[HN Gopher] The road to success is paved with rejection letters
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The road to success is paved with rejection letters
Author : cloudedcordial
Score : 129 points
Date : 2022-02-27 05:36 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (perceiving-systems.blog)
(TXT) w3m dump (perceiving-systems.blog)
| hereforphone wrote:
| Sending a rejection letter (email) out is a nice gesture. Too
| often companies just ghost you, even if you've spent time with
| them in their office during interviews and lunch.
| version_five wrote:
| This may sound dumb, but how does one find so many opportunities
| to get rejected from? I'd love to be able to get myself in front
| of more people to be rejected more, but the real problem is
| getting the funnel in the first place. This is true both for
| business development and for job applications in anything but a
| very junior or well defined position. Getting rejected is
| relatively easy to take once you're in a groove (and usually it's
| possible to get a high conversion rate anyway). It's getting into
| the conversation in the first place that I find very challenging
| ceroxylon wrote:
| There is a good thread here that has many current
| opportunities: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30515750
| atum47 wrote:
| I remember feeling lost after I quit my job at the bank I
| used to work for. Remember seeing one of those threads and
| reading all the offers. End up sending my CV for 6 of them. 3
| wrote back. 2 offered me a challenge. I've been working for 1
| almost two years now. I'm happy with them and I like to think
| they're happy with me either. Great thread. Highly recommend.
| mkl95 wrote:
| I'm bad at defining success, so I define it as the opposite of
| failure. In the last few years I've dodged some bullets because I
| was honest about my expectations. My advice is that you challenge
| recruiters about the culture and working conditions at your
| potential new job, and do your best at getting rejected if it
| sounds crappy. You will find a Good One eventually.
| bob66 wrote:
| mangecoeur wrote:
| The road to failure is also paved with rejection letters so I'm
| not sure it's a terribly helpful observation.
| bradknowles wrote:
| Wait -- you're planning to make meth with AI?
|
| Is there actually a college course for that?
|
| /s
|
| Sadly, the hero image for this site doesn't appear to have
| anything to do with the subject for this post.
| cosmiccatnap wrote:
| giantg2 wrote:
| The road to failure is also paved with failures/rejections
| eslaught wrote:
| Arguably there is no road to failure, just a road to success
| that you never get to the end of. The hard part is not that
| failure is some permanent state. The hard part is that without
| good feedback you don't know if you're actually on a trajectory
| to (eventual) success, or how long it will take, or what you
| need to change (or do more of) to get there.
|
| Good feedback is essential and makes the difference between
| wandering around blindly with no idea where you're going, and
| walking an (albeit difficult) path to something that might
| eventually look like success.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I get zero usable feedback. My trajectory will not lead to
| success.
| periheli0n wrote:
| I agree, but in my experience, recruiters and HR departments
| share total paranoia about giving feedback to applicants,
| most likely out of fear of being sued.
|
| Sometimes (rarely) it's possible to obtain feedback from
| people you know at the place where you applied, but even then
| feedback is likely to be distorted and not tell the full
| story.
|
| TL;DR There is no feedback when applying for jobs and most of
| us are flying blind.
| eslaught wrote:
| You're absolutely right. I'm querying a novel to literary
| agents right now, and it's the same way. The official
| channels provide absolutely no feedback. That's exactly
| what's frustrating about it.
|
| You need to look for feedback elsewhere. There's a risk of
| getting bad feedback if the person isn't actually involved
| with making decisions, but it's better than just talking to
| friends (or not talking to anyone at all). And if you're
| willing to iterate and experiment, you can figure out (at
| least indirectly) how good the feedback is by the results
| you achieve when you put it into practice.
|
| I personally provide mentoring to junior members of my
| community (as a researcher in HPC) through conferences I
| attend. In my writing life, I look for feedback at writers
| conferences. I'm not sure what the equivalents would be in
| other parts of the job market, but something similar might
| help.
| IshKebab wrote:
| There is an end to the road. You don't get to keep trying
| forever.
| himalayan_yak wrote:
| Perseverance.
|
| For some reason, we do not talk much about perseverance and grit.
| May be some of it is getting lost in the (what I perceive to be)
| increasingly cynical views on meritocracy (not that questioning
| the status quo on this topic is a bad idea, just that many seem
| to outright dismiss the idea of hard work and merit).
