"You're not qualified to join our team"

The thing is that employers are looking for more than just fitting requirements - they are also being influenced by subjectives (how you act, look etc) and even by pure luck. Their excuse may be that you are not qualified, but it is just as likely in my opinion that it could have been a change in market conditions, or their opinion of you as a person, or even the job description may have slightly changed during the process. You can always ask for specifics.

A long time ago I used to work in recruitment, and the two biggest things I learnt was that the requirements mean almost nothing, and that apart from entry level jobs (grad positions), how you frame your experience to what they are looking for is the most important part of applying.

I'm sorry to hear about your difficulties, but the fact you passed i) the resume screen, ii) multiple technical tests and iii) some interviews is a good sign - I would be positive and just look for another company that feels you fit better.

I'm not trying to minimize your pain, nor am I trying to defend the company in question. However, in my experience, the probability of being given an honest answer for why you didn't get the job is almost zero.

Looking for a job is an all around horrible experience and flippant answers that in no way match your interview experience make the process all that much worse. If you need someone to talk to, I've been exactly where you are and my email address is on my profile. I don't know if I can be of much help, but I'd be glad to commiserate with you. Or, alternately, if by some stroke of luck, you're located somewhere near me, the first few rounds are on me.

Sounds like a poor choice of wording from ooyala. You are clearly qualified for this position on a technical level, but there are a multitude of other things you are evaluated on for most positions. Perhaps you didn't meet their requirements in one of these non-technical areas. If this was the case, they would have been better off using the "not a fit" wording or something similar.

General advice: the reason given for a rejection is almost never the real reason.

Don't overthink it. Most likely, they said the same thing to all the candidates they didn't hire.

A company of 220 people that can't figure out how to properly phrase a hiring rejection? Not a good sign.

Maybe the next time try to convince them that you're a valuable guy, they gave you hard problems to solve and you did a great job, but its possible that they were expecting something different.

People don't get hired only for technical skills, they get hired for a lot of reasons.

Don't take it too serious, try in another company were your skills are valuable!

Most companies are confused when it comes to hiring. The process is usually like 'WE NEED MORE PEOPLE' but no one does the hard work to actually define roles, so the search becomes extremely generic based on a single skill; also, its usually somewhat divorced from the person who said 'we need to hire' in the first place.

Now when they company determines they are 'ready' to hire and interview, again, they are completely clueless. They've heard rumours that google uses all these algorithmic puzzles, and because google is cool, thats what they should do to. Rarely do these puzzles even remotely resemble what the day to day experience required to do a good job is.

So they give you some random puzzles they find on the internet, and some people fail and some people do well.

Then they 'regroup' and say 'THIS GUY DID REALLY WELL on the PUZZLES' and everyone else agrees; but then something interesting happens. Since there was no set of criteria to judge a candidate against, because the roles are very generic and ill-defined, its almost impossible to tell if you would be a 'good fit'.

So, while huddled up, someone in the group says 'YEAH HE WAS GOOD, BUT I"M NOT SURE HE WOULD BE A GOOD FIT HERE' - and everyone else tends to agree because what exactly is a good fit? No one really knows.

They say "OK LETS KEEP LOOKING", rinse and repeat.

Its MUCH harder to move forward with a candidate than it is to just say 'next'.

Dont take it personally, just keep pwning interviews, and wait for the right person to realize that you are legit.

You might have imposter syndrome. If any job I went for required 3 grilling technical interviews designed to put me like a mouse in a maze, I'd tell them to get lost. The fact that you even went through with all that chicanery is quite telling.

I believe that despite the time limits, you probably wrote subpar code. Otherwise they probably wouldn't have said, feel free to re-apply when you feel more capable. That doesn't sound like a tall tale to me. (and I'm aware other HNers are saying HR often lies about the reasons.)

To top it off, you are having a problem finding a job in a huge tech market. Any coder worth his salt, is not going to have a problem finding a job in this day and age, unless they lack confidence (imposter syndrome) or really aren't that great..despite years of experience, and yada yada.

