This is so true. It's really shocking how little effort and originality some/most people go to in getting the job they want.
I have a similar story, although nowhere near as much effort. When I was 20 and hating life in school, I really wanted to work at Shopify. At the time, they were maybe 80 people. I've never made a resume and didn't feel like that would get me noticed. Sio I simply sent a cold email to Tobi, our CEO. It was basically "Hey, Tobi. I don't know anything, and I have no skills, but I love your company and I want to be involved. Give me a chance, I'll work for free."
I got an email a week later from someone else on the team saying that I started the next week.
When I asked why, I was told "this worked because you were naive enough to think that this would work". I've been here four years now, and it's still the most important email I've ever sent. Maybe luck, maybe naivety, but I'm thrilled it's worked out.
Naiveté is a useful quality in a candidate for the right company. It signals the potential for loyalty. Once you've had your idealism broken by corporate bullshit, there's no easy way to get it back.
I think this is definitely true. Initially I felt like my loyalty was a result of having no other options, but it's proven untrue. I've had offers from all over the place since I've grown within Shopify, and I have no desire to leave this place. It's been fulfilling, challenging, and it will always be the place that took a chance on me when there were very few logical reasons to do so.
That's awesome, but please be careful. I was in the same situation as you but I was 19, hired as the first engineer (second employee) in a company of 5 people and I quit after almost 3 years.
Even though it's still fresh, when I look back, I really think I should've quit earlier.
When I joined I wanted to reward the company by showing that I was a hard worker but this resulted in just increasing the expectations without any return. Loyalty and overtime was almost expected of me after a while without any return besides the usual, low startup salary.
I hope it's different for you than it was for me. Just remember that it should be a two-way street and your loyalty should be rewarded.
I was suffering from long-term unemployment after a layoff, and my experience was so specialized that no company really wanted me (and if a company didn't want experience, why not just hire someone fresh out of college?).
I wound up somehow managing to land a job at a year-old startup that was still in early stages. I was making barely more than what I made at my last job in pure cash ($45k vs. $42k), when I'd been underpaid at my last job, and I received no insurance whatsoever. Still, I was grateful because I needed a job: the long-term unemployment had destroyed my mental health, plunged me five figures in debt, left me barely able to afford to live, and I was about out of extended unemployment (I found out I'd exhausted it the day after I accepted the offer -- and I got this job in early 2012 when extended unemployment was still a thing). It was this job or suicide, basically.
When I joined, I was one of the only employees who wasn't Director-level or higher. I stayed way longer than I should. Ended up working there almost 3 years. The company was about to kick off the pilot program for their first big product when I left (we had another product before that, but it wasn't suitable for mass production and was discontinued long before the replacement was ready). The owner/CEO was insistent on keeping control of the company, so he never sought VC funding. Instead, we went through an endless cycle of constantly demoing our product to small-time investors. It was a constant scramble of getting things ready for the next demo.
The company stayed small, raises were almost nonexistent (I somehow made it to $47k about a year in after I was rewarded for a huge flash of inspiration where I designed and wrote the product's infrastructure in like two days, but that was it, and I never got another), we never got insurance, and after a certain point we began hiring all new people as contractors to skirt under the federal 15-employee limit (which affects mandatory insurance and EEO matters).
Management was terrible. My boss had no management experience and simply didn't know how to manage anything multiple people worked on. He was a brilliant engineer himself, and everything he wrote solo was a well-designed work of art, but he had no clue how to manage other people. Code breakage issues were constant. The co-head developer was utterly terrible at both design and coding, and my boss (the official head of development -- though he treated the co-head as an equal) insisted he could do no wrong and got irrationally angry whenever his friend's design or coding ability was questioned. My and a co-worker's complaints went unanswered, and said co-worker eventually snapped and dropped his notice on our boss' desk without anything lined up when he realized the problems would never be resolved. Another co-worker left for similar reasons. Neither were replaced. Also, my boss couldn't handle stress, and he'd take out his stress by screaming at his subordinates and treating us like incompetent children.
Oh, and during my employment there, I began my gender transition. While my co-workers and my boss were totally accepting, our landlord wasn't, and they began illegally discriminating against me. My company just rolled over for them and refused to lift a finger to help me. That was when I really started to sour on the company, but it took eight months for me to actually bring myself to leave. I wound up fighting the landlord myself and filed a discrimination complaint with the city. Everyone with the city I dealt with was nothing short of excellent to me, much better than my employer. At one informal mediation session, I brought in the owner/CEO, and in his bumbling ignorance, he almost sabotaged my case. Finally, the landlord backed off, and I won, but I will never forget how poorly I was treated by my own employer. What's funny is that I was told by the city that if my employer had been over the 15-employee threshold, I could've filed both a municipal discrimination complaint and a federal EEO violation against them for rolling over for the landlord.
Still, I stuck with the company for a few reasons. One, I still felt like I owed them something after how they rescued me from long-term unemployment. Two, their treatment of me shattered my self-confidence, and now I was afraid to put myself out there (doubly so since I'd never gone job hunting as a woman before). Three, as bad as this place was, it was the devil I knew; my next employer could easily be worse. Four, my immediate co-workers were wonderful people, and I didn't want to leave them behind (when I finally left, I friended some of them on Facebook, and we still keep in touch).
