Ask HN: How did you find your current job?

I'm a freelancer. Literally every job I've gotten has come from "luck". The trick has been increasing my "luck surface area" by putting myself out there.

How I got each of my current clients:

Person in my college class gets a job and two years later contacts the computer science department at my college and asks if they "know any freelancers." I had made it known to my professors that I was going into freelancing and they connected us. Client for 3+ years.

Joined a coworking space and chatted with a guy. Mentioned I do freelance work. Built rapport. 3 weeks later I'm siting in the coworking space and he comes up to me and says "I am getting a full time job and can't keep this client. Do you want them?" Client for 3+ years.

I was a teacher's assistant at a college class about software engineering. Made friends with a student. 3 years later his friend was graduating and interested in freelance. The first student connected us. I offered to meet for coffee with the younger student, told him everything I know about freelancing. 3 months later he contacts me and says "I decided not to freelance, but this client wants a site, do you want them?" Primary client for the first half of 2018.

I discovered a podcast I enjoyed by a thought leader in the consulting space about how to find a niche. I sent him an email saying "Hey I liked your podcast. My niche is Django development." Later another person who does Django work contacts this thought leader, he shows this person my website. This person joins my mailing list. I see that person has joined and so sent him an email saying hello what up. We connect over the fact that we both do Django. 3 months later he says "my primary client needs more help with a Django site." This is how I got my current primary client.

This doesn't really work as a short term strategy but the quality of clients compared to say Upwork is night and day. Provide value, make connections, get lucky.

Moved to Saigon from the Bay Area about 2 years ago. Was unemployed at the time (I mostly do tech consulting) and sitting in the newly opened cafe in my apartment building. A guy sits down next to me and is reading a book about bitcoin. He just moved into the building a couple days before. We start talking and he tells me he is mining, invites me to come help install the next shipment arriving that weekend. I go with him to the data center located about an hour outside Saigon, which turns out to be in a super secure Vietnamese military telco building and install 150 new machines. Had a blast doing the install and I got a job offer to become CTO to help run the operation. 8 months later, the whole operation moves to Canada and I'm out of a job again (long story). Telling the story to a friend of mine, he offers me a job working for another large crypto company that he recently joined, to do an even larger mining operation. So here I am... working on that now.

Needless to say, I'm a huge believer in serendipity.

I graduated in anthropology. In the last year of the course was doing Erasmus in Brno, Czech Republic with a friend and we both noticed that a forensic software tool used by all forensic anthropologists for biological profiling was really bad. I mean, so bad it was almost divination. Because it's difficult to find a job in anthropology, we decided to create a startup and develop a new better tool. So we learned R, aggregated a lot of human skeletal data (it was so hard because there's a "GDPR for human anatomical data") and even published papers on it. It was a success except that nobody bought it. I mean nobody, they all used our papers and online code to do their own thing. In retrospective we were both idiots with no business sense. So of course it failed hard and had to find a job somewhere else. From there on it was always on LinkedIn: I worked for an environmental consulting company until they fired me and other colleagues because they couldn't pay us; then moved to a Japanese zaibatsu where I lost my mind wrangling spreadsheets for the quarterly reports. It was a lot of work and since this was a nearshoring job the pay was very very low. So I kept my LinkedIn profile as "actively looking for opportunities" and a recruiter for an investment bank contacted me about a position in banking operations. I went to the interview and left in the middle of it since that job consisted in copying and pasting stuff in Excel all day long. A week later she called me back, apologized for wasting my time (!?) and offered a position as project management officer for a team that implements some machine learning stuff and bots across the whole company. No experience in PM at all and with a basic understanding of Python and R so impostor syndrome kicked in really hard but after 6 months here I am, doing just fine. I want this to be my last job, I'm learning more statistics and python so that I can make my own forecasts and trading bots.

Coworker approached me during lunch and pitched me the startup he was about to co-found. He told me I am the most talented but the most undervalued engineer there. He shows me the slide deck and says: “Help me build this. We will get the funding. And the job is yours.” That was 4 yrs ago and I am glad I said yes. To be honest, this was burning the candle at both ends. I slept on the floor of the cowork space conference room to make this happen.

Throwaway for obvious reasons.

I was set to go into academia. I spent my entire grad school without any tech internships, and did research every summer. Months before my graduation, my ex-wife wanted a divorce, and one reason (out of many) was not seeing a future together as I will be in remote places(where most universities are), and she want to be in a big city.

Trying to save my marriage, I declined my postdoc offers and start to look for jobs in the industry in the big cities. It was difficult, as I haven't programmed for years. I applied to every major tech companies and financial companies. I asked for referrals from my friends. I got no responses from most of the companies. The only two responded was a company I worked for before entering grad school, and a company that was trying to double their engineering team. It was very demoralizing.

