[HN Gopher] I tried to automate job applications as a software e...
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I tried to automate job applications as a software engineer (and
failed)
Author : ukrainian
Score : 21 points
Date : 2024-04-08 11:40 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| yinser wrote:
| I also took a stab at this last year and made the mistake of
| using an email service as opposed to just using SMTP on my own
| Gmail. I'd love to see the open rates published, and response
| rates from this approach because this still seems promising.
| freitzkriesler2 wrote:
| The statistic information from such an effort would be really
| useful and very depressing.
| j7ake wrote:
| I guess this shows you how valuable references, connections, and
| networks are.
|
| If you don't have these, you have to go through the black void of
| dropping hundreds of resumes to get any response.
| jmcmaster wrote:
| Which is why if you're job searching you should spend a decent
| chunk of your time making connections. Go to meetups, work on
| open source, volunteer, join a hackathon if such a thing still
| exists near you as well as "job board" job searching.
|
| I read the evergreen "What Color is Your Parachute" when I was
| 18 or so (before the web), and it profoundly affected my take
| on job search (and sales). It gets updated pretty regularly
| though the original author has passed not that long ago.
| vertis wrote:
| 23 years in and all my (contract) work comes from my network.
| Parent comment is the advice you need.
|
| It's never too late to start, but it is hard to do on demand.
| Also the way you behave within a company will follow you. If
| you're NotAnAsshole(tm), can do the job and I've worked with
| you I'll help you get your next job for the rest of your
| career.
| __loam wrote:
| Don't work on open source if you're just trying to pump up
| your resume. Contribute only to projects you use and can make
| actually valuable contributions to. It does look good on a
| resume but telling people to do it because it looks good on a
| resume hurts the open source community imo.
| brailsafe wrote:
| It doesn't really seem like you failed, it just seems like it
| didn't have a positive result. You appear to have completed what
| you set out to do, but with nobody hiring, a stagnating economy,
| and a terrible source of data, it's just confirmation that it's
| time to pick up a job at McDonald's or something, because things
| don't look so great out there.
|
| Edit: To clarify, the Job Bank is a deeply unfortunate source of
| useful leads, as the author concluded, and is what I meant by
| "terrible source of data". My overall comment is regarding the
| state of what can vaguely be described as the market for software
| devs in Canada, but even now trying to get a job in a warehouse
| or whatever isn't proving fruitful.
| chinchilla2020 wrote:
| > with nobody hiring, a stagnating economy, and a terrible
| source of data, it's just confirmation that it's time to pick
| up a job at McDonald's or something, because things don't look
| so great out there.
|
| The jobs market is burning hot
| https://www.cnbc.com/2024/04/05/job-growth-
| totaled-303000-in....
|
| Tech is oversaturated, but tech is just one industry in the
| whole economy. People having trouble getting a tech job need to
| stop acting like their experience reflects that of other
| industries. Right now, manufacturing will hire pretty much
| anyone with a pulse.
| brailsafe wrote:
| That's a different job market. Canada's unemployment rate
| just tipped over 6%.
|
| I'd argue that manufacturing is also too broad of a category
| to be useful as something to mention, and every similar
| statement of "X industry is basically hiring anyone" rarely
| ends up being true in a practical way. It always needs to be
| qualified somehow, and usually by a lack of competition in
| the physical region of the facilities. That's my impression
| anyway, I'm sure everyone's experience varies, but people are
| getting ghosted for all kinds of jobs. Within tech, people
| often suggest going to work for government or some big corp
| that's not FAANG as the backup path, but you still need to go
| through similar hiring gauntlets or live down the street from
| the office, or in the capital, or meet a lot more of the
| silly list of requirements up front, or have specific certs,
| and they still need to be hiring
| __loam wrote:
| It turns out that automating both sides of a fundamentally
| human interaction didn't work, who knew?
|
| I think the real answer here is that just cold applying for
| positions is a losing game. Working with recruiters or talking
| to people internally at the company you want to work for feels
| like a way better approach right now. Everything I've heard
| about cold applying right now makes it sounds like it's a
| million idiots applying to everything with chatgpt and the
| companies using AI on their end to screen that firehose of bad
| applications. I get like 5 recruiting emails a week at least
| and when I was looking near the end of last year I could be
| pretty picky, so I disagree that the market is completely
| terrible. It's worse than before but for experienced devs
| there's still a lot of opportunities.
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