|
| Barely half way through the interview with Apple for an
| internship position - which itself felt like a huge win after
| getting rejected by all the companies I had applied for - I was
| sweating profusely, couldn't say any coherent line, and was
| internally just praying for the embarrassment to end. After
| spending weeks in preparation for the interview, it was a huge
| blow. Also, since I didn't go to a top-100 (US) school, I didn't
| know if I could ever even get to the second round of interview
| with another H1-B sponsoring (~big) company ever again. Long
| story short, rejections continued but I eventually found a break
| in a small local company - which did wonders to boost my
| confidence after being able to write "real" code for money.
| Later, went on to do Masters in a public university where I could
| work as a TA - which meant so I didn't need to pay the (almost
| impossible out-of-state) tuition. And yes, found a job a H1B
| sponsoring company where I am quite happy now:).
|
| Its not that my story is any special or anywhere close to the
| success of like the one mentioned in the post. I guess my point
| is we can only play the cards in front of us. Being able to find
| a joy in doing so well (which I think is a secret to persevere)
| goes a long way not just for success in career but in other
| aspects of life also.
| austincheney wrote:
| As a long term JavaScript developer my view into the world of
| software is distorted to this slice of the industry, so that I
| what I am speaking to.
|
| Perseverance is not rewarded in software, at least not in
| JavaScript. The key reason is that there is no trust. Employers
| do not trust the competency of the developers and the
| developers do not trust each other. The result is that the work
| is typically extremely beginner and developers are not expected
| to write original code aside from trivial React components.
| Everything else, I mean this literally, is a downloaded NPM
| package because there is substantially greater trust in
| anonymous strangers than your coworkers. If you are
| interested/capable of doing more you aren't compatible with
| current hiring trends and will not be hired.
|
| In all fairness though if you can get hired in a low cost of
| living market for 170k knowing almost nothing about how the
| software or the platform really work doing beginner chores then
| why bother persevering with hard work to be anything more?
| Eventually most of these people will elevate to management
| where their technical experience is irrelevant anyways.
| robotnikman wrote:
| >The Road to Success Is Paved with Rejection Letters
|
| The same can be said with many things in life we strive for. On
| the path to those things there will be a lot of rejection and
| failure, but you need to pick yourself up and try again.
| MisterSandman wrote:
| Lol @ me who received a rejection letter 2 weeks ago, and
| haven't been able to pull myself up again. I know it's on me
| and my mental health, but I just wish there was a silver bullet
| that I could get hit with that can stop me from taking
| rejections so hard.
| lelandfe wrote:
| I can sympathize with you.
|
| Not academia, but of the 40 job applications I've sent out in
| the last couple months, 7 rejected me outright, 4 moved to
| interviews, and all of those have ended in rejections or
| ghosting. Finding the energy to keep going every day is hard
| enough, not to mention maintaining self-worth and happiness.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| I got a physical rejection letter in the mail some years ago,
| many months after the application. I couldn't believe any
| organization would waste somebody's time to print out a form
| letter, stuff an envelope, and mail it when they could notify
| me over email. I consider these bullets dodged because
| there's more organizational anachronisms you don't want to
| deal with as an employee.
| idrios wrote:
| 6 years ago I got rejected from every grad school program I
| applied for, and also couldn't find a job in the industry I
| wanted (biotech). After a very long 2 years of unemployment
| or low wage jobs I threw my hands up and became an English
| teacher in China. Was the best experience of my life and I
| was way more employable when I came back, partly because of
| the experience and partly that I made an app for my students
| when I was there. You'll find a way for it to work out; the
| hardest part is managing your own emotions, but you're far
| from alone in your situation.
| esel2k wrote:
| I can relate and I was actually doing the same thing about
| 9years ago. I was more lucky as I had a job in biotech and
| wanted to go back to grad school but got rejection after
| rejection. I was so frustrated that I took anything (Bad
| PhD lab not the topic I wanted etc) and ended up hating
| grad school. Left it - for good. Studied another topic
| (tech) went down a different career path. Today I am more
| than happy and get chased weekly by headhunters.