The final straw was when my boss spent several minutes shouting at me for something that was his fault and then spent the next week screwing with my desk arrangements before finally putting me on a PIP. I started searching for new jobs that day. Soon, one of the jobs I applied to that day got back to me with a programming test, then a phone interview, then a real interview. Within a month, I received a formal offer from them, and I put my notice in the day before the PIP was to expire.
I like my new employer much better. I was right to apply for this job, and I'm never working for a startup again.
Getting out felt like leaving an abusive relationship. I've talked to spousal abuse survivors, and their stories about how their exes treated them and how difficult it was to get out remind me of what I went through with that company.
I am slightly confused -- who's landlord was illegally discriminating against you? The landlord for the office your company rented? How were they singling you out and discriminating against you?
Not familiar with the story, but from the text it follows that it was the company's landlord that was discriminating. Typically, in cases like this, conflict revolves around bathroom use and exclusion due to gender assignment/reassignment.
Bingo. There was only one bathroom on our floor, and we shared the floor with another company, some busybody at the other company complained, so the building manager banned me from using the women's restroom.
So you are biologically a male, you identify as a female, and you wanted to use the female bathroom?
I think that if, as a society, we decide that gender access to restrooms is not based on physical gender but instead based on how you self-identify -- then as society we should completely eliminate the separation of bathrooms for males and females.
Yes. Though in practice, I still feel more comfortable with gender segregated bathrooms, and I (female) would rather just share with female-identified persons than with males.
Interestingly, a local university (Uvic) has gender non-specific public washrooms. The kind with 4-5 stalls and sinks. Everyone welcome.
It's amazing how many parallels exist between an abusive workplace and an abusive personal relationship. Good on you for getting out and finding somewhere better!
When I was at my first job after the university, yet to learn about office politics, how things work and large companies, hyped up by the recruiter and all that stuff, I genuinely thought 'OMG so many things could be done better, I can do it!'. And given it was a company with hundreds of millions in revenue, where hourly revenue was more money than I had even seen in my life... Yeah I was hyped up! Just imagine adding 0.1% to the bottom line! :)
I am still naive, maybe not that much, and hoping that in the right company, I can do it. Won't change the world, but I can change some things for the better. Moved across Europe, joined a small (in terms of staff head count) company where I had a bit of connections. Great decision.
When I was young, I cloned services and wrote a letter to the company offering to buy a exclusive one year license or it would get released as open source in addition with a demo. That was giving me some job chances.
Now it's all about who you know, and what condition a potential employer is offering. No car, home office, solo office, dynamic hours and I'll walk out of an interview when the pay isn't obscenely high.
One time everything was right, but I complained to the managing director that the HR was giving me upfront bullshit during an interview, being not sure if I wanted to work In an environment where hiring is practiced that badly. This resulted in my first upper management position and allowing me to hire the employees of my department without HR in charge. Best decision ever, my best three engineers didn't even study. The hiring system is broken. In the technical sector even more than anywhere else, because it just doesn't make a difference for your skills if you have studied ivy league or learned everything necessary at home for yourself.
I wouldn't say that. I was after the money back then, but some companies actually liked that attitude of mine. Also lacking a product cycle those threads expired by themselves.
Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. I've sent naive emails like that with no response, or a polite "that's nice, kid, but come back in 4 years with your degree." I've also tried putting exceptional effort into a job application, like by using their API or writing a promotional piece about them on my blog that showcases their company while demonstrating my deep understanding and interest in what they do. Maybe I was just doing it wrong, but my reward for such efforts was nothing but silence.
Meanwhile, sending out form resumes seems to eventually and consistently work, with way less effort.
> When I asked why, I was told "this worked because you were naive enough to think that this would work". I've been here four years now, and it's still the most important email I've ever sent. Maybe luck, maybe naivety, but I'm thrilled it's worked out.
When I was half way through college I decided I no longer wanted to be in school. I emailed a bunch of startups saying essentially "Your company sounds cool. I'll come work for you for the summer for free as long as we set up some kind of goal system where I can get a job offer at the end of the summer." I ended up getting two offers from that and never looked back. I didn't end up lasting 4 years there like you, but I am definitely glad I did it.
Ironically enough, now that I'm somewhat into my career I can't see myself doing something like that again, which is too bad. I've picked up some risk aversion along the way :(
I think it works a lot better when you're 20 because people hire you based on potential. But when you're 30 hiring managers want to see skills. I suppose it could still work if you're changing careers, but you would need to demonstrate an even higher level of hunger and dedication.
I don't know if that's true. This strategy certainly isn't going to land you a job at Google/FB/etc. but I'd be happy to chat with someone in their 30s who'd just gone through a bootcamp kind of thing and was offering a similar deal as someone who is currently hiring at a startup and we had a position for a junior/recent college grad.
To me the biggest snafu is that it's a lot easier to do the whole "I'll work for free" thing when you're 20 and have no responsibilities.
I'll also add, though, that there was a huge faith component in myself and in the startup industry that "things would just work out," and I was also miserable in school at the time, so alternatives were bleak. Having worked in the industry I've now been given a dose of reality, but having that kind of dumb faith allowed me to grow very quickly (though painfully, too), and I'm wondering how much that learned risk aversion is hurting my personal growth. That's my big takeaway from this, at least.
At most companies if you changed careers near 30, you will never get a chance to talk with someone and show your potential. The HR filters are so tight that unless you know someone on the inside of a company who can pull strings, you'll never get asked in for an interview.
I'm watching my wife - a lawyer with math degree and programming experience - struggle to even get responses for junior QA positions.
