My friend and old boss likes to say, “The best way to find a new job is to never apply for a new job.” He means the best way is to use your network: Talk to friends, family, current and former colleagues, randos who follow your socials. Use your network to see what's available and who might like to have you on their payroll.
I agree with him, not least because he was in my network ten years ago when I was hunting. Before that, I'd been working through another network buddy. I've been working as a software engineer on and off since about 2000-ish, and I'd sat through exactly zero technical interviews.
I know. I know! This is what I'm saying! Jobs from your network are the best!
But your network's not always available. Maybe you don't have one because you're young or inexperienced or shy. (I think you probably still have one, but it can be hard to see in those conditions.) Maybe you're switching careers, and your network is useless to your new field. Maybe you don't want to broadcast that you're hunting and your network is chatty.
😐
So anyway, a little over a year ago, October 2023, I started hunting without a network, and I learned some things. (Or maybe I have survivorship bias. Follow my advice and let's find out together!)
stuff the resume full of value
If you're job hunting and you've searched literally one time for “job hunting advice” ever, you've heard this one: Make your resume about value and outcomes.
I talked to a whole truckload of friends and colleagues about resumes, and they all said variations on the same thing: Nobody cares that you designed, implemented, tested, released, maintained, and evolved a widget. How did that help the company? Quantify it. You're a salesperson for yourself on the resume, so make it about how you built and retained value for the company.
(I don't know about you, but to me this felt gross. Just icky and inauthentic and gross. Push through it!)
Designing your resume around outcomes gives you more than a compelling resume: It teaches you how to think about your experience, so you know how to make it compelling when an interviewer asks. I'm pretty bad at framing my experience in a compelling way (except for the “hey I worked for a NASA research lab” line, that one frames itself), so even just the exercise of turning
Led design, development, testing, launch, and maintenance of a product billing system migration between two cloud providers
into
Spearheaded a migration between two major billing providers with no customer payment disruption or downtime
was useful to my brain.
skip the cover letter
I don't know if this is good advice, actually. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I have a postgraduate degree in the field, so my resume is strong by sheer brute force. If your resume is thinner, maybe you need the cover letter.
I wrote one cover letter during my hunt, right at the beginning. I spent hours on it, because I was really excited about the company (a startup in a niche industry, you haven't heard of them but they have a very cool mission). They rejected my application immediately, without an interview, and that was last cover letter I wrote. I was still booked to the gills with interviews for about five weeks straight.
know what you want
Every interviewer is going to ask what you're looking for in a team, in an organization, in a mission, in a career. Figure out answers to these questions. I did not do a great job in this area, and I spent a bunch of time sort of awkwardly staring into anywhere-but-the-webcam and gesticulating while I tried to form coherent sentences.
Again, this one is a useful exercise generally. You should be able to articulate what you want, beyond the things you're probably trying to get away from.
find a hiring platform you like
I used Otta (which I guess is now Welcome to the Jungle?), for two big reasons:
- It let me organize jobs into categories that matched my mental model:
- Interested for jobs I might want to investigate
- Started for applications I couldn't finish in one sitting
- Applied for applications I actually submitted
- Interviewing I feel like these are becoming self-explanatory
- Offered I WIN
- No Rejected category. I'll get to that in a minute.
- It did a great job filtering to my preferences, including things like “the salary range is posted with the position” and “nothing even marginally adjacent to bullshit generators”. Once I set it up, it surfaced enough quality prospects that I didn't feel like I needed to use anything else. The only time I scanned through Indeed was when I was looking hyper-local, just to see what was available near my house.
I didn't really use Otta's built-in resume or application tooling, so they were just a recommendation and organization engine for me. If you don't like Otta, use something else; just use something to streamline the process or it'll be a logistical nightmare.
do your research
If you're looking for a tech job you probably live on the internet, so use it. Look up the company. Look up the history of the company. Look up the company's engineering blog. If it's a startup, look up the funding history. If it's some sort of techy tool, play with it. Look up your interviewers. Browse their socials, check their LinkedIn profiles. Look up the leadership team. Look up the Glassdoor reviews. They are auditioning for you, as much as you are auditioning for them. Walk into those interviews armed.
