I recently did a round of interviews at various AI companies, including model labs, coding assistants, and data vendors. My first takeaway is that, wow! the interviews are very hard, and the bar is high. Second, these companies are all selecting for the top 0.1% of some metric - but they use different metrics. For example, the coding assistant interview focused on writing (what I felt was) an insane volume of code in a short period of time. I did not do well. By contrast, another company asked me to spend a day working on a particular niche optimization problem; that was the entire interview loop. I happened to stumble on some neat idea, and therefore did well, but I don't think I could reliably repeat that performance.
To reiterate - wow! the interviews are hard, every company is selecting for the top of a different metric, and there's really no shame in not passing one of these loops. Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)
My career long experience with these types of interviews is you get hired by the company that, when they interview you, you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions youâve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason. The content of the actual work Iâve done at these companies and how the work is done, is completely different to these interviews and Iâd have done equally well at all the places that didnât hire me because they happened to ask the wrong questions.
I know, because Iâve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.
In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and youâll get lucky somewhere. It wonât make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.
>you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions youâve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason
My experience exactly! I've been lucky in most of my interviews that I was asked about things I just happened to brush up on or had thought about deeply in some past project, so I was offered the job.
And like you say, the job rarely demanded any of the things I was asked about... which worked against me once, where I sailed through the interview process but struggled for the first year to get up to speed in my actual day-to-day job, although I did manage to get my act together before it became a big problem.
And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug:
* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).
* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview
* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it
* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck
This is not âfairâ, but itâs a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and donât take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.
Why is it that most other jobs especially low skill take the opposite approach? You screw up or demonstrate your incompetence on your first day on a construction job site you are let go right then.
In fact, they tend to do the exact opposite, unfortunately!
Like the great Mike Tyson once said, "God punishes you by giving you everything you want... to see if you can handle it".
For many, achieving your dreams usually comes with the hard lesson that you had the wrong dreams and that the real dreams you should have had were many of the things you already gave away to get there.
Then again, infinite AI-developer money isn't the worst outcome, either. Something something land among the clouds.
Honestly, AI is far too creative to pick a job that cares about the wrong thing and you are dumped into a feature mill. Itâd be the worst time to be at these large companies because the smaller more creative startups are whatâs going to be really an adventure in this space, versus the same old run of the mill career treadmill SWE have been given after SWE ballooned in the 2010s.
You have much cooler opportunity in these new companies and product spaces versus the large ships. It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
> To reiterate - wow! the interviews are hard, every company is selecting for the top of a different metric, and there's really no shame in not passing one of these loops. Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)
I wholeheartedly agree.
That said, if you pursue jobs that are at least somewhat aligned with your personal convictions and desire for impact on the world and not strictly based on money, prestige, and power, you might be able to able to derive some greater sense of wholeness through the work. Not "make you whole", but "contribute to your wholeness".
If you only chase money, prestige and power - which if we're honest is central to a lot of the tech industry today - you probably won't experience any wholeness contribution from your work. That's fine, of course. Hopefully in that case you can find it through family, friendships, or community.
> Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)
Some people really do find a whole lot of personal meaning from their work. And that's okay. It's their life.
If someone is the sort of person who might find meaning working for Anthropic, they would find that meaning at a lot of other jobs as well. I think that's a better emssage; not that "you shall not find purpose in your work", but "the purpose you may find from work is not limited to a single or even small number of AI companies".
That is fair. I suppose what I meant is, the idea of working at one of these companies can be really exciting, almost a fantasy, but in practice: it might actually hurt you in many ways. 'Look what they make you give', as a certain character once said. With that said, obviously I think it's cool and worth doing, but there are significant and painful downsides, too.
I get it, we all want to be somebody, but is the juice worth the squeeze?
They may find a candidate that succeeds, they may not. In the end, itâs up to you to decide whether that kind of environment is for you. I also interviewed at a few AI startups and while difficult, I wasnât impressed with them. They seem to be too high maintenance with little to no experience.
This is key: the OP seems to be putting them on a pedestal, but if Sturgeon's law holds (and I think it does) then a sizable percentage of what's happening there doesn't smell very good.
There's people whose entire job is to list houses at 50% over the market pricing. And there's people whose entire job it is to offer 50% market price for houses. They only need to be successful once every couple of month. They flood the market with buying and selling signals, that's just the way the market works. I wouldn't be discouraged if my fair market offer were rejected by most bidders in a market, statistically they are professional over/under bidders, that's fine.
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."
This. I've hired in a number of roles, in several industries, and what they've all had in common is that rejection is never personal.
My first career was in theatre, which a) is (or at least was, back in the day?) much more competitive than tech - par was one callback (ie, second screening) per 100 auditions, and one casting per 10 callbacks; and b) is genuinely, deeply vulnerable - you have to bring your whole self into your work, in a way that you don't in any other field.
It's still never personal, and actors who don't develop thick skins wash out quickly.
I once auditioned three rounds for Romeo, at a company I really liked, and thought I'd killed it. I didn't get the role, and was pretty bummed (particularly since - actors are nothing but petty - I didn't much like the performance by the guy who did). Six months later the casting director button-holed me after seeing another show I was in, and told me I'd been their first choice, and he was sorry they'd not been able to cast me. The trouble was, he said, their only good choice for Juliette was at least a foot shorter than I am, and there was no way that wouldn't have looked awkward.
It's never personal.
Furthermore, that "failed" audition directly led to two later jobs, and I think indirectly to a third. Having a good interview, even in a situation where you don't achieve the immediate goal, can only be good for you - both by developing your own skills, and for creating a reputation for competence within your industry.
What? I've interviewed hundreds of candidates for engineering roles and my rejection is virtually always personal.
This is why we do interviews and not just quizzes/homework (and you should be suspicious of any company that leans too heavily on the latter). I need an idea of what it would be like to work with you _as a person_, and not a grab bag of learnable skills.
Whether you should take that rejection and change yourself about it is another question entirely.
Strong agreement. I can confirm for other readers that the day I realized this --- "Oh, rejection means nothing!" --- was a weird day. It takes a weight off.
And it is true across every other field. There are way more factors external to the "you" of the decision, and they're given more weight than the "you" of the decision. This is one of those cases where you only need to experience the "other side of the table" once for it to click.
Companies that are more humane in their hiring practices (even just actually send a rejection email vs. ghosting) deserve a bit of credit, because caring for the applicant is not a KPI.
This is such an insightful take. As someone who has interviewed many candidates, I wholeheartedly agree. While it's important to reflect on how you can improve, it's also critical to maintain morale and become comfortable with rejection during the job hunt. One of the biggest obstacles I've seen; whether with friends, family, or candidates; is the tendency to internalize rejection as a sense of being inherently 'bad.' Of course, once you internalize this belief, any motivation to study is gone. It can be challenging to help people see that this negative self-talk has become the primary barrier to their success.
My recommendation to people is to apply for jobs you know you won't get while also applying for jobs you want. Exposure to rejection really does help take the sting out of the process.
> 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.
I would also guess that in at least >50% of cases your application is never given a fair shot for random reasons. I remember when a company that I was working at was doing intern interviews, they would almost always run out of time to do interviews (this was back when interviews were in person), so they would pick 2-3 schools that they had time to get to (proximity * prestige was the factor there) and everyone else got a blanket rejection.
Maybe itâs because my school wasn't on that list, but I remember feeling like if I got rejected like that I would very much feel like I wasnât good enough. But it was essentially random.
Especially true in today's hiring environment. They probably have hundreds of qualified people lined up for that position. One company recently reached out to me asking me to submit a CV, considering me a good fit for their position. In the end, they rejected me, but they mentioned that they got 1400 applications. If you don't have a personal connection to get you in, it's basically a lottery.
Even sometimes if you do have a personal connection. I've had twice now where I've had a warm intro to the hiring manager, jobs where I had done the kind of work before, and the hiring manager didn't even reply to my emails.
Won't lie, both of those hurt, but I also reasoned it that if that's who I would have been working for, I wouldn't have enjoyed the work anyway.
Building on that: There's a few reasons why a company won't explain why they reject a candidate.
One of the reasons is that they don't want candidates to "game" the system, because it makes it hard to screen for the people they want to hire.
Another reason is that often rejections are highly subjective, and telling a candidate that "we didn't hire you because of X" could be highly insulting.
Finally, quite often candidates are rejected because the people hiring ultimately are looking for people they will get along with. It doesn't matter how smart someone is, if something about the working relationship causes friction, the team dynamic can quickly devolve. (And to be quite frank, in these situations the candidate will probably have a better job working elsewhere.) These kinds of rejections are highly subjective, so no one really wants to give a candidate feedback.
I used to provide feedback but often got candidates who were argumentative about it rather that accepting that the decision was final. This turned me off on the whole concept.
> ...the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better...
Or they liked you just as much as the one they hired, but you lost the coin toss. Or, they hated you because they misunderstood something you said. Or...?
The most helpful job interview I had was when the interviewer broke script and just leveled with me about how I wasn't presenting myself well. There was a shared connection (our alma mater) that must have convinced him to be straight with me instead of hiding how poorly I was doing behind a mask. The HR handbooks say that you should never let a candidate know why they were not selected, but that information can be extremely helpful.
