Kyle Simpson@getify Author of You Don't Know JSMajor social network company rejected me after an interview with, "We didn't think you knew enough JS."
Chris Wanstrath@defunkt CEO, GithubBefore cofounding GitHub I applied for an engineering job at Yahoo and didn’t get it. Don’t let other people discourage you.
Jon Kuperman@jkup TwitterI was rejected from 10 unpaid internships. Now I work at Twitter.
Brian Holt@holtbt NetflixRejected by LinkedIn for not knowing enough JS. Couldn't even get a phone screen with Google or Twitter. Went on to work for reddit and now Netflix.
Juriy Zaytsev@kangax FacebookFun fact: I did Google interview and was told I'm not that good of a JS developer :) So that's out of the way
Alex Sexton@SlexAxton StripeI didn't get past the Twitter phone screen. Not in the beginning of my career, like 3 years ago.
Eric Rosenberg@DrJorts TwitterI was rejected without interview at Dropbox. Escorted out halfway through my Microsoft interview. Now I'm senior eng at Twitter.
Thomas Hunter@tlhunter Open TableA year and a half after being rejected by a popular payment gateway company I finally got my senior software title at a company where I write ES6 all day.
Nick Morgan@skilldrick TwitterFacebook rejected me just before Twitter hired me. I was very junior then though, so don't really blame them.
Anne-Gaelle Colom@agcolom jQueryI was refused a reference by my supervisor in France who thought the male student on my team did all the work.
Kelly King@kng TwitterI was rejected by YouTube and Pinterest before landing an awesome role at Twitter.
Sam Maskell@samuelmaskell TwitterOver the course of 9 months, I had tons of interviews, most of which I thought went very well, and I just kept getting rejected. I was ready to drastically lower my bar. Then, within about 5 days, I got an offer from both Twitter and Amazon.
Vikas Gorur@vikasgorur TwitterGot rejected by a storage startup despite extremely relevant experience. Interview was 5 whiteboard coding problems. I did well on three of them and okayish on the other two. Interviewed at Twitter three days and got an offer.
Esten@esten TwitterI had an interview with Scribd, who I really liked at the time, and totally bombed. Blanked out on writing a linked list in Python.
Ben Sangster@sangster TwitterI was rejected at Amazon and other companies with no technical interviews because I wasn't a Java engineer.
Miguel Rios@miguelrios TwitterBefore Twitter, I was rejected twice by big tech co, which only interviewed me cuz I had a scholarship they gave to Latino students.
Max Howell@mxcl AppleGoogle: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.
Bryan English@bengl YahooRejected by Google, Twitter, Square and Airbnb for bombing the on-site onslaughts of technical mindbogglery. One startup even cut me out mid-interview one time (can't remember which one). Now I'm at Yahoo doing npm things, which is a pretty sweet gig.
Myles Borins@thealphanerd IBMFirst time interviewing I didn't get past the phone screen at google, twitter, or a number of other places. A startup offered me a 10 week internship way below market rate. I held out and got a decent job at Famous Industries where I got a ton of excellent opportunities.
Kevin van Zonneveld@kvz TransloaditI was phone-screened by Google late 2010. I was nervous and unhappy with my performance but they never shared honest feedback or gave me a chance to set things straight.
Brandon Weis@brandonweis CirqleRejected by Zenefits for not being expressive enough in implementing JavaScript serialized execution of async functions using callback. Got offered a senior position but didn't get it due to no work authorization. Both happened in the same afternoon. Still not giving up.
Zachary Forrest y Salazar@zdfs SonosWas rejected by Netflix, Twitter and TuneIn. Now I work at Sonos.
Charlie Robbins@indexzero GoDaddyWas rejected by Google in New York in 2007 because I could not figure out how to list all subsets of a set correctly. I founded Nodejitsu and now work at GoDaddy.
John-David Dalton@jdalton MicrosoftI was rejected by Google, Mozilla, and Twitter before being hired by Microsoft. No ragrets.
Sebastian McKenzie@sebmck FacebookGot rejected from a junior position at Atlassian for not knowing enough about JavaScript. Shortly after they now use the JavaScript compiler that I wrote across most of their JavaScript stack.
Mike MacCana@mikemaccana CertSimpleGot rejected by Google and within a few months was working there as a contractor. Later one of my projects was used in their recruiting ads as the kind of awesome work you can do at Google.
