Not unlike the VCs who reject applicants, you may have been great, but others may have been more great.
Further, there might have been non-technical issues at play which are harder to understand/reason about, such as communication issues, confidence issues (both over and under confident), or issues with a perception about how much you cared about their particular product.
All of the latter elements are fuzzy and not worth thinking too deeply about, if you get rejected for those, then you are lucky you didn't end up working there, as it would not have been a good fit for either of you.
I have heard people come out of interviews with negatives as fickle as "they didn't make eye contact."
This doesn't mean that the person was rejected for that reason, but if you are adding up all the reasons not to hire someone, and the sentiment was decidedly negative, then it's going to mean the company will not make the investment in hiring that person.
> I have heard people come out of interviews with negatives as fickle as "they didn't make eye contact."
Lack of eye contact is often considered to be a trait of poor communication. Do you mean to suggest that poor communication is not a valid reason for choosing not to hire someone?
I have ADD, I am conscious of my lack of eye contact, but I am actually a great communicator.
All of human behavior occupies a wide spectrum. It's probably OK to say that on average, people who avoid eye contact may be bad communicators, but it's not universally true and to use that signal as an indication of a person's quality is cheating. If you need someone to make eye contact for you to feel like communication is good, the problem is with how you feel, not with the actual communication.
There are a wide variety of engineering jobs and some of them require regular communication with people who might not know you and who are therefore are more likely to misinterpet things like lack of eye contact. Tech leads, developer relations, etc.
People who are not good communicators and people who don't seem like good communicators, to the people being communicated to, are at a disadvantage for these jobs, at least until we eliminate miscommunication from human interaction (which I most sincerely hope someone, somewhere, is working on...)
It's superstition. The entire interview process is, to be honest. Whenever anyone studies how potential candidates are rated, compared to how they actually end up performing on the job, it turns out there are two things that have significant predictive power: an IQ test (illegal in some jurisdictions), and a test of skills that will be required on the job (e.g. for a programmer, asking the candidate to write some code). Nothing else has predictive power significantly better than random chance. You might as well choose candidates based on their star sign.
If the candidate is rejected for poor communication the reason given should be "poor communication; eg did not make eye contact".
It's worth remembering that many people with Asperger's do not have a diagnosis, or would not consider declaring their diagnosis at interview. It might be worth while for interviewers to gently ask - in the spirit of making reasonable adjustments - about that.
But, really, we know that interviewing is a hopelessly broken recruitment method.
Further, there might have been non-technical issues at play which are harder to understand/reason about, such as communication issues, confidence issues (both over and under confident), or issues with a perception about how much you cared about their particular product.
All of the latter elements are fuzzy and not worth thinking too deeply about, if you get rejected for those, then you are lucky you didn't end up working there, as it would not have been a good fit for either of you.
I have heard people come out of interviews with negatives as fickle as "they didn't make eye contact."
This doesn't mean that the person was rejected for that reason, but if you are adding up all the reasons not to hire someone, and the sentiment was decidedly negative, then it's going to mean the company will not make the investment in hiring that person.