- you are too hot for well over 90% of the roles up for grabs. - your expected salary alone may be enough a deterrent.

One thing hasn't changed: the recruiting scene has not improved, rather gotten worse.

Jack is a recruiting manager. He constantly needs people and the three projects he is on are far behind. HR just announced a wage cap and he will only be able to hire one engineer. 10 remotely relevant applicants, you are one of them, but the other 9 will say yes to start coding this impossible to complete set of features and won't make noise until there is room for a few more recruits. 3 of them seem like a good fit and he won't have to battle with HR like last time to offer twice what he would offer any other three who have a few years experience which should be enough to get moving with lambdas on AWS.

My tip would be to not give in and be as meticulous in your selection of roles to apply to as your technical expertise is.

Plenty of companies out there looking for exactly your level of experience and nothing less.

On the bright side, it may sound contradictive but more roles are open than ever for top tier talent. Compensations have more than doubled in the last 10y and hiring people expect more, add noise that has amplified even more than compensations and that's what the climate is like.

It takes several months to land a fitting role. Less than that you are very lucky or gave in for something subpar to your value

The recruiters don't know quality. They know the (general) requirements asked for by the job req and the resources available to them to complete a hire (salary). OP is "failing" along one of these dimensions. From the OP's description, they fit the general requirements, so it's most likely the salary (whether the salary expectation was stated explicitly by the OP, or assumed by the recruiter).

Hopefully the OP has some savings and can withstand the amount of time to find a quality fit for themselves. I'm not sure what other solution there is.

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 …”).

That's because 90% of engineers never encountered someone from the top 10%.

I recall a story someone told me a while ago. Software business that did local CoL/prevailing wages. Hired an intern one summer that was just running around in circles around the other, more senior devs. Useless to say they loved him and the next summer they tried to get him back, even offering a signing bonus for an internship (something they considered unheard of) but he was already at a large search engine company down in the Bay. You can guess the comp was probably already 3x what his previous job was offering. Of course, he wouldn't return.

There's a whole class of engineers were completely invisible to most companies, even if they are in the same "local market" [0][1] (Some use the term "dark matter devs" but I know it has another meaning [2]). These guys tend to fly under the radar quite a bit. If you are in a tier 2 market or company, your chances of attracting one are close to nil. Because they are extremely valuable, they don't interview a lot and tend to hop between companies where they know people (or get fast tracked internally).

[0] https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/software-engineering-sala...

[1] http://danluu.com/bimodal-compensation/

[2] https://www.hanselman.com/blog/dark-matter-developers-the-un...

But what you said here about buzzword bingo is so painfully true. I’ve seen that go to ridiculous lengths more times than I can count.

These same candidates were great when I interviewed them but when I said yes to a person, there were usually a hand full of people on the team who didn't like them for various "not enough blah blah probably can't do the work we do here" etc.

These same people tended to have no objections to hiring candidates with more marginal credentials and talent.

In the case Im referring to, the engineers absolutely did understand quality and didn't want it around, instead favoring lower quality such that they could remain unchallenged. I wonder how common this is in the world.

Another possible (and to me unexpected) consequence of pay transparency in job offers is that the hiring company can (hopefully will) believe you’re OK with the salary on offer.

Focus on your professional network. Most of your jobs should be coming from referrals from coworkers, not cold-calls on a jobs board. This is the only way to continuously get hired regardless of the job market, and is very important as you get older (again: ageism is real).

Personal projects count for a lot for a software developer. Make sure you have at least a couple small projects that you maintain regularly. Contributing to open source is nice, but unless you're a major contributor, it isn't a big factor the way owning a project is. Make it really shiny: good docs, clean code, linting, testing, CI/CD. Using the latest tech is encouraging.

You're applying during a time when hundreds of thousands have been layed off at the beginning of an economic recession. It's gonna be hard for anyone but the most qualified candidates to land a job now. Just look for the jobs you're a shoe-in for, get employed, wait for a better role.

The importance of this can't be overstated. This is just my opinion based on years of interviewing and hiring devs, but...

