM and engineers.
The problem with advice here is that, if you're right and there's something personality-related and it's not just fierce competition or tiny sample size, we can't really tell through a post. I'm talking about the je ne sais quoi of you, the body language, the attitude, the unwritten vibe you give off, and posting videos here is uh, well, yeah, unlikely.
So, I'd echo the advice of others to talk to your friends and ask them to give you feedback. Hopefully they're observant and willing to be blunt.
I'll opine, though - have you tried a little masking and humility? I ask because if I had to guess based on probability, the archetype of the highly intelligent, technically excellent nerd tends to also run adjacent to underdeveloped social skills, or at least indifference to using them. Arrogance, defensiveness, ego abound. That's what I coach my team and friends on who have cracked this type of discussion open.
If you were going to mask for an interview, coming across humble/hungry/smart (smart is probably not a problem for most here, but humble?...). Consider mirroring with the interviewer. Stay detached and practice this, especially when a finger is pointed at you or you don't ace a question, or they disagree.
In all, it's probably the stuff you can't describe easily without being next to you. You may not even realize the signals you're putting off, if that is even what's going on.
I know the struggle - my wife has been turned down over and over and over, and she takes it personally, but she's also going for jobs that clearly have tons of great applicants. Is it her attitude? Did she make a mistake bringing up that experience? Or maybe...or maybe it's just out of our control, and we have to stick to the plan and stay in the market. The losing move is not to play.
In my normal personal life I tend to be pretty sarcastic and self-deprecating. My therapist says it might be a defense mechanism to avoid actually confronting problems; if you make a person you're talking to laugh then they usually think everything is fine and stop worrying about you.
I try not to do that during interviews. I don't think I'm coming off like I'm trying hard to be smart or brag, but it's very possible and likely that some level of my normal insecurities are bleeding through, and that happening even subtly might be enough to poison it for me.
From my POV, if you don’t have any strong signals about why you were rejected, I would just move on rather than trying to infer the reason.
There are probably 300 people interviewing for the job you interviewed for. So they need to not just pick someone who checks the boxes, but the BEST of all the people who checked the boxes.
Assuming you checked all the boxes, you weren't the best and someone else was chosen. That's all it is. What makes them the best? Who knows. There's likely 50 of them they had to choose from.
Job hunting has always been a numbers game but now it's worse by a factor of 100x. Don't take it personally, and keep going.
Dunno, it's just hard not to take this a bit personally sometimes. As I said, if I felt like I knew what I was screwing up, then that would be something I could work on. It's not hard to buy textbooks and learn more about concurrency theory or distributed systems or something, or to build a project on my server to play with a library, or something like that. It's extremely hard to solve a problem if you have no idea what the problem even is.
You're not wrong with anything you said though. I just need to keep applying and go from there.
This is the worst job market I've seen since the dot com bust. It's much worse than the Financial Crisis. There are tens of thousands of out of work programmers, and in the next few years more and more new grads are joining the mix. You have to understand who your competition is. There is also the existential crisis of AI taking our jobs as well hanging over us. It's pretty rough out there. That said, during the dotcom bust is when we first saw offshoring to India and people were worried to death that all the jobs were going to go to India and for the most part they didn't, there was still a competitive advantage to continue hiring in the US for the next 20 years.
The only way to get a job right now is either through connections from a friend or coworker that thinks you're great, or by hustling and applying to thousands of jobs, or by forming your own company.
Everything you know about finding a job, increase things by 100x. If last time you sent out 20 resumes and got a job, this time send out 2000 resumes. I'm not joking.
It's going to be tough, but if you're resilient, you will find a job. If you're worried about money, move your spending down to as close to 0 as possible. Move in with friends or family, eat ramen, and keep applying. You can do it!
If you are up for playing, why not play with sales and marketing? Playing isn't limited to tech. Grab a pencil from your drawer and try to get someone to buy it. Just like with those little low stakes tech projects, as you keep prodding at it to get it to work, you are bound to learn something.
And if you truly have nothing left to learn about sales and marketing, well, then you will have at least learned that the problem you have isn't what you are currently suspecting.
This isn't really true. There are 300 people that might apply but only a few that ever get interviewed. If they are interviewing 300 people then the company doesn't even know what it wants.
In my niche, I was objectively one of the most qualified in the industry. But I heard crickets last year and the year before when randomly submitting my application to ATS’s.
Don’t cry for me. That was my “Plan C”. Plan A of using my network landed me two full time offers and one contract and my plan B of personal outreach to companies looking for my specific skillset led to two interviews and one offer all in less than a month.
Last year, I just answered one recruiter’s outreach and had an interview and offer that was a perfect fit within two weeks.
You don't have to be 100% sure about what it is personality-wise that you need to tune up to start making changes. You're an intelligent agent; your intuition is much better than random about things like this. I would say act on your intuitions about what specifically you are going that is rubbing them the wrong way, and be less like that - regress a little to the mean, in other words. This is generally good advice in the business world, even if it isn't good advice for e.g. becoming a celebrity on Twitter.
Take note that most psychological studies suggest that personality is very unlikely to change dramatically in adulthood no matter what you do. It's better to focus on techniques that let you chill out for a few hours/days/weeks than it is to try to actually change who you are at core.
Deep introspection is really hard. Assuming it is you that is the problem, and working from that assumption is anything but natural for most people. Even in your own thoughts. Arrogance, defensiveness and a skewed sense of self are things most people tend to carry with them.
I've read, listened to (audio book) and otherwise experienced a lot of leadership training in my life. A lot of it didn't really click until I was at a point where I could really self reflect, and literally seeing my own flaws in another person changed me significantly.
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Think of your body. Specifically how tall you are. You can't easily change your height. However, you can do the following:
- workout
- wear clothes that fit you and flatter your particular body type
- etc
The same applies to interviews.
e.g. if you are a quiet, introverted person then there probably isn't much you can do if you are interviewing for a job that requires an outgoing personality like sales or event planning
However, you can get better at rapport, asking questions and seeming interested and excited in the role. A lot of this is also how you respond to questions. For example, if someone asks "Tell me about X", X can be either vague or you are not sure why they are asking. If you respond with "Well, I have a couple examples of X here they are: A, B, C. Which one would you like to hear about?" then that shows you are both experienced and also good at clarifying what is being asked.
One EXCELLENT way to practice this is to reach out to friends or family members who have done a lot of interviewing and have them do a mock interview. This is useful b/c they know both:
- what hiring managers are looking for in general
- you as a person and what may be "the best side of you" vs "pretending to be something you're not"
I will also repeat what some other commenters have said:
You are interviewing them as much as they are interviewing you. Much like a marriage, you want to partner with someone that "fits" with you and vice versa. In other words,
Learning how to talk to people, read a room, small talk, etc can be learned. I’m definitely an introvert by nature. But people in a professional setting are really not that much different than computer systems. Once you understand different type of personalities, you learn what input gets you what output.
The Career Tools/Manager Tools podcasts has dozens of podcasts about dealing with people with different DISC profiles.
One secret I use when starting a conversation with someone new is “what keeps you busy?” and act interested and ask open ended follow up questions.