(Not literally! Not literally armed! Armed with knowledge!)
apply for something every day
Do at least one, and don't do more than a couple-three. This process is going to take months (probably) (unless you're awesome I guess), so pace yourself. You want a steady stream of applications going out and responses coming in, but you don't want a dozen interview requests (or a dozen rejections) hitting you all at the same time.
sort out your email
I'm a labels gal, so I used a generic jobs label for incoming, and I'd manually sort those into application receipt confirmations, interview requests and conversations, offers, withdraws, and rejections. After a couple days I learned that seeing the rejections label all the time in my email sidebar was disturbing my calm, so I hid that one. This is the best tip in the whole post. This entire post is an excuse to write down this tip.
don't internalize the rejections
You have no idea why they rejected you. None. Maybe they didn't like your resume, or maybe they have an internal candidate they want to hire and they're just broadcasting the role for compliance purposes. Maybe they already have enough of your vibe in-house, and they're looking for a different vibe. Maybe the nature of the position changed after they posted it and you're not the shoe-in you thought you were.
Sort rejections into the appropriate pile and never look at them again. (I know, I peevishly stopped writing cover letters because of one rejection, but that was early and I hadn't learned this one yet.)
Definitely don't internalize the rejections that come after the tech interview. One of my rejections had asked me to implement chess as a couple specific pieces (not the whole set) controlled by a couple players on a board. I could use the tech stack of my choice, but they time-boxed the exercise so I wasn't allowed to spend more than two hours on it. I don't play chess, so I spent a large chunk of time making sure I understood the movement constraints first. I started building, but quickly realized my solution was really hard to manipulate. I didn't have time to rewrite it, so I submitted a working but clumsy and inelegant solution. The rejection said the solution was clumsy and inelegant. I was pretty upset about it for a few days, because I internalized the feedback as a personal and professional failing. Really, all I had done was not learned to play chess0.
it's ok to walk away
I initially rejected my first-choice offer because it came with strings attached that I found ethically problematic. (They weren't unethical strings, they were perfectly normal and reasonable strings, but it would have been unethical for me to...uh, tie them? What's the end of that metaphor?) I thought that was it, I was done, and I started looking at other options. The hiring manager I'd been talking to got wind of my rejection and moved heaven and earth to accommodate my annoyingly rigid ethical framework, and I ultimately accepted.
That was not my plan. I really thought I was done. (To be clear, I was absurdly, stupidly privileged in this scenario and still had both a good job and other job prospects, so walking away in this case did not mean losing the ability to feed or house myself.)
You don't owe these folks anything. At no stage of the hiring process do you owe them anything. Hang on to your own agency, and make the choices that are best for you and the people and dogs that you love. (The cats don't care, the cats are fine either way.)
it worked on my machine
At the end of my process I had four offers, all from startups I was excited about. I met people I'm still excited to work with, and other people I hope I get to work with someday.
caveats
I started writing this post in December 2023, and then forgot about it. Better late than never?!
Fall 2023 came on the heels of wave after wave of tech layoffs, so it was not a great time to be moving in the tech industry. I don't think it's better now, but I bet the influence of bullshit generators is harder to escape.
I don't know how much of my process was driven by my resume, or my lack of a cover letter, or my gender, or my personality, or my expertise. I'm working on cool stuff with people I like a lot, so I've decided as long as those things are true, I'll skip the identity crisis this time around.
bonus: don't apply at canonical
Unless you're passionate about the products or the mission or the company or Shuttleworth, just don't. They're going to ask you respond in prose to a written interview with 30+ questions. My response was ten pages long and took me several hours over the course of a week to write. Then they're going to ask you to do an IQ test, then they're going to interview you at least three times with three different people, and then they're going to tell you whether you've passed the initial screening stage. When I didn't pass, they explained that they get 80,000 applications per month. It's a massively inefficient, disrespectful, dehumanizing process, and I don't want you to suffer through it.
0 Like a lot of women don't. But I'm sure choosing chess as your litmus test for employment won't have any weird side effects or anything.
from @ello@void.ello.tech
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