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Comment by epolanski | Hacker News Reader

I feel so lucky I haven't had to apply anywhere in my entire career through postings, the good thing of having a solid network is that you get to know who knows a consultant/freelancer before any position is created.

I did post my availability few times on HN "who wants to be hired" but with poor results and lots of wasted time (as again, the person on the other end does not know me or has worked with me everything gets bureaucratic again).

Also, all of the people I had hired for my clients came again from my network, there was never a public posting.

There's also other benefits, in general, you don't get to do silly technical interviews, as you're bringing former coworkers you can vouch for.

Not saying this can scale anywhere, but in smaller companies with good teams and professionals they always know someone from their previous jobs or their online communities (common in open source related githubs/discords/slacks) and I like it.

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IME it's not that bad. My entire network failed when I was looking for work: either everyone was still at my old employer whom I didn't want to return to or they were also out of work. I don't have much online presence, because that's my preference.

I did ~11 applications (on company websites, tailored resume), of which like 9 were moonshots (NVDA, Valve, etc). I heard back from everyone, and then interviewed and accepted an offer with a smaller international company located locally. This was during the 2023/4 downturn (Dec '23 to be exact).

Caveat: I have 15YoE and work in embedded (especially embedded Linux); it seems this specialization has suffered less than others. I also don't have a degree. I had to accept a slight paycut and hybrid - but I was in office before... and hardware generally just requires you to be present sometimes.

Don't be afraid if you don't have a network, the advice is good, but it doesn't apply to everyone.

I would say the extended parts of my network are still getting the interviews, but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face. I’ve been applying since April 2020 (with about 7 interviews so far and 2-3 upcoming interviews total) and I’m getting kind of discouraged at this point.

Honestly in this market there is really only so much your network can do—at least at a “submit my resume for me” level. I’m starting to think I might get a bit more aggressive and bold with my network and have them deliver paper copies to the hiring manager or something. Because even referral submitted applications are black holes at this point.

Hang in there and take what you can get. The market is super shitty and you are absolutely not alone. It ain’t you. The market will pick back up again… it always does.

If they won’t pay for traveling for on-site interview or relocation is that a good sign; when they’re demanding three days a week in the office hybrid?

>The market will pick back up again… it always does.

It will, but this time it's probably going to be several years. It's the covid lock down train wreck. Most people underestimate the cascading damage done by the lock downs.

Yup. The damage caused by that nonsense will haunt us for decades to come.

“It’s what everybody wanted” is something I often say. “Everybody was cheering this on”.

>“It’s what everybody wanted” is something I often say. “Everybody was cheering this on”.

Spot on. I read that somewhere that during WWII when people were sent to the gas chambers, crowds would be cheering on. Common people terrify me.

> I read that somewhere that during WWII when people were sent to the gas chambers, crowds would be cheering on.

Citation needed. The execution of Jews by gas chamber during the holocaust was not a public event.

It's when there were being rounded up to be sent. Not during the event itself.

Cheering on deportation.. I wonder what modern parallels we can draw from that.

The market can remain depressed for longer than you can remain solvent.

We should be encouraging people to look at alternative careers to tech. Life after tech.

We should also be making it clear to students that while there are exciting things happening in tech this is not going to translate into large scale demand for people.

Large parts of technology are mature, indeed moribund. This is not a message that the technology industry wants to hear.

> but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face.

Since referrals became the meta-game, companies have adapted their referral process to be more selective. Most companies I've worked for have required people to enter some basic information about how and where you worked with the referral, why you're referring them, and a statement that your referral means you are vouching for that person's work performance.

It cuts down on the number of people referring people they know by happenstance, which defeats the purpose of a referral program. I doubt your friends meant it as a personal attack. They probably just had referral programs that were more rigorous than putting names into a queue.

They said they hadn’t been happy with the last three months of candidates, and that I was probably going to be it and then rejected me with no feedback and hired some ex-SpaceX person as a contractor. It may have been the investor playing a role.

Maybe you didn't impress them?

Network is important as long as people see you as a reliable professional that can help them.

There's lots of skills involved, last but not least soft ones.

Well, sure but some feedback would’ve been nice at least - it’s not like I was going to sue them.

11 apps to one job last year, huh? With a 100% response rate. Wish I could have had even a tenth of that luck. Heck even during the best booms my response rate was hovering around 30%.

I'm just exhausted with the search. I finished yet another programming take home only for the company to stop hiring at the turn of the quarter.

But yea, my network also failed me. Mostly becsuse 80%+ of them were laid off themselves.

Paid off?

What an unfortunate typo. Luckily I had time to fix that one.

But sure, I think almost all of them got severance.

Remember when 80% are laid off, they are all looking. Whoever finds a job probably has found a place that is hiring more than one person. So keep in touch, they don't have anything today, but they may have leads. Sometimes it is here is a job that you are a closer fit for than me so I may as well point you at it even if it hurts my already low chances.

Indeed. And my luck continued to fall through the cracks.

Had 3 interviews through contacts that bounced back. Failed two interviews, one technical, one cultural. Third one never really got off the ground; talked to a recruiter and then nothing ever really got arranged. Not even a call.

One got a job at a place I previously worked at and had no interest in returning to. He's on a different team though so I can't say his experience will mirror mine.

One was asking around about any open roles days before he got laid off himself.

Asked a few others and no positions are really open as of now.

Funnily enough me and another colleague applied to the same job and he got it. Right before they invoked a hiring freeze.

