That’s how I got my first development gig. Freshly moved to a new city and needing a job, I did the usual ‘apply to everything in the paper and online’ shotgun approach. After a week of that, I suited up and started driving around to various companies with resume in hand. At one office park, I got lost and went to the wrong building. Reading the names of companies on the lobby plaque, one caught my eye that sounded like a tech company of some kind. So I walked upstairs and into their suite, which I found out later was their remote engineering office. They didn’t have a secretary, so I just poked my head into someone’s office and asked about a job. “Go talk to Doug down the hall”, they said. Doug, it turns out was the company’s VP of engineering whose response was “well, we need a software tester - when can you start?”
I was shooting large amount of resumes into outer space until I finally landed an interview and job that I soon realized I was crushing.
But then after a while I realized the other end of the same scenario and that's interviewing completely unqualified candidates who literally can't fizz buzz.
My first job search was similar. I would send out resumes, not get responses, change cover letters, change out text in resumes, send out more. SO! I did what a good software engineer would do and automated it. My software would send out resumes, change out cover letters, link the incoming emails, keep statues up to date. The software became smart enough to catch "put in subjects" or use a doc vs a pdf. I would just play video games and get incoming phone calls about jobs. They would explain how I wasn't qualified to build CRUD apps. OH WELL! You wasted your time not mine lol. Then I got my first interview. They asked why I wanted to work there - I explained how my software worked and why it chose that company. It had already got my gf a job in accouting. The software scraped dozens of sites it was only a matter of time. The VP of engineering smiled.
My first real software gig was having a conversation with someone and them asking if I knew anything about making a flash program talk to a ticket printer. I described the approach I would take and they said they would pay me XX an hour if I could get close to my estimated time. So I wrote them a little python service to handle their flash games printing. It took a whole lot more time than I thought mostly because the flash games were written by a contracting group in India. But that started me out.
Mind, it was a completely shit service. I mean every time I think about it I think of more vulnerabilities. Unfortunately the contractor leading things had very little clue. So they were no good for guidance. It wasn't until my next job that I really got some mentoring.
The first time was a complete failure. I walked into a place and hand-delivered a fancy paper application. The office lost the application because they weren't expecting to receive anything like that at the front desk. I know this because I ended up working there after applying online.
The second time, I flew across the country for a final interview where all other candidates were appearing by zoom. I was hired for that job. I'm not sure, but I think that (a) I was less qualified than other candidates and probably should not have been hired, but the organization really valued dedication so flying in was over-weighted; (b) I was more inclined to ignore red flags with the organization because I had committed so heavily to the interview process.
Strategies like this are risky because you need to know yourself well in order to judge whether e.g. you might interview better remotely. It can also lead a person, as it did me, to distort their normal decision-making process in ways which are not immediately obvious.
Isn't there a lot to be said about leadership qualities and initiative/confidence for just flying in? it's like you are the captain of your own ship, you're aware and human. There's a lot of value in that I think, depending on the role. What kind of role was it?
When applying for PhDs in the UK from elsewhere in the EU it was hard to get any response to the applications. So I booked a cheap flight to London and contacted the head professors of the departments I was interested in:
- Hey, I happen to be in town in two weeks. Can I give a talk at your group and present a paper I'm working on?
I believe it made all the difference, and got me through the door (with a lesser CV).
I did something similar. I told that I was not good enough to do a Ph.D., then was contacted shortly afterwards and asked to be a teaching assistant. Without the burden of grad studies, I ended up doing actual teaching, leading a team of teaching assistants, being one of the representatives of the department by doing public lectures, and (incidentally) earning more than most of the lecturers. In the end, I decided they were right about the Ph.D. thing. I learned enough in my years there to figure out that I didn't have the stomach for academic politics.
My father was working with an employment agency after he graduated from college. Having developed a relationship with one of the staff, she was relieved one day when he walked in. Apparently there was an executive from a national telco there and the person whoever they were supposed to be interviewing didn't show. They sent my father in just to save face because they didn't want that person to have come in for nothing. He ended up getting the job and working there for several years.
For a minimum wage-ish job at a restaurant, supermarket, Home Depot, etc. that's probably about the situation today. Maybe a restaurant would want a server with a little experience but I doubt most casual restaurants are being terribly picky today.