It was surely the darkest days of my life. I questioned my self-worth. Feeling that I am not someone to be desired both personally and professionally.

My advisor, who was really kind and understanding and I'm forever grateful to, used his connection to get me interviews I'm sure I could not possibly gotten if I applied directly. In fact, I can't even apply directly, because some of the positions were not advertised. Finally, one of the places gave me an offer, and that is what I took, and I have been working there since.

Easy: recruiter asked me if I wanted to work remote. I said writing go and working remote and getting paid bay area comp sounds good.

But of course becoming the person that recruiter reached out to involved several years of study, betting on a brand new language, taking a risk on a startup with no money and a few other things.

I attended a local hackathon. I spent around 3/4 hours creating a real-time collaborative music maker (it was super basic, but pretty cool).

Unbeknownst to myself, whilst I was demoing my app my boss to be was watching and my simple music maker and was rather impressed. 18 months later when a suitable role opened up he reached out to me on LinkedIn and asked me in for a chat. A month later I started.

Wrote a blog post that got featured on HN. Someone from Facebook reached out and after a series of interviews I got in.

Friend of mine moved on to the company I'm at now (he has since left) and when they were looking for a senior developer he gave them my contact info. I'm in the market right now and the most likely opportunity thus far is through another buddy of mine.

I've never gone through the front door at any company, for that matter, in the 25 years I've been working. The first job I ever got was because the teacher of a college class I was taking owned a small ISP and needed a sysadmin, and he liked how I was doing in his class. Everything since then has been through someone I know personally.

Last startup I joined died. A tip - when a founder tells you they raised money, make sure they have actually "received" the money and that the fund they raised from hasn't gone insolvent :)

Luckily an ex colleague referred me and it has been an amazing journey at LinkedIn. BTW We are hiring!

I had a product management job and was thinking about getting back to programming fulltime. One day I went on job site and there was ad that reads "Looking for programmer" no body, nothing. I replied just for fun, went for interview and took it as a freelance gig which let me quit my previous job, work on my own various projects and travel the world for couple of years.

It was ERP programming for construction company that bought assets of software company which went out of business. 11 years later, I am still working with this customer for couple of hours each month and I can still lean on it and make it pays all of the bills for my 4 person familly. It basically works as a basic income for me.

About five years ago, I released a tiny open-source project (my first one) of about 10 lines. I kept building on it, for personal use and for the fun of it. Eventually it got to be quite full-featured and attracted a sizeable user base.

Since then, all my client work comes from businesses that use it. So, by sheer luck I'd found some kind of product-market fit, with no marketing. It's an on-going story though, I'd like to develop it more as a business in itself, with other related products.

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This is a fascinating thread, by the way. It's been a learning experience just to read everyone's stories.

A recruiter who I worked with in the past called me. This is why I tell recruiters who will listen to maintain relationships and not approach each match-hire as a one-and-done proposition. I can't count the times that a recruiter ghosts me after I turn them down.

inurl:careers Helsinki devops

Also tried couple of the variations (inurl:jobs, Espoo, sre, Linux). This helped to find companies which didn't post their jobs on the usual job boards (mostly startups at the time).

I went to DevBootcamp in Q4 2012. We had a job fair at the end of the program and got a job at Exec (YC 2012) from it.

A year later Exec got acquired and I started looking for another job. My roommate had failed an interview with Uber a few months earlier and gave me the recruiter's email. I sent an email, interviewed and got the job.

I've just started my own design/engineering studio with my fiancée - most of our clients have been our network so far. Either people we've directly worked with, or a referral from them.

So I think for me, it has always been about the network. That should be a pretty good news for anyone, because my network has never been very large (except maybe now that I cumulate experience both in YC companies and Uber).

Got a recruiter she was the worse (dropped her after she committed some criminal acts and repeatedly lied to her clients) would have me in a senior position if she could when I had zero experience. Took first job that made me a offer. Left when my contract was up, but meet a handful of good guys. Every job after that has been refers from guys I meet contracting at places, but I never found a place worth staying at. I have learn to separate the bullshitters and people with genuine interest in tech. Group messages, joke emails, epic lunches, and understanding someones true ability has gotten me more work then any recruiting agency has ever been able to.

For my day job, I took a bit of a windy road before finding it. First I decided to study in Korea the summer after my first year of university, and ended up never leaving. I studied Korean in a university language center for a year before transferring to a Korean university where I happened upon a summer internship at my eventual future employer (Engineering & Construction) on the exclusive student job/intern message board. After finishing that internship I received an offer that I accepted during my last semester before graduation. And that was that.