I think the job market will have to get much tighter before companies start hiring people retraining into software. Hiring processes are optimized for new college grads and people with industry experience. Retraining programs are going to fall on their faces if we can't reform HR to hire smart, motivated people that lack a laundry list of qualifications.
> Apply to startups. I don't know what else to tell you. I'm seeing TONS of people (for better or worse) get placed in jobs after completing coding bootcamps. Some of them have >90% placement rates.
@wdewind: I'm over 30, went to a bootcamp and changed careers (from something else in tech). It's still hard to get a good position in this situation. Yes, tons of people who get out of bootcamps get jobs but 90%+ of bootcamp grads are essentially new grads with little work experience. I was one of two people over 30.
Ultimately, demonstrable programming skill seems to factor in very little for junior positions. Maybe in general. Growing startups actually had the lowest response rate for any of us with actual work experience. Most of my interviews ended up being either large companies or early-stage startups that wanted to pay _waaaaaaay_ under-market and worthless equity (NY).
Yes, you're not going to get paid market rate as a junior developer coming from a bootcamp. Hell, most startups aren't paying senior level people market rate when compared to G/FB etc.
My first job was hugely under market rate. I was up to market rate in about 3 years. But I had to change jobs 3 times to do it. It's not easy, definitely not saying that. But it's doable.
> Ultimately, demonstrable programming skill seems to factor in very little for junior positions.
I've been having many discussions about this with another engineer friend. Is it really fair to call Google, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon salaries "market rate". My impression is that they're generally in the top 10% of pay, if not higher.
I think maximizing your compensation is great and everyone should spend some time on it. I just think having expectations of Google pay from a startup is a guaranteed recipe for disappointment. Read: I've heard of zero startups that offer that level of pay.
This reflects the people I know who have done bootcamps or just tried to build a portfolio and change careers. They struggled to get interviews, let alone jobs. A bootcamp instructor friend quit after losing faith in the program's efficacy after watching several graduating classes fail to get jobs.
My wife would take an unpaid internship for a few months if it led to a job, or work at very low pay, just to get into the industry.
Getting that first job changing careers is _hard_, but then you have experience to point at forevermore.
--
Anyway, I've gotten really intrigued by the hiring side of retraining people. I'm wondering if anyone has yet done research on the ability of retrainees to actually land jobs via social networking, which is how it's assumed they will get jobs.
I think this will be a real problem as more retraining programs start turning people out: that many companies' hiring processes aren't able to see, let alone hire them.
Almost all of us got jobs, eventually (in 6 months), out of every cohort...
...but my bootcamp was one of the best ones.
Unlike most of my cohort, I mostly relied on networking/HN to find jobs - most folks just apply via normal channels. I had a high in-person interview percentage from that, but I ultimately ended up getting my fulltime gig off Stack Overflow Careers.
The contract I landed via NYC.rb before that was a shitshow.
I was in a boot camp and have worked at two companies. The hiring managers at both looked for unteachable skills (e.g. analytic ability, proactiveness, hunger) and figured youd pick up the rest. The skills I learned in boot camp were mostly a talking point / nice to have / piqued their curiosity.
They're hiring managers who want to pay a little less and are looking at the long term potential not the next 3 to 6 months. Of course that's why first job didn't work out - we went thru an acquisition and CEO mind went from long term potential to I needed results yesterday damnit :D
From personal experience, it's better to try to make a move within a related industry - for example if she has law experience, look for software companies that create applications and systems used in the law world.
She could probably more easily get into a more client-facing role where domain experience is a plus, like project/product management or some kind of implementation/consultant position. From there, she could make a lateral move into a more techie role if desired.
You might be onto something there. I will pass that thought onto her, that a legal-focused software company may give her more of a look than others. Thanks for the idea
This is something I commented on recently. Retraining programs and those already in the industry say social networking will get these people jobs. But they have the weakest networks in their new career. Yes, I could reach into 100 companies through my network and get an interview. A new person cannot. The assumption of using social networks is true only for those already established.
Apply to startups. I don't know what else to tell you. I'm seeing TONS of people (for better or worse) get placed in jobs after completing coding bootcamps. Some of them have >90% placement rates.
Startups (depending on the size) are both wonderful and terrible places for a new bootcamp grad. There is a lot to learn, and learn quickly, which is something any bootcamp grad has had to master -- but there is often a dearth of mentoring and, as time goes on, patience for junior mistakes. Larger startups are much better than small ones, in my experience working both on the startup and bootcamp (instructor, mentor) sides of the table -- especially larger startups who have already hired from that bootcamp, or a similar one, before. Then you have the alumni-mentor train going, and life is great.
Very good point. You can only get hired for potential early in your career. This is one reason it's so hard to switch careers later on. Going back to school is the only other way to get a "reset".
> This is so true. It's really shocking how little effort and originality some/most people go to in getting the job they want.
I used to believe that putting in effort and showing originality would help me get the job I wanted. Over time, I came to understand that was a huge drain on my time, energy, and emotional well-being for the sake of people who basically never noticed.
For instance, at my current employer we use JobScore. In theory, an applicant can submit a cover letter and a portfolio and so on. People who look at engineering applicants go straight for the resume and ignore details like cover letter.
Those are valuable details, but I think that it makes the application largely about the applicant's ability to author prose. This is appropriate for a copywriter, but I find it of less certain value for a software engineer.