If you're not getting offers, I strongly recommend that you find somebody you trust to do a mock interview. Let them critique your resume, cover letter, posture, awkwardness, lame handshake, etc.
In the United States, most junior/community colleges have career centers that will do this. There are also economic development boards in essentially every town with a population over 1000; they can connect you to places to do mock interviews.
Very helpful for new interviewees, whether just out of college or during a career transition.
A couple years ago I was turned down for a position after an initial screening interview because they said my writing sample didn't meet certain criteria. I felt it arguably did, but I just said "thank you for your time and consideration", and moved on. I was just glad to get a clear "no" at an early stage.
They've probably revised their policy by now, I suspect, but I appreciated that they made the effort.
Yeah⌠the common connection thing is whatâs at play here. This is why high-stakes introductions are done through people you know, to show that you can be trusted lest you be a social outcast.
Agreed. I've been rejected from roles I've been genuinely excited about and felt totally defeated. This last application run I made a concerted effort to protect myself from feeling bad and it definitely helped. Some people can be excellent candidates but ultimately the wrong fit for the role or an equally better or exceptional candidate is also in the pipeline.
> One great piece of advice and informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.
I mean, there might be, in two ways. Sometimes, you just mess up in some obvious way and can learn from that. But you also get a glimpse of the corporate culture. Maybe not for FAANG and the likes - the processes are homogenized and reviewed by a risk-averse employment lawyer - but for smaller organizations, it's fair game.
But as with layoffs, there's nothing you can win by begging, groveling, or asking for a second chance. The decision has been made, these decisions are always stochastic and unfair on some level, but you move on. You'll be fine.
I think the point, which I agree with, was that in the typical case of a stock rejection, you don't know if the errors you think you made had any bearing on the decision. Information you get from the process you would have gotten whether or not you got accepted, so it's not from the rejection.
There are cases where the company gives you some indication of why they rejected you but they are rare in my experience (in the USA, mostly for legal reasons, IDK about other countries). Or they give you information in some other way. Some companies will stop and send you home part way through if it's not going well. That also gives more information.
Yeah I think this is a great mental framework. Getting rejected hurts, it's natural to want to find a reason, and with some self-reflection it definitely can help one grow. But you gotta be very careful about over-indexing on any one interview where the reasons for rejection may or may not have anything to do with what you did and said during the interview (let alone your personhood).
Frankly, if you want to get better at interviewing, it's better to do more general research on what hiring managers and companies want, and then do more interviews to practice communicating that you have the skills and temperament to deliver value.
One specific piece of advice to the OA: this kind of post might feel cathartic, but it doesn't get you closer to your goal. Sure, it will resonate, people will commiserate, and you'll get some dopamine and internet pointsâbut if your goal is to work at a top tier company like Anthropic then such a post can only hurt you. The reality in fast-growing, ambitious companies at the forefront of the AI bubble is that expectations are sky high, and getting things done to attempt to meet those expectations is incredibly difficult for a hundred different reasons. In this type of environment, whatever technical skills you have are not enough. To be successful you need a sustained and resourceful effort to solve whatever problems come your way. One of the most toxic traits is having a victim mentality. Unfortunately it's a common affliction due to the low agency that individuals have in big companies and late stage capitalism in general, but you've got to tamp it down and focus on what you can control (which in practice is often more than you might think). While this post doesn't directly demonstrate a victim mentality, it suggests internalizing the rejection ("My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.") in a way that is adjacent and something that would give me significant pause if I was a hiring manager evaluating for a role in a chaotic company.
The point is that bit of information doesnât tell you anything about yourself and your own skills and intrinsic value. You could be there best hire to date but someone even better than you shows up, or the bosses nephew or funding went away, etc. All events outside of your control.
Somewhat OT but I just donât like the current iteration of DevRel.
Initially I saw the folks in this field as hype-persons, but their concrete output was tools that were useful for developers. The author did create this! But it was in service of landing a role at the company.
The people that work in this field now seem to mostly just get into beefs on the internet, create funny posts on Linkedin. Which⌠doesnât seem very useful for developers.
I have no idea to what extent Anthropic or other employers delve into prospective candidatesâ blogs; but this strikes me as too much self-disclosure for oneâs own good. We all have idiosyncrasies; but calling oneself weird on a now widely published blog article seems like it risks defeating the goal of making oneself an ideal candidate for many job opportunities.
Look, many of my own eccentricities have been (net) valuable to be professionally and personally, but it was probably better they be revealed âorganicallyâ rather than through a public act of self-disclosure.
This is the age of social media. This person has hit the front page of HN twice now. That's a commercially valuable skill.
At this point, having proved that can do something commercially valuable a couple times now, I think they should run with it. Start a YouTube channel. Keep racking up views. Then, eventually, do partnerships and sponsorships, in addition to collecting AdSense money.
If you like to write or perform for other people, you can monetize that now. This person is good at it. They should continue.
As someone whoâs hired many dev advocates, I definitely value the ability to turn mundane topics into posts that hit the HN front page. If they can do this about something as dull as failing interviews, imagine what theyâd do with an actually interesting technical topic.
Failing interviews is a favorite topic for HN, not a "dull" one; this is not the only person who's made the front page about it, and certainly won't be the last. HN's audience contains a large group that believes "tech interviews are stupid and broken" and this is right up their alley.
I don't think it is a strong signal of an easy pivot to influencer-as-a-career.
On one hand I agree with you, but on the other... I don't really want to live in a world where being oneself (a perfectly fine, good self) is a liability.
I know I have privilege in being able to say this, but I'd rather get rejected by potential employers who don't get me, than have to pretend to be someone I'm not.
Maybe a good point, but honestly, interviewers barely read resumes, theyâre very, very likely not going to read your blog, or remember âhey itâs the person from that blog post I ready 7 weeks ago.â
People get hired all the time based on their online content. Or, at the very least, they get interviews when they wouldn't otherwise. Don't forget about the luck surface area!
I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. Do you, as an interviewer, not read resumes?
I read loads of resumes and the truth is more like everyone are terrible communicators. Especially software engineers. Most resumes are badly formatted, badly typeset, full of errors and give me confusing/contradictory details about what your job responsibilities were rather than what you accomplished.
Most peoples' resumes are so low-effort that they're practically unreadable and I'm trying to read between the lines to figure out what you're capable of. I might as well not be reading them because I'm trying to figure out what you've done, what you're good at and what motivates you and nothing you've given me on that paper helps me do that.
One of these days someone is going to figure out how to cross-polinate technology people and sales people in the office to smooth out each others' rough edges. Whoever does is going to revolutionize industry.
> I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry.
It's not. I've been in a number of interviews where the interviewer has told me straight up "I didn't read your resume. Mind giving me a second to give it a scan?"
To be fair, as you mention, resumes are horrible tools. They should only be used as a place to start a conversation, so does it really matter if the interviewer reads it in depth before starting the interview?
Iâm a little confused, because first you challenge me, but then come to the exact conclusion that resumes are largely unreadable. Iâll look for something they claim to have done to dig deep on, see if itâs BS or not, but Iâm not reading every X by Y% with my jaw on the floor. FWIW Iâm generally on the back side of the process, where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already.
> where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already.
I think that's a mistake, personally. Each interviewer needs to make an independent decision and relying on the judgement of a screener early in the process is giving that person disproportionate weight towards hiring for your team. Usually that resume screener is someone in HR. Would you trust them to decide who your team hires?
Your posts do indicate that maybe there is a larger segment of folks who don't read resumes than I realize...My amount of rigor may only come after being involved in some catastrophically bad hiring decisions. Like someone I made the deciding vote to hire was stalking multiple employees, was a heavy drug user, did zero work of value and ultimately crashed and burned by getting arrested for coming at someone with a knife. For years HR wouldn't let us fire that person because of their protected class and multiple false claims they made against a large number of employees.
If itâs truly only HR and then direct to full interview panel then I agree with you, but Iâve never worked somewhere where a technical person wasnât involved in screening. Yes recruiters will winnow the inbound, but usually there a technical phone screen, hiring manager screen, or both.
And yet still that screening almost always has less technical depth than further interviews. It should not carry the most weight in the process, but because of practices like this it does.
Sorry, can't agree with this. The hiring manager's decision carries the most weight yes, but saying it's biased towards the screen is over-generalizing. I'm sure sometimes it is, but as someone who interviewed thousands and hired hundreds over a quarter century career at many organizations large and small, I can tell you unequivocally that technical feedback can and does regularly override my screening signal.
It is true for some companies. That said, in my experience, the more it was visible in an interview that the interviewer read my application, my website, my open-source code etc, the more enjoyable working for that company has been for me. I guess itâs a sign people at such a company give a shit. It transfers to other areas than just interviews led by them. At this point, if I see that the interviewer barely skimmed my CV, my expectations, that this job will be good, plummet.
I have to think Anthropic is in high enough demand and looking for high enough skilled staff that any negative social implications from a blog post like this, as tame as it is, would be outweighed, for any actually suitable candidate.
Most CS people I know arenât weird and are actually pretty corporate and conformist. But at the same time, the people I know who do open source are some of the weirdest people I know haha
I'll take an eclectic bunch of weirdos who all do and like cool shit over the corpo conformist normies any day. Super easy to suss out who is who when you first meet them. Just ask what they like to do when they aren't laboring under the thumb of capitalism. The cool people will talk your ear off about some esoteric whatever.