For my nights and weekends gig at Cent (https://beta.cent.co) I had to make it. I first focused on becoming a super-user back in October of 2017. After that, I submitted a few un-returned emails to the founders and wrote over 50 blog posts on the project before finally receiving a follow up email asking if I wanted to chat with the two person founding team. We had an amazing first call which led to a second one where I presented a plan of what I could do for the project in terms of their social media and communications strategies. After that the team asked for my ideal conditions before making an offer to join the team which I happily accepted.

I kept getting calls from recruiters. After 3 recruiters called me about the same position at this super large company I gave the interview a shot.

As a senior JavaScript developer with open source projects and military leadership experience I don't really have to look for jobs. I put my resume up on places like Monster or another job site. It takes about 2 two weeks for the resume to be populated to various other places and the flood of calls start coming in. The recruiters seem to indicate the placement bonus for somebody with my experience is huge so they are willing to move mountains at lightning speed for me, but really I just think they are working fast to prevent my access to other recruiters.

The total turn around time from resume update to sitting in the new office employed is about 4-5 weeks including interviews, 2 week notice, criminal background check and so forth. The good thing about that timeline is that you can escape employment, really quickly, that isn't going well with minimal financial risk. The bad thing is that if you move too fast you aren't shopping around and can miss out on something that better fits your interests.

In my case I needed to move as fast as possible. I believed I was facing a discrimination issue at the prior employer, even though the company was a great place to work and really took all appropriate steps to mitigate discrimination, and I thought my job was in peril. Instead of challenging the issue and waiting for an investigation I started looking for another job. The group that hired me is bigger than Google and has the best time off and benefits I have ever seen. They got back to me the same day I interviewed and ended up offering me a really high rate of compensation. These were also desirable perks and they were moving fast to bring me in.

I know the grass is always greener on the other side. One thing to always consider is the bigger the company the longer the time frame between project start and project publication. Larger organizations have more regulation to comply with, established services and architecture to wrestle with, and many more constituents to please. If you want greater benefits and financial security be prepared to work with a greater diversity of experience levels at a much slower average pace. If you want to move fast and live dangerously you generally have to look for employment with a less established organization.

I was headhunted away from a long-running contract by a recruiter I'd been in touch with on and off for years. She pitched me the position, I thought "...that does sound like me," I interviewed, and got an offer.

My two favorite gigs so far I got that way (current one and a stint at MapQuest back when it was in Lancaster, PA).

Having a reasonably active GitHub profile helped, too, and has gotten me cold-contacts from people recruiting for Apple and Facebook (didn't pursue either of those because I value living near friends and family more than working for a BigCo [and have never liked Facebook since the first time I heard about it]).

I guess my recommendations would be to network and to build up a portfolio of work anyone can see. Networking gets your name in front of a lot more people than you realize, and if you have a portfolio it makes more of an impression it goes a long way towards making people want to contact you.

I'd also add to take the time to be polite even to recruiters who haven't done their research. Talking nicely to them as long as they're not just spamming form letters has been a policy of mine for years just on the grounds that they're people too and should be treated kindly.

That policy directly got me the referral to MapQuest - when I explained what kind of work I actually was interested in, the recruiter who'd ignored my skillset passed me along to a contact of hers who was looking for devs like me.

The resulting gig, while maybe not amazing by Silicon Valley standards, remains one of the best ones I've had here in central PA.

(Of course, then upper management cut the entire Lancaster office, the majority of their technical staff, but that's another story...)

A job site, I applied. It was posted by a third-party recruiter. Pretty much how I've found all my jobs. I'm not very good at networking or the good-ol boy network. I find them through job boards.

I moved from Australia to Sweden a bit under six years ago because I wanted to work in games again and Australia didn't have much of a game dev industry at the time. From there it was pretty normal/boring: applied for a job through the company's website listings, got a call about a week later to set up an interview, came in for the interview, royally messed up surprise test during the interview. The interview went ok otherwise and I asked to take the test sheets home with me to review. After getting home I realized how simple this thing is and I was just too nervous to see it in the moment. Wrote another email to the in-house recruiter with my solution to the test, requesting that they pass it on to the interviewers. Thankfully they did and I got an offer about a week later. Overall from moving to applying to signing a contract took a bit under two months.

My last four jobs where meeting someone who was an owner of a software company and the topic of what I did for a living came up. Further conversation led to informal interviews. Later I was asked if I wanted to join the company.

So I guess the lesson is, you're always in a job interview, even when you don't know it.

Friend referred me to his boss.

I know for sure I couldn't have gotten in if it was through normal interviewing channels, I always bomb interview questions in the most phenomenal ways.

I had gotten (expectedly) laid off. Following a friend's recommendation (and pressure), I asked an acquaintance for a referral at his (large, famous) company that I was wary of.

At that point, I had about 10yrs experience in my career, embedded software.

I still had to target specific postings from their job board for my acquaintance's referral. I found some that matched what I was looking for, got to through the interview process for a couple postings. I was impressed by and hit it off well with the manager of one team, and got hired. That was a few years ago.

