I've had many rejections from publishers and literary agents for a book which I've put a lot of work into (https://www.wyclifsdust.com, since you asked). It's very tough, and puts a lot of pressure on one's innate self-belief. And as an academic, you probably have on average at least one rejection for every paper you write. (If you don't you aren't being ambitious enough in your journal targets!)
I like the (apocryphal) Churchill quote: "Success has been defined as the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."
Perhaps the strangest part is realizing that managing your own ambition is a necessity for living a healthy life. Pure, unbridled ambition can theoretically have a massive reward, but it's far more likely (statistically) to cause you to neglect other meaningful life pursuits to a damaging degree.
In other words, I am the only one who can increase or decrease my own ambition, which means that I can't avoid responsibility for the fact that I am less ambitious now than I was coming out of college. I am mentally healthier, but it's also entirely possible that, had things worked out a little differently, I could have been just as (or more) ambitious and _also_ been mentally healthy. Being aware of this in some ways makes it harder to further downgrade my own ambition in service of a better life.
Some things you can fully control, and others you can't. I can't fully control the rejections, but I can control how I manage my ambition and how I view my life. I'm not sure this is particularly satisfying, but it's better than many alternatives.
> But I don’t love it as a strategy for dealing psychologically with rejection: it amounts to numbing ourselves, and I suspect that numbness can weaken the boost to ambition when we finally get a “yes.”
I've done this. I did indeed become numb and on the short to medium-term it also meant that I lost respect for the industry. I'm not sure what the long-term effects are. One of the things I now do is to apply every week to a company, I've been rejected so much that it became a habit. I'm numb, I go through the motions, let's keep on chugging. I'll never stop anymore. I can't, I need to stay sharp, as sharp as possible. I've been rejected so much that I need to create opportunities before I actually need them, because when I need them then they most likely won't be there. Keep that deal flow going.
I wish there was a better way, I'd love to open myself more emotionally, but I can't take it when you open yourself up every time and you just get: ignored, ghosted or rejected. And I mostly seem to get ignored or ghosted.
If I were at your place I would start making A/B tests with small and large variations of your CV, to see what is it exactly that makes a stereotypical HR pattern-match your application into a recycle bin.
I love this as an idea conceptually, especially as a revenge to most employers rejecting without feedback ... but in practice I imagine you'd burn a lot of bridges if you sent out fraudulent CV's, only to reply "sorry that was just A/B testing on my part" when invited to an interview ...
(maybe not though ... who knows! has anyone ever done this?)
For me what seems to kill ambition is personal failure. Lack of energy. Lack of motivation. Lack of focus. Ambition often comes, but unless I am SUPER excited about something and/or get very quick positive feedback, I will inevitably become tired, lose focus, and fail.
This has improved over the years thankfully. It was much worse in my 20s. But still, for me at least, ambition is a function of my own ability and not really of any external person or thing.
Yeah same here. For a number of reasons, most of my ambition died off when a I became an adult for a variety of reasons and it's never really recovered.
Once or twice a year, maybe I get some spark at some god awful hour of the night and get into ambitious planning mode, but it never lasts more than a few months.
Frankly most of my ambitions end up becoming just a constant fight against bureaucracies and I don't have the energy for that shit. Also most of my recent ambitions are very long term, and it's easy for me to meticulously plan some long term goals when I'm bored, but less so to follow those plans over a period that could be a decade.
This is an underrated honest comment. By this time it's an open secret that successful people, in addition to high IQ, tend to have hypomania (among other peculiar traits): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypomania
Not to mention, some of them tend to use stimulants and euheroics.
