[lkrubner]

I love this, but it could go even further:

Blaine Cook was "rejected" from Twitter after years of hard work. But he faced an insane scaling problem, and most of us would look bad if we faced the same set of problems.

Steve Jobs was "rejected" by Apple after years of hard work.

Or my all time favorite:

John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation (rather than the traditional animation techniques for which Disney was famous), then he became head of Pixar, which got bought by Disney, and which took over Disney's animation, and so now he is head of animation at Disney. They fired him, but now he is back, and now he is in charge, because he was right.

Lots of great people do great work and then get fired. Getting fired doesn't mean they were wrong. Sometimes it simply means they were too right, and nobody wanted to hear it.

[argonaut]

This doesn't really apply. At the executive/management level things are hugely different. Politics, how well you work with others, investor perceptions, "vision", experience, communication skills, etc. all become more important than raw individual contribution skills.

Another common example that people like to use, but which also doesn't apply is the example of Brian Acton getting rejected from Facebook before starting WhatsApp. I have no doubt he would have been able to get hired as an engineer. All indications are that he was interviewing for an executive position, though (he had previously been a VP at Yahoo).

[_yosefk]

AFAIK Lasseter wasn't that senior when Disney fired him.

[pc86]

> John Lasseter was fired from Disney because he was too enthusiastic about cutting edge digital animation

It's possible that Lasseter was the animation equivalent of the programmer who has a job in a web design firm that traditionally does everything in Rails (or .NET or Django or whatever) and constantly says "let's use Haskell!!" when they're just building CRUD apps for clients.

The "works well with others" thing is important even for junior folks.

[golergka]

TBH, I don't think that Lasseter would be able to do what he did if he stayed at Disney. So one could argue that Disney's decisions were good for them in the long run.

[TheOtherHobbes]

That may be a selective interpretation.

How many talented people have been fired or never hired, but you never hear about them because they don't make a spectacular come-back?

If hiring is as random as it seems to be, there's going to be a massive pool of wasted talent.

[zitterbewegung]

That could be a different site though. Instead of "we were rejected" you can say "we were fired"...