SV/NY is pretty concentrated with "non-weird" SWEs these days unless you count "money-oriented" as weird. "CS degree from a top program followed by FAANG or NYC Fintech" was a common default path for reasonably-smart/reasonably-socially-skilled/highly-career-motivated high school students to aim at for a while.
It's a personal blog. I didn't read this as an employer. Someone greener may read this and think "this guy is really hard on himself but, unlike me, he's done so much more! Maybe we'll always feel this way so I should just be kinder to myself."
The modern internet is stuffed to the gills with branding and bravado. Some vulnerability is fine.
Here's why it's wrong to think you did something wrong when you get rejected from a job:
Sometimes, a company has multiple candidates that pass the interview with flying colors for a single role. They need to pick someone, and reject the remaining great candidates. If luck or timing was different and you were the only great candidate, they would have just picked you. But now they have a few, and have a hard time deciding who is "better". Often, they kind of punt on hunches, gut feelings, or things that don't really say anything about you at all.
You end up with the "Unfortunately..." email anyway.
If you do happen to get some feedback, well that's actionable. It's something you can improve and the next time at bat you'll be in a better position to do well.
the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.
You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.
This is the advice that I hope the author takes heed of the most.
I'll add that what qualifies as âweirdâ or âquirkyâ on the web is probably a worldâs different than what did in the past. And the weird and quirky things that people are willing to indulge or entertain in certain online communities does not represent what the rest of the world is aware of or even finds appreciable.
This is the best advice. There was a moment in time where being vulnerable on the net was okayish. I donât think it is anymore. Its best to work on personal issues with your professional therapist and/or with your trusted group of friends.
I recently interviewed for Anthropic, 6 rounds, recruiter was great, said they were putting together an offer letter. I met one of the managers, then another came back from vacation... and then they decided not to give me an offer.
I asked for feedback, and the recruiter sounded frustrated (about the internal process), because they had a moving bar on what was wanted from the hiring managers. I know I hadn't completely aced one of the interviews (they had me do a second one), and apparently they thought it was good enough on initial review, but when coming back to review it again it was not good enough.
It seems like they are going through growing pains as a company.
Probably not even about whether it was good enough at all, just random managers making random decisions by how they were feeling the day they interviewed you. Any time a company has a LOT of applicants, like any big tech company does, the less you should take any info at all from a given rejection or even an offer. Itâs kinda random.
Youâll typically get better info only when a company is small and has a role in low demand and they only had a couple of people apply. This situation is pretty rare.
You be you. You will find your people and your place.
It may just be that Anthropic isn't it.
I had a company that was like a white elephant for me for a long time. Got in there, and I will say: It was one of the worst experiences I had in my career.
Not all that glitters is gold, and happiness is often only discovered when it is gone. If you can avoid those two pitfalls in life. You'll do well better than me.
Hear hear. I joined a company which made a prosumer product I truly loved using. However, shortly after jointing i realized the company was nothing that I hoped for (Ancient tech, toxic culture, micro-management. All red-flags you can imagine). Fortunately a small startup made a blipp on my radar and after interviewing with them, as I apparently made a good impression, I got an offer so I immediately switched. I didn't realize it at the time but this happened to be a major inflection point in my career (technologically, socially and economically) for which I will be ever thankful. Not exactly OP's experience but my takeaway is that sometimes, even if you think you want to work at a place, it might not be the best option for you. There are so many more opportunities out there.
It shouldnât surprise you that people like the work or products specific companies work on and have a dream to work on those too. The actual experience of working there though is hard to know in advance.
The reasons why companies hire or don't hire someone usually have very little with the candidate themselves. From my experience, whenever this machine needs another cog, almost any will do - usually the first one within reach. And when it doesn't, not even the shiniest one will be of interest. So it's probably nothing personal OP
Nah. Every company has its lore about what makes a good candidate and they try to test for that. The lore is often rubbish (as in: there's often little correlation between interview performance and on-job performance), but there is still a process and that process rejects most applicants.
Or maybe it has everything to do with the candidate. They author recognizes they have spent much of their life being an unlikable jerk. Past actions can come back to bite you.
I tend to agree, which makes it all the more amusing that companies brag about being so selective. It seems like largely artificial and random selectivity.
Putting so much self worth into a single job application strikes me as unhealthy. Hiring decisions are have absurdly high variance. Everyone I know has been rejected from a job that seemed like a perfect, usually many times over. I'd say that's far more common than actually getting a given job.
I wish I had the courage to post and talk like this more. I really resonated with the authors words as these kinds of feelings make up a lot of my internal monologuing some days.
If you have conscious insight into what behaviour is or isn't "weird" in a specific situation or environment, you absolutely can choose to turn it off, or at least damp it down. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, and there's no judgement. But if you can identify it, you can choose.
Author here! I should say that I can't turn my weird off quickly and consistently :) The feedback loops in social situations are slow. I've been working really hard on my listening/people skills, but these things take time, and I'm probably just being too impatient
I think a lot of these organizations are just really immature in their hiring because of growth. Thatâs my experience with Swedenâs Loveable at least.
That coupled with a high amount of candidates I wouldnât think much of failing one (biased, I âfailedâ one this summer :) )
As someone that recently failed a tech interview at the last stage after a long search, the only way to move forward is to just keep moving. Given your motivation and passion, there's definitely another place for you.
Also important to note, just because you like the product doesn't mean you'll love the team, anthropic is a well paying job but it's also just a job.
> My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.
This is not how to understand this. They may have been hiring for say 50 positions.
They will just fill up those 50 positions with the people who reach a threshold, not stack-rank _everyone_ who reaches the threshold and pick the top 50.
There's little ROI in doing that, and potentially it reduces their list of candidates by taking longer.
You might have been mid way through the test just as person 50 was offered their role.
If you are this emotionally invested in a job without having done it for some time, this is an accidental or insightful act of compassion from an amorphous over-funded company.
Youâre incredibly talented, Taylor. Their loss, sincerely. If they didnât hire you, know that it wasnât the right fit and you shouldnât be there. Your talents are needed elsewhere.
I do my very best when interviewing to ignore honest mistakes and look at the person. My criteria is more around, is this person demonstrating the ability to learn and grow? If so, everything else can be taught or developed.
> I can't turn my weird off, so I think I defensively dial it up sometimes
Hits close to home! For what it's worth, it sounds like you have an admirable level of self-reflection and - despite being painful at times - I expect that this will pay for itself over the course of your life.
I also got rejected by Anthropic, and now Iâm working at an amazing startup instead. Anthropicâs hiring process is dumb, you shouldnât take it personally.
Lately Iâve been thinking I might have better odds making a straight shot for ASI on my own over practicing and rehearsing the material that needs to be presented almost perfectly in the AI interviews. Iâve worked at FANG in ML / applied research for almost a decade but still canât even get a screening interview at the top places without asking someone I know for a referral. And I really hate bugging former coworkers for referrals. Normally end up procrastinating on reaching out until the job postings just disappear haha.
heh i got rejected from google about 15 years ago. I remember exactly where i was standing (outside on the sidewalk), color and placement of leaves on the grass, even the specific joints and cracks on the sidewalk i was standing on when i got the news. I don't hold a grudge or have any regrets but i remember that moment vividly.
Not sure how I feel about âfront-paging hackernewsâ as part of a devrel take home test. Obviously, I understand how important it isâI want my devrels to write content that drives front page traffic. But as a HN userâŚ
Author here! Just want to be extra crystal clear that Anthropic gave me a boring/standard coding project. I decided to post a parallel project to HN to demonstrate that I was able to quickly create engaging software. They in no way asked or insinuated that I share anything online
Hey, I feel you on rejection - it stings. Just remember that, like any company, that place is just a collection of humans making imperfect decisions with limited information. Trust me. Your worth isn't defined by one hiring decision.
I totally get the authorâs frustration. I think such motivation and talent is a sign that there would be plenty of other groups happy to have the applicant. The trick to is connect with them, and not get so hung up on Anthropic specifically. Easier said than done though.
Having been from the other side of the table. You did not flunk anything again.
A job process is not an exam where if you do well you succeed.
Your "performance" plays a small role in whether you are accepted (maybe less than 30%). The rest is:
- The pipeline: that is who are your competitors, is there someone late in the process, is there someone a manager worked with / knows
- Your CV: obviously at the point of the interview, you can't change your history
- The position fit: basically who they're looking for. They might have a profile in mind (let's say someone extrovert to do lots of talks, or someone to devrel to enterprise) where you simply don't fit.
- The biases: And there is looot of these. For instance, some would open your blog and say it's unprofessional because of the UI. Not saying that is the case, it's simply their biases.
So, my advice, you reached hn front page twice in a couple of months. Most people, me included, never did. You clearly have something. Find work with people that see that.
The disappointment of not getting a job offer seems reasonable. The disappointment about things that are core to who you are seems overboard to me. I feel the author could learn to be more comfortable in their own skin.
Also re this:
> âHeâs cute, but heâs too weirdâ
If someoneâs thinking this about you, youâre just not a good fit for each other. It isnât that youâve failed somehow. Maybe theyâre cute but too ânormalâ.
