It's interesting that the first thing you see in the comments is "don't contact anyone."
Right now we're in a weird place - if you have a network, you're pretty well off. If your network isn't hiring, or you are early in your career, it's brutal trying to get through the noise.
The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now. It takes being creative. I get a few emails a month right now. Honestly, I think this isn't going to work at this point - some go to my personal and some go to my professional emails. But what might work?
Look at people who are writing blogs. Is there something interesting on their blog? Is that worth engaging them on first? (I mean, don't waste their time if you aren't interested or if you're going to submarine it the second or third email - someone will feel used - but showing a dual purpose of the email might not be the worst thing and even if they don't have a position or influence on the position, you might have a good conversation.
Are you involved on bluesky/twitter/threads? Are you getting positive engagement? Are you finding ways to make community? It may not get the formal referral but it might make the social referral and give you 30 extra seconds with the resume and a reason to say yes.
>The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now.
The big shame is that the hardest PoW to fake right now tends to be under NDA's and proprietary codebases. So if you aren't in the position to make major contributions to FOSS in your free time or "code for fun", it feels like a soft reset all over again. As if those yeras in industry mean nothing.
I especially dread the idea of needing to jump on the very doomscrolling places I left at the start of the pandemic just to get a potential lead. My mental health over 2025 was already pretty bottom of the barrel without that.
If you're interested at all in Eastern philosophy, it has helped me survive mentally the past few years of unemployment and unstable work after burning out from a 22 year career.
Highly recommend Alan Watts. If you like audiobooks, I started out on the one titled You're It. I think it was a good starting point.
Oh, I get them all the time. Usually from junior engineers. I don't hold it against them - it's good advice.
So, what's your trick to avoid getting skipped because a contract recruiter or internal recruiter is going through resumes at 6 a minute and looking for keywords nowhere near the job profile? What's your trick to get through the noise? Right now, it's brutal from junior to staff, and if your network isn't hiring there's no real way to tell the difference between someone who is taking care and someone spamming 200 applications and using 5 minutes of AI to customize. So other than "utilize the network you built over 25 years," what's your advice if all you have is "don't do that?"
I'm glad I have a job now. However, it's brutal for people on the hunt in bad situations or people who have been laid off.
Ideally write the hiring manager and not HR. And, write something that makes it hard to not want to talk to you.
1: Minimal hygiene is writing something that shows you read the vacancy (if any). Don't: "I'm interested in the role, CV attached". do: "You want onsite in Amsterdam, I'm living in Milan but already planning to move to Amsterdam for reason X".
2: Stand out from the average applicant. Someone recently applied with a personal website that was a kinda-functioning OS (with some apps). Someone else applied with a YouTube channel hacking an ESP32 into their coffee machine. Someone applied with a tool on their GitHub profile, super well written, in our target language, doing interesting things on the database we're working with, etc., etc. how could I _not_ talk these applicants? All of these are soft signals that show affinity for their work as engineers. Don't: generic application letter combined with 3+ pages resume with too much detail.
3: if invited: get curious (but not overly opinionated/combative) about their stack. Candidates we've been most excited about have come in asking questions on how we're setup, and why we've made certain choices. Don't: expect the interviewer to ask all the questions, or bring only a prepared question that misses the mark.
4: Its a people process, if that's your challenge, work on that. Maybe you share a hobby with the interviewer, maybe you've both solved similar problems in earlier jobs, maybe you both like Haskell, maybe something else to connect over. Connection matters to most hiring managers.
You got me there, I don't have one. I'm senior in my career but haven't been able to build a network that I can rely on when I'm looking for my next role, so I'm in the same boat with all of you guys and gals.
I do maintain though that cold reach out is more often harmful due to the barrier of HR/recruiting built to prevent this from happening, and you trying to go around that will likely cause trouble.
Also, when you reach out to the employees for "the referral", what does this even mean? If the person knows you, worked with you, or went to college with you, then they can refer you, but if they haven't even met you and don't even know if you're real, what are you asking them to do? "Hey boss I got this email from this guy he says he's a good fit for this role we have open, do you wanna hire him?", is that it?
DO research the company. DO research the role, the team, the manager, the environment, the toolsets, the issues they're facing. Do NOT flood people's inboxes asking for "referrals" whatever that means.
>I do maintain though that cold reach out is more often harmful due to the barrier of HR/recruiting built to prevent this from happening, and you trying to go around that will likely cause trouble.
If you haven't been on the market the past 2-3 years: I think we're at a point where we do indeed need to all "cause trouble" if we want anything to change. It's better than being ignored (AKA a soft blacklist) in my regards. If you think that way, the worst you can get is a "no".
>Also, when you reach out to the employees for "the referral", what does this even mean?
It used to mean what you described, yes. I worked with this person in a previous job or college and can vouch to their work ethic at worst, or ability to perform this exact role at best. A referral for me should be a 5 second decision based on seeing the person's name.
I'd personally never give a referral out to someone without that; at best, maybe I'd setup a small call myself and see their work for myself before giving a "cold referral". Most Code referrals don't even do that much, sadly. But I guess enough cold referrals have happened that even those are limited in effectiveness nowadays (as well as there simply not being many openings).
I did a similar thing with productivity books early last year, but never released it because it wasn't high enough quality. I keep meaning to get back to that project but it had a much more rigid hypothesis in mind - trying to get the kind of classification from this is pretty difficult and even more so to get high value from it.
