Ask HN: What Tools Did You Use to Land Your Current Job?

I'm in the job search right now but I wrote my own little tool to scrape linkedIn.

It's a simple automation which searches through 10 pages of job postings and stores the results in a log file.

This alone is helpful because it helps me avoid getting distracted by all the non-job related aspects of linkedIn; click-bait headlines, cringe posters etc.

In addition it also filters out jobs that it has seen before. I found that the exact same job can be posted again with a different ID so I use a hash of the job description as the ID.

I also have filters for certain words like "7+" which I assume means 7+ years of experience which I don't have. It's not perfect but it works well enough. I hate reading a job posting which looks decent only to find hidden near the end that they want someone with over a decade of experience.

After a few days of using this tool consistently, I'll reach a saturation point which means that after going through the first 10 pages it will not find any new job.

That's not a bad thing. That's actually the goal. It means that when an actual new job is posted, my tool will help me see it through all the clutter.

The saturation point gives me a goal to reach every day. Instead of some arbitrary goal like sending out 10 applications or spending 1 hour every day, my goal is always to keep going until I reach the saturation point. This encourages me to be consistent and gives me a reasonable stopping point.

My tools: Deeply understanding the fundamentals of UNIX/Linux, networking, network protocols, SQL/databases, and various programming topics. It's been a solid foundation that's helped me for decades now.

My last round of interview all stemmed from posting on the Who Wants to be Hired thread. I examined a few months of previous posts and looked for descriptions people had written that stood out and looked good. I went back and looked at a previous month I had posted and noticed that post by me didn't stand out. I added a well written prompt about what I was looking in an organization and a role and I feel like that helped to give color to who I was compared to a giant list of technologies I'm capable of working with.

I also received feedback from people who reached out that they went and read my personal website / blog; that gave them better insight into who I was. Don't underestimate the fact that soft skills and communication go a long way in the interview process and software engineering as a whole. Having a blog, which demonstrates the ability the communicate over a written medium, I feel is a great way help yourself stand out. It isn't a requirement to land a job, but I think it helps.

Resume: I rewrote (well Claud rewrote but I helped) my resume in latex, which really made it easy to tweak things. I found that ruthlessly trimming unrelated experience helped the resume screening stage a lot. Latex also was nice for source control compared to my previous word doc which has evolved since 2008!

Coding: love it it hate it leetcode premium was worth it! I also set up a python project and used pytest to easily debug and step through questions, and add failed test cases from leetcode easily.

Behavioral: I used Google's live mode for Gemini to ask me common interview questions, and give me feedback. It turns out there is a big difference to having a STAR answer written out, and verbalizing it! That was good practice

System design: I didn't really need this but I heard mock interviews are the best for prepping here.

My tools: always kept a close relationship with a couple c-levels I knew. When the layoffs hit, I had an escape hatch. So I guess you could say I used the power of friendship <3

Friends

My tools: Microsoft PowerPoint, YouTube.

LaTeX (for my CV), a bunch of PDF (for examples of my work), experience, and some good references.

Making friends at work over the past 10 years. I know HN loves (in general, anyway) the transactional nature of work done as remotely as possible, but the more human side of work has benefited me in spades moreso than any technical work. Whether this is deserved or not is up to you, but in the end, for the most part, we aren't doing much more than tying various libraries together. Who you know if much more important than what you know.

Still searching.