We should be more honest about fundamental biological basis of high productivity, and we should open the path to meaningful self-enhancement to anybody applying, not just a lucky few.
i dont feel like calling this personal failure though. (ya i know, it is what it is but i dont like that term: it's not my personal fault my brain works the way it does)
feels more like "weather". like a system of moodclumps that fight for their turn to blend my view of the world with their specific "flavour"... (think "inside out" but them little mood-guys hate each other and joy is probably lost somewhere in the depths of the memory library getting railed or something...)
i might get up early tomorrow and get stuff done on personal projects before heading to work, but a week later tops, i wont be able to get out of bed that soon and almost miss work at 7am.
and in the evening im mentally to pooped to do anything but game or watch something to pass the time until i pass out in bed again... and most probably far to late like 2am, so getting up at 4am to get stuff done prior to the toil becomes a nonoption...
i guess i could force myself to go to bed early, but my partner consistently stays up longer than me and i miss going to bed together and cuddle... maybe im jealous of her having consistently such a good time with friends online and that might be what drains me... but on the other hand, im not that interested in goofing around with strangers on the internet: most of the time people dont get it and it gets awkward, so i'd rather doomscroll twitter than actually try to talk to people and get told im an idiot or whatever. i know i am. all humans are idiots at varied degrees, and i am one too so.... shitpost with me or fuck off pretty pls
i used to have a couple of close friends that were also interested in the things i was intrigued by and helped me maintain my drive and focus (though back then i was lacking a vision). but life is what it is and some friends go missing, others die and a third group simply starts to avoid you because you told them you are bisexual.
so, yeah.
oh yeah, a little PSA for all the (mild) homophobes out there: just because someone tells you they are bi or gay, does not necessarily mean they want to fuck you (or get fucked by you). they most likely just wanted to tell you to make things less awkward in case they feel the need to talk about a potential partner.
The issues outlined in this essay are why, as an organization, it's important that if you want your members to be ambitious, you need to be positive, cooperative, constructive, and helpful.
I don't mean "don't provide any critical feedback" or "competition is bad", I mean, the point of you having an organization is to have a group with some goal, and if you want to accomplish that, you should cooperate. If you're going to provide critical feedback, do it with the aim of improving things, not just to tear things apart.
>Instead of simply rejecting people from the mountain path, lead them, with friendliness and encouragement, to another path they can take.
I would point out that you get a lot of societal bang for your buck even if gatekeepers only sometimes give feedback. Getting rejected from 20 jobs and getting feedback from two of them gives you a big ambition boost: someone is looking at my applications! They thought I was a good enough applicant to merit some of their time!
The next 18 feedback emails probably don't add as much value as the first couple.
Anyway, my guess is that giving good feedback, absent any societal movement to change norms around rejections, still has a fantastic ROI.
Everytime I’m rejected, I follow up a number of times. Usually that leads to an answer of why, even if it’s a generic one.
I will never understand why companies fail to give candidates constructive feedback. Especially at the final rounds. Even if it was “you were great, but we are going with someone else at this time”. One ounce of feedback is investing in people reapplying or wanting to work for your company. No feedback at all makes people look elsewhere.
Ambition and success are similar to me. It’s a few practiced disciplines every single day. Nobody can gatekeep that except you.
There was an article a few days ago on why you should keep your mouth shut during exit interviews. The same rationale applies for me when rejecting a candidate - some people tend to be angry and volatile when rejected, so the safest thing is to just say "we're going with someone else." I almost never give honest feedback on why.
That said, ghosting a candidate is completely uncalled for.
A slightly different point is that it's simply a liability for the company to provide that reason because there are reasons that are illegal. Unfortunately, it is true that not providing a reason removes that liability.
(I guess that's not true in states that don't allow "any or no reason" but I don't know what those states are, if any.)
> Even if it was “you were great, but we are going with someone else at this time”
This is how it is with two out of three people. By the time they pass the filter of their resume and whatnot, two or three people are OK. They can answer basic questions, they act normally, they seem to have been doing the job as they said for a few years. They are also somewhat interchangeable with the person we interviewed before. Then we interview someone else, and maybe they were referred by an internal team member with a recommendation, maybe they are just a standard deviation above who we interviewed in terms of what they know. There's nothing really wrong with the people rejected, it's "you seem to know how to program basic features like two out of three people we interviewed, but we interviewed someone else who has a deep understanding of the language we use".