Shaun LeBron@shaunlebron OSSI wondered what I was really worth after getting rejected by two silicon valley startups. So I decided to stop giving up on my side projects.
Ralph Holzmann@rlph VineI failed an interview at eGain for not knowing all the options on $.ajax. Went on to work for Bitovi and now Twitter / Vine.
Adam Reineke@AdamTReineke MicrosoftAt a college career fair, a Midwest healthcare company handed my resume back because GPA was too low, saying "save the paper". I went on to spend two great internships at Microsoft where I've continued full-time for over two years now.
Sinan Midillili@Sinanm89 OSSA swedish startup company dropped from skype mid call after I told them I was born in Turkey. Im still blocked to this day.
Lloyd Watkin@lloydwatkin IMDBI was rejected by a top 10 website because I don't use semi-colons in my JavaScript. Now at IMDb / Amazon. Don't let them get you down :)
Michael Shao@abr71310 AmazonI got turned away from every return offer from internships I had (7), as well as 85 companies I applied to for full-time (even after getting to onsites for over 15 of them!). I now work at Amazon and love what I'm doing. :)
Sebastian Brandes Kraaijenzank@sebastianbk MicrosoftWhile finishing up my master's degree I was sending out tons of applications to big corps for software development jobs but I was rejected by virtually all of them. One week I was rejected by two companies I really wanted to work for so I was sad and got drunk in the weekend. The following Monday I had an offer from Microsoft sitting in my inbox.
Ian Devlin@iandevlin TrivagoRejected by the Google HTML5 Developer Expert programme for not knowing enough about HTML5. Apparently being one of the HTML5 Doctors, writing many articles on the subject and having a book on HTML5 Multimedia being published wasn't enough for them.
Chris Hartjes@grmpyprogrammer MozillaI interviewed at Mozilla in 2008. I ran a gauntlet of 10 interviews in 8 hours. Didn’t get it. Ended up there Nov. 2015 anyway ;)
Rey Bango@reybango MicrosoftI was rejected by Arthur Andersen Consulting in the '90s because I didn't have an undergraduate degree and also by a number of well-known Silicon Valley companies because I couldn't relocate. Since then I've worked at great companies like Mozilla, Telerik & Microsoft, all remotely and with no undergrad degree.
Derick Bailey@derickbailey WatchMeCodeI was told by a hiring manager at Netflix that my career would be over if I wasn't willing to relocate my family to San Francisco. Since then, I've had 2 full time jobs that were 100% remote (work from home), have been a full time consultant with clients around the world (Germany, Japan, Denmark, South America, Canada, and all over the U.S.) Now, I'm an entrepreneur as well as consultant, I work less hours than any full time job I've ever had, and I earn more than ever.
Dave Geddes@geddski DomoI totally bombed an interview at Trello about implementing linked lists in JavaScript. Today I’m a JS Architect at Domo.
Jake Johnson@xyclos OSSI was rejected by Amazon. I waited around for an hour for a phone interview with their "head of acquisitions". He emailed me later that night saying he didn't have my phone number. My number was in the email he replied to 😒. He ignored all my attempts to reschedule.
Rachel White@ohhoe IBMWhen I graduated from a less than desirable college, no employers in New York would take me seriously... so I moved to St. Louis. Everyone in the midwest didn't care where I went to school, and instead I was highly in demand as a developer with a design background. I worked in agencies for 3 years, until I got a job offer from Adobe and moved back to NYC. Now I'm at IBM Watson, and it's the best.
Spencer Gibb@spencerbgibb PivotalInterviewed at Netflix, didn't get the job. At Pivotal, I helped create Spring Cloud Netflix which integrates Netflix Open Source with Spring Boot. Now Netflix uses Spring Cloud Netflix... at Netflix.
Jason Shen@jasonshen IBMApplied to the Harvard Business School as a Stanford honors grad with a 740 GMAT, no interview. Was rejected from Airbnb for a customer support role and later was passed over for a PM role at Google after 2 phone screens. I've cofounded Y Combinator startup (Ridejoy YC S11) and was selected by the White House to serve as a Presidential Innovation Fellow. Today I'm a product manager at Etsy. Timing and fit are everything.