The resume tells you the "what". What is the candidate's experience, what is their skillset, etc. Resumes get a once-over, mostly to see if the candidate is in the ballpark for the position.

The cover letter tells you the "why". Why should I hire this candidate over the others? Why does the candidate want to work here? etc.

The cover letter is the more important of the two. Assuming a candidate has the technical skills required, the things an interviewer really wants to know are softer: will they fit in with the team? Will they be happy in this role? And so forth. This is what the cover letter should be talking about.

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.

(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.

Granted, one admitted "usually they're cookie cutter and I don't read them" before praising mine... but I like writing real cover letters because it's a second chance to consider why/how badly I want to work somewhere

I craft them to the company/problem space, call out specific areas of interest. And sometimes halfway in I realize I don't care what they do enough to continue writing, so I save everyone involved's time

Perhaps the difference is because I write cover letters?

> Nobody reads cover letters.

This is demonstrably untrue. But if you said "not everyone reads cover letters," you'd be correct. But that's not a reason to not put in the effort to write them.

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.

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 :)

All I can offer you is general guidance, then. This is just my opinion, of course, and there are plenty of disagreeing opinions out there. So take that as you will.

To me, a good cover letter conveys four things:

1) That the candidate has at least some knowledge of the company they're applying to and what sorts of problems the company is likely to need solved.

2) Why you want to work for that company in particular. Highlight how what the company does ties into your personal interests.

3) Summarize and contextualize your experience in a way that explains clearly how your experience will benefit the company. This is your chance to call out any special skills that may be particularly relevant to the position, but aren't clearly called out in the resume.

3) Explain anything in your resume that might not look that great. Did you do a lot of job-hopping? Address that. Does it look like the position you're applying for is a bit outside your normal experience? Explain why. That sort of thing.

A cover letter shouldn't reiterate what the resume says. The resume should speak for itself. A cover letter is just that -- a letter from one person to another. It's where you show who you are and what special value you offer to the company.

This is actually a huge problem for me right now, and I’m not sure how to solve it.

My resume tells a very boring story that I feel discounts me. It just say boring companies, boring projects, boring tech.

There’s all sorts of things I’ve done and worked on. In both my professional career and as a hobbyist I’ve hacked around with stuff, learned interesting skills that have helped solved all sorts of odd problems, picked up a lot of knowledge about different software and it’s internal workings, but it was tangential to my job at best and would feel out of place in a resume, but it’s a lot of stuff over the years.

I’ve experimented with putting some of my open source contributions in there (partly to fill space since I don’t have any education to add). To be honest, it feels like embellishment, given how small it was in reality, but it is something that looks impressive on paper. Unfortunately, it’s just not very relevant to the sort of work done in my professional career and at best it’s gotten me a jaded “that’s interesting” during a final round of interviews. More recently though, I’m just not getting any interviews.

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

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.

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.

Think of it like a resume pitch on a resume.

For example, turn this: - experience with imbedded i/o in C for mobile equipment

into this: - "Team needed a 1-10ma vehicle sensor input using the NXP Semiconductor AN4731 so I prepared a POC demo board with C code in 7 days allowing continued progress and delivered the finished code 14 days later after peer review and unit testing. No changes were made to the final deliverable"

This version shows the challenge, how you approached it with urgency and an understanding of how your work impacted the downstream efforts. Finally, this story reveals your knowledge of quality process development and final delivery.

Writing these stories takes more time: the challenge, what you did, how it was superior

Tight, cohesive insight into telling your story requires practice and reflection so don't expect success the first time without some editing or proofreading from others

Once you begin this process, you maintain this portfolio forever by adding adventure summaries each year

I was very impressed with a recent post regarding the storytelling structure from Dan Harmon and it may offer a great starting place for laying each out before condensing it into that golden nugget: I came, I saw, I conquered.

Original Article: https://channel101.fandom.com/wiki/Story_Structure_101:_Supe...

HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34576085

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.

Also, there's the issue of fit. Plenty of companies don't operate like FAANG companies do. If a candidate is FAANG-heavy, it raises a serious question about whether or not they'd fit into a non-FAANG company.

