My learnings from 7 failed tech interviews

Job interviews are stressful. You try to show up your best and put your best foot forward and very often you get the door slammed in your face. Learning from job interview rejections is one of the most important things you will do in your career!

In this article, I’ll be diving deep into each rejection I faced through out my ten year engineering career and what I learned from it!

sometimes interviews make you feel like your entire body is on fire

2014

I was rejected by i.tv for an Android developer position. (this company no longer exists)

This was my first job interview. My brother Jacob Wilson referred me. I went into the interview thinking I had it in the bag especially with my brother's referral.

I nailed the technical round. The main issue here was they thought I didn't have enough experience to do the job well. So I realized I needed to build a project that was awesome so nobody would question my experience.

The main lesson I learned here was:

• Referrals aren’t everything. You actually have to be good too

• Projects and experience matter just as much as interview performance.

• Rejection is just redirection. I ended up landing a great data science internship role instead here which was a much better fit.

2015

I was rejected by Google for an Android developer position

When I interviewed for Google the first time, I felt ready. I had an Android app with 10,000 users and I figured I would SURELY get in. I got smoked by the data structures round.

The main lessons I learned here were:

• Don’t pick Java for the coding round. It slows you down dramatically. Always pick Python!

• Actual practice some competitive programming before interviewing at FAANG. Use resources like NeetCode.io to truly gain a competitive edge in your big tech interviews

I knew the next time I interviewed I would DEFINITELY get in.

2016

I was rejected by Google for an Android developer position, AGAIN

When I interviewed with Google the second time, I had an Android app with 40,000 users! I figured there would be very few people more qualified than me.

The second time around I aced data structures and algorithms. But I failed a different part of the interview. I messed up the very last behavioral interview because I was exhausted. This was back when Google did an eight hour interview in one day.

The main lesson I learned here was:

• be less attached to interview outcomes. I was so attached to the outcome that I slept very poorly the night before the interview and that wrecked my interview performance. This lesson was very good when I interviewed at Facebook later in the year where I did get accepted. After my second rejection from Google, I went 5 years in a row without experiencing a single job interview rejection.

• Maybe mobile development wasn’t my thing and I should pivot more towards data engineering.

2021

In summer of 2021, I had been at Airbnb for 6 months and lost half my grant in that time. I was looking for new roles because the compensation wasn't competitive anymore.

I was rejected by Clubhouse for a data engineer position

Clubhouse looked very interesting because it was catching fire that summer. That interview was strange. They asked me many things outside my wheelhouse around machine learning algorithms.

The main lesson I learned here was: the title data engineer has varied responsibilities especially once you look outside big tech.

A few months later, I was rejected by Robinhood for a data engineer position

I was so excited to interview at Robinhood because I was obsessed with trading in 2021. The interview process here was very chaotic though.

I failed the DSA round because the interviewer showed up fifteen minutes late and asked me the wrong question which killed another fifteen minutes. He gave me thirty minutes to solve a problem most candidates get sixty for. He had a hard stop too so I couldn't get any of that time back.

The unfairness in that interview and their unwillingness to give me a redo made me grateful I didn't get a role there. Their stock dropped 75% in the next 6 months afterwards too. So I dodged a bullet.

The main lessons I learned here were:

• The grass isn’t always greener. Just because Airbnb stock dropped so much in 2021, that didn’t necessarily mean I was in a bad position

• Sometimes the interviewer fails you for reasons beyond your control and you need to take that signal and be grateful that you didn’t get hired at that company

2022

I was rejected by Databricks for a developer relations position

I thought a developer relations position at Databricks was going to be a slam dunk given how quickly I had grown on LinkedIn. The hiring manager didn't think so though. We had one major disagreement around tenure.

He said to me, "looking at your resume, you only stay two years at companies. I only want to hire you if you're down to commit four years here"

I looked him dead in the eye and said, "I can't do that and I don't want to work at a company that values tenure over impact"

This was the very first time in my career where my “job hopping” brand seemed to negatively impact my interview experience.

The main lessons I learned here were:

• Job hopping is really good to grow your career early. It looks worse as you go from early career to mid career though!

• Not all companies value impact over tenure. Some companies prefer people to make less impact over a longer, more sustainable period of time. This was something that really nudged me in the direction of startups and initially put the idea of DataExpert.io into my mind!

2024

In 2024, I had had a pretty successful previous 18 months as an entrepreneur, making over $1.5m in that time span. The entrepreneurship journey is lonely and I succumbed to FOMO. I decided to give my first interview at OpenAI since getting rejected by Databricks in 2022. And I was rejected.

I made the best April fool’s joke on LinkedIn ever. I feel like this post ultimately destroyed my chances of getting in at OpenAI

OpenAI is the hottest company in the world right now. I nailed every technical round. I hadn't interviewed at all in over three years and was a little rusty in the past project round. I didn't give a great answer when asked, "what was your biggest mistake when working at Airbnb."

My answer was, “I missed a staging table in one of my pipeline designs that added a month to the development time because without it backfills were much slower”

This answer isn’t great because it screams carelessness. It was too candid and portrayed me in a more negative light than it should have. So even though I had all the technical chops and nailed the rest of the interview, I wasted my time because of a mistake in a five minute segment of the interview process.

The main lessons I learned here were:

• The entrepreneurship journey I am on is different but still really good. Not giving one organization so much power over my life is a good thing even if it comes with a different set of challenges.

• Interviewing out of FOMO can be a bad idea especially if your values do not actually align with the company

• Don’t let interview rustiness impact the interviews at the jobs you want most. I should have interviewed with some other companies before OpenAI to refine my pitch instead of going in cold after years of not interviewing at all.

• Don’t post April Fool’s jokes about joining a company that you’re currently in the interview process with; it might go extremely viral and hurt your chances!

DataExpert.io just launched a live Analytics Engineering boot camp that will start on October 14th! We will be covering Snowflake, Iceberg, dbt, and Airflow. Along with that we’ll have five lectures on the SQL interview, the data structures interview, the data modeling interview, the product sense interview and the behavioral interview!

The first 10 people to use code PASSINTERVIEW25 at DataExpert.io checkout, you can get 25% off!

What have you learned from interview rejections? Make sure to share this article with your friends who you think would benefit from this!