|
| My take away: It is a journey. Don't be affraid to push for
| what you believe in and I can say that as I applied to more
| than 500jobs in the last 10 years... But I am now down to
| narrowing a handful applications with nearly 80-90percent
| success rate (Sr Manager and Director level positions).
| cirgue wrote:
| For me, it wasn't getting better at taking rejection, but
| quitting putting emotional investment into job applications
| (or whatever else) on the front end. Quit fantasizing about
| how great the work/your coworkers/the comp will be and just
| treat it like the roll of the dice it is.
| willis936 wrote:
| I went on a hundred dates before meeting my fiance. I sent out
| a hundred applications before getting my current job.
|
| Being good is great and all, but the recipe for success is
| perseverance and improvement.
| MiguelVieira wrote:
| "Well suppose" -- Pemulis can just make out Lyle -- "Suppose I
| were to give you a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a
| hundred keys, and I were to tell you that one of these keys will
| unlock it, this door we're imagining opening in onto all you want
| to be, as a player. How many of the keys would you be willing to
| try?"
|
| ....
|
| "Well I'd try every darn one," Rader tells Lyle.
|
| ....
|
| Lyle never whispers, but it's just about the same. "Then you are
| willing to make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept
| 99% error. The paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would
| stand there before that door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try
| the first key."
| lbj wrote:
| I hate that an inspirational story like this has to start with an
| inb4 "Im white. Im straight. Im privileged". Its 2022 and I
| thought we'd be colorblind by now, but its never been a bigger
| issue. At least for some very loud people.
| [deleted]
| paulpauper wrote:
| In spite of the rejection, it helped greatly that the author is
| clearly very smart and competent. For people who are neither, it
| would be hopeless.
| 99_00 wrote:
| Do you agree that if someone is not smart nor competent, then
| following the authors advice is highly likely to result in more
| success than if they did the opposite of the authors advice?
| paulpauper wrote:
| I dunno. How many rejections does it take before you know to
| stop trying? You only hear of the successes. If you can
| compare your skills to your peers, that can at least help in
| determining if you are totally out of your league or not.
| deltaonefour wrote:
| Yes his road to success is paved with both rejection and
| success. Its relatively normal actually. In fact I don't even
| consider this story to be one where the author encountered a
| ton of failure and got success through raw tenacity. It's
| fairly tame.
| 0000011111 wrote:
| He is also white, male, not gay and has a Phd.
|
| Many folks from marginalizes communities cant find a way past
| the rejection barriers the world throughs at them.
| throwawayarnty wrote:
| What's the evidence that being gay lowers job prospects?
|
| I doubt you can pick out the gay people from looking at
| resumes and a 30 minute interview.
| sroussey wrote:
| You would be surprised.
|
| I'm one of those that is harder to pick out (but that is
| not true of many others), so I'll make a subtle reference
| as early on as possible if the conversation allows (I don't
| force it).
|
| Better to discover a place you won't advance, early in the
| process. More so for executive roles than IC.
|
| Also have seen when raising capital.
| drenvuk wrote:
| The trick is to just be better than everyone else or use the
| rules in a way that others don't or can't, which in a way
| makes you better than everyone else.
|
| Don't cry about it, there's always a way nowadays if you're
| intelligent and driven.
|
| Voting me down instead of explaining how I'm wrong is both
| lazy and cowardly. I am a single data point, sure but I've
| lived it.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I'm not so sure how accurate that is in today's tech world.
| I've often told my wife she ought to consider switching to
| coding as a career because my company will pay a premium to
| get female software developers.
| twofornone wrote:
| Companies have been tripping over themselves to hire from
| "marginalized" communities for years now. At this point it's
| a handicap. At my tiny startup people are overtly talking
| about not hiring any more "white guys". Which is offensively
| discriminatory.
|
| Same for colleges by the way, more likely to accept and
| graduate minorities. In this blind push for equity, white men
| are being deliberately left behind.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Similar situation here. I've been in a staff meeting where
| the principle openly told the managers that they needed to
| place females into specific roles.
| vmception wrote:
| Exactly, I feel like "privilege" has become a misnomer for
| "no strife" when its use really just means "less
| distraction".
|
| Less barriers on an already fraught path. Its honestly
| probably the wrong word for the phenomenon, but that ship has
| sailed.