> On top of their secret take-home assignment, I independently published diggit.dev and a companion blogpost about my [sincerely] positive experiences with Claude. I was hoping that some unsolicited "extra credit" would make me look like an exceptional/ambitious candidate.
As an employer, such brown-nosing would put me off. Being exceptionally eager to please can be a red flag.
what was the position? what are your credentials to fulfill that position? I feel like cover letters, and recommendations are just icing on the cake of core skills and experiences, not the entire cake.
> I expect companies to reject candidates who make honest mistakes during interviews.
I mean--maybe their interview process is overly harsh? They could miss out some good candidates that way.
> I don't need (or deserve) your sympathy.
Hey person, don't be so hard on yourself. The world is already hard enough to just live in. Hoping you find an alternate and maybe more enjoyable career path :)
The post reads to me like all those movies about the nerd with a heart of gold that the hot girl will recognize and eventually marry.... which only happens in those movies.
Do people really not understand that companies don't care one whit about your personality? They only care about whether you can make them more money. And that extends to interviewers; the number one thing interviewers care about is can you meaningfully contribute to the existing roadmap, not whether you can bring your own unique perspective. This is especially true at mega huge corporate places like anthropic.
Anthropic from a technology perspective does interesting work, but from a business perspective its long-term viability is unclear. LLM generated slop will unlikely make it through the valley of despair in the Gartner hype cycle.
Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
The fact is all employees that produce intangible assets look like a fiscal liability on paper. If you don't have project history in a given area, than managers quietly add training costs and retention issue forecasts on that hiring decision.
I found the dynamic range anecdote by Steve Jobs (a controversial figure) was rather accurate across many business contexts =3
> That's the point at which I would have stopped the process personally.
Why is that? I love take-home assignments. At least, if it's just an initial get-to-know-you interview, and then the assignment. What I utterly despise is the get-to-know-you interview, then a tech interview with the entire dev team, then a take-home, then a meeting with the CTO.
I will never, ever, ever go through with any job that has an interview process like this again. I always ask up-front what their interview process is like.
If a take-home or anything else (automated half-hour online test or whatever) taking more than a couple minutes and not requiring as much time investment from them as you comes before they've winnowed down much of the fieldâif it's used as any kind of screenerâI'd be out. That time's better spent sending more applications (or, IDK, drilling leetcode) if there are more than a very-few candidates still in the running for a given position.
If you want early stage bulk screeners, go for it, I'm sure you need them, but don't take much of my time or the math don't math.
Why would I spend 4 hours (in the best case scenario, otherwise days) on the very first step of the application process, where, regardless of my resume, I have an extremely high chance to be rejected, while the company puts literally no time in?
Well, that's different. If it's a super challenging take-home, with requirements that exceed 1 page, then yeah, I'd agree. Most take-homes that I've received have been super simple, though. And they're usually not the first step, but the final step, in my experience.
I've been at a past company where we (well, mostly I) set up a take-home that would take a mid-level web dev familiar with the material maybe 15-30 minutes to knock out, basically just to test if candidates could produce responsive CSS layouts and knew how to make a proper web form work. It was wild how many we got back that still didn't account for basic (explicitly outlined) use cases like 'works on a phone screen'.
> Over the past decade, I've been striving to spread joy, to do good, to be better. I'm trying so hard.
To give some advice that is loving but entirely unkind: knock it off.
No amount of spreading joy or do gooding is going to make you feel better. It can not, anymore than doing math homework will convince yourself that you are smart.
The problem is not what you want, it's how you want it. Or to put it another way, be the ocean not the wave.
I truly do not understand the use of this public self castigation; it does not strike me as healthy, if anything itâs a cry for help, and Iâm uncomfortable being exposed to it.
This whole essay is cringe. They're not your girlfriend. They're not "guiding humanity toward post-scarity AI abundance" whatever the hell that means.
Getting rejected from a job always stings, but it's worse if you build it up to be more than it is. There's a dozen other AI companies out there shoveling the same shit, go apply to them. It's a job, not a vocation. Try to keep it all in perspective.
That might be your problem right there. Deciding you can't do something is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. How hard have you tried?
I learned to turn my weird off a long time ago. It wasn't easy. It took many years. It was painful at times. But I did it. If I can do it, you probably can too.
P.S. You might want to think about whether or not turning your weird off is something you actually want. Being normal comes with its own set of trade-offs. But if you are going to keep your weird you should do it because it's something you decide you want, not because it's something you decide you are powerless to change.
Faking normalcy can often make you more unattractive than being yourself. I suspect that people can sense when someone isn't being genuine about themselves.
You can definitely fake it. Most people at $BIG_CORP aren't half as jovial and excited as they seem. Whatever, it's fine - we don't need to be perfectly authentic at all times, sometimes you can just go with the flow a little.
Is "God actor" a term reserved for only the best actors? :P
Well, they could also dial down the weird during an interview, and slowly reveal their more personal side as they get to know their co-workers better. This seems so obvious it's barely worth stating, but it seems like there's a false dichotomy in their post (no weird XOR weird).
I mean, everyone is weird when you look really close. But we can be cool with one another. To me it just sounds like they're still quite sensitive to judgement, and looking for explanations as to the rejection. I totally get that, I'm in the same boat. Sometimes you just don't have a good explanation, and you have to solicit valuable feedback elsewhere.
I like weird people. I think most creative people like weird people. If "weird" means you have idiosyncrasies, then yeah, all of us do. In my experience, once you get to know a person, you realize there is no such thing as "normal".
Now if "weird" in this case actually means "kind of an asshole" then that's a different thing, and yeah, that's definitely worth working on.
"I spent so much of my life being an unlikable jerk" - so yeah, it sounds like that could be (somewhat?) true, or maybe they're just very self-critical.
I like "weird coffee people", and folks that are obsessed with fun hobbies. I'm not so into sociopaths though, so it depends on the kind of weird.
I recently did a round of interviews at various AI companies, including model labs, coding assistants, and data vendors. My first takeaway is that, wow! the interviews are very hard, and the bar is high. Second, these companies are all selecting for the top 0.1% of some metric - but they use different metrics. For example, the coding assistant interview focused on writing (what I felt was) an insane volume of code in a short period of time. I did not do well. By contrast, another company asked me to spend a day working on a particular niche optimization problem; that was the entire interview loop. I happened to stumble on some neat idea, and therefore did well, but I don't think I could reliably repeat that performance.
To reiterate - wow! the interviews are hard, every company is selecting for the top of a different metric, and there's really no shame in not passing one of these loops. Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)
My career long experience with these types of interviews is you get hired by the company that, when they interview you, you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions youâve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason. The content of the actual work Iâve done at these companies and how the work is done, is completely different to these interviews and Iâd have done equally well at all the places that didnât hire me because they happened to ask the wrong questions.
I know, because Iâve been rejected and accepted to the same company before based on different interview questions, and did just fine in the role once I was in there.
In short, if you have decent skills the tech interviewers are mostly total random luck IMO, so just do a bunch of em and youâll get lucky somewhere. It wonât make any rational sense at all later where you end up, but who cares.
>you get lucky and they happen to ask the questions youâve just brushed up on or you get lucky and see the answer quickly for some reason
My experience exactly! I've been lucky in most of my interviews that I was asked about things I just happened to brush up on or had thought about deeply in some past project, so I was offered the job.
And like you say, the job rarely demanded any of the things I was asked about... which worked against me once, where I sailed through the interview process but struggled for the first year to get up to speed in my actual day-to-day job, although I did manage to get my act together before it became a big problem.
And unfortunately, from the point of view of the company, this is a feature not a bug:
* to the company the cost of a false positive (bad hire) is very very much higher than the cost of a false negative (passing on a good candidate).
* AI companies have a large pool of strong candidates to interview
* Therefore they are incentivized to make their interview process hard enough that a poor candidate almost never passes it
* but then it becomes something a strong candidate can only pass with a bit of good luck
This is not âfairâ, but itâs a marketplace. The best approach is the one you propose: accept it and donât take it personally if you miss, roll the dice again.
They just have a pool thatâs filled with bad candidates. They want to disable luck for them.
Why is it that most other jobs especially low skill take the opposite approach? You screw up or demonstrate your incompetence on your first day on a construction job site you are let go right then.
Like the great Mike Tyson once said, "God punishes you by giving you everything you want... to see if you can handle it".
For many, achieving your dreams usually comes with the hard lesson that you had the wrong dreams and that the real dreams you should have had were many of the things you already gave away to get there.
Then again, infinite AI-developer money isn't the worst outcome, either. Something something land among the clouds.
Honestly, AI is far too creative to pick a job that cares about the wrong thing and you are dumped into a feature mill. Itâd be the worst time to be at these large companies because the smaller more creative startups are whatâs going to be really an adventure in this space, versus the same old run of the mill career treadmill SWE have been given after SWE ballooned in the 2010s.
You have much cooler opportunity in these new companies and product spaces versus the large ships. It really is a once in a lifetime opportunity.
> To reiterate - wow! the interviews are hard, every company is selecting for the top of a different metric, and there's really no shame in not passing one of these loops. Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)
I wholeheartedly agree.
That said, if you pursue jobs that are at least somewhat aligned with your personal convictions and desire for impact on the world and not strictly based on money, prestige, and power, you might be able to able to derive some greater sense of wholeness through the work. Not "make you whole", but "contribute to your wholeness".