But even that doesn't mean as much as you might think. Someone might be willing to take a pay cut because they're in dire need of work. But will they be happy with that pay rate in a year or two?

Close but not quite. It's more like:

> If someone with FAANG is still applying, it appears they're willing to work for that range.

When I'm willing to go through the job interview process and say no to an offer I don't like, I completely ignore the salary range. I'll get the interviewer and team to love me and then just decline if they won't go above their range. Or I'll take it because they've convinced me the job will be enjoyable enough to offset the lower salary.

Plenty of things in life are flexible if you ask. But plenty of things aren't flexible even when you ask. Sometimes, I'm willing to waste my time to find out which is which.

I replied to:

> If someone with FAANG is still applying, that means they're willing to work for that range.

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.

This sounds illegal in the US.

(Also, it's the opposite of the usual illegal ageism we see in post-dotcom tech companies.)

More generally, discrimination in employment is legal by default, unless a specific protected class is created by a specific law. Many classes of discrimination are legal, such as against smokers or obesity.

States and localities may have more restrictions than at the federal level, of course.

As an engineer in my 50s I've never personally been on the receiving end of ageism, but I've definitely seen extremely smart young engineers passed over for opportunities because they were deemed too young/inexperienced

Discriminating against how old someone is is illegal, not usually how young, but this isn't discrimination because of an uncontrollable attribute, it's requiring experience outside of what being a team lead at a FAANG would normally afford you.

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.

This has not been my experience. I have zero personal projects on my resume (despite actually having some) and have no issue getting interviews. A FAANG experience nullifies that project experience, IMO.

> FAANG salary? Red flag.

Completely not my experience. I am constantly being poked and prodded by recruiters and have to play hard to get until they reveal salary as it's usually too low. SO many times they try to convince me to do an interview loop first and reveal comp afterwards ("it depends on how you're leveled in the interview").

I think it's 90% relevance of your actual job experiences. Fix up your resume/linkedin to really sell yourself better. Put any and all technologies/languages you've used - recruiters have that stupid a heuristic.

_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.

Hasn't been a problem.

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.

It’s a very very good filter for better culture (according to my personal criteria anyway), but it’s exceedingly rare as to be insignificant.

If you want a job you’re better off doing a couple projects if you’re a junior and then spending your time learning todays new hot framework + buzzwords instead of actual projects. If you’re more senior don’t even bother (unless you want to)

> 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.

It universally seen as at least "this person passed a very high hiring bar elsewhere". If you were at the staff/principal level at FAANG there's not even technical/design interviews, or they are an underhand pitch and mostly a conversation.

It's like hiring someone with a phd. Expensive and often the skills are not a fit

Second, as other people have mentioned, sometimes FAANG can scare companies away. They see your resume and think "gosh, he's expensive, there's no way he'll sign at the rates we're offering". This happened to my father - MBA, 30 years of experience, he found that companies didn't want to hire him because he would "be too expensive" or "was more experienced" than they wanted.

Combination of those two factors could be it.

FAANG in the resume will clearly be seen as a risk because we won't be working on high visibility project, we won't have free perks laying around the office and we won't be able to pay what they're used to have... So we're kinda sure that the person might leave at any better opportunity that comes around.

I won't be able to hire someone "perfect" so I'll hire someone "good enough".

To say it differently, I need a car, I know I should buy a brand new electric car but my budget only allows me to buy a used gas car.

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.

I'll give you a 5 minute review if you find my contact information from my profile and send me your resume. I've publicly helped people land all sorts of tech jobs in the last few years.

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.

You and about 200,000 others. This is going to have a horrible impact on people's success rate.

If you do find remote work, do like me: Save your money.

In the past cycle, and with remote work in the mix, I saw a couple interesting roles every single day. Given that I have 20+ YOE and was looking for Director/VP roles, this was remarkable. Even restricting myself to ones that felt like either great matches or slight reaches, I applied to about 30-40 jobs. Each of those had 10-300 applications. Fully half of those resulted in no reply whatsoever, about 10 resulted in an eventual rejection after weeks, and about 10 of those resulted in screens (a couple came 2 months after applying), with about 5 progressing to interviews, 2 going to "final round" status, and exactly one offer.

