Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired
As the title says, I have applied to over 450 positions. Most companies did not even send me a rejection. Ghost jobs are a thing, so are fake roles to get you to signup/join some rando job board.
I interviewed for a director of engineering role, and all interviews went well, but they ghosted me at the end.
I did several take homes and all were accepted, but companies dragged their feet on next steps.
I did reject a few kinds of roles: ones that used AI for interviewing me, ones that had me do a coding challenge as the first step, and jobs that had "no working hours" and expected you to be "on" 24/7.
Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?" and would say things like "don't use AI! we want your true self" or would go so far as to try to get you to agree to their AI interview policy. As If.
I eventually did get hired as a software architect. the company that hired me was very professional, respectful, forward thinking (i used windsurf during the interview) and did not play games with me. They had a 4-step interview process, and asked a lot of good questions. One of the best interview processes of my career.
My advice to other engineers on the job market:
1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless.
2) Always be willing to walk. Protect your time. Don't waste your time on lengthy job applications that take too long to complete. Some hiring managers will gladly waste your time. (one job application explicitly wanted you to spend 20 minutes filling out theirs)
3) Don't do coding exercises before you interview with someone, be weary of asymmetrical time expenditures. see #2.
4) You can probably do a lot of different roles, "prompt engineer" is a real job title companies are hiring for, for example.
5) Work a couple of different job platforms. For example I used linkedin, dice, ziprecruiter, weworkremotely, and rubyonremote and a few others.
6) Use AI to generate your resume, but feed it all the context of your work history (don't misrepresent your skills)
7) Use AI to fill out asinine job application questions, but if they ask you thoughtful questions answer those yourself. I got the interview for director of engineering because i answered authentically to thoughtful questions.
8) Pace yourself. Spend a few hours a day at it then come back in a day or two and go again.
9) Work on a side project or learn a new lang/framework in parallel.
10) Interviewing is like dating, everyone is looking for something different, and some don't really know what they want. Not a you problem.
11) If they use workday for their job applications, bounce. It's the worst.
12) It takes time as roles become available. The job you end up getting might not open until 2 months from now. see #1.
52 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 71.3 ms ] threadIn my experience it’s much better to spend much more time on a target application to a company you’ve researched and maybe reached out to people or met current employees.
1. Minimum of a BCompSc or adjacent field (using a dedicated academic verification service)
2. Brief 30 minute phone screener
3. On-site interview
The jobs were actually fully remote positions, so we would rent out a shared workspace where we would conduct the interview itself. We found that this cut down on the chaff by about 90%.
This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken.
I just skipped the rest of the steps after reading (1) and completely stopped reading after (6).
This is poor advice and it is no wonder you had to send 450+ applications and I think people reading this would want to do this with less steps and less than 450+ applications.
In my cv I care a lot about the details: the typeface, margins, grammar (I use llms since i’m not a native speaker), bullet point order, succinctness, etc. Perhaps that counts for something. Then if I get an interview, that’s like already 50% of the job done. Im an easy guy imho. I have failed mainly systems design interviews, so that’s where I put some work nowadays.
Here'a a recent case for a remote software engineering role for a US based company:
A position is posted publicly, in 2 days it gets 300 applicants. Out of those 300, 9 are selected for interviews. Of the 9, only 2 showed up for the interview. Both candidates weren't close to a good fit (skills didn't match resume, etc.).
It opened my eyes on the process. Imagine an engineering manager getting handed a few hundred resumes and now they need to hand select ones that move onto the next phase. This takes a huge amount of time and it also indicates if your resume isn't strong, you will probably get passed over in a few seconds.
With that said, he told me most of the applications were AI spam.
> Use AI to generate your resume
> Use AI to fill out [...] job application questions
The irony is strong on this one, and one person's "asinine" question is another person's "thoughtful" question. It's a bit hard to take this seriously.
If something is not working out, change up your approach. The first obvious step is to try networking instead of applying. Perhaps start something on your own, becoming a B2B service provider rather than an employee. Or try to out-compete the companies which have rejected you. Be a stalwart, not a pushover.
Job was about Linux admin and I told one about bash programming and that I like and know about it. At the end, he says "there are some things I did not hear like scripting in Linux..." and I just went ok, thanks for you time, bye.
Common advice on Reddit is also to lie about your experience.
The irony is that because of both of these, it takes longer to get a response and get through the interview process.
I don't see this as a asinine/foolish/stupid thing to ask. It's helpful for both sides:
- potential employee can provide an honest opinion on their motivation, in a targeted, specific way to highlight their talent. - offering company can use it for evaluating mutual fit, as well as filter out generic trash applications.
I've only once applied to a job I didn't get, and I've had more than 10 jobs.
It's called networking.
Here is one advice to rule them all:
Talk to people and build a network for yourself.
https://jck.earth/2025/04/06/finding-a-rails-job.html
Enjoy your jobs those who will. I’m choosing a different life, even if it doesn’t dump endless money into my bank account.
Can you low-key coach me how to do this better? My email is in my profile.
Emphasis on low-key. I don’t want to take too much of your time.
I hope no one outside of highly experienced individuals applies this rule when looking for a job in 2025.