| aqme28 wrote:
| It's true. If all you get is acceptance and never rejection, you
| have set your sights too low.
| tombert wrote:
| When I was starting out, the ratio I would get for callbacks was
| on the order of 20:1, and the conversion to offer was on the
| order of 50-60:1, and those are extremely generous numbers.
|
| I think a lot of people have seen the million jobs that I've had
| (and the fact that I have not been unemployed for more than a
| month in almost a decade) and just assume that I'm some expert
| interviewer, and yeah I've gotten better, but in reality I still
| get rejected far more often than getting an offer. My ratio now
| is probably closer to 20:1. Obviously I'm not the pinnacle of
| success or anything, but I think I've done pretty well as an
| engineer (particularly since the first decade of me doing this I
| didn't even have a degree).
|
| I think a lot of things in life boil down to a numbers game.
| Million-to-one odds aren't so bad if you plan on doing something
| a million times.
| rr808 wrote:
| Its true too of jobs. Everyone sees when someone gets a job but
| its much harder to know if someone effortlessly switched or spent
| years failing interviews every week. My last job hunt took 6
| months and had dozens of failures. I'm still not sure if its
| normal or I'm below average quality.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| If you're not getting rejected then you don't know where your
| ceiling is.
|
| If you get rejected somewhere and then accepted somewhere
| slightly lesser, you know you pushed yourself as high as you
| could go.
|
| If you apply and get accepted and just take that job... then
| who knows how much higher you could have aimed.
| hereforphone wrote:
| This isn't true at all in my opinion. Hiring criteria are so
| vague, subjective, and interpersonal fit is also very
| subjective, that failure isn't a direct indication of one's
| ceiling.
| cxr wrote:
| > If you get rejected somewhere and then accepted somewhere
| slightly lesser, you know you pushed yourself as high as you
| could go.
|
| No, you still don't know even that. For every person reading
| this comment, there exists at least one job "lesser" than
| their current one where, if they were to apply to today, they
| would get rejected (and not just on the basis that they're
| overqualified).
|
| Your statement imputes _way_ too much rationality and
| efficiency into society--a sort of just-world hypothesis
| applied to the narrow domain of the job market and those who
| hold the keys into any given organization. Organizations are
| made of people, and people can be dumb and irrational. The
| kinds of people who have the final say on whether to reject
| or hire aren 't exempt from this. The decision to reject can
| be as uninformed and arbitrary as it is logically sound.
|
| The same principle applies to successful hires, too. In fact,
| that's the reason why it's possible to get rejected even for
| jobs where the application process should result in a hire.
| Companies hire people, find them to be worse than expected,
| but keep them around anyway because, while the powers that be
| definitely wouldn't go back in time if the opportunity to do
| so were available and hire that person all over again just
| the same, it's still too much work (or it's _perceived_ to be
| too much work--again, people do not make optimal decisions)
| to get rid of them. Good candidates who get rejected are a
| casualty of organizations hedging their bets to try to
| prevent this from happening too much to them.
| ghaff wrote:
| Or you had some "in" at your current job that you may not
| have somewhere else.
|
| I've done fine at my last two long-term jobs but I also
| very much got them because I knew very higher ups who
| answered an email right away.
|
| It actually encourages me that a lot about the hiring
| system is pretty random. Otherwise the big tech employers
| would just skim the cream except for people who really
| don't want to work for those employers. As it is, there's
| enough randomness that lots of good people end up at other
| companies.
| krisoft wrote:
| That assumes two things:
|
| - there is an ordering between jobs
|
| - one's goal is to find the "highest" according to that
| ordering
|
| I don't think that either of those is true in my value
| system.
| ghaff wrote:
| In fairness, for a lot of people, the ordering is "Who will
| pay me the most?"
| twblalock wrote:
| Another thing about being rejected from a job is that you may
| have made a good impression but were not a good fit for the
| role you interviewed for. When a better-fitted role comes up,
| the company might ask you to come back and interview for that
| one.
|
| If you had never tried, the company wouldn't know about you and
| this kind of reconsideration wouldn't happen. So at least
| rejection gets you on their radar.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "When a better-fitted role comes up, the company might ask
| you to come back and interview for that one."
|
| I want to be optimistic. But realistically, how often does
| that actually happen, even in this hot market?