It's a numbers game now. The good news is that there are still lots of great roles, but there are more applicants. If you've been at large companies/FAANG and are used to lots of RSUs, then it's much more challenging to find that level of pay, as those companies are the ones making the cuts.

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

Many hiring managers will all but ignore any high-school level work. It's a nice positive signal to know that you've been interested in this kind of work for a long time, and stuck with it. However, I've seen many resumes that will claim "3 years" worth of experience before entering college, and when you dig in it frequently boils down to "I edited a few html pages for a total of < 100 hours when I was 16". I'm not saying that's necessarily the case here, but unless you have demonstrable projects on your resume from that period that prove otherwise, I'd probably avoid counting those as "years of experience" on an application.

Many hiring managers will even discount college internships, as the quality can vary significantly. This is less likely to be the case for you as you have that FAANG AAA brand recognition. I've also seen candidates do two 3-month summer internships and count that as "2 years experience" though, so you have to be careful about that.

Ultimately, some managers will see that you graduated in eg 2019 and therefore bucket you in with other applicants that have ~3-4 years experience. Nobody will believe a fresh 21/22 year old graduate getting their first job after graduation credibly has "5-6 years experience", for example.

Some may also see and accept 8 years experience at face value, but then they'll judge you at that level and compare you to other applicants with 8 years post-college experience. These days that includes many other folks from FAANG companies with equally impressive resumes who were recently laid off. Maybe the resume screener notices that you didn't make it to a certain level within 8 years (senior/mentor/manager/tech lead/whatever arbitrary metric they expect somebody with 8 full years experience to have achieved), which could be an elimination criteria for some. Finally, as many others have commented coming from FAANG usually implies a very high salary expectation, especially for folks with 7-8 years experience, so many companies likely literally can't afford you!

Know that I really appreciate your detailed analysis and the information is really helpful to know - thanks for taking the time to type this up.

Definitely get in touch with them, let them know you're available.

Also, since everyone seems to be "trading up" when they get a new job, you might be considered overqualified in one or more senses..

From the view of someone hiring:

- Previous FAANG? = High salary expectations, our little shop not fancy enough for you.

- 8 years, done a lot, coding since childhood: High expectations to problems (this role is too boring for you, you'd jump ship first chance you get, waste of time for us to onboard you)

Use your network, explain you're looking for stability.

I remember an interview where the interviewer asked my current salary and told me "it didn't scare him" well.. it shouldn't ? looking back on it, I guess he expected that he'd have to outbid it (he wouldn't even, I dropped them for other reasons)

I ended up finding a really nice job via my network. Took some time but I'm very happy now. Ping me your LinkedIn or CV, the company I'm at is still hiring. My email is the same as my website in my HN profile, only replace the first dot with an @.

After getting laid off 3 weeks ago I turned it back on, and I have gotten a single response.

There are other indicators in my job search that tell me the market is much cooler, but this is the clearest.

I have also heard from people on the inside of other companies, that posted jobs are on hold, will actually go to internal transfers, or already have a backlog of applicants. This could explain the ghosting.

27 outright rejections, 13 I still have not heard back from, only 6 companies actually reached out to talk to me. I’ve heard it said that applying is a numbers game; I did not want to believe it, but my recent experience was exactly that.

My recommendations:

1. Work to distill what you actually want from a new opportunity and use that to ruthlessly filter opportunities. I applied to a ton of companies, but every single one of them met my checklist of career goals. I passed on hundreds of others that did not.

2. If you want practice finding out what you want, engage with recruiters on LinkedIn. I did not find my job this way, but it was helpful for me to workshop my communication and build up a good list of “do not wants” (can be as helpful in winnowing down opportunities as “do wants” or “must haves”

3. Try multiple job search sites to be exposed to interesting new companies. (Otta was useful for me and where I ultimately found my new company). Don’t limit yourself to only companies whose names you already know. I trawled LinkedIn regularly to see who my connections and their connections were working for to expose myself to new companies and industries.