If you only chase money, prestige and power - which if we're honest is central to a lot of the tech industry today - you probably won't experience any wholeness contribution from your work. That's fine, of course. Hopefully in that case you can find it through family, friendships, or community.
> Also, none of these companies will actually give you your purpose in life, your dream job will not make you whole:-)
Some people really do find a whole lot of personal meaning from their work. And that's okay. It's their life.
If someone is the sort of person who might find meaning working for Anthropic, they would find that meaning at a lot of other jobs as well. I think that's a better emssage; not that "you shall not find purpose in your work", but "the purpose you may find from work is not limited to a single or even small number of AI companies".
That is fair. I suppose what I meant is, the idea of working at one of these companies can be really exciting, almost a fantasy, but in practice: it might actually hurt you in many ways. 'Look what they make you give', as a certain character once said. With that said, obviously I think it's cool and worth doing, but there are significant and painful downsides, too.
I get it, we all want to be somebody, but is the juice worth the squeeze?
They may find a candidate that succeeds, they may not. In the end, itâs up to you to decide whether that kind of environment is for you. I also interviewed at a few AI startups and while difficult, I wasnât impressed with them. They seem to be too high maintenance with little to no experience.
This is key: the OP seems to be putting them on a pedestal, but if Sturgeon's law holds (and I think it does) then a sizable percentage of what's happening there doesn't smell very good.
There's people whose entire job is to list houses at 50% over the market pricing. And there's people whose entire job it is to offer 50% market price for houses. They only need to be successful once every couple of month. They flood the market with buying and selling signals, that's just the way the market works. I wouldn't be discouraged if my fair market offer were rejected by most bidders in a market, statistically they are professional over/under bidders, that's fine.
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."
This. I've hired in a number of roles, in several industries, and what they've all had in common is that rejection is never personal.
My first career was in theatre, which a) is (or at least was, back in the day?) much more competitive than tech - par was one callback (ie, second screening) per 100 auditions, and one casting per 10 callbacks; and b) is genuinely, deeply vulnerable - you have to bring your whole self into your work, in a way that you don't in any other field.
It's still never personal, and actors who don't develop thick skins wash out quickly.
I once auditioned three rounds for Romeo, at a company I really liked, and thought I'd killed it. I didn't get the role, and was pretty bummed (particularly since - actors are nothing but petty - I didn't much like the performance by the guy who did). Six months later the casting director button-holed me after seeing another show I was in, and told me I'd been their first choice, and he was sorry they'd not been able to cast me. The trouble was, he said, their only good choice for Juliette was at least a foot shorter than I am, and there was no way that wouldn't have looked awkward.
It's never personal.
Furthermore, that "failed" audition directly led to two later jobs, and I think indirectly to a third. Having a good interview, even in a situation where you don't achieve the immediate goal, can only be good for you - both by developing your own skills, and for creating a reputation for competence within your industry.
What? I've interviewed hundreds of candidates for engineering roles and my rejection is virtually always personal.
This is why we do interviews and not just quizzes/homework (and you should be suspicious of any company that leans too heavily on the latter). I need an idea of what it would be like to work with you _as a person_, and not a grab bag of learnable skills.
Whether you should take that rejection and change yourself about it is another question entirely.
Hey, my first "career" was also in theater!
Strong agreement. I can confirm for other readers that the day I realized this --- "Oh, rejection means nothing!" --- was a weird day. It takes a weight off.
And it is true across every other field. There are way more factors external to the "you" of the decision, and they're given more weight than the "you" of the decision. This is one of those cases where you only need to experience the "other side of the table" once for it to click.
Companies that are more humane in their hiring practices (even just actually send a rejection email vs. ghosting) deserve a bit of credit, because caring for the applicant is not a KPI.
This is such an insightful take. As someone who has interviewed many candidates, I wholeheartedly agree. While it's important to reflect on how you can improve, it's also critical to maintain morale and become comfortable with rejection during the job hunt. One of the biggest obstacles I've seen; whether with friends, family, or candidates; is the tendency to internalize rejection as a sense of being inherently 'bad.' Of course, once you internalize this belief, any motivation to study is gone. It can be challenging to help people see that this negative self-talk has become the primary barrier to their success.
My recommendation to people is to apply for jobs you know you won't get while also applying for jobs you want. Exposure to rejection really does help take the sting out of the process.
> 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.
I would also guess that in at least >50% of cases your application is never given a fair shot for random reasons. I remember when a company that I was working at was doing intern interviews, they would almost always run out of time to do interviews (this was back when interviews were in person), so they would pick 2-3 schools that they had time to get to (proximity * prestige was the factor there) and everyone else got a blanket rejection.
Maybe itâs because my school wasn't on that list, but I remember feeling like if I got rejected like that I would very much feel like I wasnât good enough. But it was essentially random.
Especially true in today's hiring environment. They probably have hundreds of qualified people lined up for that position. One company recently reached out to me asking me to submit a CV, considering me a good fit for their position. In the end, they rejected me, but they mentioned that they got 1400 applications. If you don't have a personal connection to get you in, it's basically a lottery.
Even sometimes if you do have a personal connection. I've had twice now where I've had a warm intro to the hiring manager, jobs where I had done the kind of work before, and the hiring manager didn't even reply to my emails.
Won't lie, both of those hurt, but I also reasoned it that if that's who I would have been working for, I wouldn't have enjoyed the work anyway.
> there is no information in a rejection
Building on that: There's a few reasons why a company won't explain why they reject a candidate.
One of the reasons is that they don't want candidates to "game" the system, because it makes it hard to screen for the people they want to hire.
Another reason is that often rejections are highly subjective, and telling a candidate that "we didn't hire you because of X" could be highly insulting.
Finally, quite often candidates are rejected because the people hiring ultimately are looking for people they will get along with. It doesn't matter how smart someone is, if something about the working relationship causes friction, the team dynamic can quickly devolve. (And to be quite frank, in these situations the candidate will probably have a better job working elsewhere.) These kinds of rejections are highly subjective, so no one really wants to give a candidate feedback.
I used to provide feedback but often got candidates who were argumentative about it rather that accepting that the decision was final. This turned me off on the whole concept.
but confirmed why you rejected the candidate - which is sort of a win
> ...the only reason is that the hiring team liked someone else better...
Or they liked you just as much as the one they hired, but you lost the coin toss. Or, they hated you because they misunderstood something you said. Or...?
> there is no information in a rejection.
The most helpful job interview I had was when the interviewer broke script and just leveled with me about how I wasn't presenting myself well. There was a shared connection (our alma mater) that must have convinced him to be straight with me instead of hiding how poorly I was doing behind a mask. The HR handbooks say that you should never let a candidate know why they were not selected, but that information can be extremely helpful.
If you're not getting offers, I strongly recommend that you find somebody you trust to do a mock interview. Let them critique your resume, cover letter, posture, awkwardness, lame handshake, etc.
In the United States, most junior/community colleges have career centers that will do this. There are also economic development boards in essentially every town with a population over 1000; they can connect you to places to do mock interviews.
Very helpful for new interviewees, whether just out of college or during a career transition.
The HR handbooks say that for good reason. Telling a candidate why they were rejected means they'll argue with you, or worse, file a lawsuit.
A couple years ago I was turned down for a position after an initial screening interview because they said my writing sample didn't meet certain criteria. I felt it arguably did, but I just said "thank you for your time and consideration", and moved on. I was just glad to get a clear "no" at an early stage.
They've probably revised their policy by now, I suspect, but I appreciated that they made the effort.
Their policy will last until they're sued. All it takes is one to ruin it for everybody.
Yeah⌠the common connection thing is whatâs at play here. This is why high-stakes introductions are done through people you know, to show that you can be trusted lest you be a social outcast.
Agreed. I've been rejected from roles I've been genuinely excited about and felt totally defeated. This last application run I made a concerted effort to protect myself from feeling bad and it definitely helped. Some people can be excellent candidates but ultimately the wrong fit for the role or an equally better or exceptional candidate is also in the pipeline.
Fantastically well said. Iâve also seen people literally flip a coin when unable to decide between some equally skilled candidates.
> One great piece of advice and informal mentor gave me long ago is that there is no information in a rejection.
I mean, there might be, in two ways. Sometimes, you just mess up in some obvious way and can learn from that. But you also get a glimpse of the corporate culture. Maybe not for FAANG and the likes - the processes are homogenized and reviewed by a risk-averse employment lawyer - but for smaller organizations, it's fair game.
But as with layoffs, there's nothing you can win by begging, groveling, or asking for a second chance. The decision has been made, these decisions are always stochastic and unfair on some level, but you move on. You'll be fine.
I think the point, which I agree with, was that in the typical case of a stock rejection, you don't know if the errors you think you made had any bearing on the decision. Information you get from the process you would have gotten whether or not you got accepted, so it's not from the rejection.
There are cases where the company gives you some indication of why they rejected you but they are rare in my experience (in the USA, mostly for legal reasons, IDK about other countries). Or they give you information in some other way. Some companies will stop and send you home part way through if it's not going well. That also gives more information.