>The walk-in strategy that landed your first job bagging groceries or scooping ice cream just might help secure your next one.
ha. I remember ten years ago as an unemployed teen, trying this strategy in various pubs, shops, hotels etc. even for these minimum wage jobs, I was uniformly told to fuck off and apply online. my parents didn't really "get it", that things had changed since their day, they kept telling me to go out and try again. weeks of repeated humiliation.
Same. It was the worst back in 2009. I was 19 and my dad couldn't understand why I couldn't get so much as a burger flipping job. I told him how many companies I'd applied to online, but despite how otherwise technologically savvy he is, it didn't compute for some reason. He told me to just walk in to businesses and ask the manager for a job.
So I did just that. If I was lucky, I just got the fluoride stare. Most of the time I was either told sternly "you gotta just apply online" or was actually laughed at a few times. I could handle all that on its own. The real bad part was my dad thinking I wasn't really trying.
Showing up IRL might work if one already has a resume full of experience, but I have to wonder how well that works when one either has no experience or is junior to mid level (in any field).
Strange, as this has been my Go-To for finding meaningful work over wading through pages of stale, unsavory job offerings. I walked into a PLC shop last week & scored a tour and informal interview, on the spot. The owner is OoT ATM, waiting for their return for the real interview.
If a potential employer's priority is online applications & utilizing various on-boarding agencies, IMO, you dodged multiple bullets. They likely are content just feeding a stream of fresh meat into their grinder. As always, YMMV.
To all the people in the replies who got told to f-off: Who were you giving your resumes to? When I was working min-wage retail, the other staff were notorious for trashing any resumes that came their way. For "job security". The manager/owner never saw them. This was also around 2008-2010.
Agreed. Working for a major big box retailer for 12 years: never once have we accepted a hand-delivered resume or hired a walk-in. On the rare occasions fresh high school students try that (and it's never anyone older), it's always the same response: fill out the online app, because we literally cannot hand-key your paper documents and we cannot fill a hiring requisition without that digital record.
What works is a combination if the business is open to the public. You apply online because that is the only method to get into the system. Then you go to the location and introduce yourself to the hiring manager.
I had a different experience, 8 years ago I needed to get a job quickly and went round my local town pubs with CVs, had an interview the next day and a job the day after.
I did this in 2016 after graduating high school and it worked surprisingly well. I had been applying to places online and never heard back, went in and they had me working the same day. I was assuming every place would say apply online, but it seemed most employees were referrals.
"Mr. Hazlett, 29, estimates he has applied unsuccessfully to 400 tech jobs, all online, since graduating from a coding boot camp in May"
Is this indicative of a bad job market, or instead perhaps a bad fit between the perceived skills/value the persons belives themselves to have, and the view of the recruiters?
I think it's more likely they're just applying wrong. Shotgunning applications on indeed doesn't work as a fresh bootcamp grad, you need at least some sort of relationship with the company. That's why referral mills like blind are popular, when there are 100 applicants for an entry level job literally anything that can help hr narrow the process is used. I even had success just calling the company as an undergrad and asking to speak to HR. Always at least got an interview after that.
Is it a bad job market? Everybody I know is desperately trying to hire, and finding that even decent candidates can afford to be really choosy right now. The place I used to work (not a terrible company, and competitive but non-FAANG salaries) has had an FE position open for 11 months.
Anyway, I think if they've applied to 400 places in 3 months, they're probably using more of a shotgun approach. I always got better results when I researched the company and customized my application to what I thought they were looking for.
Likely the latter. I've done O(100) interviews at big tech companies. There are some folks who went through boot camps and have been valued teammates, but there are many orders of magnitude more who went through a boot camp hoping for a big paycheck and can't code their way out of a wet paper bag.
Around six months ago, I was a Staff SWE at Google with ten years there. I applied to a few smaller-than-FAANG public companies online...and never heard back from any. The only way I managed to get interviews, or even have a recruiter acknowledge my existence, was by pinging potential hiring managers on LinkedIn (or in one case, having a former Google coworker ping the CTO of the company, since they were connected on LinkedIn). I ended up with very strong offers from Coinbase and Roblox; I never heard back at all from Airbnb.
(I took the Roblox offer and am happy with the decision. :) )
Impossible to tell without knowing more. For our recent entry-level opening we could offer an interview to about 5-10% of applicants due to the volume of applications, generic "I've done a bootcamp/I have a degree" resumes in general did not fare well.