4. Find a way to achieve balance in the search. Some jobs I really wanted, I spent more time on the application. Some jobs that I knew less about, I submitted resume only. Have hope, but don’t fixate on particular opportunities - that’s a recipe for disappointment. This isn’t necessarily great advice for someone recently laid off - I was still employed while searching, so adjust accordingly. Understand that it’s possible that some things have nothing to do with you: one company I really wanted to work for never reached out to me. Turns out they gutted their recruiting department in a recent layoff. It is what it is.

I wish you well in your continued search and hope you are able to find what you are looking for.

Edit: Attempting to fix formatting

Oh, what a good point!

When I'm looking for work, I tend to divide jobs into two piles. Jobs I really want, and jobs I know I can get.

I usually work out how much time I can afford to go without work. I divide that in half, and spend the first half of the time chasing the jobs I really want (even if I'm not sure that they'd have me). If I haven't landed any of those at the halfway mark, I switch to jobs I know I can get.

My track record is 50-50 on landing my dream jobs, but those are the jobs that made me more valuable on the market in later days, because those were the ones where I stretched and expanded my skills.

Applying to jobs can be a numbers game. Just keep applying.

Tune your CV to have keywords in each job application. Reach out to the recruiter on Linkedin and see if they can refer you. Have a trusted friend review your CV too.

I’ve been a hiring developer for a lot of my career and with more context I might be able to give you pointers.

1. Not only FAANG, I was a first eng hire at a startup, did some consulting work, etc.

2. It's 5 positions excluding internships.

3. I'd say I have some experience, I did competitive programming back in the day and the usual LC-style questions are not a big problem for me. I used to land jobs without doing any prep at all. Although I'm sure I've gotten a bit rusty.

4. I applied to some higher seniority jobs, but I'd say that's not the majority.

5. A startup would be great, I love wearing many hats, but I've been applying to what I considered mid-level companies with a larger engineering workforce, processes in place, etc.

Thanks!

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??

My current role is 3.5 years. 1.5 years was a startup, start-to-finish. In the end it failed, so it's not like I left voluntarily. Before that I was a student so I picked up junior and project-based jobs to finance myself.

Now, with 1.5 years at a startup that didn't go anywhere, fine, but people are going to see this as your first job out of school.

If FAANG isn't your current job, that means it was during our "contract work" period, which is gonna be meh at best. Spending 8 months in a junior role at a FAANG tells me 1) that you interview well or that you have connections in some way (neither of which are impressive) and 2) you aren't working there now.

FAANG alone gets your resume a second look. FAANG likes to play up the "you'll have us on your resume" and sure, it might impress some people, but it's also just like any other job.

My frank opinion? With what you've posted? You are still likely junior dev/dev. Apply to a lot of places. Best chance? Make connections with people. I hate to say it, but knowing people is still the best way to get in. Maybe reach out to those FAANG contacts you should still have.

I think my original post was misleading, but I can't edit it anymore. I currently work at FAANG, 3.5 years there, mid-level but expecting a senior promo soon.

For me at least, I want to see work experience first (post-college), then educational experience, then projects, open source, part time stuff. The progression is full time pro work, school, and “other”.

Your answers appear to be conflating full time work with school and projects and maybe open source. It makes it very difficult to get a handle on your “true” background.

You can deviate from that pattern, but you have to be very clear about it. Because as a hiring manager, if it’s clear we are starting on a good foot and building trust. If it’s not clear, I worry about communications skills, and maybe I worry you are trying to promote a side project as a full time job. Trust wanes a little.

Another example of that is single person consulting to various companies. Some people are clear about this on their CVs, and list the roles and companies they consulted to. Very clear, and short tenures are not a problem because that’s the nature of the beast (as long as you’ve had a perm job somewhere and shown some stability).

I have seen others with similar backgrounds list themselves as CEO of XYZ LLC and paint themselves as a C suite exec, and you dig and single it’s a sole proprietorship out of Kentucky (or whatever). Not good, I lose trust in the candidate (side note: LinkedIn kind of sucks at showing this clearly).