Unless you can provide more information, I'm leaning towards lack of confidence, or false confidence.

Sounds like an HR moron run amok. Not surprising considering my general impression of that outfit. (Look at their atrocious name, reflects general thoughtlessness.) Consider yourself lucky.

I bet probably you got a canned response and they didn't go ahead with you not because of tech skills but because somebody didn't like you for some reason or felt threatened or who knows why, it's a very random process.

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    PUSH RBP
    MOV RBP,RSP

    MOV RAX,SF_ARG1[RBP]

    POP RBP
    RET 8

When someone breaks up with you, do you believe them when they say "Its not you, its me!"? Lesson 1: Be skeptical. Lesson 2: Be really skeptical of humans offering insight into the real motivations for their own actions.

Lets go into detail on this. If you're going for a job interview, you don't get the job, and you're given some feedback, several rather unlikely things have to line up for that feedback to be truthful, useful, and accurate.

1. The interviewer has to actually be able to accurately gauge the metric they think they're measuring (and most interviews don't). 2. The interviewer has to actually be relying primarily on that metric (and most interviews aren't.) 3. The interviewers have to actually be able to have the insight to know the real reason you aren't given the job (and most people don't have good insight into why they make decisions, and there's often a layer of bureaucracy involved as well) 4. The interviewer has to actually be able to tell you the real reason you aren't given the job (they can't tell you if the reason is illegal, or if circumstances have changed, or if someone is trying to save face/not admit something...)

How can I put this gently. Its all bullshit.

Could I be wrong? Sure, but if you're a betting person, I know which way I'd bet...

It doesn't take a long time to find that Ooyala might not be the best company to work for:

* http://gigaom.com/2010/03/31/brightcove-ooyala-is-spreading-...

* http://blog.brightcove.com/en/2010/03/desperation-security-a...

You know what, to some extent its a numbers game.

The reasons you didn't get this job could be many. They could have felt intimated by your level of competence, someone decided they don't like you, etc.

The main thing is to take what you can from each company and learn from it. There are some companies that doing 3 technical interviews and weeks of interviewing are worth it (I'm thinking of Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc.) If it is a start up or a small company and they make you jump through these hoops you got to decide if its worth it.

Build your pipeline. You should try to line up at least two interviews a week at different companies (at a minimum). When you do this, you will feel more confident and it will show in the interview. Never stop looking until you have an offer. So this means, focus on setting up interviews even if you have ones coming up.

Realistically speaking, if you get to your forth company and you don't get an offer, its likely there is something wrong with your approach, your interview skills, the jobs you are applying to, etc. My rule of thumb when I am looking is that if I don't have an offer by the third company I have interviewed with, I totally need to focus on what I am doing wrong. It could be just a streak of bad luck, but somethings off in my approach.

Lastly, like I said, its a numbers game, you win this by having a lot of companies to interview with.

I had an unusual, negative interview experience with Ooyala several years ago. I rather suspect it is the company and not you.

This happens. As you get more experience in software or engineering, you will find yourself acing hard technical questions on interviews and knowing you have done well, yet, for some reason, the company won't hire you. In some cases, it will be because they, in fact, feel threatened, that you are better than they are. You can be a direct threat if the hiring manager is running a project that is in trouble and higher ups or investors are unhappy about his/her progress.

From what I understand, Ooyala was founded by a couple of very young Google alumni; Google was their first job after Stanford. The heavy technical interviewing is a typical Google practice, and Googler startups frequently copy Google practices. Googler startups, especially those founded by ex-Googlers who have never worked anywhere other than Google, tend to be odd. There can be a teenage rock star whose success and adoring groupies have gone to his head problem.

Some aspects of video technologies, such as developing and implementing video codecs, are extremely difficult. It is fairly common for people to grossly underestimate the difficulties if they are unfamiliar with the field and then become frustrated and emotional in dealing with the problems. This might also have contributed to your negative experience.

"...we'd like to extend an invitation to you to apply again whenever you feel more capable".

Sounds like it was written by a pompous egg head on a power trip.

