Ask HN: Reject/ghost on all job applications with 8 YoE, what am I doing wrong?

As for your question, I consider finding a good job without a personal connection to always be a grind. I have about 20 years of engineering experience with trendy buzzwords, high profile gigs and high praise from references.

Yet I still expect to apply to a hundred places and only get a handful of interviews.

Do you want to work at a small company, or a large one?

Do you have a specific kind of technology you’d like to work on?

And do you have a specific kind of company mission you’re seeking?

All of these can be addressed in a good cover letter. And as a hiring manager at a small business, I can tell you that although personal recommendations are great, someone who is clearly passionate about our market and who took the time to learn about our small company is equally interesting at the resume stage.

So… what are the answers to those questions above? Feel free to reach out to me privately if you’d like, too.

Anyway, no pressure to reveal yourself any more than you'd prefer, just my own thoughts.

Regarding work authorization, are you not in the US? If you’re not in the US and you’re applying for jobs that accept non-US people, you can increase the numbers I mentioned by an order of magnitude, you’ll be competing with literally thousands of people.

Step 1 of an effective job search is to invest your time into positions you have a realistic chance of getting — if you can share some links to jobs you’ve applied for, I can let you know if they pass my own sniff test for worthwhile.

Do I get this right?

5 jobs over 7-8 years?

In my opinion this is very bad

How you can have strong experience if you rarely go thru whole software development lifecycle unless projects are small?

This is genuine question

If project takes a year to develop and you leave a few months later, then how do you know implications of your design??

>It's 5 positions excluding internships

Five jobs in seven years is likely why you aren't getting callbacks.

I know the meme on HackerNews and in tech is to always be job hopping / once a year is fine, but in my experience that isn't as normal as internet people make it seem. People who never did the startup circuit are not going to understand so you need to help them.

Big traditional companies frown on too many 1-yearish stints. The first couple of jobs, sure that's OK, but 5 in a row is a red-flag for many. They will wonder if you're just going to be there for a year and then vanish.

I suspect what’s happening is, your resume looks great to recruiters/HR/manager, so you get the initial call(s), but somewhere through the process things get hairy. You get talking to engineers and they’re: impressed with your experience, but can’t afford you; lost by your experience because you’re talking from experience using in-house FAANG tools and processes; intimated by you; put off by some kind of interpersonal quirk like not asking enough questions or the right ones.

The tough thing about interviewing is it’s basically a tough sales call, and it’s administered to people with little sales experience. Here’s a quick tip: ask questions about what problems they’re facing right now, and tell them how you can solve those problems for them.

I don't think OP disclosed any info about salaries before getting "rejected".

He could just broadcast to his circle that he's available for hire and a few weeks later some opportunity come up. Seems dumb can feel diminishing but can save a lot of time, good connections know what's a fit and what isn't.

Is it reasonable for 90% of software engineers to know what a top 10% software engineer resume looks like? I don’t think so. Most people think repeating dozens of skills at the top of your resume with no storytelling is a must-have (e.g. “skilled w/ Python, Ruby, Scala, Rust, Go …”).

Curious how you know how many people applied for each position.

Some companies will also give employees who refer someone that then is hired a bonus - have seen this be $1500 to perhaps $5000 in U.S. places.

Referral processes may ask whether you know the person in some non-professional capacity, or whether you have direct professional working experience with the person. There’s usually more weight assigned to the latter case.

Applicants who have multiple referrals really stand out; applicants who have referrals from people in my team (versus the wider >100k person company) are also extra interesting.

The best way to use your network in all cases above though is reach out to everyone. You never know who in your network has the right connections to help - but they do know. I know of cases where all the hiring managers (4 different managers) ask one person who to hire, if you already had reached out to that one person he will give them a resume and you are hired (note that no jobs were ever advertised, it was either this one person said who to hire or it went to an external 6 months contract to hire company). In small companies everyone talks to everyone, so just reach out to them. In very large companies you need to know someone who knows the hiring manager.

In all cases your contact will know better than you what to do. So ask them.

