[tmuir]

I've recently gone through similar rejection myself. I found a company through a Who's Hiring post. I breezed through three phone interviews, and it felt like the company had hired the NSA to find me, as what they seemed to be looking for was me exactly. I had an all day in person interview, felt like I had a great rapport with everyone, had no problems with any of the coding sections, had great answers for their questions, and getting the job seemed like a foregone conclusion. Then a week later I got "we've gone with another candidate". I'm pretty sure that's not true, as it's a fairly small company, and over the course of my interviews, their team page was updated a few times. No one with the position I applied for has been added since before my interview, and the job ad is still up, and in fact, has been expanded upon. So essentially, they'd rather just not have that position filled then fill it with me :\

What's funny though, is that when I first read the rejection email, the main source of my disappointment was not the job, but realizing I'm probably stuck in the midwest for another winter.

My head is up, though.

[annythesillicat]

Funny to me too. After the recruiter called me and said I was rejected, I said thanks and hung up the phone and cried very hard as if it was the first time I cry in a whole year. But then I feel very very good about myself. It's like damn I am quite damn kick ass!, especially after this experience, I feel like being a better person and I have learned a lot!

[zerr]

If relocation is not an issue for you, there are literally tons of jobs in US. HN's hiring thread doesn't represent even a 0.01% of these... There are many great companies or big enough circles where they even never heard of "Hacker News". So you should consider the world outside HN.