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Comment by amirathi | Hacker News Reader

This is fantastic practical advice for software engineers early in their career. Here's some more based on the common pitfalls I see,

- Don't apply to 50+ companies at one go thinking only a % of them will call you. Choose ~5 companies, do a lot of homework about their business & write to key people at these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business. If it fails, choose next ~5 and so on.

- Other things being equal choose team over company. E.g. working at core technology or customer facing team at a less-known growing business is much better than working at some internal tools team in Google. FAANG carries some brand value for future recruiters, VCs but you should really optimize learning rate early in your career.

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This is one of the best advices for people starting their careers. This comment should be at the top of this thread!

EDIT: Formatting

No, no, no, arghh no! No matter how much you research, study, network, and prep for any one special particular company, if you are the one to reach out you’re going to get ghosted a certain percentage of the time. If that percentage is around 90-95%, which is what it is in my experience being in the industry for 20 years, then focusing on 5 companies may mean zero callbacks. You need to cast a wide net, especially as a junior engineer.

I’ve tried this strategy of targeting an insider in my network and pitching myself through him. Several times. It has never worked for me. Ultimately it ends up at “Whelll, nice talking to you! Next step is to apply for this job id online. Good luck!!” What does work is if conpany initiates contact, THEN you go through your network to gather information about the role and hiring manager, and so on. Having an insider pushing for you after company has already expressed interest has been a lot more reliable to me.

I think the key is that you need to motivate them for why they should hire you. I recently went through the job interview process and I got ghosted by a company with a job opening on LinkedIn that I know I was qualified for. I reached out to the recruiter and within a week I had an interview scheduled, and within two weeks I had an offer.

Sometimes you need to just get a human's eyeballs on your resume.

This has been my experience as well.

I think you misunderstood the parent post. They didn’t say only apply to 5 companies. They said don’t send 50+ Low quality applications in one go. Send five high quality ones to places you think are a good fit, follow up, and then send five more.

I think it’s good advice. Although the points you make are generally true too.

Agreed on this generally being solid early career advice. Some of it is outright wrong though at more senior levels. E.g;

* Not giving salary expectations upfront lead to a waste of time if the company expectations are below yours

* It's not really relevant how bad many other programmers there are since you'll tend to look at switching to "better" companies, not worse.

* This is a bit too negative on equity grants for companies with strong product market fit (mostly article just hasn't aged well with companies staying private for so long now)

> write to key people at these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business.

Do you have an example of this? What can you possibly do for their business?

Do key people respond to random solicitations for a job. Don't you still have to go though their original Leetcode interview process. I am really not seeing what the advantage of this approach.

Maybe for small stage startups or deliberately tiny, private ventures. Otherwise, yeah, might as well just apply via the normal channels since the employees will forward your request to HR/hiring anyway.

OP's advice is wishful thinking. I highly doubt they themselves took that approach

Learning rate doesnt really matter anymore. If you want to do really well you basically have to work for FAANG, who will basically only vet you on your algorithms skills. They completely negate everything else. So none of it matters, all that matters is if at interview time you can find the most optimal solution. If you want to work for companies paying less money, then sure, experience counts.

There are lots of opportunities to make that same type of comp at non FAANG companies. They're just not so clumped together, and don't have a cult-like following pumping them up in every thread.

Much harder to make 300k+ at a non faang/unicorn corporation

No it isn't. If you can make 300k+ at FAANG you can find a 300k+ job across dozens of public companies.

What if you truly need employment and you are a run of the mill beginner? Is that 5 company application approach still optimal?

Yes.

With 50-company approach you increase the absolute number of first callbacks you get (hence everyone thinks it's optimal). With 5-company approach you increase the odds of actually getting through to a single job offer. Think about it.

>you increase the odds of actually getting through to a single job offer

You haven't AT ALL explained why your "~5 companies approach" is more likely to get you an offer.

It's not. That sort of approach would be less likely to get you an offer anywhere that I've ever worked.

