CV of failures

What is this? A list of things that didn’t work out for me.
I will try to be honest and update this page with research- and career-related failures as they happen. The first version was written in 2020 from memory.

Why is this? To increase transparency in academia, in the hope that this will make failures more normal and less painful.

Note 1. This page is inspired by Twitter conversations about paper rejections and research failures and Ben Greenman’s CV of failures; transitively inspired by Johannes Haushofer’s CV of failures.

Note 2. Many things that work out involve a great deal of luck.

Papers I did not submit

  • POPL 2023 (technical problems with a formalization)

Paper rejections

I was on the academic job market (mostly in the US) in 2025–2026 academic year. It was not the best year for academic hiring, at least in my discipline (programming languages), as many places were not hiring at all or were hiring only in specific areas, such as artificial intelligence or quantum computing.

I submitted ~90 job applications for tenure-track positions, and I submitted them broadly, to both research- and teaching-focused institutions, with only a handful of positions specifically focused on my area of expertise. In a good year, a few people I know would submit 60–90 far more narrowly focused applications.

I had a dozen of phone/video interviews, five campus visits, and four offers (three teaching focused and one research focused), and I canceled a few more campus interviews upon accepting the offer from Commonwealth University.

Internships I did not get

  • Uber (2020)

Awards and scholarships I did not get

  • Facebook Fellowship (2019)