I'm really glad I was pressured to apply at this company that I would have otherwise avoided, this is my favorite job in my career so far.

Hm, I guess I should mention last two jobs, because I am just two months in with my current job.

Previous: Started as an intern during first year of my 2-year masters. Went to their recruiter during their open-house. Told me there would be an entrance exam on some date, if I am interested. I was, did well enough on the exam, then started in the QA part of the organization, later upgraded to full time epmloyment, and spent 6 years in the company :)

Current: a friend of mine was complainig over beer that they are looking for more senior QA people. I joked that I might actually send them my CV. In the end I did, and they gave a me good enough offer. So I switched companies.

I started an open source project, quit my job and coded alone in my apartment until it became useful enough to be sponsored by a large enterprise.

https://micro.mu

Was approached by a recruiter for an interesting position. They sent me the job description and I had a sort of pre-selection interview. Then another recruiter was supposed to call me for another interview, but after making two or three appointments, they never called.

After doing a Google search for the job description, I found the actual company that the recruiter contacted me about. I waited a couple of weeks and then directly approached the owner of the company. I got an invitation for the next week, had two interviews on the same evening and got an offer the next day.

I got my current job after getting accepted to Indeed Prime, where my current employer reached out to me for an interview.

I uploaded my resume, and after getting in (every potential candidate has to be accepted) I got free advice over the phone from one of their career coaches on what resume and profile changes to make in order to attract more employers. Soon after that they started reaching out to me for interviews. There is a culture in the service of being respectful of your time as a candidate, so if the recruiter knows they don't offer every single thing you specified wanting in your profile they'll get that out of the way in the first phone call. They almost always discussed salary and remote benefits on the first call so I knew if their offer was in line with my expectations.

I signed up in February and was contacted by 9 employers, interviewed with 7, and accepted an offer with 1 in March.

Full Disclaimer: if you want to check out the service via my referral link, I'd get a commission the first time an employer reaches out to you, and if you accept a job through the service. Also, if you accept an offer through Prime, you get to pick a free gift from Indeed. (I chose a PS4, which I'll start using when The Last of Us 2 comes out).

Ref link: https://prime.indeed.com/refer/c-Wrs9hjR

Non Ref Link: https://www.indeed.com/prime

I work at a large, well-known Silicon Valley company. I interned at the company while I was in college, but decided to work elsewhere after I graduated. After a few years, one of their recruiters reached out to me via email, went through the normal interview process, and ended up with the job.

Past jobs/internships have been a mixture of applying directly on college job boards, recruiters reaching out through email/LinkedIn, and Hired.

Nothing exciting here. I found the job online and submitted my application. One interesting bit though is that I initially tried to intro my way in - there was someone at the company whom I worked with several years ago. I reached out to ask for an intro. Did not receive a response even with follow up.

Generally speaking intros are more important as the company gets bigger. More noise for recruiters to shift through from official channels.

My new job was a recruiter cold message on LinkedIn. This was pretty novel as all my previous jobs (~17 years worth) were referrals of some sort.

Stackoverflow Careers.

Previous Jobs:

5 Job ad by recruitment agency

4 Contact from previous job

3 Job ad by recruitment agency

2 Job ad by recruitment agency

1 Job ad by recruitment agency

I was unemployed, because I got fired (first time ever, by an asshole who never liked me). I had taken a month or so to try my hand at writing a novel, but eventually a recruiter cold-called me and offered me an interview, and COBRA was so expensive I said "sure, go ahead and schedule it."

Current job is a good fit, I enjoy it and have been here for two years.

Flooded the market with over 100 job applications. Talked with dozens of people - from Tech Leads on another continent to clueless HR interns. Build up a really good perspective of the IT industry in the area. Dismissed many dodgy, disrespectful, weird companies, afterwards discovered that one has very bad Google reviews - customers call them scammers (my gut feeling was to refuse working on their take home assignment with a copyright clause). Met many respectful, caring people building legit businesses. The endeavour took 8 months (with one transitional acceptable job) and resulted with one legit job offer, in a niche but interesting industry, paid what I believe is the market rate. Realized that the job postings online basically evolved into Tinder - showing off, claiming things, lying, liking-dismissing for the most trivial reason, but few actual "transactions" happening. I don't want to go through this again.

Recruiters mostly from LinkedIn.... last five or more jobs.

I do a lot of contract work and in the last few years got into designing/coding govt sites and technology.

Overall I started this career by doing my own startups where I had a lot of fun chasing the dream. During that time I also taught myself how to code & design.

I was working for a company where I felt I had stagnated somewhat, about the same time my current employer posted to a local Ruby mailing list saying they were doing things with home automation technology and needed a developer to join them. It just so happens I love home automation, so I applied, got on well with the team, and ended up joining them.