Yeah I think this is a great mental framework. Getting rejected hurts, it's natural to want to find a reason, and with some self-reflection it definitely can help one grow. But you gotta be very careful about over-indexing on any one interview where the reasons for rejection may or may not have anything to do with what you did and said during the interview (let alone your personhood).
Frankly, if you want to get better at interviewing, it's better to do more general research on what hiring managers and companies want, and then do more interviews to practice communicating that you have the skills and temperament to deliver value.
One specific piece of advice to the OA: this kind of post might feel cathartic, but it doesn't get you closer to your goal. Sure, it will resonate, people will commiserate, and you'll get some dopamine and internet pointsâbut if your goal is to work at a top tier company like Anthropic then such a post can only hurt you. The reality in fast-growing, ambitious companies at the forefront of the AI bubble is that expectations are sky high, and getting things done to attempt to meet those expectations is incredibly difficult for a hundred different reasons. In this type of environment, whatever technical skills you have are not enough. To be successful you need a sustained and resourceful effort to solve whatever problems come your way. One of the most toxic traits is having a victim mentality. Unfortunately it's a common affliction due to the low agency that individuals have in big companies and late stage capitalism in general, but you've got to tamp it down and focus on what you can control (which in practice is often more than you might think). While this post doesn't directly demonstrate a victim mentality, it suggests internalizing the rejection ("My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.") in a way that is adjacent and something that would give me significant pause if I was a hiring manager evaluating for a role in a chaotic company.
I love the quippy things that people post on hn that are try-hard tech quippy and wrong:
> from the single accept==0 bit that you typically get back.
A single bit literally has information so you just contradicted your entire thesis.
The point is that bit of information doesnât tell you anything about yourself and your own skills and intrinsic value. You could be there best hire to date but someone even better than you shows up, or the bosses nephew or funding went away, etc. All events outside of your control.
LOL. People who think "try-hard" is bad need not apply. Nobody owes you anything, least of all a job, man.
I don't love the boring, uselessly pedantic takes some people have on what is otherwise truly good advice.
Give it a rest, please.
It has none of the actionable information that people want in a good feedback message:
- What did I do wrong during the interviews
- What did I do that you weren't happy with
- Why was I not liked enough to be accept==1
If there is even a bit of information on these things, there are actionable things that can be done for the next interview (with any company).
Somewhat OT but I just donât like the current iteration of DevRel.
Initially I saw the folks in this field as hype-persons, but their concrete output was tools that were useful for developers. The author did create this! But it was in service of landing a role at the company.
The people that work in this field now seem to mostly just get into beefs on the internet, create funny posts on Linkedin. Which⌠doesnât seem very useful for developers.
I have no idea to what extent Anthropic or other employers delve into prospective candidatesâ blogs; but this strikes me as too much self-disclosure for oneâs own good. We all have idiosyncrasies; but calling oneself weird on a now widely published blog article seems like it risks defeating the goal of making oneself an ideal candidate for many job opportunities. Look, many of my own eccentricities have been (net) valuable to be professionally and personally, but it was probably better they be revealed âorganicallyâ rather than through a public act of self-disclosure.
This is the age of social media. This person has hit the front page of HN twice now. That's a commercially valuable skill.
At this point, having proved that can do something commercially valuable a couple times now, I think they should run with it. Start a YouTube channel. Keep racking up views. Then, eventually, do partnerships and sponsorships, in addition to collecting AdSense money.
If you like to write or perform for other people, you can monetize that now. This person is good at it. They should continue.
You think too much of HN.
I expect many tech employers also think too much of HN, which is exactly the point being made here.
Surely many of the kinds of companies this guy is applying to think the same?
As do many employers.
Influence may be intentionally avoided by managers. Applicant should try the marketing team.
The job they were applying for was DevRel, literally one of the goals of many DevRel roles is getting traction on places like HN
> This is the age of social media. This person has hit the front page of HN twice now. That's a commercially valuable skill.
In general yes, wrt HN it's not; literally in this second post he bemoans that the first one didn't pay off for him.
As someone whoâs hired many dev advocates, I definitely value the ability to turn mundane topics into posts that hit the HN front page. If they can do this about something as dull as failing interviews, imagine what theyâd do with an actually interesting technical topic.
Failing interviews is a favorite topic for HN, not a "dull" one; this is not the only person who's made the front page about it, and certainly won't be the last. HN's audience contains a large group that believes "tech interviews are stupid and broken" and this is right up their alley.
I don't think it is a strong signal of an easy pivot to influencer-as-a-career.
On one hand I agree with you, but on the other... I don't really want to live in a world where being oneself (a perfectly fine, good self) is a liability.
I know I have privilege in being able to say this, but I'd rather get rejected by potential employers who don't get me, than have to pretend to be someone I'm not.
Maybe a good point, but honestly, interviewers barely read resumes, theyâre very, very likely not going to read your blog, or remember âhey itâs the person from that blog post I ready 7 weeks ago.â
I expect that for a Developer Relations role, someone read the blogs.
Perhaps the blogs of the candidates yes. On the other hand, perhaps OP will find a perfect fit this way.
Thatâs a good point, Iâve been a bit burnt out on strictly eng roles that I projected there a bit
Absolutely. Especially for late-stage candidates.
People get hired all the time based on their online content. Or, at the very least, they get interviews when they wouldn't otherwise. Don't forget about the luck surface area!
> interviewers barely read resumes
I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry. Do you, as an interviewer, not read resumes?
I read loads of resumes and the truth is more like everyone are terrible communicators. Especially software engineers. Most resumes are badly formatted, badly typeset, full of errors and give me confusing/contradictory details about what your job responsibilities were rather than what you accomplished.
Most peoples' resumes are so low-effort that they're practically unreadable and I'm trying to read between the lines to figure out what you're capable of. I might as well not be reading them because I'm trying to figure out what you've done, what you're good at and what motivates you and nothing you've given me on that paper helps me do that.
One of these days someone is going to figure out how to cross-polinate technology people and sales people in the office to smooth out each others' rough edges. Whoever does is going to revolutionize industry.
> I feel like this is the biggest lie ever told in this industry.
It's not. I've been in a number of interviews where the interviewer has told me straight up "I didn't read your resume. Mind giving me a second to give it a scan?"
To be fair, as you mention, resumes are horrible tools. They should only be used as a place to start a conversation, so does it really matter if the interviewer reads it in depth before starting the interview?
Others in the loop (sourcer/screener/recruiter at minimum) almost certainly read your resume for you to even make it that far.
It's starting to sound to me like on both sides of this conversation, up-front effort made can be strong positive signal...
Iâm a little confused, because first you challenge me, but then come to the exact conclusion that resumes are largely unreadable. Iâll look for something they claim to have done to dig deep on, see if itâs BS or not, but Iâm not reading every X by Y% with my jaw on the floor. FWIW Iâm generally on the back side of the process, where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already.
> where someone at the front (is supposed to have) vetted the person already.
I think that's a mistake, personally. Each interviewer needs to make an independent decision and relying on the judgement of a screener early in the process is giving that person disproportionate weight towards hiring for your team. Usually that resume screener is someone in HR. Would you trust them to decide who your team hires?
Your posts do indicate that maybe there is a larger segment of folks who don't read resumes than I realize...My amount of rigor may only come after being involved in some catastrophically bad hiring decisions. Like someone I made the deciding vote to hire was stalking multiple employees, was a heavy drug user, did zero work of value and ultimately crashed and burned by getting arrested for coming at someone with a knife. For years HR wouldn't let us fire that person because of their protected class and multiple false claims they made against a large number of employees.
If itâs truly only HR and then direct to full interview panel then I agree with you, but Iâve never worked somewhere where a technical person wasnât involved in screening. Yes recruiters will winnow the inbound, but usually there a technical phone screen, hiring manager screen, or both.
FWIW this is what I assumed to be true when I said what I said.
And yet still that screening almost always has less technical depth than further interviews. It should not carry the most weight in the process, but because of practices like this it does.
Sorry, can't agree with this. The hiring manager's decision carries the most weight yes, but saying it's biased towards the screen is over-generalizing. I'm sure sometimes it is, but as someone who interviewed thousands and hired hundreds over a quarter century career at many organizations large and small, I can tell you unequivocally that technical feedback can and does regularly override my screening signal.
It is true for some companies. That said, in my experience, the more it was visible in an interview that the interviewer read my application, my website, my open-source code etc, the more enjoyable working for that company has been for me. I guess itâs a sign people at such a company give a shit. It transfers to other areas than just interviews led by them. At this point, if I see that the interviewer barely skimmed my CV, my expectations, that this job will be good, plummet.
I have to think Anthropic is in high enough demand and looking for high enough skilled staff that any negative social implications from a blog post like this, as tame as it is, would be outweighed, for any actually suitable candidate.
https://xkcd.com/137/
They're in devrel. If they're not publicly visible devrel isn't for them.
I still have to meet a person in computer science who isn't weird
Normal people are just weird people you don't know very well.
I think software should be weirder. If people have ever used the MRI analysis software afni, I think itâs just the best kind of weird.
Most CS people I know arenât weird and are actually pretty corporate and conformist. But at the same time, the people I know who do open source are some of the weirdest people I know haha
I'll take an eclectic bunch of weirdos who all do and like cool shit over the corpo conformist normies any day. Super easy to suss out who is who when you first meet them. Just ask what they like to do when they aren't laboring under the thumb of capitalism. The cool people will talk your ear off about some esoteric whatever.