What was the age difference between you and the people you interviewed with at Ooyala? Maybe the 20-year old who interviewed you decided you are not a "cultural fit" (read "too old") for the team.

I have 10 years+ of experience, too, and I am quite impressed with your performance; given the description of the tasks, I wonder if I would able to complete them!

Maybe they're just testing your interest. If you really want to work for them, apply again. That may just be a part of the process.

Probably was no job. They had a few unsolved JIRAs and needed a breakout clone for a client :-)

Here in Brazil the main reason for these rejections, what I suppose to be in more than 90% of times, are the salary expectations. It's the first thing they ask about and, even if they call you for personal interview, it's only to build a large number of candidates because they will choose the cheaper one. Almost all the times you will never even receive a return.

Software engineering are positions suitable for kids of that guys who lives with parents forever. It's not possible to have a family o raise children with these kind of careers.

I'm so regretful for dedicating my whole life working with IT and computer programming. I was so curious in the beginning, but nowadays I fell like I was stupid.

I'm also unemployed because I left a position in a bad company about three weeks ago. The last information I received states that a lot of people are leaving as well.

You should have walked out when they asked you to do that 2nd technical interview. People are not computers. We all know that a simple coding interview is necessary to winnow out the barely competent people, so it is reasonable to have a brief phone interview, followed by some kind of timed coding test. But when you pass that and then, instead of talking to you, they want you to do another coding interview, walk away. They are a bunch of idiots who you would not want to work with anyway.

Employers owe it to candidates to actually talk to them, to ask them questions about their experience. If they are not willing to do that after a short phone screening and a timed coding test, then this employer lacks confidence in their ability to find people and is clutching at straws in the hope that battery after battery of coding tests is going to identify a good employee.

People are not computers. There is value in a person's character, their approach to work, the way they design a solution and make decisions. You need to talk to them in order to learn that kind of thing.

It's starting to look like a lot of startups just don't know how to assess candidates, or to reliably predict job performance from the interview process. So instead they like to churn through lots and lots of applicants, subjecting them to needlessly lengthy quizzing cage sessions and other ostensibly "objective" stack-ranking techniques. And then brag to their peers about how they only hire "top 1%"-ers. As if to cover up for the fact that quite often the actual hiring decision amounts to a gut level feeling, a hunch basically, that this person will or will not flourish in the role despite having about the same order of gaps and deficits that everyone else on the team has, and which the interviewer secretly knows himself to have. Just different ones, perhaps.

So I wouldn't make much of their "assessment" of your capabilities. Why they passed on you ultimately doesn't matter. Overall what you've described is indicative of a general thoughtlessness and lack of vision somewhere at the top of the food chain in that organization. So like the others in this thread I'd say it looks like you dodged a bullet, here.

And thanks for naming the company (Ooyala) in this case. The more companies that get exposed for bullshit interviewing tactics and shabby treatment at the hands of poorly trained HR drones, the better.

I wouldn't take it personally. Many companies seem to never be forthcoming with their reasons for doing the things they do.

I know this won't pay your bills right now, but in a way you can be glad to not be working at the company that didn't hire you. If they're the kind of company that makes people jump through a bunch of hoops, gives them positive feedback every step of the way and then doesn't hire them then it's likely not a place you want to work. The tougher situation is when you do go to work at a company like that, and they just arbitrarily hire you and not someone else, and then over the next couple years you have to experience how fucked up their decision make process is.

My last company fired one of the other developers shortly after I left; they gave him no advanced warning, no indication that they weren't happy with what he was doing, and no honest reason for why they were firing him. They fired a girl from marketing apparently for just being intelligent. They fired another guy from marketing because a few years after they hired him for a marketing job they decided he should suddenly be a coder.

You got a small peek into the decision making process at this company you interviewed for. For whatever reason they didn't think you'd be a good fit, and you should now be certain that they weren't a good fit for you either. Sounds like you're a smart guy/girl and you'll rock an interview at a place that will actually appreciate you and what you can offer them.