The best argument for a cover letter over a resume is that relatively few people tailor their resume to each application. As a result, a resume is the job-application equivalent of a mass-mailer. Cover letters (when written correctly and not templated) convey a certain amount of interest in THIS job, and show that the candidate is serious about the position.
I think that's only significant if you believe a candidate's display of interest correlates significantly with their ability to perform on the job. I am not convinced that that is a significant correlation or that it should be aggressively selected for.
It definitely correlates with interviewing them being a complete waste of time because they barely read the job description and don't actually want to work for you.
Then I suppose it's a matter of what your local hiring market looks like. If there's a lot of unattached talent floating around, by all means, filter aggressively for those who want it the most.
You get not only a list of facts, but also an idea of what the applicant thinks is important - that is, important to them, or that they perceive as being in line with the company's objectives.
I feel pretty fair in blaming the current "standard" way of submitting job applications at most places. For pretty much every posting I see, I'd be taken to some ugly and bloated page asking me to upload a PDF/DOC which is then parsed out to auto fill some form fields and those form fields mostly don't let me actually communicate what I want to.
I have been looking for a job since the past couple of months, and my experience has basically been just that. Simple job listings with an email to send your details to haven't been a common sight to me, specially at established places[1]. If anyone knows of some service where I can find them, I'd be glad to hear.
[1]: I know the story is about startups, but I presume parent is talking about jobs in general?
Yeah, had some issue with the domain this AM – fixed now. I started as an intern on the App Store team; that team was four people at the time. Through a series of internal moves, the team eventually dropped down to just me about six months after I joined.
I'm still with the same team today four years later; I lead the Developer Relations team and manage a team of five within a larger team that includes API Support and Merchant App Experience.
They, like most good companies, ended up not letting me work for free. I was paid well (for someone with, as I said, no experience and no concrete skills) right off the bat.
I have been, and continue to be, compensated more than fairly for my position. I don't think not going to school or anything has had any impact on my earning potential so far.
An intermediate step between "send in a resume and cover letter that no one reads" and "send in an unsolicited blow-their-minds project", which may well bounce off the same spam or attention filter which bounces a resume, is "convince one person in the company that they want you to apply there."
This is much, much less difficult than engineers think it is. People with hiring authority are on the same Internet you are. They use the same email / Twitter / etc. THEY WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU. Engineers are in incredible demand.
They get a steady stream of resumes from people who are wildly unqualified for the job. That is one reason why they're not going to read your resume when you send it in unless their prior expectation is that you're interesting.
It is not harder to be interesting than "someone I've never heard of or met." "Hey Bob, I watched your presentation at $CONFERENCE last year on Youtube. Great stuff; loved what you did with $FOO, in particular $COMMENT_PROVING_YOU_KNOW_WHAT_YOU'RE_TALKING_ABOUT. I'm also a $FOO developer. Do you have a few minutes to chat on Thursday about what you guys are doing?"
You're not proposing marriage here. You're asking for 15 minutes to get to know them. You do not have to author a heartbreaking work of staggering genius to make this call happen.
Your goal for the chat: get Bob enthusiastic enough to either suggest "Hey you should apply here" or be receptive to you suggesting "Hey, I really like what you're doing, and would like to see if I could be a part of it. Can you get the ball rolling for me?"
n.b. If you want to knock someone's socks off with a demo of e.g. an application which uses their API, use the above to get one person enthusiastic about reviewing the demo, then implement. If you can't get one person enthusiastic about the prospect of looking at your work, there's sharply limited odds that actually doing the work meaningfully advances your interests.
Time to do such research is not always a luxury a job applicant has. The hypothetical job candidate would, I'm sure, love to be able to get to know the intimate details of the 30 companies they need to apply to right now (because their savings dries up in 3 months and they have a family to feed), but that takes a lot of time. Maybe you didn't happen to have watched Bob's presentation at $CONFERENCE. Chances are, you don't even know how to contact Bob or that indeed Bob is even the decision maker. What then? In many cases, you'll not know a single person at the company that is in the position to hire or recommend you. At that point, you're back to the "job posting black hole".
I'd turn it around on the company: You're not proposing marriage either. Take a measly few minutes every so often to really look at the stack of resumes you get, and give a few of them a whirl. Don't spend months and months of the company's time and money hopelessly looking for that special snowflake 100% match when there may be many 90% matches lining up at your door. Thanks to lax U.S. labor laws, the decision to hire is not irreversible.
If unsolicited apps are 1/10th as effective as solicited ones (generous!) then you only have to research 4 companies to outdo 30 shots in the dark.
You can find e.g. the name of the CTO of Fog Creek. It's FizzBuzz-level difficulty or less.
You can find e.g. any published work of Thomas Ptacek to bond over. You didn't have to run into him at Black Hat, or even know that he has spoken at Black Hat, to find a video of him speaking at Black Hat.
You may not know who is in charge of Fraud at Square. You know who probably knows? Well, to a first approximation, any engineer there should (or be able to find it out trivially). Can you find any engineer at Square?
We have the good fortune to be in an industry where people are hyper-connected, publicly identified, and Internet routable. Use these facts to your advantage when looking for a job.
I don't think we're talking about unsolicited vs. solicited applications. Surely a candidates odds are substantially better when the company initiates contact.
I'm talking about official vs. unofficial channels: does it makes sense to have an official (job site / resumes) channel that pretty much funnels into the trash, along side an unofficial one (where the real hiring happens) that rewards insider connections, friends of friends, cyber-stalking, cold-calling, and/or exhaustive research into companies? Is that the best we can do?