CV’s are very interesting because you do want to sell and market yourself, but at the same time you do want to steer clear of dark patterns that go over the line from selling yourself to over inflating your role too far.

Always put yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager truly trying to understand your career and abilities, market yourself well but be accurate and clear.

It makes a lot of sense to split it up like that. My early experience (throughout college) was some full-time roles (that I quit e.g. to accept a FAANG internship, which I think I would be foolish not to), some project-based work, and I list all of that as regular work experience. It's clear to me now that this causes some confusion.

I really appreciate you taking the time to explain this to me as someone who is on the other side of the process, and I'll incorporate this knowledge in my resume (which, it looks like, I need to fully rework).

I had three "roles" during graduate school that I jointly put on as "independent contractor" for awhile. It barely had relevance afterwards and certainly by a year in my field it was not really worth mentioning.

>Before that I was a student so I picked up junior and project-based jobs to finance myself.

If you think this is relevant (I review resumes and I don't, fwiw) list them all under one "independent contractor" umbrella.

This is why I said we can't give you useful feedback without seeing your resume.

The resume game is sometimes a matter of the same information framed in the right way.

I agree that job-hopping is a YELLOW flag that interviewers should prod on a bit, but ultimately the reason that I "job hop" is that whoever my current employer is, can't remotely compete with this unsolicited job offer I have received.

More details for anyone curious:

When I was a sophomore in college, a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn asking if I was interested in an internship at a startup. I accepted because I needed the money to pay for college, and internships = good yadda yadda. Paid me $14.50/hour and I was full-time in the summer, part-time (20 hours) during school.

In that fall semester, after being at this startup for around 8 months, I gave a presentation for a class, where the class broke up into teams and each worked with a local company for a web-related project. The day my team presented happened to also be the day the Allstate team presented, so people from Allstate were in the audience during my presentation. They were impressed and offered me a job basically on the spot. I resisted, partially feeling guilty about leaving the internship that gave me a chance and kicked off my career. Ultimately though, the startup failed to deliver on promises of one-on-one mentorship and getting to work in certain technologies like ElasticSearch, which at the time was the "new hotness". The pay, which was $16/hour now, was competitive (at the time), and I figured if I asked Allstate for a stupid amount of money, they would say "no" and I could make myself feel a little better about "declining" a role that promised a fast-track to leadership/management, which was something I was interested in at the time. So I met with the VP-level guy at Allstate who had seen my presentation, and I asked for $25/hour. Surprisingly, he said yes, and so as uncomfortable as it was, I gave my notice at the startup. There were around 9 of us at the time, and the other two devs were upset, really almost angry with me, and they were shitting on Allstate, saying how I wouldn't grow as much there as I would here, etc (they were wrong).

So I'm at Allstate working under this VP who saw my presentation, and I'm spending a couple hours each week one-on-one with various devs in the company, getting all this personalized attention and education, and it's great. By the summertime, I am working 4 days/week remote. The devs got to work from home. I forget if the BAs and QAs and PM could. I don't think so... Anyway, we would just come in on Wednesdays, that was the designated "meeting day" where sprints would start and end, so we'd get the retro and planning out of the way. Things are going pretty well, until my team completes the project we were created to complete. The team I end up on after that is pretty toxic, and there was a guy who was jealous that a 20-year-old college student was making waves (a lot of people were jealous of me, understandably- but this guy took it to another level). This one guy, I would find out, is a sociopath (or a psychopath). It was only after I left (to get away from him) that the company realized he's bad news and got rid of him. He lied compulsively, and sold himself as this unicorn cowboy that could do anything, but he ended up failing miserably as a dev lead. He bashed me behind my back to management and anyone who would listen, so he could get the dev lead role I was supposed to get, only to completely blunder it. Absolute ass.