Oh, this person has worked at Google (for example). Our compensation is good, but not Google-good. I could look that the rest of this resume, if this person is a good fit, have an initial 40-minutes meeting with them to discuss compensation, start the hiring process, and then they will reject us because we're lower than they are accustomed to, or because they have found something that pays more.

Or I could move this resume to the reject pile and move on to the next candidate.

Oh my, look at the time.

The fact is that FAANGs do things in a very particular manner and on small, focused teams. That's the opposite of how start ups work and applying most of the managerial "skills" that are in place at FAANGs are a good way to apply a ton of unnecessary bureaucracy to a company that doesn't even have an HR department yet.

"Founder is formerly Google and Facebook!" makes me stay very very far away from the company because outside of the VC world the reason those words have power are red flags.

Some people are only really good for a couple of years at a position. After that, they get bored and move on. If you need to fill a position with someone who will last longer than that, seeing a bunch of 1-2 year engagements on your resume is a strong hint that you might not be a good match for the needs of the position.

If you don't care so much about longevity, then it may be a non-issue, or even a positive thing.

_Any_ reasonable experience nullifies personal projects. The myth that a personal github account full of open source personal project activity is the only way to go should die already.

The claim is that personal projects can help. You don't have any personal projects (so they haven't helped you) but that isn't evidence personal projects aren't helpful, only that they are not strictly necessary.

> Completely not my experience.

Whether more than a little experience at a FAANG company helps or hurts you depends entirely on which companies you're applying to. With many, it really is a red flag. With others, it's almost a guarantee that you're going to round 2.

I've got two sentences at the top of my resume explaining who I am and what I do.

I use much more flowery language but I basically say:

    I'm team lead.
    I care about communication.
    I want to know your business and customers. 
    I want to work with stakeholders and help them solve problems.

It's worked pretty well for me. I don't get calls from people who dislike furries and the first two sentences got me my current job.

Especially in tech where you get fantastic ESL engineers who might struggle to write flowery prose about their skills but can document their code very well in English.

(1) Cover letters are very rare. Out of the last ten interviews, I've received two.

(2) It's the one place you can reveal some of your personality. Focus your message to answer this question: "What is it about this role/company/job that you find exciting?"

I have a PDF file with a cover letter on the front and a page or two of resume. Five minutes before the meeting, I'm opening up that PDF, again ... the first thing I see is that cover letter and a candidate that's excited about the job. It puts them on the right footing before the video camera fires up.

I also know that "your resume was produced, once, and probably fired off to several companies in that exact form". While (assuming it was done correctly) "your cover letter was written to me, about this job."

If you've provided it, I'm going to pay more attention to the words on that page than probably any others. So while a cover letter is not required and a resume (often) is, if you include it, it's not controversial to say "it's more important than your resume" as far as its impact on my opinion of you prior to an interview.

But usually a cover letter encourages the writer to tell me what they _think_ I want to hear, but not what I really want to know - which the CV usually does much better.

Which means they are often sycophantic and a bit embarrassing - and I usually have too much respect for the people I want to interview to expose them to that :)

Reframe: successful companies, practical projects, mature and reliable tech.

Think of it like a resume pitch on a resume.

It should be possible to write those up in such a way as to be less boring. But the other reality is that 90% of all the jobs out there appear to be with "boring" companies, have "boring" projects, and use "boring" tech. Companies generally avoid things that are too exciting -- exciting has risky as its partner, and companies prefer to minimize risk.

However, it's also very common that there's really interesting stuff in all that boredom. If I told you what company I work for, the project I was working on, and the tech stack I was using, you'd very likely yawn. But the work is actually very interesting and exciting when you dig into it. When I put this on my resume, I will focus on telling what was interesting about it, because that will also tell what my contribution was.

Second, be honest. In your cover letter, tell your prospective employer that you feel like your resume seems boring. Tell them the exciting things you've worked on, and how it has helped you at work. Tell them how you're excited to learn new things and take on new projects, in addition to just getting better at doing the boring things. Express your interests, your passions, things about you that you think would make you a great co-worker.