I like some of your points like get through to real people. That's an incredibly important part of landing a job. However I do have an issue with the graphic at the beginning. I think it's misleading, because you shouldn't really be applying to 200+ companies. When you take that kind of approach its like you're selling yourself short (not putting your best foot forward). Its like saying "I'll take anything, just please give me a job". It's also more difficult to actually show interest in whatever company you're talking to, which is a key part of performing well and ultimately obtaining an offer. So you end up showing 8 offers from 291 applications, but I would argue that by making so many applications, you are decreasing the rate at which the applications turn into offers. I can offer a contrasting viewpoint to this job search thing. When I was in school for Physics I taught myself how to program and started focusing on Web Dev. I ended up dropping out of school and decided to become a programmer. In that initial job search I applied to three companies in SF. (Companies that I was familiar with and legitimately interested in) and got offers from all three. That was two years ago and I've since applied to two other companies in Mountain View (I'm trying to move to an ML engineer position) and received offers from both as well. And like I said I think the difference between what our bar graphs would look like is due to the fact that my applications were much more targeted and my interest and motivation in the companies was much more apparent.