I'm not in the US; if I had to send out 200 or even 100 applications I would change career. If I had to send 50 I would be starting to investigate other careers.
But I also target the mid-tier, not FAANG, finance, or top-tier startups that hire like FAANG. I'd break down halfway through one of their day-long interviews no matter how much I studied leetcode, and I know it. Put me in any kind of meeting for more than a couple hours and I'm braindead, and interviews count as meetings. Even worse than ordinary meetings, really.
Yeah, if I had to send 50, let alone 200 applications in one search... I can't even imagine. If I hit 100 with no offers I'd for-sure reckon my career was over and I needed to look at jobs several notches down the economic and social ladder (and tech's already not that high on the social ladder).
- previously passed a loop with FAANG ( didn't join tho ) - have a strong portfolio in a hard to resource niche
Easily send out 200 apps and get ignored.
The market is dumb, not sure I should quit over it tho
I’m not even remotely FAANG level but if I wanted a job I’d email some people I know or Tweet that I’m looking - not fill in a form.
Have you tried working your network? Emailing some friends?
What's the word for cronyism if the person is qualified?
And at the end of the day - do whatever you need to within reason to put food on your own table. Don’t worry about someone else judging you for cronyism for feeding your family.
I think we already were? That's exactly what I said. Who do you think isn't being honest?
Someone who doesn't really check boxes and doesn't have a network may have to play a numbers game.
On the other hand, more senior and more specialized people (both in and out of engineering) will often have a much smaller number of holes that they would fit properly in and just sending out resumes is unlikely to be nearly as effective as networking.
Err yeah kind of. I always recommend people find someone in the team they want to join and reach out to them personally or via a mutual.
If you fill in the form without someone on the other end waiting to pick your application out of the firehouse it can get lost in the HR mystery machine.
I think that’s a pretty common opinion? I’ve never gotten a job with a blind application. I’ve gotten every job I applied to when I did it by reaching out.
Also the teams in smaller places are not anything spectacular, just backend, frontend, data, whatever, with a lot of overlap, so the idea that someone would be aiming for a particular team, meaning whoever is working on that part of the stack this month, is also strange.
What you're saying makes sense with big, complex companies with huge HR processes and teams of varying levels of prestige and expertise. Probably a good idea if you're aiming particularly for a team at Google that works on a particular thing you like.
The point is that giving preference to someone you know reduces or even eliminates the other person's opportunity. This is especially important for minority groups that may not have as many connections in a given industry. Sure, people do what they need to for work, but people skipping in line...
But picking someone to join your team isn’t taking the first person who appears in line.
In the UK the market is pretty dumb. Folks are mainly looking for reasons to exclude you rather than focusing on the positives. Ergo, I fire and forget resumes and only really put effort into the ones that come back positively.
When I get past the gate keepers, I almost always get an offer.
So my point is, "hang in there".
If you're applying for "senior" positions and have the CV to back it up and you're still batting 1/200 getting to the first interview then you are either the unluckiest person ever or there's a red flag you haven't noticed.
But, with a track record and you aren't trying to career change? That is a lot.
Also, there are red flags, and there are red flags. I have some red flags I can't do anything about, I just have to push through them, but they shouldn't be a dealbreaker for anyone actually desperate to hire.
Frankly, companies don't train. Mt company talks about training all the time and it's a joke.
The company I ended up working for basically would stick 10-15 potential Junior engineers (majority from bootcamps) in a room for 2 months and give them all 2 identical features to ship. Then access to the dev codebase, docs and the ear of senior engineer.
People would help each other, it was expected. People would go learn parts of the stack come back and teach everyone else (this is how I learned about GraphQL). At the end of the 2 months anyone who couldn't preform was let go, everyone else was placed.
I understand this was a boomtime thing that only works as massive companies, but it makes getting a new person on your team easier if they know the codebase/workflow. For the new engineer it also really helps to get used to how code works in a massive repo when all you've done is tiny self run projects.
I'm a reasonably good developer, but not top tier by any means.
But my starting point is usually a recruiter contacting me. It's been a long time since I've chased a recruiter or company. And I've never sent out 100+ applications in my 22 year career.
Maybe geography plays a part. London and Dublin are full of tech jobs. Isolated cities in the US might be different, with moving or commuting to a different city not an easy option.
I'd like to see some of the CVs that keep getting rejected or passed over, because that volume (100-200) doesn't feel right to me.