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369 points surprisetalk | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.246s | 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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kelnos ◴[] No.45068646[source]
> you cannot draw any conclusions about yourself or your interviewing technique or your skills or anything from the single accept==0 bit

And every role usually only gets one person accepted into it, or at most, a small number. Ideally they want the "best" person for the role (where "best" is highly subjective and context-dependent). Say 200 people applied for the role. Are you really going to feel bad about yourself because you weren't the absolute best person out of 200 applicants? Is it going to be a huge blow to your self-esteem that you might have been the 2nd or 3rd best out of that 200? (And that's assuming their interview process is perfect and accurately measures who the "best" person is, which is rarely the case.)

Rejections are hard. I get it. I don't enjoy them either. But it's so important not to take them personally.

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1. forducks ◴[] No.45082892[source]
Unsure about the author's financial situation but the calculus tends to change depending on it. I wasn't applying to Anthropic mind you but $50k-80k tech positions with 4 YoE in industry already. I had already burned through nearly all my savings before hitting another interview and rejection (for far less than what I used to make) and then realizing the job search had burnt me out and I was in danger of losing my lease and everything on top of that. I haven't gotten past a phone screen for half a year by now.

When America prescribes that you only deserve health insurance and shelter if you have a good enough job, and you're at the end of your rope financially, it is in my experience very difficult not to take things personally. I was actually pretty good at this earlier on, when I still had savings! But contrary to what some people say, it became harder and harder to stay positive as time went on until it became all but impossible. The last straw was when 13/hr jobs started rejecting me for not having "moving things around in a warehouse" experience.

I'm now having to work an eye-wateringly menial job with no experience requirement just to make ends meet, and even that still isn't enough for my poverty-level expenses. It's not the prestige of the job that bothers me but the fact that it isn't livable. It does feel sometimes that my life could have diverged significantly if I had just passed that interview all those months ago. So much was riding on that final interview and yet I didn't perform to some arbitrary unknowable standard to deserve a livable salary, and this is the end result of my rejection.

I'm hoping that if I get an HVAC certification or something I can just... survive comfortably. I don't think I'd be happy changing careers and I wanted to work in tech until I died or retired, but seems like it's not going to happen at this rate.