And those are just referrals. The nightmares from jobs I just found myself get even better. I'm just tired. This market suuuuuuucks.

There have been ups and downs for decades. I'm sorry it is happening to you, glad it isn't me this time (so far!). I've been there. Hang in, there are always jobs though sometimes you need to become a handyman or something to get any money for a year.

Yeah, no worries. I'm stable for now, just not full time stable. I just gotta survive until the market bounces back.

I work in games so I was pre-programmed far in advance to expect shakey times. Just not times where I'm ghosted for over a year with no sign of anything opening up (quite the contrary, still plenty of gaming layoffs!).

How would I recommend I get into embedded Linux as a total newbie with only Node/Ruby experience? :^)

No joke: just start!

Learn C and C++. Find a cheap micro pc board, pick one of the embedded linux distros that run on it, and make something with it.

Repeat until you get bored, exhausted, or a job. :)

Make sure you touch a little rust too. C and C++ are still big, but embedded is interested in Rust as a potential mitigation for issues they have.

Try getting a single board computer such as a raspberry pi, and see if you can get it to do stuff! Hook it up to some SPI or I2C peripheral boards to read temperature or light. Stream data to a cloud.

Another big part of embedded Linux is managing the OS itself and updates. Things like Yocto handle building an OS image

I think that's relevant if you have a highly specialized skillset like embedded Linux. People don't make embedded Linux job postings to "test the waters" or "see if the perfect candidate applies." If the listing is up, they're probably hiring an embedded Linux developer, and while there will be a lot of resume frauds applying, they actually need to make the hire.

If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.

> If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.

B2B SaaS is broad. If you're a generalized you're fucked.

But if you're specialized in a specific B then you should (probably) be doing fine.

That said, most of the new-gen PMs are generalists who drank the "domain experience doesn't matter" koolaid.

Curious, what do you earn?

> My entire network failed when I was looking for work

That's been my consistent experience as well. Conventional wisdom is that you only get good jobs through referrals, but about half of the companies I've worked for have been through referrals and half "cold" through monster or linkedin, etc. and BY FAR the worst working experiences of my life have been the internal referral ones. The last time I was looking for work was 2017, though - I get the impression that things have gotten really, really bad in the past year or so.

My experience is the network typically fails, but it can sometimes work.

Remember with networking there is often only one person in your network of hundreds who can do anything so you need to find that person. Often it will be the guy you just barely talked to who won't think of you at all unless you remind them, but they then know enough to know you are good enough for some position and then they are not interviewing they are convincing you to take the job.

Those cases where the network ensures you are the only candidate are one of the reasons why they work well. My current company doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter how good you are, all I can do is put your resume in the HR stack (unless it is for my department in which case my boss might ask me about a couple resumes). I'd be considered a conflict of interest so I couldn't interview you.

This is really the best career advice.

I was fortunately able to leave a terrible job 2 years ago and immediately had contract work, now I run my own business and get constant referrals from my network. I make more than ever, have incredible work-life balance, and for the most part love what I do.

If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a job you are dead to the world. Even now I have people approaching me for FTE roles, I haven't even worked with them for 2 years. Am I some god tier programmer? Not really, but I have a good track record and people always want to go to someone they already trusted.

Yeah if you're not a social butterfly in the modern world you're just effed. Or about as good as dead, unless you happen to be extremely lucky.

In academic / white collar work for sure. But if you're something like a skilled craftsman whose services are in demand, you can probably do fine with less social networking.

Carpenters, electricians, and plumbers will be able to name their price in the Los Angeles area for the next few years.

Maybe. All of them have cycles of good and bad times. I've known many Electricians and Carpenters who have been laid off for years at a time before things come back.

> If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a job you are dead to the world.

As someone without a network and left their FAANG-adjacent (or whatever the current acronym is) job in 2022, this is mostly true.

Amazon still hits up my inbox every month or so, though.

What sort of business are you running now, if you don't mind elaborating?

I have two, one is a dev shop for LMS software, mainly working in custom AI solutions now.

The other is a consultancy where I help resolve tech debt and put out fires at SMB's, which I get most of my work from referrals.

It's not advice really. If it were advice, it would be something you could do.

Building a network is something anyone can do. Join meetups. Find local user groups. Find online groups and get active in them. Give talks. Write and publish your thoughts locally and/or online. Talk with people. Ask (good) questions. Let people get to know you and the way you think. Many more ways exist than just these.

Connecting with other professionals in various ways is all there is to building a network and anyone can do it. They just have to do it.

This. I'm still benefiting from being in a BSD users group that I went to between 2000-2008 because it was filled with passionate/talented tech people, most of whom have gone onto other things. Find places to get into discussions and show your opinions and have discussions. If you are in a group where your mind is never changed, then find something else.

Ok, now that's advice.

You definitely can.

I always built my network mostly at local meetups and online communities.

It helps if, like in my case, are into functional programming, as people into that niche prefer working with other functional programmers.

I posted once with a seconds account on who is hiring, the amount of spam and fishing attempts received is crazy, 10-50 DocuSign and the like a day since then.

I decided I wanted a better job in 2025 after being at my company for 6ish years. I started applying to 2-3 jobs a day starting in december and reaching out to old contacts. Complete ghost silence and bullshit. Managed to get 2 leetcode screens that went nowhere even after doing alright on them.

Hit up an old college buddy on linked in, got a referral, went through a ton of interviews (6) and got a job in two weeks. It's nuts how far a referral will get you.

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