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While I agree with your advice in the general case, I also find the author's data point interesting and compelling. Receiving 2 offers from 7 interviews with only 16 applications is a good rate in software engineering as far as I am aware.

It's also worth pointing out that the cover letter mentioning "rare programmer" ultimately led to an interview and an offer according to the author.

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It depends. For the types of companies he was applying to - yes.

For your standard experienced “enterprise dev” in most major US cities outside of the west coast and NYC, pre-Covid the demand was so high and so few experience developers come on the market, you could usually find a job in less than a month depending on if you were looking for the “right job” or the “right now” job. That’s been my experience since 2000 with the exception of the years between 2008-2010.

Of course that’s if you do enough resume driven development and have a strong network of former coworkers and local recruiters.

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