A couch surfer riding a dirt bike across the country was staying on my coworker's boat. He came in one day and asked for a job. We gave him a silly microcontroller project to work on for a few hours, and then offered him an internship. The particular internship didn't pan out, but he made a lateral move within the company and has now been around 4 years or so.
One time I called him a hobo and he was offended, and then he looked up the definition and agreed that he was indeed a hobo.
After graduating university I got fed after a month of applying online and not hearing back.
I printed my CV as an A0 billboard and stood on the street in the center of the city for a few days. Got my first job like that and a couple of interview invites, including for a PE firm.
I don’t know when this happened, but if you work in the tech industry today, after 30 minutes a black car would stop, 2 guys would take a hood over your head and abduct you.
You would wake up in a nice office, with a signing bonus on your desk, a new MacBook Pro and an open end work contract.
Job market in Europe is insane for the tech industry, companies buying smaller companies not for the ip, product or engineering knowledge, but just for the people that work there. And this was years ago.
Like „we need 30 engineers but get none, f** it we are doing it live, buy a company that matches“
Intel plans to simulate this kind of old-fashioned hiring by hosting a job fair in the metaverse early next year. Tech workers—or people who want to be tech workers but have unconventional backgrounds—will strap on virtual-reality headsets, select avatars and pitch themselves to Intel.
“We’re still working through the details, but I’m assuming people will look like aliens or something,” says Intel spokeswoman Chelsea Hughes, adding that the goal is to prevent imperfect algorithms and unconscious biases from filtering out good candidates.
Brilliant. So they replace hypothesized implicit bias with ... an explicit bias for people willing to jump through whatever hoops the company puts in front of them. Like showing up to the interview dressed up like an alien, for example.
A VR interview isn’t that different from a video interview when compared to an in person one. My concern is this reads like an applicant must have a vr headset to be eligible for interview.
Back in the summer of 1999 I had finished college and an internship and was weighing my options. Many afternoons I was hanging around the office with a friend that had just been hired by a startup. One day there was some issue, I don't remember exactly what, I casually typed a Perl one liner solving it, and was hired the next day.
And some time later the people from the internship place called me just as I was becoming sick of the post acquisition vibes at the startup, so I left.
And so on... I have never sent a CV or interviewed, sometimes I think I should have.
Telling people to apply online and hiring people who show up anyway is an asshole filter (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html ). You're preferentially giving benefits to people who are willing to break the rules rather than to obey them, so you are selecting for assholes.
Curious Déjà vu moment: Why does the post claim '1 hour ago' when it & 2 comments are from yesterday. The comments also state '1 hour ago', but the posters' history says '1 day ago'. DB issues?
The mods sometimes put posts in a 'second-chance' pool if they think the post was high-quality but may have been overlooked. These posts get randomly placed somewhere on the front page with the timestamp "reset". [0]
I have a sneaking suspicion that this manual curation is more common than we realize and could be the main reason for HN's high quality.
There used to be such a thing called a job fair where hiring managers could do a brief 3 minute interview, collect a resume, and follow up. These were great in that the last one I went to I bagged a developer position at a well-known contractor.
[+] [-] bookofjoe|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thadt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Aperocky|3 years ago|reply
I was shooting large amount of resumes into outer space until I finally landed an interview and job that I soon realized I was crushing.
But then after a while I realized the other end of the same scenario and that's interviewing completely unqualified candidates who literally can't fizz buzz.
[+] [-] ransom1538|3 years ago|reply
I started work monday.
[+] [-] karmicthreat|3 years ago|reply
Mind, it was a completely shit service. I mean every time I think about it I think of more vulnerabilities. Unfortunately the contractor leading things had very little clue. So they were no good for guidance. It wasn't until my next job that I really got some mentoring.
[+] [-] public_defender|3 years ago|reply
The first time was a complete failure. I walked into a place and hand-delivered a fancy paper application. The office lost the application because they weren't expecting to receive anything like that at the front desk. I know this because I ended up working there after applying online.
The second time, I flew across the country for a final interview where all other candidates were appearing by zoom. I was hired for that job. I'm not sure, but I think that (a) I was less qualified than other candidates and probably should not have been hired, but the organization really valued dedication so flying in was over-weighted; (b) I was more inclined to ignore red flags with the organization because I had committed so heavily to the interview process.
