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Comment by friendly_deer | Hacker News Reader

Can you share a little more? Because this is outside the norm I’m hearing and I’d like to know more.

I'm not a PM, but I PMed it very aggressively. I made a Notes.app personal wiki tracking every company I spoke to, with a timeline in reverse chronological order of every contact I'd had with them, like:

  Foo Corp

  Recruiter: [Jane Smith]

  * 2025-09-15 On-site prep call with [Joe Brown]

  * 2025-09-13 Coding screen with [Pat Doe]

I kept a "pipeline" note with companies in each stage, like:

  # Leads

  * [Adam Albert] at [Bar Corp]

  # Initial Contact

  * [Brenda Baker] at [Qux, Inc.]

  # Recruiter call

  ...


  # Phone Screen

  # Tech screen

  # Onsite

  # Rejected

  * [Shifty Corp] (they gave me the heebie-jeebies)

And then there was a separate Interviews note, which was a lot of the content from the Pipeline doc, but ordered chronologically and with more detail:

  # 2025-09-15

  * On-site prep call with [Joe Brown] from [Foo Corp]
  * Recruiter screen with [Chris Carter] at [Deluxe Pinkies]

  # 2025-09-14

  * Reference check with [Arctic Drilling and Waste]

And I replied to every recruiter I talked to, even if just to say "thanks for reaching out, but I'm looking for something more like ... right now", which often led to followups like "ooh, I have another client looking for that! Want to talk to them?"

Hyperorganization is one of my superpowers, and I leaned into it. Every morning I'd review the pipeline and timeline docs and ping every recruiter or company who I should've heard from but hadn't yet: "hey, it's me! Thanks for the chat the other day. Hope your Maltese, Mr. Pickles, feels better! Here's a picture of my cat waving to Mr. Pickles!" A lot of times that'd nudge them to respond and move things along.

I'm looking at my timeline right now and seeing the day where I had 2 recruiter screens, a tech screen, and an onsite. It was busy. But I was ready and willing to work, and at the end I turned down 3 pending offers to accept the one I most wanted.

Again, I count myself as exceptionally lucky. That said, half of "luck" is putting yourself in the right place, in the right condition, to jump on a good opportunity.

Awesome work! Really nicely built funnel. Great to hear people doing it the right way.

Thanks! I treated it as my full-time job and spent hours scrambling nearly every day. If things had worked out a little differently and I didn’t get a job in a reasonable time frame, I wanted to know it wasn’t from lack of trying.

Is this because you were talking to recruiters and they would respond? Because I've only been able to talk to ~three hiring managers this entire year. So the idea of lining up thirty interviews sounds preposterous, and not because it's hard work.

I followed up with the three of course, but was ghosted after one reply or so.

It's a little of that, and almost my particular job skills are still in demand right now. Just putting "looking for work" on my LinkedIn profile got the contacts flowing.

BTW, I did not, never, not once, apply to any jobs listed through LinkedIn this time around. I did that before and it was utterly demoralizing. Their ads were like "subscribe to LinkedIn Ultra and move to the top of the list of 9,000 people applying for this role!" I've never gotten a single hit from applying for a tech job through LinkedIn. I don't think that's actually a thing.

Thanks for the details—Its encouraging to hear how you approached it, and I’m glad it worked!

Obsidian app with it's latest "bases" feature (or Dataview plugin) would work nicely for this.

For sure. Or Bear, or Notion, or ...

There are a lot of things to track all this. I personally didn't want to spend more than the minimum time setting up and using the system, because last think I wanted was to get nerdsniped into inventing a job application tracking systems instead of, like, applying for jobs. That would've been a real risk to me.

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