The job wasn't quite what I'd expected when I accepted it - they merged with an insurance startup between me accepting and starting - but I've been having great fun since. These days I get paid to play with new bits of connected hardware, and mentor the other developers on my team. When I first started I got to write the first iteration of the firmware for our hub, and do a ton of work on our core infrastructure.

Timing, luck, and connections. I decided it was time to look for a new job, and that evening I went to Craigslist, just to see what jobs were listed there. I had never looked at them before, and didn't have much hope, but one of the ads was for exactly what I wanted, working at a company that I built part of the initial proof of concept for a decade previous, and had done a small consulting job 5 years earlier. I reached out to the CTO via e-mail, he asked if he could take me out to lunch the next day, and 2 days later I was in the office setting up my credentials and fixing some problems in their infrastructure so the CTO could go on vacation the next day. A few weeks later we negotiated the deal and I started my new job.

During my university years my boss (current, not at the time) asked if he could pitch an idea for those in class who wanted to listen instead of going on 15 min break, I think at this point he was going to pitch to investors and wanted the practice. Two or so years later I reached out to him, asking if anything had come of it (I mean he did quit a stable job at Uni to do this, might as well check up on him) and if they were looking for a summer intern and/or part-timer. Luckily everything was going well (except that startups are never smooth sailing) and I got offered an internship. A year later and I am set to work there full time at the start of September.

The lesson I took away from it all was to make effort to stay in touch with people.

One night in a bout of frustration with my then-current job, I started searching message boards for names of products/companies in my field of side-project interest (mobile development).

I then Emailed several of these places my resume, and within a half-hour I heard back from one of them. I guess you could say the rest is history.

(At the same time, I also ended up in the application process with Amazon. However, I probably flunked their tech phone screen on account of not being able to cough up minesweeper-relates algorithms off the top of my head.)

One thing I really liked about the company that responded to me was that they actually treated me as an individual, with existing projects worthy of interview discussion, rather than just another faceless resume in a pile.

I was presenting at a conference, the CIO came to me after the presentation and we chatted about her company. She ended up offering a great position.

Funny that I have never heard of this huge company (and uber cool), some of the great ones are just not visible to outsiders.

10 years later I still love it.

Every job I’ve had except the very first has been following a friend/coworker to the new place.

I literally saw a super cool company sign on the side of 101 and thought to myself, "hmmm, I wonder what they do?" Two months later when I was browsing the job boards I saw a perfect fit opening for "that company with the sign".

I looked into the company further at that point and found out their customers were evangelical fanatics about the product. I ended up getting the job and three years later, it's by far the best job I've ever had - the team, daily responsibilities, financials, etc. So when you're stuck in that long slog of a commute on 101, take the time to peruse the corporate creativity lining the freeway. It may just lead to your next opportunity.

Became interested in a startup's technology and joined their developer community. I build some small examples and offered my help here and there.

After helping out (paid) they kept asking for more assistance. I asked to formalise my relationship with them and got the job.

I was working at a large tech company with awesome coworkers and cool technology, but I wasn't applying my experience/time/skill towards something I cared about. But I likely would have stayed if it weren't for my SO getting an opportunity for a position in an awesome new city/country.

I have been interested in education, healthcare, gamification, and video games for a while. When my SO's opportunity came up, I found that one of the companies I follow and that is focused on most of those interests of mine (gamification of education, educational video games) was located in the same city.

I applied, went through the interview process completely remotely, and was eventually offered a job.

First job out of uni - a company run training scheme, ran for nearly 3 years. Fairly low pay, that came with a job

At the end of that, after a couple of months on second line I was then asked by a dev department to take over from someone who was leaving.

Stayed there for 10 years and then had another head of department come up to Manchester and beg me to work for her, with a hefty pay rise and official home working.

I did apply for one job (internally)after a bad manager took over, which I got - it wa supporting a system that I'd written, but they couldn't pay enough. On the whole I'm terrible at interviews though (the training course was mostly test based), head hunting is the only way I've managed to progress.

I'm a freelancer, so I usually have several jobs. The last 3 jobs:

1. A VC who I pitched to didn't invest in my startup, but he was impressed enough by my technical ability that he took me on for some work. After being conscientious in series of jobs over a year, I usually get first pick in his projects.

2. A guy whose project I failed at recommended me to a friend. Two other people also mentioned me. He was a speaker at a talk that I liked and so I added him on Facebook years ago, which broke the ice.

3. Some of my students were doing a real world project for educational purposes. They dropped out and I took on the project, which was easy and paid very well for the difficulty level.