I've met a few. None in SV, all in "flyover" states/provinces.
SV/NY is pretty concentrated with "non-weird" SWEs these days unless you count "money-oriented" as weird. "CS degree from a top program followed by FAANG or NYC Fintech" was a common default path for reasonably-smart/reasonably-socially-skilled/highly-career-motivated high school students to aim at for a while.
It's a personal blog. I didn't read this as an employer. Someone greener may read this and think "this guy is really hard on himself but, unlike me, he's done so much more! Maybe we'll always feel this way so I should just be kinder to myself."
The modern internet is stuffed to the gills with branding and bravado. Some vulnerability is fine.
Author here! Thanks for this. This is exactly what I want people to feel :) I'm willing to hurt my chances if it helps others
Here's why it's wrong to think you did something wrong when you get rejected from a job:
Sometimes, a company has multiple candidates that pass the interview with flying colors for a single role. They need to pick someone, and reject the remaining great candidates. If luck or timing was different and you were the only great candidate, they would have just picked you. But now they have a few, and have a hard time deciding who is "better". Often, they kind of punt on hunches, gut feelings, or things that don't really say anything about you at all.
You end up with the "Unfortunately..." email anyway.
If you do happen to get some feedback, well that's actionable. It's something you can improve and the next time at bat you'll be in a better position to do well.
Dear Author,
the internet is not your friend, but a kind of alien intelligence - vast, cool, and unsympathetic, in HG Wells' formulation. Publicly melting down (even anonymously) is not going to help you; if anything, you'll just end up feeling more isolated.
You need to work out your self-image issues with a person instead of projecting them onto your environment. That person might be a friend of therapist, or several people helping you with different things, and finding the right person(s) is likely to involve several false starts and blind alleys. You should pursue this work in person. Parasocial relationships are a necessity in this day and age, but over-reliance on them is ver bad for your mental health.
This is the advice that I hope the author takes heed of the most.
I'll add that what qualifies as âweirdâ or âquirkyâ on the web is probably a worldâs different than what did in the past. And the weird and quirky things that people are willing to indulge or entertain in certain online communities does not represent what the rest of the world is aware of or even finds appreciable.
This is the best advice. There was a moment in time where being vulnerable on the net was okayish. I donât think it is anymore. Its best to work on personal issues with your professional therapist and/or with your trusted group of friends.
I recently interviewed for Anthropic, 6 rounds, recruiter was great, said they were putting together an offer letter. I met one of the managers, then another came back from vacation... and then they decided not to give me an offer.
I asked for feedback, and the recruiter sounded frustrated (about the internal process), because they had a moving bar on what was wanted from the hiring managers. I know I hadn't completely aced one of the interviews (they had me do a second one), and apparently they thought it was good enough on initial review, but when coming back to review it again it was not good enough.
It seems like they are going through growing pains as a company.
Probably not even about whether it was good enough at all, just random managers making random decisions by how they were feeling the day they interviewed you. Any time a company has a LOT of applicants, like any big tech company does, the less you should take any info at all from a given rejection or even an offer. Itâs kinda random.
Youâll typically get better info only when a company is small and has a role in low demand and they only had a couple of people apply. This situation is pretty rare.
You be you. You will find your people and your place.
It may just be that Anthropic isn't it.
I had a company that was like a white elephant for me for a long time. Got in there, and I will say: It was one of the worst experiences I had in my career.
Not all that glitters is gold, and happiness is often only discovered when it is gone. If you can avoid those two pitfalls in life. You'll do well better than me.
Hear hear. I joined a company which made a prosumer product I truly loved using. However, shortly after jointing i realized the company was nothing that I hoped for (Ancient tech, toxic culture, micro-management. All red-flags you can imagine). Fortunately a small startup made a blipp on my radar and after interviewing with them, as I apparently made a good impression, I got an offer so I immediately switched. I didn't realize it at the time but this happened to be a major inflection point in my career (technologically, socially and economically) for which I will be ever thankful. Not exactly OP's experience but my takeaway is that sometimes, even if you think you want to work at a place, it might not be the best option for you. There are so many more opportunities out there.
I canât imagine why someone would want to work for a specific company. Even team to team can go from terrible experience to great experience
In my case, it was more: It was a company where we just kept near missing, and it was a very logical fit.
But it was a bad team fit. 100%.
That said, sometimes one has to have a few bad experiences to actually know what good is.
It shouldnât surprise you that people like the work or products specific companies work on and have a dream to work on those too. The actual experience of working there though is hard to know in advance.
RSU's. Nothing less, nothing more.
The reasons why companies hire or don't hire someone usually have very little with the candidate themselves. From my experience, whenever this machine needs another cog, almost any will do - usually the first one within reach. And when it doesn't, not even the shiniest one will be of interest. So it's probably nothing personal OP
Nah. Every company has its lore about what makes a good candidate and they try to test for that. The lore is often rubbish (as in: there's often little correlation between interview performance and on-job performance), but there is still a process and that process rejects most applicants.
Or maybe it has everything to do with the candidate. They author recognizes they have spent much of their life being an unlikable jerk. Past actions can come back to bite you.
I tend to agree, which makes it all the more amusing that companies brag about being so selective. It seems like largely artificial and random selectivity.
Putting so much self worth into a single job application strikes me as unhealthy. Hiring decisions are have absurdly high variance. Everyone I know has been rejected from a job that seemed like a perfect, usually many times over. I'd say that's far more common than actually getting a given job.
particularly at these high prestige companies where open roles are likely to get thousands of applicants
Why is Anthropic hiring developers? Amodei said that AI will be generating all the code by the end of the year.
I wish I had the courage to post and talk like this more. I really resonated with the authors words as these kinds of feelings make up a lot of my internal monologuing some days.
> I can't turn my weird off
Why not?
If you have conscious insight into what behaviour is or isn't "weird" in a specific situation or environment, you absolutely can choose to turn it off, or at least damp it down. I'm not saying you should or shouldn't, and there's no judgement. But if you can identify it, you can choose.
Author here! I should say that I can't turn my weird off quickly and consistently :) The feedback loops in social situations are slow. I've been working really hard on my listening/people skills, but these things take time, and I'm probably just being too impatient
I think a lot of these organizations are just really immature in their hiring because of growth. Thatâs my experience with Swedenâs Loveable at least.
That coupled with a high amount of candidates I wouldnât think much of failing one (biased, I âfailedâ one this summer :) )
As someone that recently failed a tech interview at the last stage after a long search, the only way to move forward is to just keep moving. Given your motivation and passion, there's definitely another place for you.
Also important to note, just because you like the product doesn't mean you'll love the team, anthropic is a well paying job but it's also just a job.
Hey! In my opinion the rejection doesn't really matter.
I really like diggit.dev, your approach, and I appreciate that you use Elm!
Keep pushing forward!
> My best wasn't good enough. I'm not good enough.
This is not how to understand this. They may have been hiring for say 50 positions.
They will just fill up those 50 positions with the people who reach a threshold, not stack-rank _everyone_ who reaches the threshold and pick the top 50.
There's little ROI in doing that, and potentially it reduces their list of candidates by taking longer.
You might have been mid way through the test just as person 50 was offered their role.
> It was easy to swallow that failure. I made an honest mistake; I expect companies to reject candidates who make honest mistakes during interviews.
what a ridiculous statement
If you are this emotionally invested in a job without having done it for some time, this is an accidental or insightful act of compassion from an amorphous over-funded company.
You shouldnât even get this emotionally invested in a job you actually have. A corporation canât love you back.
On the bright side, do you think that Claude would pass any coding interview without problems?
Youâre incredibly talented, Taylor. Their loss, sincerely. If they didnât hire you, know that it wasnât the right fit and you shouldnât be there. Your talents are needed elsewhere.
> I expect companies to reject candidates who make honest mistakes during interviews.
So the only ones who make it are 100% flawless?
I do my very best when interviewing to ignore honest mistakes and look at the person. My criteria is more around, is this person demonstrating the ability to learn and grow? If so, everything else can be taught or developed.
> I can't turn my weird off, so I think I defensively dial it up sometimes
Hits close to home! For what it's worth, it sounds like you have an admirable level of self-reflection and - despite being painful at times - I expect that this will pay for itself over the course of your life.
Try again in six months. Don't give up.
I also got rejected by Anthropic, and now Iâm working at an amazing startup instead. Anthropicâs hiring process is dumb, you shouldnât take it personally.
Lately Iâve been thinking I might have better odds making a straight shot for ASI on my own over practicing and rehearsing the material that needs to be presented almost perfectly in the AI interviews. Iâve worked at FANG in ML / applied research for almost a decade but still canât even get a screening interview at the top places without asking someone I know for a referral. And I really hate bugging former coworkers for referrals. Normally end up procrastinating on reaching out until the job postings just disappear haha.
heh i got rejected from google about 15 years ago. I remember exactly where i was standing (outside on the sidewalk), color and placement of leaves on the grass, even the specific joints and cracks on the sidewalk i was standing on when i got the news. I don't hold a grudge or have any regrets but i remember that moment vividly.
What did you flunk? There was no interview in both cases..
