Aside from that one, the rejections that were the least self-esteem-damaging were ones that said "we've decided not to fill the position". Even if not true, it's a good "it's not you it's me" type of rejection.

It was particularly hurtful as it somehow re-enacted a scene from highschool. Which in retrospect now comes across as a brilliant troll.

It officially read ( and I paraphrase the important part ) :

Dear ionwake,

Thank you for your application. But we dont want you in our band.

Regards, xxxx Spotify

This can't be an actual message from OpenAI though?

Thank you for considering OpenAI for your next career move. Amazing that you thought you had a chance. Try Microsoft.

I had two interviews with a smaller agency that I knew of and really wanted to work there because of their reputation and the work they were doing.

The last interview was with one of the founders of the company. She was really cool and we had a great rapport. The interview was about 90 mins and we covered a lot of ground. She said she would be reviewing my resume with the other devs I interviewed with and asked when I would be available to start.

I figured, cool, I got this in the bag.

A week goes by. . . .then another four days and now its been around two weeks since I heard from them. I practically checked out at my last job thinking I would be leaving and now I was getting nervous.

By sheer coincidence I run into one of the devs from the company at a conference that weekend. He was stoked to see me again since we had some common hobbies outside of development. I immediately asked WTF was going on, I hadn't heard anything from his company.

He looks at me and says, "Nobody called you to tell you what happened?" I said, "Yeah, no man, nobody called me, WTF happened?!" He does that nervous look around and then looks back and says in a hushed tone, "Two days after your interview, the founder you interviewed with? She sent an email to the other founders just saying, "I have to flee the country, and I've taken all the cash from the petty cash fund. I'll send back my phone and laptop when I'm in a safe country."

So yeah, I didn't get the job because one of the founders fled the country, took the companies petty cash fund along with their phone and laptop.

"We have determined that our position isn't ideally suited to your talents...."

Whilst still a student in university I messaged Valve my resume, I knew they only hired wizards or people with extreme seniority, but I really liked what I knew about the company and I said hey I'd be really cool. I received a rejection in ample time, sent by an account that has an actual person's name (not just hiring@company.name). The message was a few paragraphs long of (what seemed like) personalized non-auto reply text about what skills I lack, what Valve looks for in a hire, and how the people at Valve acquired their knowledge.

Checking back on the details of the person I now see it wasn't even just an HR person, but an actual engineer. And I do need to say I applied to a lot of considerably smaller (in number of people) companies than them and never have I received such a nice experience.

It is not enough to say that after dealing with hundreds of rejections that one was actually the first uplifting one I ever received. And also the only. So for that I want to thank that person @Valve.

> It was a pleasure to learn more about your skills and accomplishments; however, I'm afraid that after careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we do not have any positions that are a fit for your experience and skills at this time.

This can't be real.

> "Sorry, we're on a hiring freeze"

I pressed my contact to reach out to the guy who interviewed me. He said, 'Yeah. I like the guy. I gave a positive feedback' (I would've been his manager, actually).

So, what really happened?

> Sorry, we're only looking for women candidates for this position.

(My name can apply to both genders. The recruiter called and heard my voice before scheduling the interview.)

there are companies that don't respond to your application at all, and i have started to feel that it is ironically a better approach.

funnily enough, one time i applied for a role in a company, which i never heard back from. however, someone else in there looked at my CV and sent me another job offer, which I ended up getting in the end.

What is the real reason behind this site?

the mobile display needs work ;)

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I applied to a large newspaper (I won't say the name but you've definitely heard of it) as a software engineer. They made me do some idiotic Myers-Briggs style test that took me about two hours to do, which was annoying, but the pay seemed like it would be ok and I was unemployed anyway.

Outside of an ITIL certification that I had to get for college, my resume is extremely technical, as I've only ever done engineering. I have bullet points about different tech I've used, programs I've written, and basic tasks I did for the company. I've had a ton of jobs so the resume is long, and basically devolves into a bunch of software engineering buzzwords. We can argue all day on whether it's good or not, but I don't think anyone would claim it's not technical [1].

Nowhere on my resume (outside of one line that said I mentored some junior and mid-level engineers and some lecturing I did for two semesters) does it say that I've done any kind of "people management", but the response I got from the recruiter was as follows:

    > Does not show technical keywords or statements in his resume. Showing to be more of a PM and not a hands-on coder. Not see enough Java experience. I don't see him as a focused Java developer like the other candidate you've sent us. Needs someone who can write the code.

I think what happened is that the hiring manager already knew who they wanted for the job, but for legal and/or bureaucratic reasons they had to have a pretense of "trying to find the best candidate". I suspect that they never even looked at my resume, had some basic boilerplate rejection text that had some vague plausibility, and was just going to reject every candidate sent to them.

That's fine, but I really wish they had done this before I had to spend multiple hours trying to get a read on my personality. I think a lot of hiring managers are sociopaths.

[1] https://gitlab.com/tombert/Resume/-/blob/master/resume.pdf?r...

I dislike corpos as much as the next guy, but there's no reason to treat these as anything other than completely made up by randos on the internet.

Personally I'd anticipate a string of defamation lawsuits from something like this. And dick pics. I'm actually surprised that so far there's only a bunch of garbage and not dick pics.