Anyway, so I had to go out interviewing to get away from this guy and this team, and I ended up at actually a really nice place that was on the tail-end of its "startup" phase. I got a huge salary bump, a title bump, and got to work in more cutting-edge stuff than what Allstate was about. There was a lot of free food and such too, of course. After about a year and a half at this company, this startup founder reached out to me on LinkedIn and wanted to talk about working with me on a moonlighting basis. I said sure (I love networking) and I did some 1099 work for him for a few months. They started asking about whether I wanted to join them full-time after a couple of months of that, and I indicated I was open to it, but I was just given more responsibility at my current job and I wasn't sure I wanted to leave. They pushed, and again I did my "give them a large comp figure" thing... and again, they accepted. Nothing was written in stone, but I was having a great time with the stuff I was building for this startup, and I loved the people, the office location, the product idea itself. It seemed like a perfect fit. So I quit my day-job, expecting to take about a month off in between to reset and relax. That's when COVID broke out in the US, and the startup was having a harder time getting funding and getting clients, so I ended up unemployed for a couple of months while the world figured out how serious COVID was, and then I interviewed and got a job at a random no-name company, again making a lot more than I was in my previous job.

This company made all manner of promises related to moving from waterfall to agile, implementing Apple's release cycle (one big release per year, et. al.), doubling the size of the dev team, moving to Azure and being able to immerse in that... most of it did not come to fruition and the bits that did, did so much later than originally promised. This company was by far the worst-run software shop I have ever heard of or worked at. It was a sweatshop, and there was never any time to breathe, much less learn new things on the job. This was my shortest tenure at exactly 1 year. I wouldn't necessarily have left at that point, though, except that I got an unsolicited message from another recruiter on LinkedIn about a very unique-sounding role on an R&D team at a larger company.

I interviewed, got the job, and I've been at this company since (going on 2 years). What has me looking NOW is the company was hacked/infected with malware 3 times last year, and so the CIO is "overcompensating" with measures that really only serve to make our jobs harder. For example, we must log back in to things like the AWS console several times per day because the timeout is so low. So I'll be in the middle of something, and suddenly get kicked out of AWS and have to go MFA back in and refresh all my AWS tabs because they all pop up with the "you have been signed out" message. Also, accounts that are inactive for something like 1 week are automatically deactivated, so anyone who goes on any real vacation comes back to... bullshit. There is apparently no provision for saying "hey I will be on vacation for the next two weeks, do not deactivate my account). It's incredibly dumb, and I know that most companies won't put me through stuff like that... so I am looking again, casually, but... I know in the long-term all these "security measures" will kill my morale.

So I guess from my perspective... either I am incredibly unlucky, or y'all just suck it up and stay in shitty situations for one reason or another, perhaps in-part because you are afraid of how it will look on your resume. I dunno man. Life's too short, I think. Yeah I have had a couple of companies poke me about the short tenure average, but they were all companies I did not want to work for anyway (really it was that they were people I did not want to work for).

>It's 5 positions excluding internships

So, no, some aren't "obviously capped length internships."

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.

Really? Agreed, full red flag and hands off those guys, everytime we hired such a person it ended badly, and they left or had to leave after another year ;) Gaind nothing, usually negative work (though it is unfair to generalize, but why take the risk if there are better candidates).

Even two years, and a fine&competent person, cost of onboarding to everything is usually just too high.

At my company, we are spending months searching for people, so we are definitely not hiring anyone who will leave after 1-2 years.

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.

>It's 5 positions excluding internships

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

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 assume you have your resume and profile fully up to date on there, and you have it indicated that you are actively looking for a job. Recruiters aren’t bombarding you?

I haven’t had success or responses from sending in job applications the old fashioned way since I used Craigslist to get a job in like, 2008. By all means keep sending them. There’s nothing to lose. But what you really want is to get an introduction from a recruiter, or a referral from someone you know. Have you asked your former co-workers if there are open positions at the places they are working?

Besides contracting projects, I've been including regular jobs in my search now as well.

The most success I’ve had getting interviews has been with small startups. Try YC’s Work At A Startup if you haven’t already. The Who’s Hiring thread this month may also have some good leads. Best of luck

If not, my email is in my profile. :)

Thank you so much for the offer, I'll drop you an email.

