When you see famous developers in the industry, you tend to think highly of them.
Somehow you think that you are the only person who is facing job rejections.
They are always able to get whichever job they want, and it was always like that. When we take a closer look, it cannot be further from the truth.
1. Remind yourself that you are not the only one
First of all, it can happen to anyone. There can be coding challenges that you may not be able to solve at the time of the interview due to stress, or that you made a mistake, or forgot something as you haven’t recalled and used it in a while.
If you look at the data, it is hard to find someone who never failed, or was never rejected.
This also includes people who you can look up to today and that have already faced plenty of rejections.
In this category, we include people who also currently amaze us with the work that they have done.
Elon Musk, Founder of Paypal, Tesla, Space X
Elon Musk is one of the most popular people on this list, as being one of the most ambitious and hard-working people, who aims to make humanity an interplanetary species.
Just like others, he has also faced many failures throughout his life.
One of them is not getting any replies from Netscape when he applied there for a developer job.
Apparently, Netscape didn’t see any computer science degree or experience on Elon’s CV, so they didn’t even give him a chance.
He had degrees in economics and physics from Wharton School.
He actually did try to go to their office but was too shy to talk to anyone there.
Here is the ex-vice president of Netscape describing the situation:
“It’s legendary that he failed to land a job at Netscape. I was a VP there and he submitted a resume and, when no one responded, he chose to enter our lobby and sat there, apparently too shy to speak to anyone. At the time we were hiring up to 50 engineers/month, the hiring activity was unreal, so he would have been easily overlooked.”
Founder of GitHub, Chris Wanstrath
As you are reading this, you probably don’t need an introduction to GitHub at all.
However, you probably didn’t know that its founder couldn’t get a job at Yahoo:
“Before co-founding GitHub, I applied for an engineering job at Yahoo and didn’t get it. Don’t let other people discourage you.”
It’s arguably better to start GitHub than to get a job at Yahoo.
Founder of WhatsApp, Brian Acton
Many people use WhatsApp these days, but it’s often not that much recalled that it came out as a product of someone who got rejected from the company that acquired it years later.
Facebook rejected Brian in 2009:
During that same year, he was also rejected by Twitter:
He then collaborated with his partner Jan Koum and made WhatsApp.
Less than five years later, Facebook bought WhatsApp for 19 billion dollars.
Not a bad deal for Brian, right?
Founder of Shopify, Tobias Lütke
Although he managed to go all the way through the employment process and was about to sign the contract, Tobias couldn’t start working because of the missing work permit.
A lawyer advised him that he couldn’t really start working in Canada, but could instead start his own company.
That absence of the work permit was actually a blessing in disguise for Tobias, who created a business based on his hobby of snowboarding.
As it was hard at the time to build its e-commerce website with any existing tool, he developed it himself.
This website was so different, that he got people asking about it:
“It was just different. It wasn’t the normal grid. It told stories. It was clearly modern and web 2.0ey. And so people were saying, ‘I would love to just build my business on that foundation,’” said Tobias.
“Scott and I said, ‘OK, skateboards or software?’ It was pretty obvious that we should go with software.”
Founder of Homebrew, Max Howell
If you use Mac or Linux, you probably use Homebrew or have at least heard about it already.
For those who haven’t had the chance to get informed about Homebrew before, it’s a free and open-source software package management system that helps with the installations of software on both macOS and Linux.
Although contributing to open source projects can be a really good way to demonstrate the skills that can open up new opportunities for you, you can still fail an interview at Google:
“Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard, so f**k off.” — Max Howell in a tweet
There are a lot more people who were rejected multiple times, but they didn’t stop.
They continued learning and making use of other opportunities.
Here are a few more examples taken from this page:
“Atlassian rejected me with ‘you don’t know what you want’. They were right. I built a dev community, international conference, a startup, traded crypto and retired in 30.”
— Eduards Sizovs, founder of DevTube
“Major social network company rejected me after an interview with, ‘We didn’t think you knew enough JS.