The biggest determinant is company culture and treating QA as an integral part of the team, and hiring QA that understands the expectation thereof. In addition, having regular 1:1s both with the TL and EM to help them keep integrated with the team, provide training and development, and make sure they're getting the environment in which they can be good QA.
And work to onboard bad QA just as we would a developer who is not able to meet expectations.
This post is talking about very small companies. At that 20+ person department, it's true. Once you have a team where the founder doesn't know everyone, the average matters a lot more.
If you have 15 people, you can hire 15 people and they will be able to organically organize if you hire well. If they have a question, they know what everyone is working on. The code base is small enough that everyone can just figure it out even if the documentation is bad.
The larger that group is, the more effort it takes to make sure everyone has the context they need to get their job done. That's where management matters.
And honestly, when I was the first manager (team of 17) brought in, I was writing code and on my own project in addition to starting to build up the "what do we need to do to scale?" You bring someone like me in at 17 people because you're going to need to scale soon and someone needs to build the first set of processes that solve the problems of the next stage, and figure out the onramp because done wrong, they make everything worse.
There is no world where a 4 hour commute to work is reasonable. That said, Stockton and Tracy seem like they happen more often at an hour and a half (to San Mateo or San Jose)
But why are we building a world where that is necessary? That's an awful world.
That world isn’t necessarily until that four hour commute is driving past houses the whole way.
But it isn’t.
I think a big part of the problem is we’ve lost the shitholes; it used to be 20/30 years ago you could be making good money in the city and choose to live in a crappy apartment/house that others of your salary tier wouldn’t look at; that option is mostly gone. The shitholes are infinity dollars a month.
I think the major problem we have is we are lumping depression and anxiety into the same category.
Some people probably do have issues quickly resolved by SSRIs. Others are magically fixed by bupropion while it spikes anxiety in others. Others have major trauma that they have to work through and many therapies (like internal family systems therapy, as one example) are great at handling that. Others are stuck in cognitive distortions and merely learning about them and handling them (through cognitive behavioral therapy) can be life changing.
But if you have major trauma in your past, exercise is probably not going to do much. If you are heavily overwhelmed and your body is stuck in perpetual flight or fight) exercise and meditation might be a giant help.
But right now the practitioners are aware of this, but it's really hard to double blind test these divisions until people can do the analysis first. And at that point, you've basically already started therapy.
If only their sound signature was a bit better... they went all in on engineering tricks to make things small and cheap to produce, but it shows in their sound quality. Their QC headphones are the best in noise cancellation, and the sound quality is good enough that they're my pair of wireless headphones.
A long while ago i heard something (that might have been a urban myth) about Bose putting useless weight into their headphones to make them appear more "substantially professional". Is that a myth or they have pivoted towards actual quality since early days?
There used to be a whole culture of bose kind of being a-holes. (Like 20 years ago.) I used to work at CNET back then and there was a kind of "yeah bose is ok" kind of vibe but it was always tinged with "but they want to sue you if you say mean things" whether they did or not.
As far as I know now, things have changed substantially. I would assume this includes engineering quality and honesty.
This bricking avoidance seems like another note in that positive direction.
My understanding of modern Bose kit based on RTINGS reviews is that it's fairly competitive in its price range. Still a touch pricey for what you get, but not bad by any means—like 2nd/3rd best, and occasionally punching above its weight for their midrange offerings. They seem to be #1 for comfort (headphones) though.
I don't own any, I've just read reviews from when I was in the market for new headphones and earbuds.
I believe that's always been a thing. A long time ago I read this teardown article [1] of real vs counterfeit Beats headphones. And even the counterfeit versions had metal weight added to make it feel like the real Beats headphones!
Those were Beats, not Bose, and it was true. IMO Bose does a great job of being both consumer friendly and high quality. There are others with higher fidelity for the same price (Shure, Sennheiser) but you often lose the comfort and portability Bose offers.
Their aviation headsets are infamous for being heavy and the latest generation of the A30s haven't changed much except it's much lighter because they swapped out some metal parts for plastic.
You are right, my memory only includes the original report and not the follow-up that determined it was bunk. Sadly it is too far past my post so I cannot edit it. Apologies for persisting bad info
When I bought my Bose QC ten years ago, I tried a lot of brands and found Bose to have the most pleasant sound, very clear/neutral. I guess it’s personal taste.
However, I think the biggest thing is the replacement of products. We are in a place where he talked about replacing two products his wife was using with custom software. I personally have used LLMs to build things that are valuable for me that I just don't have time for otherwise.
Right now we're in a weird place - if you have a network, you're pretty well off. If your network isn't hiring, or you are early in your career, it's brutal trying to get through the noise.
The truth is that proof of work matters. But the big problem is that proof of work is easy to fake right now. It takes being creative. I get a few emails a month right now. Honestly, I think this isn't going to work at this point - some go to my personal and some go to my professional emails. But what might work?
Look at people who are writing blogs. Is there something interesting on their blog? Is that worth engaging them on first? (I mean, don't waste their time if you aren't interested or if you're going to submarine it the second or third email - someone will feel used - but showing a dual purpose of the email might not be the worst thing and even if they don't have a position or influence on the position, you might have a good conversation.
Are you involved on bluesky/twitter/threads? Are you getting positive engagement? Are you finding ways to make community? It may not get the formal referral but it might make the social referral and give you 30 extra seconds with the resume and a reason to say yes.
reply