| krisoft wrote:
| In my experience from the hiring side we never call back
| people but very often shuffle promising candidates between
| different roles. Like we are interviewing people because we
| need a Foo-guru and one candidate is kinda meh in Foo but
| shows promise as a Baz-person then we for sure let both the
| person and our recruiters and the Baz team know. And our
| team receives similar referals from other teams in the
| company too.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Yeah, I've definitely seen that shifting move before.
| 09bjb wrote:
| I was talking to a friend last week who got hired this way
| (initial rejection, then a position opened up that seemed a
| better fit). It does happen, I guess.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "... or I'm below average quality."
|
| If you are, there's plenty of us there to keep you company. My
| career (10 years in) and skill has already peaked and is
| rapidly degrading.
| christophergs wrote:
| How do you know your skill is degrading? Could it be the old
| "the more you know, the more you know you don't know"?
| giantg2 wrote:
| Not in my case. My company hasn't allowed me to settle into
| a steady type of work/language/stack. I used to be an
| expert in other systems/tech, but they outsourced and
| downsized those. So now I'm always working on different
| languages/systems/etc. I'm basically an entry level with 10
| years experience and an MS who gets a bad rating because
| I'm slow.
| [deleted]
| polalavik wrote:
| I've had the same experience. For every job I've landed (all of
| 2 spanning 8+ years) I spent 6+ months applying to hundreds and
| hundreds jobs and failing interviews until I landed something.
| It's certainly not the optimal way to be getting jobs - most
| people network better, I imagine. But if you are not good at
| networking it's a long process.
|
| I sometimes think companies spend too much time assessing
| candidates. I just spent months interviewing with a two
| companies. Each company had me doing a hour zoom call nearly
| every week with someone new until eventually rejecting me. I'd
| reckon if the person seems reasonably competent in the first
| 1-2 interviews, has work artifacts in the public domain
| (academic papers, patents, etc),and has a background closely
| aligning with the posting then just taking the risk is probably
| a better use of everyone's time. Truly wild out there trying to
| convince people you know something.
| cjaro wrote:
| I agree with you. I was rejected from a company in January
| after spending upwards of 40 hours on the process. 9-10 on
| the actual interview, talking to people, Zoom calls that blew
| through the scheduled times, and the rest on their code
| challenge/assessment. I could feel my motivation and even
| desire for the job tanking dramatically by the end of my 3rd
| 3-hour-long zoom call with their team. I didn't even want to
| do the code challenge at that point.
|
| On the flip side, the jobs I've held where the interview
| process is more centered around my past work, discussions
| about approach to teamwork & software development, and
| extracurriculars/interests have never failed to lead to
| something more enjoyable and long-term. The fastest way, in
| my experience, to destroy a candidate's interest in your
| company is to demoralize and dehumanize them by dragging out
| the process for weeks (I am "still waiting" to hear back on a
| job I applied for in December... if they end up getting back
| to me at this point, I just can't see myself wanting to
| continue the conversation.)
| 09bjb wrote:
| I'm not sure what field you're in but if you're reasonably
| competent, being transparent and honest with what gaps there
| are in your knowledge can be an attractive trait for a
| candidate. Someone who's forthcoming about things they're
| unsure about is someone you can train faster because they
| recognize that they don't know everything...and that trait
| keeps them open to learning and open to better solutions too.
| Sometimes people want to hear that you struggle with the same
| things.
|
| All of this probably goes out the window in hyper-competitive
| fields but in my field for example (software engineering)
| where there's a labor shortage, I've found this to be the
| case anywhere outside of the companies that just want to test
| how well you remember your Computer Science degree.
| swsieber wrote:
| Or above average quality. If you're talking about actual job
| competence and not interview cheesing skill.
| applgo443 wrote:
| My college professor once said - 'If you are not facing constant
| rejections, then you are not aiming high enough'
| tombert wrote:
| I had a job where the CTO of the company said "obviously none
| of us want to be woken up at three in the morning for a
| production issue, but if we're never being paged then we're
| probably moving too slow." He was very big on the "it's ok to
| break production, just don't make same mistake twice" mantra,
| which I like.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| I've got rejected from DeepMind, OpenAI and Tesla. At least
| aiming high ;) Gotta fund something on my own I guess.
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