Strategies like this are risky because you need to know yourself well in order to judge whether e.g. you might interview better remotely. It can also lead a person, as it did me, to distort their normal decision-making process in ways which are not immediately obvious.
[+] [-] redanddead|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphydan|3 years ago|reply
- Hey, I happen to be in town in two weeks. Can I give a talk at your group and present a paper I'm working on?
I believe it made all the difference, and got me through the door (with a lesser CV).
[+] [-] II2II|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeffrallen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] michaelmior|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gullywhumper|3 years ago|reply
Report: 95% Of Grandfathers Got Job By Walking Right Up And Just Asking
https://www.theonion.com/report-95-of-grandfathers-got-job-b...
[+] [-] ghaff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _dain_|3 years ago|reply
ha. I remember ten years ago as an unemployed teen, trying this strategy in various pubs, shops, hotels etc. even for these minimum wage jobs, I was uniformly told to fuck off and apply online. my parents didn't really "get it", that things had changed since their day, they kept telling me to go out and try again. weeks of repeated humiliation.
[+] [-] ravenstine|3 years ago|reply
So I did just that. If I was lucky, I just got the fluoride stare. Most of the time I was either told sternly "you gotta just apply online" or was actually laughed at a few times. I could handle all that on its own. The real bad part was my dad thinking I wasn't really trying.
Showing up IRL might work if one already has a resume full of experience, but I have to wonder how well that works when one either has no experience or is junior to mid level (in any field).
[+] [-] tunap|3 years ago|reply
If a potential employer's priority is online applications & utilizing various on-boarding agencies, IMO, you dodged multiple bullets. They likely are content just feeding a stream of fresh meat into their grinder. As always, YMMV.
[+] [-] MonkeyMalarky|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tekno45|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joe-collins|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] matt_heimer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] superpope99|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colinmhayes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moneywoes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alar44|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] js98|3 years ago|reply
Is this indicative of a bad job market, or instead perhaps a bad fit between the perceived skills/value the persons belives themselves to have, and the view of the recruiters?
[+] [-] colinmhayes|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
Anyway, I think if they've applied to 400 places in 3 months, they're probably using more of a shotgun approach. I always got better results when I researched the company and customized my application to what I thought they were looking for.
[+] [-] Arainach|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] endtime|3 years ago|reply
(I took the Roblox offer and am happy with the decision. :) )
[+] [-] isbvhodnvemrwvn|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sgtnoodle|3 years ago|reply
One time I called him a hobo and he was offended, and then he looked up the definition and agreed that he was indeed a hobo.
[+] [-] user_named|3 years ago|reply
I printed my CV as an A0 billboard and stood on the street in the center of the city for a few days. Got my first job like that and a couple of interview invites, including for a PE firm.
[+] [-] BonoboIO|3 years ago|reply
I don’t know when this happened, but if you work in the tech industry today, after 30 minutes a black car would stop, 2 guys would take a hood over your head and abduct you. You would wake up in a nice office, with a signing bonus on your desk, a new MacBook Pro and an open end work contract.
Job market in Europe is insane for the tech industry, companies buying smaller companies not for the ip, product or engineering knowledge, but just for the people that work there. And this was years ago.
Like „we need 30 engineers but get none, f** it we are doing it live, buy a company that matches“
[+] [-] akhmatova|3 years ago|reply
“We’re still working through the details, but I’m assuming people will look like aliens or something,” says Intel spokeswoman Chelsea Hughes, adding that the goal is to prevent imperfect algorithms and unconscious biases from filtering out good candidates.
Brilliant. So they replace hypothesized implicit bias with ... an explicit bias for people willing to jump through whatever hoops the company puts in front of them. Like showing up to the interview dressed up like an alien, for example.
[+] [-] wyre|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijonman2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fcatalan|3 years ago|reply
And some time later the people from the internship place called me just as I was becoming sick of the post acquisition vibes at the startup, so I left.
And so on... I have never sent a CV or interviewed, sometimes I think I should have.
[+] [-] Jiro|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] tunap|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] npilk|3 years ago|reply
I have a sneaking suspicion that this manual curation is more common than we realize and could be the main reason for HN's high quality.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308
[+] [-] Jtsummers|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/pool
[+] [-] Pakdef|3 years ago|reply
https://i.imgur.com/E01COOF.png
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] sys_64738|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]