1. giving feedback is a skill that almost no one learns to do
2. bad feedback will often cause problems that wouldn't exist if no feedback were given
3. not everyone is well placed to actually receive feedback
>I will never understand why companies fail to give candidates constructive feedback.
Zero benefit to them with small but non-zero chance of causing them a lot of problems. Unless a lawyer looks over the feedback, all it takes is an uncharitable reading to try to spin it into an attack on a protected class.
This article resonates as I’ve observed it happen in many contexts. In addition to failure and rejection sapping away the energy to be ambitious, alternative forms of success can reduce the motivation to pursue the original ambition. For example, it can be hard to turn away from a stable FAANG job that supports a happy family and undertake more ambitious but less certain endeavors.
If you're poor your best achievment in life is to simply hold a job and make the future better for your kids, and in a few generations those ancestors will be able to follow their dreams.
Statistically the poor are totally screwed from birth. By a huge margin. A very very few will be able to follow their dreams beyond holding a job but that's a statistical anomoly. The best most poor people can hope for is to get a job until you die. Almost every single rich person/ world mover you see was born with some natural talent or rich or upper middle class from birth with enough time/resources to develop some talent. If you're just working to survive your time and energy will be taken in exchange for money.
Is your source: Just trust me bro, I heard it from my really smart uncle.
According to actual research:
Looking at larger moves, only 4% of those raised in the bottom quintile moved up to the top quintile as adults.
There's other studies in there as well that all demonstrate intergenerational mobility is single digit percentile from bottom to the top meanwhile from middle and upper classes it's much more.
It's much easier to move from bottom to middle class where you work as a drone for some rich person. This provides a platform for your kids to attempt to launch from in the next generation or two or three or four if ever.
> Looking at larger moves, only 4% of those raised in the bottom quintile moved up to the top quintile as adults.
Now you’re talking about a completely different topic than what we were talking about. The bottom quintiles are much bigger that the top ones. Even if the top quintile was made up 100% of people who started in the bottom ones, the percentage of people from the bottom who move up would still be small.
What we started discussing was whether starting in the top is a near-requirement for staying in the top.
I didn’t get get it from “trust me bro” fwiw. Here are a few sources to consider:
> The overwhelming majority (79%) of millionaires in the U.S. did not receive any inheritance at all from their parents or other family members. While 1 in 5 millionaires (21%) received some inheritance, only 3% received an inheritance of $1 million or more.
> 8 out of 10 millionaires come from families at or below middle-income level.
> Recently, faced with the necessity of making money, I began applying to full-time jobs again. I had thought that with my skills and network, it wouldn’t be too hard to find an enjoyable job that paid well enough. But of course, the first few that I applied to rejected me right away. I could feel my ambition collapsing: half a year ago, I thought I could revolutionize some of the institutions of science, and now I am merely wondering if I’m good enough to land a regular coding job. Maybe I should go work in a restaurant or something. Am I even good enough for that?
I've had this. University built me up (high grades, cum laude, honors, published paper, side projects, TA jobs, 1 year of iOS development experience, 1 year of being a web development instructor experience). FAANG (and its friends, like Elastic, Databricks, all the known names, banks, etc.) broke me down by not ever responding to my job applications for a graduate software engineer. Fast-forward 18 months later, still no job. I also got more downvotes on HN due to having a more gloomy mood and my desperation was perhaps a bit too strong. In general, people can't deal with it. HN has a lot of edge-cases where they can (some ask HNs are an example of this), but in my case they couldn't deal with it. HN showed me that I had to force myself to be more positive, lest I'd get more downvotes (and also because I reasoned that the general public would judge me way harsher than HN). For context, this comment is already quite on the "negative" side. I know that by writing like this I have a one in five chance to be downvoted. Often enough these category of posts also get upvoted a lot, so I do get some insight into the nuances of this problem area simply by seeing my downvotes and upvotes on what I experience to be similar comments, so in both cases the upvotes/downvotes are really helpful.
