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Comment by cia_plant | Hacker News Reader

Being rejected repeatedly is disheartening for sure. However, 10 rejections is actually not that many, nor is two months a very long job search. Many companies have a pretty narrow idea of what a good candidate is - e.g. "5 years experience with X" or "agrees with the lead engineer about most things" or "can solve this tricky puzzle". I'm a very good developer and have a degree from a top school but faced many rejections early in my career (more than 10 I'm sure).

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Maybe you are applying to the wrong places? I work in Silicon Valley and without naming names I can say I know there are places that will settle for very mediocre technical talent because it is so hard to get people right now. Avoid the well known, "hot" companies, and the start ups. Look for big companies in hot job markets.

Could you give some examples?

Go on Dice, then search for any job listing requiring J2EE/struts/hibernate. The technical interview will consist of explaining what polymorphism is and a handful of OO design patterns like singletons and factories. Then give a poignant speech about the evils of multiple inheritance, why interfaces are better, why you love XML, why writing SQL statements in the code is wrong and the only way to talk to a DB is with ORM, and you are done.

Why is the only way to talk to a DB with an ORM? Why cant you have SQL in the code? Sounds like you think the only way to write well structured and clean code is by introducing more layers of complexity?

My dear, the parent was slightly sarcastic. But he is right, that in order to please the corporate ears, you need to sing the 'right song'. You get hired in no time. Learn the corporate buzz words, etc. Once in, you will meet some saner persons, which do the right job, so that you will not feel to be in some mental institution, where all speak some acronym gibberish.

I don't think those are the GP's thoughts; rather the GP is saying that if you say that you have those beliefs you have a good chance of getting hired at those companies.

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