Also not arguing that the unofficial channel is ineffective. Clearly that's where all the hiring is going on, but is this the way it _should_ be?
It sounds like you guys are talking past each other. Patrick is telling you the reality of the situation. You're telling Patrick that the situation he describes is silly and unfair.
That's certainly true, but it's definitely not helpful to point it out then continue doing what you're doing.
The correct thing to do when faced with a series of silly steps that are 10-100X more effective than the "fair" way that an engineer would design is to learn how to follow those silly steps and follow them.
This pattern hangs engineers up quite often in life. See also salary negotiation, promotions, dating, etc. etc. It's worth taking a step back, looking at how the real world operates, then finding a way to make yourself operate in that real world.
I think it's more about a situation when you are 'omg I want to work at THIS company' rather than 'I just need a job'.
You can get enthusiastic about one company and get something done about it. Following the Patrick's suggestion, it's some mega project that would take the whole week or so, a couple of focused hours should do the trick. And if you are genuinely interested, you will naturally sound generally interested without any bs covering it all.
Even if the case of just needing a job, following this advice will probably help you get produce a few but high quality applications, rather than sending yet another resume.
>Time to do such research is not always a luxury a job applicant has.
I think their point is that applicants should focus more on quality, not quantity. Rather than focus on 30 companies, focus on six, and spend time trying to impress them rather than just throwing your application into the numbers grinder.
That is true, but I don't think I have 30 companies I would be really excited to work at. I could find 30 companies easily, but that would require doing the same amount of research. Sure doing research on 30 different companies may require too much time, but not doing it would mean I would probably end up shotgunning job applications to a bunch of places I don't have strong opinions on.
As a former recruiter, I can't second this enough. Applying online is like shouting into a black hole. Pinging a real person with sincere, earnest content and talking to them like they're a person is so much better.
>Pinging a real person with sincere, earnest content and talking to them like they're a person is so much better.
I was a bigtime Rdio fan. I loved their clean design, discoverability. I pinged a real person with big list of improvements and bugfixes that was I was collecting over many months. I told them I wanted to work for them and sent them my resume.
They got back to me with "We have sent over your suggestions to our engineers, but we can't hire anyone without Python experience" .
I wish this was true everywhere. I've tried this few times on the companies I was very excited about, but it never worked so far for me. Most of the time, they don't even care to reply. I don't like faking interest, so I just drop my applications into the black hole these days.
For one thing, existence of a jobs page tells desirable candidates to find the real way to apply; non-existence leads some candidates to assume you're not hiring.
Every company with 10+ engineers is hiring engineers but many people don't know that yet, so, have a jobs page.
> For one thing, existence of a jobs page tells desirable candidates to find the real way to apply; non-existence leads some candidates to assume you're not hiring.
Assuming there is a "real way". Many large companies force you through their terrible portals and HR filters.
> Every company with 10+ engineers is hiring engineers but many people don't know that yet, so, have a jobs page.
Mine isn't, and has not been for several months. We aren't in financial trouble, either. We just don't have the backlog or volume of expected work.
For me the biggest job-search hurdle is emotional... I know it sounds like one of those bullshit "you biggest weakness" dodges, but the idea of "looking elsewhere" is perilous.
I feels either like cheating (on my current employer) or else some sort of irrevocable sense of obligation towards whatever I'm asking about. ("How dare you waste my time with questions if you weren't already planning to accept an offer!")
If it helps, remember that the people on the other side absolutely do not feel the way you feel. Your current employer understands that employees will leave, and plans and budgets for that. That's why people talk about bus numbers.
Your prospective employers do not expect every coffee, phone screen, or interview to result in a new employee. They understand that they will talk to people who are a bad fit, and that's part of the process.
I respect that you feel that way, and have felt that way myself, but it gets in the way of advantageous moves.
This is, legitimately, one of the most comments ever written about the job search process on HN. Employers run a portfolio strategy for candidate selection, much like sales guys run a portfolio strategy with regards to leads. Making the wrong decision on a candidate/lead is totally acceptable. Missing an opportunity with a candidate/lead is totally acceptable. Spending time investigating a candidate/lead which doesn't work out is not just totally acceptable it is the entire freaking job. If an employer has a 100% acceptance rate on candidates or a salesman closes 100% of leads that is an alarming signal that the process is out of control: they're clearly not exposing enough people to it!
Very good advice. Any employee at any halfway decent company can put a friend's resume at the top of the pile. You still have to know what you're doing to get through the interview, but HR people are looking for any good reason to cull their stack. "Well, Jane over in QA recommended them" is as good a reason as any, and provides them cover when asked, "Why doesn't this person have skill X"
The author overlooked the first major factor in their success - finding the startup they wanted to work at! I actually think the more specific you get in your job search the more successful you will be. People often think that by being 'flexible' in what they want to do they are increasing the number of companies they can work for. That is true, but you aren't trying to work for a bunch of companies, you are trying to work for one. By being that general you will never find the place where you specifically are the best candidate.
To be concrete, I'd rather find the 5 companies that are really aligned with my skillset and target them very specifically than apply to 50 random companies looking for someone kinda sorta like me.
It's a high risk method. But it's much more effective than traditional job applications. So if you weigh the time spent (10-20 hours building custom thing for company) vs spending 10 hours filling out 30 applications, I would guess this is a better approach.
It's also a method described in "guerrilla marketing for job hunters". There's others in the book if you're looking for a little lower effort non-traditional methods.
I put a much higher priority on the people I work with. So I would add to that risk the scenario where I get the job but it turns out to be a bunch of bros. Maybe there was some public insight to the kind of people this person would be joining to mitigate that risk.
I spent a lot of time learning everything I could about the company, the people, their product, etc. I knew half the engineers by name from various videos they had posted and was fully convinced it was a company of amazingly talented people.
Just curious -- were there other companies you put this much effort into studying and making such a stellar first impression? Did you feel sure enough you would get this position that you didn't need to?
When you're looking for work and need to get a job (e.g. to support a family) spending 10-20 hours working on a single job opportunity is risky because they may just say "sorry, we like you but _____". where _____= {there's a corporate headcount freeze, we don't need that skill, we already have something that does that better, we're not good at hiring}. I still think it's likely a good strategy, just worth acknowledging the inherent risk.
If you have oodles of free time, then sure, it's low risk.
I once applied to Heroku; I wrote a song about deploying to Heroku, made a video for it on Youtube, deployed it to Heroku (of course), and applied (via their site and Twitter). Never got an email back, not even a "we received your application". Was bummed out for a while afterwards.
I got my first real startup job by submitting a bunch of bugfix patches to their open source offering. It was relatively easy - they had a public bug tracker, and I just picked the things I thought I could figure out, and after one weekend, I had a job offer.
I was there for two years, and I never saw another candidate try to do that. We kept doing technical interviews that gave mixed signals - plenty of people got turned down because we didn't have an effective way of measuring their abilities. If they had gone through the code review process, they would have had a much better chance of getting the job. (In hindsight, I'm not sure why we didn't include "submit a bugfix to our open source project" as part of a standard interview process)
At my previous company, someone walked into our office and asked if we had any openings for engineers. Given that we were hiring anyway, we said sure so we talked with him. Unfortunately because of visa issues we couldn't hire him but if not for that, we definitely would have. It was a case of right-place-right-time, but it definitely was something we talked about for a while afterwards.
My first startup job I literally walked in the front door and asked if they needed a Unix hacker. They interviewed me on the spot. Not enough office furniture so I got a chair and the engineering lead sat on a DEC Alpha he had in his office.
The largest thing that stops me from being able to apply for a job as a college student is that every job I am interested in, mainly back-end/low-level software development, say that they require a "MS in CS and 5 years of experience."
These job postings are for entry level positions and internships, nothing higher.
Is this something I should be worried about? Should I just apply to this kind of work anyway?
How do I find companies willing to hire me as a college student with no official experience?
Having hired a bunch of people, including juniors out of school, I'll tell you this: apply, just apply.
A job description and requirement is their picture of the ideal candidate, but they will hire the person that's the closest to that, and other things not mentioned in the offers like how you would fit culturally in the team, work with others, and so many other things.
Just apply to what you want to do, what's the worst case again? Ah, you spent time writing a cover letter.
Btw, keep your cover letter short. People might not read it if it's too long.
Another last tip: apply even if you are almost certain you won't have it. Never say "I'll apply when I get more experience". You know what? By then, you will change, the company will change, and it might not be a good fit anymore. I wanted to apply to a couple of specifics startups in the past that I never applied too because I felt like I was not up to it, in the end, I was wrong and the company changed so much that I don't want to work there anymore at all, but I'm sure that would have been great for years.
In school there was a scholarship I was almost eligible for. I needed a 3.5 gpa but only had 3.2 so I didn't apply thinking I was disqualified. A few months later I found out someone with a 2.3 got it because lack of entries.
Then again later I entered a programming competition with a $5 entry fee. Only 2 people entered and we each won $100 and $75. A 3rd place prize of $50 went unclaimed. Anyone who entered and earned 0 correct would have gotten it. As second place dude didn't get any right.
If it's low effort or something you enjoy, always apply. It's almost always worth it. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take.
It seems that everything in the process, from the "Jobs Page" that goes to a black hole, to the unrealistic job descriptions, to the months-long interview processes, to the opaque and feedback-less selection process, seems to be built for the purpose of not hiring candidates. Which seems odd for an industry that constantly complains about not being able to find talent and is bent on perpetuating the "shortage of engineers" meme.
I know a little, but like every college student: I still have a lot to learn. If you would like, I would be happy to email you my resume and talk with you via email. My email is my username @ my username .com.
I worked in embedded development for much of my career. There is a pretty small supply of people who are interested and capable in the field, relative to the jobs available, especially for more junior positions. What Ive seen happen is companies will hire java developers to do C development because they have few other options (it often doesn't work out well). Just apply and you are likely to get people who will talk to you.
I can imaging the kind of spaghetti a Java programmer would make if told to write C with no prior experience. That's how I got my start. I didn't even understand the difference of passing a pointer from the heap and passing a pointer from the stack.
I will be the first person to admit I don't know it all. Will the senior devs be willing to tell me when I mess up and what I can do/read to get better at my job?
I still have a lot to learn. Right now I'm trying to learn as much as I can about the i368 architecture since it is one of the last few processors that, from what I have been told, "a single person can have a working understanding of every part of the architecture and computer."
In any event, I'm basically looking for a summer job or a part time job for next semester, so I think I definitely have given myself enough time to search.