In any case, I took a job that paid low out of necessity (2500 euro's for a junior position, my own coding students were making more). I quit 6 months later, because I wasn't passionate about their product. I searched and 5 months later found another company. I felt so grateful to already find a company after 5 months that I felt excited by! They thought I was too slow (after 6 months), I agreed. Sometimes it simply doesn't work out. In this particular case, my contract didn't even formally end yet and I already found my 3rd company. Holy hell! What a different world. The 6 month mark is coming up, I hope I'll make it this time. I think I will, but not because my skills improved a lot. In my case it's mostly luck/bad luck depending on the company I was at. Culture has a lot to do with it. It's not my dream company, but I'm simply trying to get by. Moreover, the work conditions are amazing, I have nothing to complain about. However, if I'd be ambitious then I'd have all kinds of ambitious "complaints" like that it isn't my dream company.
Because of this whole process, I don't really know what my purpose in life is anymore. I decided to drop it for now and simply enjoy life. It feels too hedonistic for my taste, but alright, life is teaching me I can't control it I guess. Let's flow with it then!
So, I have 16 months of ragged recent experience (not including my experience that I got as a student). Here are some things I've noticed that are notable:
What I find weird is that some FAANG companies are even approaching me now. Like, really? Having a ragged resume with 16 months worth of experience is really that much better? Really?! It still makes me a bit angry, because I feel it diminishes how tough and valuable my actual academic education was. I've definitely learned a thing or two at the 3 companies I've worked at, don't get me wrong. However, the hardest stuff I've learned was still at university (e.g. rowhammer via JavaScript + WebGL, using IDA Pro to analyze binaries, hacking in general really).
Another thing I find as weird is that my salary is at 4500 euro's gross now. It's amazing that I feel compensated well now (for Dutch standards), but given my ragged resume, I also find it weird. Somehow failing at companies and searching for a new job (after six months of staying at one place!) allows me to negotiate for a much higher salary. Wait what? Why?
Company 1: 2500 euro's
Company 2: 4100 euro's ("This is what a software engineer costs right?" Me: "Yes")
Company 3: 4500 euro's ("How much did you make at your previous company?" Me: "4100 euro's gross" Them: "Hmm, we need proof" Me: sends proof Them: "Okay, we'll make you an offer based on that, it's a bit high on the pay-scale though for your level")
I can't see the forest through the threes here, it just feels like I'm being tossed into a downstream river and whatever randomness happens, I just have to take it.
University isn't like that, at university you can actually shape your path. In real life, I can't shape my path, I feel little agency. I've tried. Right now I'm enjoying a 4 day work week at 80% of my salary, remotely in another European country. I suddenly catapulted myself in a very enviable position. And it's mostly luck and I've happened to have bad luck before. My sense of agency feels crushed, and I feel sad that I belief it. I wonder if it's learned helplessness or whether there's a huge kernel of truth there. With that said, I'm very grateful for what I have.
I don't know what to make of it anymore. I simply try to get by and have a lot of empathy and sympathy for people who've lost their way. I don't understand how some people can say "I chose to do xyz." How do they have so much agency?
> I can't see the forest through the threes here, it just feels like I'm being tossed into a downstream river and whatever randomness happens, I just have to take it.
Yeah, pretty much. You have some control over it, but often not as much as you'd like. I was pretty consistently one of the best in my classes in school also, and then the real world said "Haha, you actually want to work on things that interest you and innovate? Think again!"
That's why I ended up working for life insurance companies and for health insurance companies and wealth management companies, despite telling myself I'd never work for such boring companies when I was younger (where I grew up, the headquarters for a life insurance company was the biggest employer in town, especially white-collar, and was omnipresent).
I have had interviews at FAANGs, though, and the interview didn't go as well as it could have for various reasons (sometimes just not being given enough notice / not motivated enough to practice enough for their ridiculous exams).
Simple advice: become a regular in higher quality programming-related communities (could be discords, IRCs etc), befriend a FAANG worker and ask for a referral.
Entering the hiring funnel shouldn't be hard; it's the "exam" part which is very demanding.
I like the (apocryphal) Churchill quote: "Success has been defined as the ability to go from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm."