The Rejections

And now we need to talk about the rejections. All of them. The ones that blend together into background noise and the ones that stand out like scars.

I have been applying for opportunities since 2022. Four years of applications. Four years of "we regret to inform you." Four years of "we were impressed by your background but." Four years of "we've decided to move forward with other candidates." Four years of form letters and ghosting and interviews that went nowhere.

Some rejections were standard. Fine. That's the game. Everyone gets rejected. I'm not special in that regard.

But some of them were different. Some of them had a shape to them that I learned to recognize. A company in California. I won't name them, but they know who they are, rejected me and actually said, in writing, that I was overqualified. Overqualified. Let me repeat that: overqualified. At eighteen, nineteen years old, with no degree, no formal training, no industry experience on paper. Overqualified.

What does that even mean? What it actually meant was: we don't know what to do with you. You don't fit our categories. You're too young for the senior role your skills suggest, but you're too skilled for the junior role your age suggests. You're a classification error. A database anomaly. And instead of recognizing that as a sign of something extraordinary, they treated it as a problem. Too much for this box, too little for that box, and no one willing to build a new box.

Then there was the interview where the video call ended shortly after I appeared on screen. The issue wasn't technical, we hadn't gotten to technical questions yet. The issue was an expectation mismatch based on my appearance. Someone saw my face and made a calculation, conscious or not, malicious or not, but made about what I was supposed to look like versus what I looked like. And the call ended. Just like that. Before a single question about architecture or system design or problem-solving. The evaluation had already happened, silently, in the gap between the person they expected and the person they saw.

That moment made explicit what I had felt in subtler forms for years: sometimes evaluation begins before skill is even considered. Before a single line of code is reviewed. Before a single technical question is asked. The decision is made in the first seconds of visual contact. And what was being evaluated wasn't my ability. It was my face. My skin. My existence in a body they didn't expect to be attached to the resume they had read.

This is not unique to me. It is a pattern reported consistently by African tech workers across continents. Interviews that shift tone when video turns on. Emails that grow colder after a LinkedIn profile picture is viewed. The sudden discovery that the position has been filled, or the requirements have changed, or the timing isn't right, always after visibility, never before. The decision was made the moment they saw you. The rest was just the performance of due process.

And then there are the applications that just disappear into the void. No response. No acknowledgment. No rejection even. Just silence. You send your portfolio, the AI search engine, the voice assistant, the penetration testing bot, the Rust systems project, the years of building and learning and surviving and it goes into a black hole from which no signal ever returns. Was it even read? Did anyone look at the GitHub? Did anyone understand what they were looking at? You'll never know. The silence is the answer, and the answer is no, and the no doesn't even have the courtesy to announce itself.