I've been seeing a lot of discussions of tech interviews in my Twitter feed and a lot of it is around the idea that someone needs to be "more technical" (that's not a thing, by the way — technical expertise isn't linear) or that they need to be able to balance a binary search tree or whatever from memory when the job never requires it.
The typical interview process at tech companies is almost worse than useless, so I wanted to share some of the comically awful reasons I've been rejected by companies.
One company rejected me because they didn't think I would be able to jive at their scale. There are two weird things about this. The first is that they asked zero questions about my experience with scale during the interview.
The second is that this team only handled referrals — so really only putting people through their customer-acquisition funnel. Unless this company was somehow managing to gain tens of thousands of new customers per second, it's unlikely that scale was actually a factor. That's the entire population of the US in a matter of hours, though, so probably not. Even if they were going with their company's total size, I've worked at companies several times their size with several times more traffic, data, and engineers.
Scale is an ego point for some developers. It's some "get on my level" shit.
But it's the kind of vanity metric that actively discourages optimizations and encourages poor scaling practices, so it requires a lot of discussion to understand someone's familiarity with it.
Another company rejected me because they didn't think I would enjoy working at a large company. I can't even begin to understand how they came to this as a hiring decision. Why would I apply if company size was a dealbreaker? Why are they trying to decide what I'd like? 😂
Another company rejected me because I struggled to find a given bug in the sass Ruby gem during "the debugging portion" of their technical interview — this was an on-site interview that lasted all day.
Apart from the fact that this Ruby gem contains 13k lines of code (not counting whitespace and comments), it's a parser and working with parsers isn't like working with typical apps. And in Ruby, parsers make heavy use of metaprogramming, making it that much more difficult to find a bug when you're unfamiliar with the code because you can't grep for what you need.
I asked the interviewer if the role required implementing parsers in Ruby, he said "probably not". So it was a pointless exercise, but they actually told me that my inability to locate and fix this bug in a 13k-LoC gem in 45 minutes was their reason for rejecting me.
During another interview, the interviewer asked very vague questions. Every time I asked for clarification on even the kind of response he was looking for, he just dumbed down the question. And he did it in a way that let me know I was losing points for getting "hints".
He did the same when I stopped asking him to clarify and started guessing at what he wanted. Then later, he asked questions I gave him answers for earlier when I was trying to guess at what he meant.
I remember standing in front of that whiteboard thinking "they're 100% gonna reject me because this guy can't ask the questions he wants the answers for". I mean, at least I saw the rejection coming.
Even so, this one was probably the hardest rejection because the engineering manager was excited about me and even introduced me to her team because she expected a positive outcome.
At another company, they asked me about my own strengths and weaknesses. This is a pretty pointless question in general but the rejection letter said "we're looking for engineers with a different set of strengths".
This particular interview was a shit show from start to finish, but this was my favorite bit.
None of these are small startups run by no-name techbros, either. These are well respected companies. If you're in the tech industry, you've probably heard of most of them, if not every single one of them, and you've almost definitely used some of their products and services.
And yet, no matter how good they are at providing snacks in their "kick-ass office in downtown San Francisco" or "unleashing the world's creative energy by designing a more enlightened way of working", somehow they're all shit at interviewing.
Sometimes interviewers will find arbitrary reasons to reject you that have nothing to do with you. Maybe the interviewer doesn't communicate well. Maybe they have a superiority complex and are rejecting you just to exercise that power. Maybe they just had a bad day.
For these interviews, there may actually be no way to pass it. You could probably do everything "right" and the interviewer would still find some excuse to shut you down. And a lot of the time, the team may actually be amazing but the interviewer is someone that works on a completely unrelated team who would never see you, anyway.
I've been working in this industry for 15 years. Interviewing is still every bit as terrible now as it was when I started. We're all being judged on the wrong criteria. Even when we get the job, it may not be for the right reason.
Latest comments (40)
Someone called me out for my language in the article, too. 😄
But I think you're right, the power and complete lack of accountability that comes with being on the company's side of the table, especially at larger companies, makes it incredibly easy for them to reject you for arbitrary reasons.
Smaller companies don't typically have this level of negotiating power since they don't have nearly as many people trying so desperately to work there, but some small companies try to emulate that large-company mindset, including in hiring. It kind of goes along with scale being a point of ego for a lot of engineers. But even people at Google say things like "no, this interview process is terrible, please don't copy it!". 🤷♂️
Now I make it clear to the interviewer during the course of the interview that I'm good at understanding the problem and building the app/service they need. But I'm not a great algorithm inventor or steeped in comp science minutae. I do it purposely as I'm not interested in tech shock jock kind of atmosphere and I-know-better-than-you kind of colleagues. I just want to put in my 40 hours, get paid and then enjoy my personal and family life.
Also being an independent contractor, it gives me freedom to work at organizations who are using technology to develop solutions for their business processes and problems. I've had my fill of working at a tech giant and 2 networking patents there. Tech company interviewers are more interested in trumping the candidate with their mastery of some minutae and beating them down. ☺️ So I prefer non tech clients.