I was a freelancer doing contract work for various companies (while also running a few side projects) and a guy I did work for recommended me. Guy who I was recommended to messaged me on LinkedIn and we arranged a lunch meeting to get to know each other. Soon after I started doing contracting work for them. After about a month of the contracting gig he asked what it would take to bring me on full time and we came to some agreements. Now two years later I'm a partner at the company and we're growing like crazy. It's cool how all the little decisions and events in your life can come together to get you where you want to be.

For years (and due to a comment I read here changing my ways), I have responded to all the cold emails and linkedin messages I get from recruiters with a short polite response thanking them for their consideration and saying I will reach out if I become interested in new opportunities. So this time I actually did that last part: I reached out to a recruiter who had sent me a linkedin message a year or so earlier. He didn't actually work for the company any longer (if I'm remembering correctly), but knew the person who had taken his role. He put me in touch with her and she got me started on the interview process.

I saw an “adopt a highway” sign that the company sponsored while visiting the city where they happened to be headquartered. I looked online to see if they had any positions available. They did, so I applied and the rest is history.

I visited the library, and saw an advert in the local newspaper about a programming job in a neighboring city (~3 hour drive). The day I saw the ad was the deadline for sending an application, so I hurried home and threw together an application, along with my CV. After just a few days, I was asked to come in for an interview where I got a small task that I then went home and worked on the task for a day or two before sending everything back to the company. They loved both talking to me and what I had done on the task and I was offered a job just a few days later.

I actually applied for an RoR job but my employer learnt from my blog and site (given in profile) that I can do data automation and scraping too so he hired me for that. Now I am working remotely from Pakistan.

I've been out of undergrad for about 8 months now and I'm working for a university doing research programming, what I've known I've wanted to do for years. It took six months of searching university job postings and applying to hundreds of positions before I landed mine, and I had to take an awful electrical contracting job for 1.5 months just to have something to do. Searching for jobs was really hard, so much harder than working, IMO. It feels like you'll never get a job until you finally do, but you never know when that will be.

I was a financial analyst with no interest in computers or programming.

Three years ago I bought a raspberry pi to set up a Plex HTPC. That led to bash scripts to automate little bits of my work. Fell head over heels into Linux and bash, then started learning R to do what Excel couldn’t do. Then I quit and started a Data Science masters. Now I’m employed full time as a data scientist but spend most of my time helping design a modern infrastructure at my very traditional employer. Raspberry Pi to rack servers running containerized workloads in 3 years - best time of my life.

Recruiter reaching out on LinkedIn. I had a few recruiters approach after I set the open to opportunities flag on in LinkedIn. I did onsites with three companies and my current employer seemed the best fit.

If you are in the US you may want to go through Vettery/Hired especially if you are a fresher or you don't have contacts to get your foot in the door. If you do have some contacts working at companies, ask then to tell you how it is working there and make a judgement for yourself if you like working there or not.

Recruiters are a double edged sword, they can help you get your foot in the door but if you do use them as I did a few years ago, make sure you do your homework on the company and find out everything before signing the offer letter.

Job posting on Stack Overflow, and a nice combination of closer to home, things I know, and things I love to work on. Had a nice two-hour chat with my now-boss and got the contract a day later.

I'm in bio research and not programming. Moral of the story is to cold-email people who are friends of friends. I have never got a job through my CV/resume.

Current job I got via word of mouth and an email. My boss used professors he trusted and knew me to check I was okay.

Previous job I got from a friend mentioning I should ask them. I emailed them and they gave me a job.

Back before University I got two jobs in retail and fast food through my mum who worked as a bank teller and thus could ask if they were looking for work.

My current job at Amazon: Took two online coding tests, didn't talk to a single person and got an offer a couple days after the second test. Efficient.

I didn’t. I’m unemployed and enjoying every minute of it.

Recruiter talked me into doing web scraping for their new data division over linkedin.

I've just got laid off from a very big company where I did web-crawling and general data management/delivery and I wanted out from this particular niche, but got a decent remote offer with laid back work hours. At first I thought I'll regroup my mind for a more serious job but I kinda fancy low work load and a small team.

I cold emailed the company I work for now, saying their product (not a piece of software, hardware, etc, a real-world thing) was cool and asking if they needed tech help. At the time, they had none. Now we're starting to have scaling issues and it's getting exciting!

BONUS The job before this: started working for a founder, showed him I was a really hard worker and knew my stuff, then was asked to Co-found.

I applied for a thousand jobs on Indeed and went to about 40 interviews until I got one where I clicked with the interviewer. I passed the first round with the Director of Operations who subsequently ended up getting fired a week before I started. My second interview I ended up with the Project Manager who was also an alumni from the same university as I was.

There's a slack instance for local South African developers called ZATech. Posted that I was looking for a job in the appropriate channels and was approached by a few people and took one of them up on their offer. It's quite the interesting gathering of developers since the other local popular tech forums don't have as many developers gathered.