Dhananjay Nakrani@playingDJ GoogleDuring campus-placements in undergrad, interviewed with Samsung-India. Due to favoritism, I was rejected. Almost lost faith from meritocracy. Later got to do Google Summer of Code (Summer'14) and Google Internship (Summer'15). In grad school, received full time offers from both Yahoo & Google. Now, headed to Google for full time. Still, I have a long way to go. ;) My point is, don't lose faith because of a few incidents. Keep working. "Adventure is out there!"
Angel Colberg@angelcolberg MozillaI've been rejected by Google, Apple and FB. Ended up working with Microsoft, Apple, Google and Mozilla. Never take it personal.
Neil Kistner@wyze MonsantoI was rejected by Facebook and Netflix at the technical interview/coding exercises. Now I write ES2015 && React all day at Monsanto.
Brian Salcedo@salcedo OSSGot rejected by Linode because I'm a convicted hacker. Shortly thereafter, I won $50 Linode credit and a Raspberry Pi 2 through a Linode-sponsored challenge on True Ability. They probably think I hacked that too.
Steven Hauser@stevenhauser OSSRejected by GitHub for a frontend developer opening because my HTML, CSS, and JS skills were strong, but I failed to demonstrate my Ruby skills.
Ricardo Correa@rcorrear OSSAfter applying for a Senior Development Engineer position at Amazon I get an email from HR for the Senior Cloud Support Engineer position. After two (technical) phone interviews and an 8 hour on-site multi team interview I get back the results: You really did very well in the interviews, but we're not extending an offer because you are a better fit for our Senior Development Engineer position!!
Rajat Arora@rajatonit BlackBerryWas rejected by many companies which one of them was AutoDesk whom escorted me out of their office midway through the interview for having more knowledge of java over C++. I kept at it and now work at BlackBerry as my job. #StickWithIt
Patrick Haney@notasausage OSSApple interviewed me 4 times for 3 positions, all while I was employed at Harvard University. I even had to talk through designing the "iStove" for Steve Jobs and explain how Google Maps worked using a whiteboard. They never hired me and I left Harvard to work for myself a year later.
Lindsey Campbell@_lindseytron InVisionInterviewed and rejected by two local startups in medical and education spaces. They talked down to me during my interview, wouldn't respond to emails, and left me hanging. The following week I landed my job at InVision. :)
John Slegers@johnslegers Cascade & PHPPowerToolsFor frontend developer jobs, I'm usually told I don't have enough design skills. For backend developer jobs, I'm usually told I don't have enough experience in this or that framework. I'm currently unemployed.
Peter Kim@pkayfire OSSRejected by AngelList because I froze up during an interview and forgot the fibonacci sequence (seriously). Received an offer from Stripe a month later. Now cofounder at a top 500 US site. Never ever give up.
Mark DiMarco@markmarkoh OSSI was literally asked to leave the office 15 minutes into the interview. The guy said "I don't think either of us should waste any more of our time" and turned around to face his computer. I sat in the parking lot for 30 minutes thinking I'd never be a developer.
Adam Sontag@ajpiano BocoupI wanted to be a professional football player but the New York Jets didn't want me because I couldn't run a sub-4.3 second 40 yard dash. Now I am Director of Community at Bocoup so I like to think I landed on my feet.
Scott Kosman@humantorch adidasSurvived multiple phone and Skype interviews with Apple (from Europe) as well as a take-home developer assignment. Flew to Cupertino for a round of in-person, highly technical interviews less than 24 hours after a 14 hour flight. Got my rejection notice 3 hours afterwards. Ended up as a Director in a production company and am now a Senior Digital Manager at adidas.
Lyn Muldrow@lynmuldrow Front-end DeveloperAfter bootcamp, I was rejected over 50 times in three months by companies like Pandora, Twilio, and Zendesk for not having enough experience. Received an offer with an amazing company and now I motivate youth and others like me to succeed. Never let anyone tell you that you're not worthy. Keep going.
Robert Wilkins@rwilki Self EmployedI submitted applications to Sucuri, Buffer, and Road Runner Sports in hopes of furthering my career as a web and graphic designer. Ultimately, my career path has evolved just fine as I'm busier now more than ever working for myself. I'm challenged, rewarded, and love what I do. If I could manage the stress, it would be all good.