999 times out of 1000 you don't have a clue to a company's current business needs just by looking at public information, even if you had insider information, a random insider probably doesn't know the current business needs of anyone outside of their day-to-day job. Even if you did know the company's current business needs, unsolicited job applications from strangers to people who aren't recruiters mostly go straight into the trash bin. If I personally received unsolicited job application from a stranger, I'd probably just ignore it. The most I'd ever do is reply telling them to apply via our career site like everyone else.

Plus what exactly would you say as a "run of the mill beginner" for "what you can do for their business" that would catch anyone's attention that a quality resume and cover letter submitted though the job portal wouldn't?

It's because E(#offers) = #applications * P(initial_contact) * P(successful_interview | initial_contact)

The ~5 companies approach tries to optimize P(ic) and P(si) at the expense of #apps.

The 50 approach optimizes only #apps because it assumes P(ic) is low, and disregards P(si).

Especially P(si) is very important because the interview's purpose is to determine that you're a good match for them. If they're just another company you spammed an application out to, that becomes very obvious.

The ~5 companies approach forces you to have already selected them because you think there's a solid business case for them to hire you. And you can make that case during both your initial contact and the interview, thus maximizing P(ic) and P(si).

> 999 times out of 1000 you don't have a clue to a company's current business needs just by looking at public information

I'd say it's more like 9/10, but that absolutely makes the case for the ~5 company approach. You're filtering out the ones that have a poor recruiting process.

It takes a lot of time to put together a good application and you have to focus on companies that will not only be responsive but follow through all the way to the hiring decision.

So focus on companies that make it clear what they do and what the position entails will tend to maximize P(ic) and P(si).

IME no.

This is going to be an extremely cynical take but most software jobs (>80%) are basically the same. That goes for the companies as well, we aren't as unique as we think; and the companies that are unique or doing unique work aren't exactly having trouble finding employees (FAANG vs nearly everyone else).

If you want an employment as a beginner apply to as many postings as possible. Only do research for companies once they want to talk to you, anything else is a waste of time. It also takes very little time filling out job applications (outside of obnoxious companies that ask lots of behavior Q), it should less than 10 minutes to fill out job apps.

IDK how to feel about cover letters, every company I've worked at (startups, national ISP, to massive insurance companies) have stated they never read cover letters sent. They just want to make sure candidates have all the keywords on their resume before even talking (this part is largely automated away).

I have a basic cover letter that explains what I'm doing at my current job and how I'd like to work at $company doing $unique_stuff. Basically my cover letter is 90% the same between job apps, but I change the intro paragraph to match the title, company, and job description.

But as a beginner or moving to a new city where you know no one, apply to everything everywhere. It's a numbers game and even as you progress in your career, you may not command enough talent to target specific companies.

I’d say yes, with an asterisk.

The trick is to treat finding your first job as a search problem, not a dice roll. You’re searching for employers that need someone with your skills and experience, and those same employers are also searching for you.

The asterisk is that I think this “5 company” approach is meant to be aimed at companies that don’t have the resources to do very “active” searching. A rule of thumb: if the company has a specialized university recruiter, they are probably too “active” for the list, if you’re a new grad with no intern experience.

You don’t find these companies on job boards or LinkedIn. You find them by “searching”, like an investor. You can begin by looking for local VCs, the look at the portfolios of those VCs, then at the LinkedIn history of people who work at those portfolio companies. By now you probably have seen 20 interesting companies, and you can proceed to whittle it down to 5 small companies that will already know you have the requisite energy and enthusiasm, since you went through the real effort of finding and choosing them.

TLDR: yes, but not if your five spell out FAANG.

Like many things in life, applying to jobs is a numbers game. You don't know what the other side is doing/thinking. You don't know how much there is out there (answer: a lot). To negotiate well you need multiple offers and practice negotiation. If you are nervous about the application / interview process at all you gotta do it more.

How would one do this though? Should I find these people on LinkedIn and message them? Should I try to find their email? I’m applying rn and I’ve heard this advice before, I just don’t know how it could be implemented in practice.

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