Not sure how I feel about âfront-paging hackernewsâ as part of a devrel take home test. Obviously, I understand how important it isâI want my devrels to write content that drives front page traffic. But as a HN userâŚ
Author here! Just want to be extra crystal clear that Anthropic gave me a boring/standard coding project. I decided to post a parallel project to HN to demonstrate that I was able to quickly create engaging software. They in no way asked or insinuated that I share anything online
Hey, I feel you on rejection - it stings. Just remember that, like any company, that place is just a collection of humans making imperfect decisions with limited information. Trust me. Your worth isn't defined by one hiring decision.
But were you non threatening and likable? In many cases that will be a greater factor than your technical competence.
I totally get the authorâs frustration. I think such motivation and talent is a sign that there would be plenty of other groups happy to have the applicant. The trick to is connect with them, and not get so hung up on Anthropic specifically. Easier said than done though.
Having been from the other side of the table. You did not flunk anything again.
A job process is not an exam where if you do well you succeed.
Your "performance" plays a small role in whether you are accepted (maybe less than 30%). The rest is:
- The pipeline: that is who are your competitors, is there someone late in the process, is there someone a manager worked with / knows
- Your CV: obviously at the point of the interview, you can't change your history
- The position fit: basically who they're looking for. They might have a profile in mind (let's say someone extrovert to do lots of talks, or someone to devrel to enterprise) where you simply don't fit.
- The biases: And there is looot of these. For instance, some would open your blog and say it's unprofessional because of the UI. Not saying that is the case, it's simply their biases.
So, my advice, you reached hn front page twice in a couple of months. Most people, me included, never did. You clearly have something. Find work with people that see that.
The disappointment of not getting a job offer seems reasonable. The disappointment about things that are core to who you are seems overboard to me. I feel the author could learn to be more comfortable in their own skin.
Also re this:
> âHeâs cute, but heâs too weirdâ
If someoneâs thinking this about you, youâre just not a good fit for each other. It isnât that youâve failed somehow. Maybe theyâre cute but too ânormalâ.
> On top of their secret take-home assignment, I independently published diggit.dev and a companion blogpost about my [sincerely] positive experiences with Claude. I was hoping that some unsolicited "extra credit" would make me look like an exceptional/ambitious candidate.
As an employer, such brown-nosing would put me off. Being exceptionally eager to please can be a red flag.
I wish I could right like this. The flow is crazy and the words are honest and beautiful.
what was the position? what are your credentials to fulfill that position? I feel like cover letters, and recommendations are just icing on the cake of core skills and experiences, not the entire cake.
You sound like you'd be a great teammate. Hang in there and best of luck next time.
> I expect companies to reject candidates who make honest mistakes during interviews.
I mean--maybe their interview process is overly harsh? They could miss out some good candidates that way.
> I don't need (or deserve) your sympathy.
Hey person, don't be so hard on yourself. The world is already hard enough to just live in. Hoping you find an alternate and maybe more enjoyable career path :)
Probably auto rejected by Claude screening agent. Nothing PERSONAL.
typo: post-scarity
I enjoyed reading, thank you
This is what blogging was, should be, and maybe will be again some day.
Fuck some companies and their opaque, convoluted and too-precious hiring processes.
The post reads to me like all those movies about the nerd with a heart of gold that the hot girl will recognize and eventually marry.... which only happens in those movies.
Do people really not understand that companies don't care one whit about your personality? They only care about whether you can make them more money. And that extends to interviewers; the number one thing interviewers care about is can you meaningfully contribute to the existing roadmap, not whether you can bring your own unique perspective. This is especially true at mega huge corporate places like anthropic.
oof
Anthropic from a technology perspective does interesting work, but from a business perspective its long-term viability is unclear. LLM generated slop will unlikely make it through the valley of despair in the Gartner hype cycle.
Rule #3: popularity is not an indication of utility.
Rule #23: Don't compete to be at the bottom, as you just might actually win.
The fact is all employees that produce intangible assets look like a fiscal liability on paper. If you don't have project history in a given area, than managers quietly add training costs and retention issue forecasts on that hiring decision.
I found the dynamic range anecdote by Steve Jobs (a controversial figure) was rather accurate across many business contexts =3
https://youtu.be/TRZAJY23xio?feature=shared&t=2360
> take-home assignment
That's the point at which I would have stopped the process personally.
> That's the point at which I would have stopped the process personally.
Why is that? I love take-home assignments. At least, if it's just an initial get-to-know-you interview, and then the assignment. What I utterly despise is the get-to-know-you interview, then a tech interview with the entire dev team, then a take-home, then a meeting with the CTO.
I will never, ever, ever go through with any job that has an interview process like this again. I always ask up-front what their interview process is like.
If a take-home or anything else (automated half-hour online test or whatever) taking more than a couple minutes and not requiring as much time investment from them as you comes before they've winnowed down much of the fieldâif it's used as any kind of screenerâI'd be out. That time's better spent sending more applications (or, IDK, drilling leetcode) if there are more than a very-few candidates still in the running for a given position.
If you want early stage bulk screeners, go for it, I'm sure you need them, but don't take much of my time or the math don't math.
Because it's time theft?
Why would I spend 4 hours (in the best case scenario, otherwise days) on the very first step of the application process, where, regardless of my resume, I have an extremely high chance to be rejected, while the company puts literally no time in?
Well, that's different. If it's a super challenging take-home, with requirements that exceed 1 page, then yeah, I'd agree. Most take-homes that I've received have been super simple, though. And they're usually not the first step, but the final step, in my experience.
Simple does not mean short. I can give you a one line take-home assignment that will take a lifetime to build.
In any case, if it exceeds one or two HOURS, it's too long. And I have never seen a take-home assignment that did not.
(some companies pay for your time for take-home assignments, obviously that changes everything)
I've been at a past company where we (well, mostly I) set up a take-home that would take a mid-level web dev familiar with the material maybe 15-30 minutes to knock out, basically just to test if candidates could produce responsive CSS layouts and knew how to make a proper web form work. It was wild how many we got back that still didn't account for basic (explicitly outlined) use cases like 'works on a phone screen'.
> Over the past decade, I've been striving to spread joy, to do good, to be better. I'm trying so hard.
To give some advice that is loving but entirely unkind: knock it off.
No amount of spreading joy or do gooding is going to make you feel better. It can not, anymore than doing math homework will convince yourself that you are smart.
The problem is not what you want, it's how you want it. Or to put it another way, be the ocean not the wave.
I truly do not understand the use of this public self castigation; it does not strike me as healthy, if anything itâs a cry for help, and Iâm uncomfortable being exposed to it.
In some cultures, it's perfectly normal, and not too long ago was generally considered healthy.
See, for example, self-deprecating British wit. Or anyone from the upper Midwest.
There is a big difference between self deprecating wit and this.
This whole essay is cringe. They're not your girlfriend. They're not "guiding humanity toward post-scarity AI abundance" whatever the hell that means.
Getting rejected from a job always stings, but it's worse if you build it up to be more than it is. There's a dozen other AI companies out there shoveling the same shit, go apply to them. It's a job, not a vocation. Try to keep it all in perspective.
chill. it's a personal reflection on a personal blog.
> I can't turn my weird off
That might be your problem right there. Deciding you can't do something is always a self-fulfilling prophecy. How hard have you tried?
I learned to turn my weird off a long time ago. It wasn't easy. It took many years. It was painful at times. But I did it. If I can do it, you probably can too.
P.S. You might want to think about whether or not turning your weird off is something you actually want. Being normal comes with its own set of trade-offs. But if you are going to keep your weird you should do it because it's something you decide you want, not because it's something you decide you are powerless to change.
Faking normalcy can often make you more unattractive than being yourself. I suspect that people can sense when someone isn't being genuine about themselves.
Yes, that's what makes it hard. You can't just fake it. It's is the same thing that makes acting hard. Good actors aren't faking it.
You can definitely fake it. Most people at $BIG_CORP aren't half as jovial and excited as they seem. Whatever, it's fine - we don't need to be perfectly authentic at all times, sometimes you can just go with the flow a little.
Is "God actor" a term reserved for only the best actors? :P
> God actor
Oops.
Well, they could also dial down the weird during an interview, and slowly reveal their more personal side as they get to know their co-workers better. This seems so obvious it's barely worth stating, but it seems like there's a false dichotomy in their post (no weird XOR weird).
I mean, everyone is weird when you look really close. But we can be cool with one another. To me it just sounds like they're still quite sensitive to judgement, and looking for explanations as to the rejection. I totally get that, I'm in the same boat. Sometimes you just don't have a good explanation, and you have to solicit valuable feedback elsewhere.
I like weird people. I think most creative people like weird people. If "weird" means you have idiosyncrasies, then yeah, all of us do. In my experience, once you get to know a person, you realize there is no such thing as "normal".
Now if "weird" in this case actually means "kind of an asshole" then that's a different thing, and yeah, that's definitely worth working on.
"I spent so much of my life being an unlikable jerk" - so yeah, it sounds like that could be (somewhat?) true, or maybe they're just very self-critical.
I like "weird coffee people", and folks that are obsessed with fun hobbies. I'm not so into sociopaths though, so it depends on the kind of weird.
Really refreshing to read this. Sometimes I feel like an alien among the weird for having gone over to the âdark sideâ (to the normies)