Bosch demanded IT employees from a part time job agency where I was registered. Quite simple.

Be careful when searching for a job, you may find one...

I went to a conference put on by a vendor of products I supported at my then current employer. I had met people over the years at this conference and was at the dinner table with some folks and someone said "hey, aren't you looking for new opportunities?" and introduced me to the person who would become my new boss.

Strangely. I was looking, applying and interviewing everywhere (even HN's Who's Hiring).. And then I overheard some office talk about a coworker who met with his friends that worked at XYZ company, who is not exactly a competitor but in the same space. So I looked up the company, applied, and got a job there.

5 months from graduating I started looking for job offers. I wanted to get into ASICs D&V so I looked up the jobs from all the well-known companies, and applied to the one that was in Europe and looked the coolest. Got the job.

Realised two months after that that my prof could have got me an introduction there, but oh well!

Don't follow luck or what ends up coming on your path.

Ask yourself what is the most important problem you should be solving, and find companies that do that. Then prepare the hell out to be relevant in that field (follow MOOCs, read books, prepare for interviews, ...). Take a year if needed. And finally, apply.

A recruiter who had been stalking me for about 5 years (in a good, friendly way) contacted me, and the position was just interesting enough that, combined with rumblings about possible pending layoffs at the then-current gig, I decided to pursue it. $NEWCO made me an offer and the rest is history.

Hated my current job and while I was on vacation in China, I sent a couple of inquiring emails to some contacts I had. I had a phone interview from a hotel lobby in Hong Kong at 2am (job is in Illinois). By the time I got home, I had a face-to-face interview and had a new job in a week.

Emailed a company that I am a customer of saying "are you hiring?"; was interviewed the next day

I researched interesting companies in my area that were hiring and would fit my current planned career trajectory. I went to a few interviews, other went well until I interviewed the hiring manager, the second went much better and after 7 years I'm still in the same company.

I won a hackathon with a couple of friends at university, the company sponsoring the hackathon let us work for them while writing the masters thesis (carefully splitting us up, to see if one of us was just coasting on the others' work) and we all got an offer 6 months later.

Referral from an ex-coworker. I've gotten several jobs over the years this way. If you can pull it off it really makes the whole process so much nicer, knowing you have someone on the inside vouching for you.

$job - 1 I found right here on "Who's Hiring?" :)

So much varies by industry, specialization, time of year, time in economic cycle. My clients typically find 40% by aggressive networking (in-person, LinkedIn, Meetups, conferences), 30% by who they currently know in industry, the balance cold approaches and other.

I needed a ride back home from a birthday party and so the birthday guy introduced me to a friend of his who lived in the same direction. In his car we naturally made small talk like “what do you do” and two or three weeks later I was working for him.

I had moved to a new town, and got an adjunct teaching job as a stop gap. My office mate was a former employee of a company. One day he called the founder of that company on the phone, introduced me, and handed me the receiver. That was 20 years ago.

In my previous job work was drying up so my boss sent me out contracting at another company. Six months later the company I was contracting at made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’ve been there for 4 years now. Previous job was nearly 8 years.

Referral. A good friend of mine dropped my resume for a different position a year ago. In retrospect, I wasn't a perfect fit for that gig. But 6 months ago, I got a call from the same company when a matching profile came up. I got in.

Last 3 jobs = LinkedIn recruiters

I apply and do interviews without any references. I guess I could escape this if I was interested in local jobs, but I work remotelly and every next job/company/client is thousands of miles/km away from the previous one.

Power of the second-degree network: a friend of a friend referred me to my current job.

Twitter DM in response to an engineering manager that tweeted ≈'we're hiring!'. Talking to the eng manager directly, rather than going through a typical recruiting channel, made the whole process a lot smoother I think

I found a random post searching for developers in local Facebook developers group. I responded, went for interview and got the job. It was quite a godsend for a 16 year old, as most companies would consider this risky.

Twitter. I hearted a listing from my (now) boss because I liked the company and thought the listing looked great. Wasn't really looking for a new job, but things worked out that way, and it has been fantastic.

I've had jobs from -

An internship (itself gotten from cold applying, and serendipity meaning I had HCI/HCD experience, when that was a big internal initiative at the company).

A recruiter reaching out.

A former boss poaching me.

A cold application sent in for an open req.

Had interviewed with a recruiter I met via LinkedIn a year ago, and rejected an offer. One year later I felt like it was the right moment to switch jobs and called him again. He got me the new job I have now.

Saw a note pinned to a cork board while walking in a university campus and wrote an introductory email with a link to my online portfolio and my resume attached. Followed up two or three times.

When I felt like it was time for a change, I went to my linkedin inbox and replied to some of the recruiters who contacted me for the past 6 months, asking if the position was still open.

