Early in my career, I encountered one of the more formative professional experiences I have had, though not in the way I expected. The company I was working for at the time was going out of business. I had been asked to stay through the end of the next quarter to wrap things up, document systems, and effectively turn off the lights. Jobs in the early 2000s were evaporating at a rate people today sometimes forget, and I had exactly one solid lead.
A recruiter contacted me about a consulting company on the south side. It was not my dream scenario, but given the economic climate, I listened. Their pitch was compelling enough: they had established their own interpretation of the Rational Unified Process, claimed they could successfully implement it at client sites, and positioned themselves as a company that took software seriously. At the time, that mattered a great deal.
I felt I had a respectable early-career foundation. I had administered databases on multiple platforms. I had helped build internal systems that genuinely made the business more efficient. I had taken on responsibilities far beyond what my job description required. I was not simply checking boxes. I was trying to understand why things worked, not just what needed to be typed into a terminal.
When I arrived for my technical interview, the discussion shifted almost immediately into an interrogation on object-oriented theory: definitions, memorized distinctions, and abstract nuances that one might only know if they had the “correct” pedigree, the “correct” mentor, or the “correct” prior employer. None of the questions touched on anything I had actually built or learned. They were not interested in systems I had worked on, the problems I had solved, or how I approached design. They were fixated on vocabulary.
The final outcome was not ambiguous. I was rejected in a way that was unnecessarily pointed. It was not “you are not the right fit” but delivered with a tone that implied I was fundamentally unprepared for the industry. At that stage of my career, that hit hard. I had worked consistently, learned continually, and pushed myself outside my comfort zone. I had read The Pragmatic Programmer when it was first published. I had studied Code Complete and numerous others. But in that particular room, none of that mattered.
For a long time, the memory was uncomfortable. I can still recall the interviewer’s name. It took years before I finally recognized the truth behind the rejection:
A rejection is not a verdict. It is an opinion. And opinions, especially poorly informed ones, do not carry predictive power.
The company that dismissed me so confidently, the one with the proprietary process, the rigid views on what constituted “serious development,” the one that lectured me on correctness, has been out of business for years.
If their technical certainty had been as accurate as they claimed, they would still be here.
Meanwhile, I continued to grow. I had the opportunity to work on systems they never would have touched, solve problems they never encountered, and follow a trajectory that exceeded anything that interview could have measured. Their perspective was narrow. My career did not have to be.
It is easy to over-assign meaning to early-career rejections. They feel diagnostic, as if someone has identified a flaw you did not know you had. But in most cases, what they actually reveal is misalignment, not incapability.
If I had been hired there, I might have absorbed the same constrained thinking that eventually sank them. Instead, I learned something I still repeat to others starting out:
You cannot let someone else’s limited worldview become the boundary of your potential.
Rejections happen. Some are polite. Some are blunt. Some are delivered with more confidence than competence. None of them define you. What defines you are the years that follow, how you learn, how you adapt, and how you persist.
And on that front, I am still here. Still doing what I love. Still learning. They are not.