I had an interviewer reject me because he asked about tree traversal and I gave him inorder, preorder, and postorder as the possibilities and he was actually looking for graph traversals breadth first and depth first, one of which was specifically listed on my resume.
Another interviewer was upset with me because I said the test was easy. He went on some diatribe about empathy while demonstrating none. They wanted to both under pay and over work me.
Both of these were big names in tech. I used to be upset but now that I look back, I am better off now without them.
Honestly, I hate overly academic interviews. I am a professional engineer, not a college professor. If my experience isn't being tested in your interview process, then your interview process is broken. I should not have to develop and maintain a completely separate set of skills just to get the job. My ability to actually do the job should get me the job.
@jgaskins , how did it happen that you could collect so many rejection reasons? I never even got one which could make any sense. In my case a "standard" rejection answer is a copy-pasted bullshit...
Most of my rejection letters have been, as well. But after 15 years and a whole lot of rejections, it’s possible to get a few relatively straight answers. If I’ve been rejected for 50 roles, for example (no idea what the real number is, but it could be higher), I’ve probably had to ask 48 of them for feedback (this part is important because almost no company volunteers that info), 35 of them have given it (the rest may have a no-feedback policy or they’ve decided not to respond), and only 10 have given a straight answer.
Thanks. Last fall I've just come through of the process so I can share some numbers. For some short period of time I've been involved in about 50 interviews, which turned into ~20 on-sites. I did not pay much attention to pre-onsite process (screenings and different phone calls), cause the reasons of not going forward could be different and they are not interested to me so much. I was more interested in the on-sites rejection results, which in my case were 1/2 of the total number (~10). I always explicitly asked for the feedback. I got zero answers that could give me an understanding of the rejection. Nobody told me the reason. Zero. That is probably one of the weird things in the whole process.
Jamie, thank you for the great article. I hope you were able to find a role and org that you enjoy despite the tribulation.
I have hired folks for software engineering in an organization of 40-ish technical people. We would curate 2-3 candidates through a couple screening interviews then introduce them to the team on which they would work. The team would be able to veto any individual, though they always seemed to choose one candidate out of the group that they liked best. This is a time intensive process but we were all happy with the results.
I was usually very terse in my rejection letters, but would always respond to someone who made it through the initial screens. I wonder if "we decided to go with a different candidate" is better or worse than "we liked someone else better because they have more direct experience with x". You've given me something to think about regarding candidate rejection...
I did indeed find a role with an engineering organization I really like. Surprisingly, they were one of my lower-ranked picks for myself when I started the process but they ended up being my top pick by a mile. :-)
Regarding your rejection letters, telling a candidate why you chose another candidate could end up adding friction as they try to justify their knowledge, but the reality is that they don't know who the other candidate is and how much experience they have with X technology, so it's hard for them to argue. They'll probably ask, but at that point it's probably best to leave those interactions to the recruiter (assuming you have internal recruiters) so you can focus more on other candidates.
But to take it back a bit, a "we prefer them" rejection is often way better received by a candidate than a "we don't want you" rejection. :-)
Just playing devil's advocate, it could be that you aren't qualified but they aren't able to communicate that in a clear way that makes any sense or they are just blithering idiots...
For future reference, any time you're opening with any variation of "playing devil's advocate" in reply to someone you don't know, it won't be taken well.
For every single one of the roles listed in this article, I exceeded every requirement laid out in the job posting. When you considering these are almost always more of a wish list than actual requirements, the problem isn't being unqualified. I also have a history of contributing to open source and even building my own tools. I also have a blog with some pretty great content in it.
I've had plenty of interviews where I was out of my depth. That was not the case in any example presented in this article.
Whoa man, that's why I said ... or they are blithering idiots. I wasn't questioning your intelligence and qualifications are in no way related to intelligence anyway. I was just saying sometimes when companies don't "like" a candidate for whatever reason they sometimes don't communicate that well and pick some stupid reason to say that might not even be related to the real reason.
Do you think some of the dumber reasons were honest? What do you think were the real reasons some of the companies rejected you?
Please refer to the last 3 paragraphs of the article for that explanation.
Oh, yeah, I saw that. That definitely happens, a superiority complex.
I know "the real reasons you didn't get the job" wasn't the topic of the post. It's just the last paragraphs didn't really leave me with a satisfying sense of the full range of possible reasons, so I wondered if you had other thoughts that didn't fit into this article.
Also, superiority complex alone leaves a job interviewee with very little sense of what he can do differently to improve his odds next time around.
Ya know what I mean?
I have interviewed with companies in the past, and I have been asked to take technical assessments provided by 3rd party vendors. I'm sure all these tests aren't the same, but I've been burned multiple times. Sometimes I'm asked to solve a problem not related to the job description and once it was in a programming language not shown in the job description. I find things like this very frustrating. Hopefully, companies are vetting these 3rd party vendors periodically.
I totally relate to this. IMHO, smaller startups tend to ask the right questions and assess real experience and ability. They want to know if you and the team get along well and tend to give more real-world programming assessments.
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