Rejection from Amazon
One of the most important skills I’ve had to learn, the hard way, is how to deal with rejection.
It’s not a great start of the year, but I recently applied and was rejected from Amazon. It’s difficult not to associate “assessment” with “worth” as the two are highly correlated. However, there’s an important point to be made:
Your value as a person is not determined by the outcome of a job application.
The value you can bring to a role is the outcome of the craft you’ve honed over the years.
FAANG is not the reason your “job sucks”, happiness in your job and life is not found in a company or a pay check.
While I would have loved to start the year with a bang! I haven’t been a software engineer for that long, and even for the time that I’ve been one the experience I’ve had was varied and not as deep as I would have liked.
All to say that I need to push forward with the craftsman mentality and keep working hard on improving.
For example, one of the most important lessons of the experience is the work I had to put in preparing for the assessment as well as the experience of going through the process.
I did the Amazon leetcode path which showed me how much I enjoy problem-solving and optimizing. It showed me how much I enjoy and need to improve in C/C++. I also watched a few videos on the work simulation and culture fit assessment that introduced to some valuable life lessons.
Here’s what I decided to do next:
- Try and probe the recruiter for feedback on the rejection to help me understand what I could have done better.
- Keep doing leetcode while keeping a log of the problems I’ve solved to improve my DS&A skills.
- Keep applying, keep blogging, and keep learning.