Sagar Savla@sagz FacebookAs I was finishing my Masters' I applied to so many companies that I was getting a rejection at least once a day. If I search my inbox for the word 'regret', I get over a hundred emails of these rejections. But I kept applying and kept interviewing. I finally got some offers and worked at companies like PayPal, Lyft and Facebook; after a lot of perseverance. You don't have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.
Eray Arslan@erayarslan markakodRejected by Valve Software for a Software Engineer position because i was young. (when i was 19)
Sam Saccone@samccone 🐐I could not even get an unpaid internship at a newspaper because I was going to add too much overhead. 🆒
aditya1@aditya1 AnonymousI'm originally from India. I have been rejected by 10-15 universities before landing in Virginia Tech. It took me 3 years to get my first admit. During my grad school I have been rejected by Google for not knowing their book search algorithm :-). Rejected by Microsoft for whatever reason and I blew up Amazon interview. Now work at European company in New England. Still eager to go to Silicon Valley, maybe 2016 is my year.
Coby Benveniste@daVinciCEB OSSI was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for a year. The school academics office was telling me that I had to take three semesters of Physics, including Quantum Physics and Thermodynamics, and that if I didn't like that, then I didn't belong at the school. I dropped out, and was almost immediately hired as a freelance contractor at a billion dollar investment company, and told that I could name my own price. Suck it, UIUC.
Adrian C@marshmallowmouth OSSIn my junior year of college, I had a phone interview with Apple for an internship. They asked me a question that took me a bit of time to answer, and the interviewer cut me off in the middle, saying "if you can't answer a question that is so simple quickly how could you expect to be hired by Apple." I went on to be hired at Microsoft, and then Apple and then get into a Ph.D. program.
Abad Federico@abad Popcorn TimeRejected by Twitter, got depressed but then I created Popcorn Time!. Don't lose hope and keep your head up, adventures are around the corner!
Mark K Cowan@battlesnake OSSRejected by various small companies, have since rejected Google and Amazon and am working on space technologies
Greg Tarnoff@gregtarnoff Accessibility ConsultantI applied to a job for Web Accessibilty Engineer with Expedia and was rejected due to 'not having enough experience'.
Victor Trac@victortrac WikibuyAs a freshly minted EE, American Megatrends rejected me as a BIOS engineer. I decided to move to and work in Europe for 4 years, where I got to travel extensively, and then took a job at a startup in Austin, TX, having never visited the state before. The startup grew and even IPO'd, and since then I've had a great time back in the startup game.
Marco Hengstenberg@nice2meatu Smashing MagazineIn late 2012, during a phone interview, I was told that, by judging from my résumé, I might better look for a trainee position. One week later I applied at Smashing Magazine and was hired right away – full time.
Luke Schunk@LukeSchunk Software EngineerWhen I was a designer, I was rejected from countless internships and junior positions at agencies like Huge, RGA, and more. Decided to learn to code and can't wait to apply to some of those companies again - as a developer.
Troy Connor@troy0820 Software EngineerGot rejected from Dominion Enterprises fresh out of college trying to do some PHP. I attended Meetups with Norfolk.js and found myself in a great community. I contributed to open source and was very apprehensive about leaving my government job to become a developer. I met great people who encouraged me and helped me get rid of my imposter syndrome. Now I'm a full-time Software Engineer with Emerging Technology Advisors. Keep fighting for it.
Tim Chevalier@fatneckbeardguy Software EngineerRejected by MIT for undergrad, accepted to the computer science Ph.D program. (I chose Berkeley for grad school instead.) Rejected by Google in 2003, 2006, and 2007; hired by Google in 2015. Previously rejected by Facebook, Twitter, and Apple.
Nathan Friedly@nfriedly Senior Software EngineerI was rejected for a Software Developer role at smaller company because I was "junior-level" and had bad motivation. A few months later I joined IBM as an Advisory Engineer and helped launch IBM Watson.
Frances Coronel@fvcproductions Software Engineer at SlackI was rejected for a developer advocate role at a startup that helps people sign documents where I was 1 of 2 finalists after a lengthy interview process. When I asked for feeback on what I could have done better, the recruiter told me that in all his years as a recruiter, he's never been in a position where he wasn't able to provide any feedback. Later, I found out that the guy who got hired went to the same school as the hiring manager. This was the first time I felt a strong sense of imposter syndrome in the tech industry. One month later, I got an offer from Slack. Perseverance is key.
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