Breezy Glacier asked
answered 4d ago
Keeping up while being rejected
I loved how you ended your OpenAI post with this sentence:
After that, it’s about the fortitude to keep persisting through taking many shots at goal
Could you elaborate on how one can keep their mental state healthy while dealing with rejection after rejection?
For context, I’m currently in a job where I make close to $330K a year. I know that I could make closer to $450K at peer companies for essentially the same role. I started preparing for interviews back in May while maintaining my day job and also taking care of a toddler.
So far, I’ve been rejected by three of my top target companies. I’m feeling pretty dejected right now and, frankly, part of me wants to give up. But the thought of continuing to toil away at what increasingly feels like a dead-end job, while knowing how much more I could be making elsewhere, keeps me going. At the same time, that thought also makes the whole process and every living moment feel miserable.
There are also some practical challenges. I did most of my coding prep at the beginning of this process and got quite good at it, but now, four months in, I’ve forgotten some of the neat tricks, patterns, and tactics needed for certain categories of problems. System design is mostly fine. And unlike studying for an exam, interviews aren’t evaluated on a clean binary signal, so it’s difficult to know whether I’m actually improving or simply getting unlucky.
I don’t really know how to keep my mental state in balance while continuing to push forward. How do you persist through repeated rejection without allowing the process to consume you?
Would love to hear your perspective.
Philip's answer
I'm not going to be one of these people who will blindly respond to you by saying you can definitely get a job at a more elite company if you just keep trying. I couldn't possibly know that for sure without knowing your actual skills.
That said, here are a few thoughts:
When I worked at OpenAI, and also when I worked at early Facebook (when it was only 500 engineers), the number of false negatives in interviews, where great candidates were rejected, was very high. This makes sense when a company is very desirable to work at, since it favors them to bias toward false negatives (which are so much better for them than false positives). This means a rejection doesn't necessarily mean you can't do it. It also means you should be rejected from quite a few elite places, the more the market skews toward going elite.
Over the past few years, the market has skewed heavily toward the most elite workplaces, both because compensation has skewed that way and because there's not the same sense of plenty as there was in the dot-com days. In the dot-com days, you could work for elite firms, but there were also a boatload of startups, and many of the startups were compensating quite well. In fact, in the dot-com days, it was considered most attractive to work for startups because people felt like big companies just didn't get it. This increased competition squeezes far more people in through a tight little door.
There is, of course, also the question of whether you indeed are the right material for the ultimate job you want. I have no idea whether this is the case. As a frame of reference, I've worked on three different teams at OpenAI, and on each one of those teams I was the slowest engineer. This, in my 28 years of work experience, had never happened before, not even close. On most teams in other companies, I was considered a pretty strong developer. Are you a stronger engineer than I am? I have no idea whether that's the case. Can you get objective feedback about whether you are? If you're lucky, once in a while an interviewer will go off script and be willing to give you true feedback about your interview performance after the fact. Sometimes you'll even meet a recruiter willing to do that. Barring those opportunities, I'd encourage finding parallel routes to getting that all-important feedback, because my advice would bifurcate for you depending on the answer. If you truly are elite, my answer will be: take more shots at the goal and keep going. There are no shortcuts to that. If instead you're tilting at windmills, my advice would be to seek the best job you can obtain right now and make the most of it.
Wishing you all the best. It's a very tough market out there, and I completely empathize with the difficulty of getting some jobs. I was flat out rejected the first time I applied to OpenAI.