I know the company I work has boilerplate job descriptions, but if we think the person is a good fit, we never compare their experience and education to the job description, we just hire them. Most interviewers couldn't even tell you what was in the job description.
Also, I have several friends who applied for jobs that appeared way above their current level. We're talking 10 years of experience, when they only have 5 (and you include a lot of experience that isn't directly relevant). They got those jobs.
If you are interested in a job, apply for it. Full stop.
These lists are wish lists and is used to see who can be brought in as applicants. Unless they are very generic, it is very difficult to tick off every item on the wish list.
My rule of thumb is that if you are able to meet about 75% of them, just apply.
This is a great story and kudos - it looks like an awesome piece of work for a weekend project.
As a counterpoint, I did something similar (replicated a barebones version of a tool that a company I wanted to work for had) and sent it off and didn't even receive a courtesy "thanks but no thanks" email. Them's the breaks I guess.
I don't get why you have to go to such extremes to get hired. In my experience getting hired at a startup is like getting hired anywhere else - in fact generally it's easier. You send in a CV, attend one or two interviews (personal and technical), and get a decision. I'm not sure what it's like now but weren't companies finding it really difficult to find engineers in SV not that long ago? That should make things even easier.
Since the destructive idea started that one bad hire was a disaster for a company, it has been a lot more difficult than that. It is probably a major factor in the talent shortage, as companies are no longer willing to take any chances or train anyone, even for jobs that would take four hours of training!
I've watched companies in the last year I interviewed with wait and suffer? a year to fill a position, even though I could have done their silly rest-api job with one arm behind my back, haha.
> Since the destructive idea started that one bad hire
> was a disaster for a company, it has been a lot more
> difficult than that.
I experienced this first-hand a few years ago. I had a few friends and former colleagues working there and was qualified. One of the six interviewers was known to be difficult (even to outsiders) and sank me. The CTO personally apologized to me face-to-face but decided to uphold the 100% agreement tradition.
I think everyone is ignoring the fact that he really wanted to work there. If you're in that boat then yes this makes sense.
But if like most people you're not exactly gaga over the company but value other factors like pay and lifestyle then the traditional approach could yield more dividends. Return on time invested after all is important.
I did something very similar and approached the hiring manager to show him what I've done. While he appreciated my work, he wanted me to work (for free) on the company's Github stuff and said he will call me if that something opens up.
PS: I am okay spending my free time on his cool project but it progressively looks unsustainable.
This boils down to being able to show the potential employer than you can be of immediate, tangible value to the company, which should be the main goal of anyone looking for work. A resume is one way to do this (albeit not great), building a valuable, relevant prototype is another. There are many alternatives along that continuum.
But really, are talented, creative software people really having trouble finding work?
Of course, there is a difference between a demo focusing on implementing new features then the software that we are shipping. But yes, it was extremely impressive and it's no surprise that he is leading much of our engineering team (beyond software, as well) today.
On a side note, what are higher ups looking for in a young applicant? I'm graduating in the fall with a CS Undergrad and don't have any startup contacts (I live in a smaller town in Missouri) and am trying to get my foot in the door somewhere that is doing interesting work.
Projects. Contribute to open source as much as possible and build as much stuff as possible that you can show off. Then you should have no issue finding something interesting. Might have a better chance searching outside your hometown though.
Passion. Engagement. Curiosity. Being the absolute best possible at something - I don't really care what, but being mediocre at lots of things is a turnoff. Ability to learn new stuff, more so than any specific skill (although YMMV with this one).
Any interview I walk out of thinking I've had a 2-way meeting of minds, a genuinely engaged conversation as if we're already peers, rather than an attempt to simply answer a list of questions is going to do well.
I am curious if the demo app was built using some pre-existing libraries/frameworks or even UI widgets. Because, based on the info available on the demo site, even if the author knew exactly what he was going to develop and the tech behind it, the sheer amount of coding required to build such an app from scratch would take way more than 3 days.
Anecdotally, that's how we hired our designer - her last "mockup" project matched exactly what we were working on next - the hiring process was super fast, and there are a lot of benefits to hiring someone who has already spent time thinking about the same problem space as you did.
For one thing, it's probably much harder for these types of moves to make an impact when your stereotypical HR drone is handling incoming resumes -- hell, I can practically see them filing the cover letter in the standard way, the resume in the standard way, and the random hunk of metal in the standard way (garbage).
True, but then if it's a 10-person startup there's also the danger that they're so amazed by your ingenuity they decide they definitely want to hire you as soon as they've closed that next round so they can afford a few more people.
Now it might be the case that you're so engaged with their mission you want to wait a few months for a below market salary offer (hey, you're obviously far too keen to negotiate it) but it might be a trick that's easier to consistently pull off with a maverick-friendly businesses with more substantial funding or revenue
In my experience, your typical startup has its own drone handling resumes. It may not be a dedicated HR person—it could even be a fellow developer—but it's still someone with their own biases and blind spots. Engineers can certainly better understand how the demands of a position map to a candidate, but there's a tendency to "hire someone like me" that doesn't exist to the same extent with dedicated HR people.
Great approach. I would hire someone like this. You're gonna be a legend the day you join. Probably easier to be noticed/hired this way with smaller companies.
Even if you don't get hired, you've learned something new and produced something cool which you can show in your next interview, and only lost a couple of days of your time.
Yep. I think people are getting caught up on the 'startup' part of this.
Roughly this is how I've met every mentor I've wanted to and then gone on to work with them.