Contact 3-4 recruiting companies in your area, and let them sell you. You don't have to stop your own outreach either. Just get someone else trying to sell you as well. Asking professionals whose paycheck depends on getting you placed in a job may be more fruitful than asking random HN readers. :)

I don't necessarily recommend it as a 'use recruiters your entire career' but... I've had a couple good experiences that helped over the years. You also don't have to say 'yes' to anything they present.

But you need to find a good one. They do exist -- but they're not likely to be cold-calling you.

I know of a lot of companies who simply don't do direct hiring at all -- they do everything through agencies, on a contract-to-hire basis. That way, they don't have to put as much time and effort into finding and screening applicants, and they can "try before they buy" -- if the person doesn't work out during the contract period, it's less investment lost by the company. If they do, then the company hires them directly after the contract ends.

I'm wondering if in this environment FAANG is a detriment. It's possible with all the belt tightening that companies would rather go with cheaper candidates.

Mid-twenties with 7-8 years professional experience suggests you’re self-taught. IMO that’s a highlight, but could it be that in this tech hiring freeze economy, companies are filtering on undergraduate as a prerequisite?

I suggest tempering your expectations right now until the large companies start hiring again.

Most of the industry seems to be hiring at the same rates they've always been hiring.

The other possibility is that your resume is terrible for some reason — does the file open? Are you sending a PDF or some obscure file format that nobody could open?

Personally, I would not bother with jobs that are advertised as “remote” first, and instead I would focus on finding a great job match that can offer remote working — so that I’m not competing against thousands of people.

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.

https://www.stimulus.com/jobs/1539721e-7c7d-4f45-a5b0-17e5c0...

https://app.beapplied.com/apply/grlyqh9t6e

https://www.ashbyhq.com/careers?ashby_jid=7dcbfb52-f465-46b2...

https://brave.com/careers/?gh_jid=4822139

https://careers.liveflow.io/?ashby_jid=335a93bc-2cb0-4f6c-bd...

I've hired ballpark 500 people in my career, talked to a lot of FAANG candidates, and hired only one. Comp expectations compared to experience was just always way out of alignment. Only reason the one got hired was because they were a great fit and very open about being willing and able to take a pay cut to go full remote.

FAANGs, banks, etc have hiring freezes and VC-funded co's don't even know if they can ever raise again: Unspecialized desperate learn-on-the-job well-paying senior hires aren't as big a thing right now

A recruiter for a hot technical-excellence company (the kind you might think would poach the strongest FAANG people), told me that an exec was explicitly uninterested in candidates from a particular FAANG.

(I forget the exact rationale, but it was something like a belief that people from there having learned the wrong lessons about engineering or product.)

If you mean company names, that doesn't mean much. Get referrals, as directly as you can manage but even just active endorsements when you can't. As your career progresses, more and more of your job search can lean on and might rely on referrals.

If you didn't make meaningful connections with people at your past jobs who can endorse or refer you, that's kind of a red flag in itself.

So this may not just be about you.

Friends are important to the process; let them review your CV to see whether your description aligns with real life. Good luck!

I'm in similar shoes at the moment although I'm not only applying to fully remote jobs, but almost any job I see.

I started in Y2k, so internet bubble burst when I had only 1 year experience, then in 2008, I'd just switched from J2me to python before everything got tricky.

Both times had about a year out of work, it can be very boom and bust.

But remote jobs for remote companies have always been a thing (been doing that on and off for 20 years, continuously for 14) and I don’t see them going away. If anything, hiring just got a little less difficult know that the pool of people who can and like working from home grew a bit.

If you have a position to fill and a stack of resumes in front of you, you will be looking for reasons to whittle down the size of that pile. That means you're going to be looking for red flags that let you quickly roundfile resumes.

How many is "literally all"? What's the number?

After how many days of not hearing back do you consider an employer to have ghosted you?

Do you follow up with emails or phone calls to recruiters?

Fiverr/Upwork and the ilk

Could be a timing problem.

May get better in the summer. Summer is hiring season