— Author of “You Don’t Know JS”, Kyle Simpson
“I was rejected from 10 unpaid internships. Now I work at Twitter.” — Jon Kuperman
“Got rejected from a junior position at Atlassian for not knowing enough about JavaScript. Shortly after they now use the JavaScript compiler that I wrote across most of their JavaScript stack.” — Sebastian McKenzie
“Rejected by MIT for undergrad, accepted to the computer science Ph.D. program. (I chose Berkeley for grad school instead.) Rejected by Google in 2003, 2006, and 2007; hired by Google in 2015. Previously rejected by Facebook, Twitter, and Apple.” — Tim Chevalier
As you can see, not everyone has overnight successes as movies and social media tend to give the impression.
Microsoft was not the first company that Bill Gates and Paul Allen started. They had another company called Traf-O-Data in the early 1970s, which they had to shut down because of the losses. The lessons they learned from that experience played a crucial role in Microsoft.
Yahoo rejected buying Google for $1 million in 1998.
Rovio developed 51 unsuccessful games before reaching “overnight” success with Angry Birds.
2. Look for ways to get better
After the rejection, try to learn the reason why that happened.
Did you fail to implement an algorithm? Did you lack experience from a particular framework or technology that they used and you need more time to work and prepare for it?
Were you not that quick in coming up with a system design for a particular business scenario that you were asked?
Try to take as many notes as possible so that you get to keep this log that you, later on, want to look at.
Treat rejections as potential bugs that you are trying to debug. Do not start to feel bad about yourself. Everyone can experience failure here and there.
Consider this failed interview as a way for you to get better at handling stress another time and stay calmer.
Consider it as a source of data, a reflection of your current weaknesses that you need to address.
Please remember that failing an interview does not necessarily mean that you are not a good software developer, or that you lack the expected skills and experience.
Maybe there is a lack of culture mismatch or value mismatch, or someone else is just a little bit better than you are and the company has decided to take that person instead.
3. Keep applying
During these days it’s pretty common to see many companies offering the opportunity to work remotely from home. This means that we can apply to many remote jobs all around the world.
This is also true for others.
Many people from around the world can apply for the same exact job that you are trying to apply for. They can have more job experience or can simply be more experienced.
As such, you may have already seen that it can be quite tough to get a job in such fierce competition.
Earlier we may have hesitated to apply for certain jobs, simply because we weren’t willing to do a relocation.
Even if we fail to get a job, it doesn’t mean that we aren’t good software developers. It can be that we are not that good at interviewing due to lack of expertise and not being part of many job interviews before.
We should also remind ourselves that despite having plenty of rejections, we still don’t know whether the next application is going to result in us getting the job.
"Not every door is locked. Push." pic.twitter.com/umPfrecqW0
— VV (@visualizevalue) May 25, 2020
Moreover, if we really do the math, we can understand that our chances are not that low despite facing plenty of rejections along the journey.
“If I told you that you have a 4% chance of getting an offer from any application, that might seem dishearteningly low. But mathematically, that means that 50 such applications will give you an 87% chance of getting at least one job offer.”
4. Do your research
Don’t just go to an interview without prior preparation no matter how much experience you have, or have many previous interviews you have been at before.
Try to spend at least a few minutes researching about the company and find something interesting that they are doing and that you pay attention to especially during the interview.
Check closely what they are doing and try to come up with questions that you can mention when they ask, Do you have any questions for us?
Here is a list of 105 questions that you can ask your recruiters.
5. Practice as much as possible
Probably one of the biggest enemies of software developers during interviews is stress. The stress of not being able to answer every technical question, not having experience with a particular technology, nervousness while negotiating the salary, or simply the fact that you feel anxious about the next questions that can come up.
One of the most important things that you can do to help with that is practicing as much as possible.
This includes practicing answering both technical and nontechnical questions.
Practice with a friend. Practice coding challenges that you can find in LeetCode, HackerRank, or AlgoExpert. Find as many questions as possible in Glassdoor or other places that you can find and come up with a plan to master answering those types of questions.
The more you practice the more you are going to increase your chances of getting a job.
If there is just one thing that I want you to take from this article is the fact that it is okay to fail an interview here and there.
As long as you keep on improving and getting better each time, you are good to go.
Everyone may not have a good initial experience in an interview, or at anything else.
As long as you keep on improving and learning, there is no such thing as failure.
As video game designer Will Wright says, “I’m actually more likely to hire someone based on how many failures they’ve experienced. I think it’s the best learning system.”
Everybody fails at a seemingly trivial question in tough time pressure, but do not let that discourage you.
Keep applying, keep getting better.