2 last jobs were through networking in tech meetups. (Vancouver, BC)

I was a customer that was given the opportunity to work on improving the developer experience, and fixing the issues I was facing for a platform I was passionate about (Twilio)

Got a contract job with a unicorn through one of the giant domestic body shops. Converted to permanent status after 3-4 months.

I don’t think I would have been hired through the front door.

Walking around the career fair at my university and talking to recruiters. Three years later it’s still going well and I even got some of my friends from school jobs here.

LinkedIn with proper keywords so people can find you. Recruiters will probably start sending you messages really quick. I have no Facebook account but do have references.

Who's hiring right here on HN (on the first of the month).

Salesforce: recruiter

Twitter: referral

Current: referral

I also had to do a typical interview at all of them.

Submitted my resume to a FANG online form a few months out of grad school. Recruiter contacted me, I did the screens and interviews, and got an offer.

First job was through an advert in a local paper, after that every job and eventually contract came through contacts I made at previous employers.

After 18 months of applying, getting several 2nd and 3rd interviews, I got a random message from a CIO I interviewed with 6 years ago.

A contact forwarded my resume to an IT manager at my employer.

I interviewed and was accepted for a temporary position.

They hired me full time after a few years.

Found the job listing on Monster, prepared CV and cover letter as required, applied.

Went to the interview, got an offer, took the job.

Hired.com. Alternate things that lead to offers: applying wildly on LinkedIn and company websites.

First job: company came on campus.

Since then: cold applications, yes they do work sometimes.

CEO of a previous employer was working there and brought me in to fix shit

I was in the final year of college and having tried a couple of startups I wanted to get a remote job. The naive thought was "gee, someone is gonna give me a product role remotely" and let me see how many folks want to hire me. Applied at every known startup in SV world and remotejob sites and gave up on the hope for getting a product role but remote working still was a first love of sorts. I started appliying for customer support positions at various places again only to never hear back from them. Posted once on Who wants to be hired on HN as well and that did not go anywhere. And out of the blue a friend of mine whom I had sort of worked with in the past told me about a Product role in Bangalore. I had given up hope on Product Roles, Remote jobs since I was sitting on 70+ rejection mails. I decided to take it and that was nearly 3 months back. TL:DR ? a bit of network and luck(ing out and in ?)

Contact from previous job. Before that it was a referral by a relative.

Freelancing agencies. More specifically, Toptal, Gigster and Pilot.co.

The last two jobs I've had I got from recruiters.

Before that LinkedIn.

Referral by former colleague.

Word of mouth.

I was coding in Python almost 24/7 when studying at University and loved teaching so I started offering private python courses for students that had problems with it (it was mandatory also for some non-IT studies) in exchange for beer/dinner/cash etc... One of them was my close friend that I knew for a very long time, he got very excited to the point he applied to the python-dev job at a major international corporation. During the interview, he was very shy and the employer didn't have confidence that his python skills are sufficient for the position he applied to so he gave him a coding homework (simple stuff, convert some XML output to a nice HTML page). He forwarded it to me asking for help if I could do this because he really wanted to get the job. I didn't have the heart to tell him his skills are not as high as they should be so I wrote that homework for him. Also as a kind of payback as he actually helped me before to get my job I was working at that time. In the homework, I put there a lot of comments with in-depth explanation of how each piece worked and some of them contained rude words like "this sh does not handle utf-8 so we need to monkey patch it here and do some black magic below" with instruction that he should read the comments to understand it and delete them before submitting it for next interview round. Of course, he did not. So he went to the next round in the interview with the homework, opened it up. Everything working perfectly, even the comments with rude words made a good laugh that he hasn't removed. He made a so good impression with that that the guy immediately put him an offer for employment discarding all previous candidates as he thought he is just a classic IT guy that is very bad when it comes to social interaction but when closed in a room, is coding like a beast. When the contract was presented to him, he made a long awkward pause and disclosed that I made the homework and it was not his own work. The guy then made him another offer to give him my contact details in exchange for dinner & beer for both of us if I show up at the interview. I wasn't really looking for a job change but I thought its cool since I was a student eating cheap instant noodles to save money everywhere I could so a nice dinner (normal food, yay!) sounded good for just showing up at the interview. I was immediately presented with an offer that I took even if it was not my intention as I just had a few nasty arguments at the current job. The position was for a fixed time, just for one small project but I started poking around with their security systems and built a complete system for remote forensic acquisition while my manager was looking to free up money to offer me a full-time position. (successfully).

This was how I got my previous job, which I already left to fund a startup for providing reconnaissance/OSINT as a service but that's another even longer story.

It's a big company so I applied online. Come to think of it all the companies I've accepted were the same way, though I've gotten interviews by directly reaching out to recruiters.

Jumped ship to a consulting company that my boss wanted to hire.

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