This list is a follow-up to my popular post Some Reflections on Being Turned Down for a Lot of Data Science Jobs.
People talk freely about jobs they’ve been offered but are naturally hesitant to mention rejections.
For those new to the industry, this gives the impression that those who are more senior are drowning in job offers.
My goal is to make it clear that even someone with a successful career of 10+ years receives rejections, and we all need to keep persevering.
| Year | Company | Reason Given | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Meta | Recommender system design interview solution “lacked depth” | |
| 2024 | Anthropic | “we recently hired for the Software Engineer, Infrastructure role” | |
| 2024 | Movable Ink | Shifted what they were hiring for | |
| 2023 | Handshake | N/A | |
| 2023 | Credit Acceptance | Ghosted | |
| 2022 | Netflix | N/A | |
| 2022 | Flock Freight | “the team felt that there were some gaps on the Infrastructure and SWE side of things” | |
| 2021 | Talking Leaves | “While we were impressed with your skill set, we have chosen to go in a different direction.” | |
| 2021 | Spotify | “We’ve decided to move forward with another candidate for this position.” | |
| 2021 | Microsoft | “We decided to extend an offer to another candidate. … I wanted to add another aspect we considered – your compensation requirements were out of band for what we can offer a senior DS for this remote location.” | |
| 2021 | Tecton | Failed to implement backend for Connect 4 in code screening | |
| 2021 | Square | “Ultimately, there wasn’t a strong enough signal coming out of this round to allow us to proceed confidently” | |
| 2021 | Grubhub | N/A | |
| 2021 | Okta | “Not sure how things felt like on your side but the coding question wasn’t answered right?” | |
| 2020 | Zillow | N/A | |
| 2020 | Urbint | Hiring manager left the company | |
| 2020 | SamsungNEXT | Insufficient deep learning for image recognition experience | |
| 2020 | Autodesk | “The hiring team has decided to move forward with other candidates at this time who more closely meet the needs for this role.” | |
| 2019 | Secureworks | Non-compete issue | |
| 2019 | Saiva | N/A | |
| 2019 | Proofpoint | N/A | |
| 2019 | Deepwatch | Decided not to hire | |
| 2019 | Brave | ghosted | |
| 2017 | Stripe | “We’ve had a chance to sync and, unfortunately, we won’t be moving ahead with your candidacy at this time.” | |
| 2017 | Mystery Tacklebox | ghosted | |
| 2017 | Grubhub | “after careful consideration, the team has decided to move forward with another candidate whose background aligns slightly better with the team’s current needs.” | |
| 2017 | Grubhub | “After careful consideration, the team has decided to move forward with another candidate.” | |
| 2017 | Cogitai | “The decision was close, but the team has decided to keep looking for someone who might have more direct neural net experience. That seems to be an area of black art which our overall strategy depends on, and so is very important in our hiring criteria.” | |
| 2016 | Citadel | ghosted | |
| 2015 | Precisionhawk | ghosted | |
| 2015 | Maxpoint International | N/A | |
| 2015 | Mavrx | “We really need some talented data scientist/engineers and you definitely fit the bill. We just have pressing hires for image analysis specific folks.” | |
| 2015 | Digital Turbine | Unable to accomodate partial WFH | |
| 2015 | Datarobot | Offer rescended. “Quite honestly given your questions and the fact that you are considering other options, Datarobot may not be the best choice for you.” | |
| 2014 | Simple | “we’re not ready to move forward with you in the Data Scientist role.” | |
| 2014 | Kaggle | “This was not an easy decision - you have the raw intelligence, attitude, and work ethic that we want. Unfortunately, we weren’t confident enough to make you an offer for a remote role w/o a job trial at Kaggle’s current stage (we are more conservative when making remote hires, since not all great contributors are great remote contributors & remote employees need a higher level of independence & communication to work effectively).” | |
| 2014 | Farmlogs | “While we were really impressed with your unique approach (particularly the binning technique), we weren’t able to have a strong enough conviction to make an offer. The bar was set particularly high given that you would want to work remotely.” | |
| 2013 | Yieldbot | N/A | |
| 2013 | Tiger Analytics | N/A | |
| 2013 | Stripe | “you’re still not the right fit for Stripe right now. " | |
| 2013 | Stash Rewards | “Despite an original desire to find a great data guru wherever they’re located, the team has unfortunately changed their mind and settled on finding someone in either Seattle or San Francisco.” | |
| 2013 | Etsy | “there is not an exact match with this role at this time” | |
| 2012 | Ibm | “After consideration of your skills and experience, the team has decided that we will not pursue your interest in this position any further.” | |
| 2012 | Plotwatt | “There’s no question in anyone’s mind at PlotWatt regarding your technical strength, math chops, or programming abilities. You’re clearly good on all counts. The bar for proceeding though is set based on our assessment of whether we can “live without you.” We require a unanimous “hire” vote from all interviewers. In your case, we couldn’t figure out exactly where you would fit into the stack and which of our challenges you are especially (among a ridiculously qualified applicant pool) suited to solving.” |
Read my reflections on being turned down from a lot of data science jobs.