Ask HN: How do you look for your next opportunity? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you look for your next opportunity?

15 pointsmoystard8 comments

I was wondering how senior software engineers, technical leads, and CTOs look for their next opportunity.

How do you make sure that it will match your expectations and provide a great environment to work within a great organisation, and a great team?

This process sounds even more complicated when you are based in Europe, where websites like levels.fyi do not exist.

In my experience, I often end up on LinkedIn looking at bland and non-descriptive ads. Most do not include a great description of the position, no information about the remuneration or the package.

Is the natural next step for someone who is a good software engineer and has worked for a while in startups to head to a GAFAM when you are looking for team excellence? I would like to be surrounded by inspiring people.

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Pareto's Principle applies. You get over 80% of your results from less than 20% of your efforts. That effort might be job hunting and self marketing.

So many people think why not double down on this 20%? They spend more time optimizing for interviews, looking for better jobs, getting certifications, and so on.

But nobody wants to hire or work with someone who's looking for the next opportunity. Especially at the senior stage.

I wanted to be a consultant. My first consulting gig was from a consultant at my office who was impressed with my results. The following consulting jobs were similarly from people I worked with.

I wanted to be an entrepreneur. My co-founder was someone impressed with my work ethic and he was someone whose work ethic impressed me too. We spent little effort marketing ourselves but were picked out by accelerators and customers because we built something nice. I wanted to be a trainer. My first training gig was from a VC I pitched to whose bread and butter was corporate training.

I'd say focus on the 80% of work that gives you the 20% of your results. But don't neglect the career growth. Your mind should be focused on bringing in more sales to the company, making the product better, building a better team. If you wanted to play in Manchester United, your best bet would be scoring goals rather than scouting clubs.

This is a quite a good comment and I must agree. There's an authenticity to that mindset as well that I think is noticed by collaborators and that is really powerful too.

I really enjoyed reading your post but I have a comment regarding your final football analogy.

Football players goals and statistics are publicly available and analysed. Additionally, every football team plays the same game, so the rules and context are understood by all.

As an employee, you do not necessarily have this kind of visibility so you necessarily need to market yourself in some ways. This way, your achievements are visible, but also understandable to others who are not familiar with your company's context and situation (to put things in perspective).

I found that the hardest part of cold applications was identifying companies. In any major city you can probably think of 20 companies off the top of your head that exist there. Fewer with your expertise or interests in mind, fewer that are currently hiring. Additionally, identifying companies (without references or a network to pull on) for job search is a labor intensive and often boring process.

Since I would rather be "always learning" it is far more fun to watch technical talks at conferences and track any company that sponsors a speech I enjoy. I am doing this constantly (not just during active job search).

Since it is the norm for technical conferences to post to youtube, this strategy only costs time.

When you have a list of companies large enough, then it is easier to find competitors or get appropriate suggestions from networking platforms like linkedin.

I never track large or obvious companies, because I probably already know their name.

Now I've been in the field long enough to pull on my network, but don't really find it necessary. I have a list of 300+ companies that I can pull on reflecting my interests/expertise at different points in my career.

The only downside to this is it doesn't usually grow proportional to your geographical region, but there are ways to bias your results with other strategies.

It’s all about networking. Ideally when you have a job already. Express to the world that you’re looking for something new. When something good enough to leave your job comes along, then you’ll know you’ve found the fit.

OP: I would love to talk to you. I’m building something exactly to help talented folks find their next opportunity and I’m thinking about all of the things that you are. It would be interesting to chat about why this is so hard.

Do you mind sending me a note? My email is in my bio.

Talk to people around you, let them know you have free time and want to join a project or a company

That was my first idea of course. Unfortunately, my friends who work at great companies are based in the US (Apple/Amazon/Google) and the others are in Finance or contracting (very popular in Europe right now).

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