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Comment by Dylan16807 | Hacker News Reader

Most jobs are giving no feedback on B, and you can only stare at a wall and meditate on your own failings for so many hours before you run out of insights. Maybe one in 20 jobs you find something you can spend several hours on. You could always do showoff projects as a completely separate activity, but I don't file that under improving your application skills.

For C, I figure by the time you've written 50 proper and sincere cover letters you can do them in under an hour. What could you be doing that takes a very long time and still counts as a cover letter?

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>projects as a completely separate activity, but I don't file that under improving your application skills. <

Absolutely NOT my experience!!! In my case, being able to put "sideprojects" on the tabe, which were somehow adjacent to the role, it always made huge plus.

Currently I'm interviewing for a role for which they rejected a second interview after the first one, when i showed them something i've developed during my recent sabbatical - instead they asked just for completing a 2-slide-ppt and will hire me without having ever met (the corp office is 3 miles away from me)

I'll rephrase.

It's something that can help you get a job, but it's not "how do I get better at writing a resume?"

There's unlimited time you can put into side projects. But that's very different from figuring out what you did wrong when applying and trying to fix it.

And the time you put into side projects isn't based on how many job applications you're filling out.

It varies. Side projects are nice, until you have professional experience. Real experience will trump hobbyist ones 99.9% of the time.

Of course when the market gets rough, now they want both.

Very strong disagree: Showing interest for a distinct thing always helped me jump to the next adjacent square.

The modern job market disagrees with you, sadly.

I defo agree that unless you get to interview you're unlikely to get any feedback, but showing your application to others in the industry (or university tutors as in this girls case) and getting their feedback can be super helpful.

With C, I think it always helps to demonstrate some knowledge of what the company gets up to so if your application does get a second glance then it seems like you actually care about the company, and that does take time.

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