Ask HN: As a software engineer, where do you look for jobs these days?
I was a big StackOverflow Jobs fan, but it is closed now. Is there anything as simple / straightforward?
Apply to many positions, do as much interviews as possible, get a few offers, pick the best.
My dream position would be to work remotely for an US company while living in my small European country and so far LinkedIn isn't helping with that as I mostly find EU based positions. Maybe I will search for jobs here on HN when the time arrives to change my job.
The side projects that help are directly in the the niche as my main service and they are my customers. I only do those when I have to because it distracts from building or improving services.
- 5 minute phone call to explain the position, get my resume and say they'll send it to their client
- silence
Maybe I'm just getting hit up by resume farmers pretending to be recruiters?
There are lots of good reasons for a company to be really choosy in who they hire, primarily because a bad hire can be hugely damaging to a company. Rightly or wrongly, this means that a single perceived negative on your resume can mean you're immediately discarded.
If you're not having much luck, it might be worth getting your resume read by someone who hires, to understand if there any inadvertent red flags, or missing key info. I did this recently with a friendly recruiter and they made some useful suggestions. I also made changes in response to concerns people raised about my background that they said during interviews, so I could counter potentially negative reactions to things in my work history.
I think this is overstated. The only engineering positions that can really do any reasonable amount of damage to a company are people who set policy for the whole company (CTO, CEO, VPs). Everybody else is designed to be replaced. Any changes they make can be reversed. The worst you've lost is a little time and money.
> If you're not having much luck
I utilized /r/EngineeringResumes/ and rewrote my resume last month in an X, Y, Z format. I haven't had any problem getting interviews since then. But, I apply directly through the company website. I haven't had a single response on hired or linkedin, but I've had about 20 interviews in the past two weeks at companies I applied to directly. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I start out with the type of company I want, usually dictated by lessons learned working with previous bad employers. Tech journals, Glassdoor, Levels.fyi, Slashdot, Y Combinator etc. will get you a potential list depending on the scale.
Then it's polling my developer network on LinkedIn to find 2nd or 3rd "hops" away that get me access to that area, and asking someone to setup an introduction. Once introduced, I start trying to figure out if the company is all just a marketing smokescreen, or whether they do indeed do quality engineering.
Then I try and actively connect with recruiters via Indeed or LinkedIn and search their jobs pages - you'd be surprised the number of roles that aren't quite ready to be advertized just yet, but would be top-of-mind for technical recruiters.
Lastly - when I start a proper job search, I go wide! Get about 20 companies like that in the funnel, which might yield 2 or 3 quality interviews and maybe 1 offer. If there's anything you don't like, pull in another 20 companies and go again. It's completely a numbers game.