Demonstrate value by investing time/effort in your interest, and build on that through communication until an opportunity to work together presents itself.
I've done something similar. I wanted to branch into a new discipline, so to show off my ability to pick up a new skillset, I learned how to juggle. At first it started off as a joke, because their jobsite said "juggle multiple things."
I spent a couple of hours, recorded video of my progress and posted it to YouTube. I didn't get the job. I actually went out on a limb and reached out to somebody privately to make sure it wasn't too "out of the ordinary" and that I didn't ruin my chances for anything in the future. Thankfully, mostly everyone forgot about it. I guess it wasn't unique or clever enough?
Thanks for sharing. I agree with doing the unconventional, and I think it comes down to making a very clear case to the founders that you can add value off the bat when joining the company. Given the limited time and resources, it's hard for the company to pass on hustlers who can get shit done right away.
I was interested in working with the Data Science team of one of India's leading e-commerce startups.
Later, I ended up doing a project[1] where I have collected and analysed the user order data from their order tracking portal.
Now I feel that they won't take me back because I kind of played like a Black-Hat instead of a White-Hat by not notifying them about the little loophole that made it possible for me.
Before this, I was an intern there and got that because of one of my past project. This method does work.
They likely thought you used knowledge of their internal system for blackhat purposes, which is kind of what you did. Interesting analysis and dci nonetheless.
My approach. Either do the job (I'm a marketer and built a landing page for one company with bootstrap to show I could), or find a common connection. In my current job, the hiring manager formerly worked with a good friend of a guy I helped out 4 years ago evaluate two job offers. that's how weak ties work. Also the benefit of paying it forward, never know how that connects back to you.
I feel like this approach is easier for smaller startups. But what about bigger places like google, apple, or facebook. My background isn't your traditional CS background but I have over 4 years of experience on a site that does million+ in traffic but I can't even get my resume sniffed at by those companies.
Years ago, during the original dotcom crash, I was working in banking. All the banks were firing, not hiring. I got an interview at Morgan Stanley by contributing a feature to their open source A+ project[1]. Running code counts for a lot!
I've done something similar by creating a 3rd party companion website for an online marketplace (which has ~50 employees), but haven't contacted the company directly. Now I'm stuck. What Shane did requires not only hard work, but the guts to engage the company and knowing what it is that you really want. If you're considering this, make sure you're resolved to a particular course of action.
My site targets sellers from that marketplace and provides a search of information scraped from the official source as well as detailed sales statistics which are not available from the official source. For active users, these two things can easily save several hours per week.
The 1st party company has acknowledged the existence of my site and indicated to their users that they'll allow it but are unaffiliated, which is completely understandable since they have no idea who I am. My companion site was created out of necessity and receives about 20k pageviews a month (approx 2000 users).
Currently, I am not charging for the site but a half a dozen people have suggested charging for its use or contacting the 1st party site to license it to them. The people making these suggestions are the marketplace sellers from the 1st party site (the users who are common to both sites).
But now there are difficult decisions to be made. I've worked from home for over a decade and loathe commutes, even those measured in minutes. This company is 2.5 hours away and best-case public transportation would have me out for 12-14 hours per day. This company makes no mention of any kind of remote work possibility but my impression is that it's done some of the time by some of their employees. I wouldn't want special treatment even if they offered it. With all of that said, if I did have to travel to work... this place looks like the kind of place I'd enjoy working. It was relatively easy to find about 1/4 of their team on social media and get a feel for their culture, even found some video of their office on a regular workday.
If I did join them and the commuting situation were overcome, would that constrain my freedom to make the new features and enhancements that the community wants? Contacting them with a laundry-list of questions feels wrong.
If I didn't join, would enough of my currently free users convert to paid to make it worth continuing? What's the optimal price to balance the seesaw of retention vs dollars (number retained free users * price per month)? Is it unknowable? What percentage of the existing users might actually pay? It's all very uncertain. It'd be great to get some feedback from everyone, maybe with your own experience(s).
Shane's idea is great but it doesn't magically fall into place, relationships are complicated!
Contact the company, show them your site, explain your situation, explain that you're looking for remote work. If they offer a compromise like being in the office one or two days a week, take it. If they won't go for it at all, thank them for their time and go to plan B.
> I wouldn't want special treatment even if they offered it
That's a bad thought that you should get rid of before it has a chance to harm you. Life is hard enough as it is; you don't want bad thoughts creeping into your head and handicapping you. (I'm not saying they'll offer special treatment, of course, only that you should certainly take it if they do.)
For Plan B, go ahead and charge for your site. If people are willing to pay, great! If not, chalk it up as an experiment worth trying and shut it down. I don't know what the price should be, but I do know you should not trust your instincts; us geeks always err on the low side. Either charge significantly more than you think you should, or ask some non-geeks and follow their advice.
I have a similar story, although nowhere near as much effort. When I was 20 and hating life in school, I really wanted to work at Shopify. At the time, they were maybe 80 people. I've never made a resume and didn't feel like that would get me noticed. Sio I simply sent a cold email to Tobi, our CEO. It was basically "Hey, Tobi. I don't know anything, and I have no skills, but I love your company and I want to be involved. Give me a chance, I'll work for free."
I got an email a week later from someone else on the team saying that I started the next week.
When I asked why, I was told "this worked because you were naive enough to think that this would work". I've been here four years now, and it's still the most important email I've ever sent. Maybe luck, maybe naivety, but I'm thrilled it's worked out.