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369 points surprisetalk | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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jp57 ◴[] No.45065311[source]
One great piece of advice an informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.

That is to say that you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back. There are so many reasons that a candidate might get rejected that have nothing to do with one's individual performance in the interview or application process.

Having been on the hiring side of the interview table now many more times than on the seeking side, I can say that this is totally true.

One of the biggest misconceptions I see from job seekers, especially younger ones, is to equate a job interview to a test at school, assuming that there is some objective bar and if you pass it then you must be hired. It's simply not true. Frequently more than one good applicant applies for a single open role, and the hiring team has to choose among them. In that case, you could "pass" and still not get the job and the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better.

I can only think of one instance where we had two great candidates for one role and management found a way to open another role so we could hire both. In a few other cases, we had people whom we liked but didn't choose and we forwarded their resumes to other teams who had open roles we thought would fit, but most of the time it's just, "sorry."

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ChrisMarshallNY ◴[] No.45069685[source]
I can say that in some of the rejections that I got, it was quite personal.

I was old (55, at the time), and that seemed to actually upset the interviewers.

I had all the right buzzwords, but as soon as they saw my grey coiffure, the process started going sideways. Somehow, they seemed to think that a 30-year-old could have 30 years of experience.

I was treated pretty shabbily, a couple of times. It was clear that I was considered a waste of time.

I only made it to a test a few times. I failed the BTree part of one test (of course), and they didn't seem to like what I returned in a take-home, once. I also once failed a Swift test (I had just started programming in Swift), when I applied for an ObjC job. Otherwise, I did passably (but probably not outstanding) on the tests.

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swat535 ◴[] No.45071112[source]
I don't know about you but the older I get, the less I take anything in life personal.

I've come to realize that there are so many aspects of life that are not under one's control and shaking your fist gravity doesn't accomplish anything; even more so when it comes to business and professional relationships.

One of my favorite quotes is from "Deuteronomy 18:13", or as the The Coen Brothers aptly put it:

- "Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you"

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SoftTalker ◴[] No.45071142[source]
Not that I’m religious but I looked up that verse and don’t see how the Coen Brothers got that message from it.
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1. names_are_hard ◴[] No.45075249[source]
I looked it up as well, because I had a guess at which famous verse it was but didn't know it by chapter/verse.

The context of the verse, based on the surrounding verses, is that "simplicity with the Lord"[0] means accepting that what happens, or what will happen in the future, is from God and there's no need to try to figure out what will be out make sense of the uncertainty of life.

I think I can relate that to the GP's quote.

[0] translation to English my own, not sure what the language you saw was. Notably, the word used in the original Hebrew[1] can be translated as "simplicity" but also "wholeness" or "completeness". Maybe that works better? Also interestingly, in contemporary Hebrew, it means "naive"...

[1] תמים