How do you look for jobs in 2023?

Bit of a tangent, but what has been everyone's experience so far in 2023 trying to find a new job? I got really interested in this and have been passively researching it (HN, reddit posts).

My conclusion, so far, is unless you've got strong connections it's hard right now to find a job. Most job posting, as OP mentions get hundreds if not thousands of applications. Other times, I've personally also notice, candidates with perfect skill/experience matches get the same generic rejection ("we respect your experience but we're going to go with another candidate") or worse getting no response at all. There have been mentions of pseudo job posts (ie companies are just falsely advertising positions they are not actually look to fill). Ultimately, a really crappy situation for those looking for a job. Even experienced people, think 7,8,10+ years of experience, are seeing similar things unless they have a strong connection that get them to the final stage(s) of the internet process.

Happy to provide a links to relevant online discussions and articles about this situation if anyone is interested. Let me know.

1. Make friends with people at work

2. Eventually, some of those people will get new jobs, and they can refer you to their new employer (and vice versa).

3. Repeat for a few cycles and you have a network full of potential job opportunities without ever going through a job board.

Its rough out here. I've got 8+ years of experience and I've worked a breadth of experience as well. I'm scouring the posts here on "Who's Hiring", I work applications on LinkedIn, Speak with some recruiters, and I utilize Remote Rocketship. My network of connections is a bit smaller than could be useful (this is my own fault.) but I have also reached out to people I personally know who could vouch for me. A number of those are still working at my last job.

Sent out upwards of 500 applications, 10, 20, maybe 30 interviews even fewer that have gone to the 'final rounds' and even some very close calls. No offers yet.

I'm also spending this time learning new tech that interests me and working on a portfolio site that is true to those interests. This is slow going but I don't let it get me down (if I can help it) because I help my partner garden, raise our dog, and work on my other hobbies as well.

Indeed. Last year I more than doubled my income by applying with the “click to apply” feature on indeed with a 4 sentence long cover letter.

Later I had a couple short zoom culture interviews and a take-home project which I sunk 10 hours into and outshined 30 other applicants. Offer in my inbox in less than 7 days. Mind you, this was after a grand total of like 20+ hours of interviews at other companies, with on the spot algo tests and all.

Here’s what I’ve learned: I will not subject myself to algo interviews. I just don’t think that’s what I want the companies I work for to value most in their devs. I want take-home projects with clear instructions. I want culture interviews where they are truly trying to see if I’d be a good fit.

Since I got hired I’ve actually helped hire a couple devs. Even as someone who went the traditional route of majoring in CS at a university I’ll say this: I don’t care how you got your knowledge. I just want to see real projects you’ve worked on. The sheer amount of people who apply even from prestigious schools like Stanford who have a mostly empty GitHub is staggering to me. I don’t care how much money you spent on education, show me the code!

The truth is, most jobs these days are rather bloated themselves. I do wish you luck in finding a job, but I would also give you this following piece of advice: at the same time while trying to find a job, think about strategies where you can work less and contribute more to society in your local community.

I truly believe that the real opportunities out there are those which are mostly divorced away from the typical LinkedIn posting where it's just some company trying to push more consumerism on the world.

Do not be put off by the number of applicants of jobs on LinkedIn.

I hired two developers in the last few weeks via LinkedIn job ads and I can tell you out of 200 applicants there were less than 10 who fits the requirements.

I would also say make sure your resume fits the job, add your phone number and email address. Start with what's important, your experience and things that you're really good at.

Changing the resume to fit each JD would hard, but apply for jobs that your experience fit well.

Besides all the already mentioned, solid responses about looking for new opportunities (personal network, consistent daily applications, etc), it's worth noting this one too:

Become a regular contributor to specific open-source projects (esp if it's a growing and/or funded startup).

This approach might work better for those that are already comfortable w/ OSS and don't yet have connections. When applying to that company a bit later, obviously mention all the merged PRs.

For example, here's Posthog [0] showing you what you could help with thru a job post. You can find more companies like this one at Fossfox [1], shameless plug: I maintain that index rn.

[0] https://posthog.com/careers/full-stack-engineer-growth#typic...

[1] https://fossfox.com/

Reading about all you engineers with years of experience struggling to get a job is incredibly painful, but in some ways it's relieving to hear that even experience engineers are finding this market difficult. I managed to land my first job during the pandemic on a combination of self-education and a bootcamp. That job is over due to lack of funding and I have been applying non-stop for 6 months, 300-400 applications and just one interview. In the meantime, I'm pursuing a BSc part time, building personal projects, and working in the service industry. Finding that next role seems like it will an epic journey and I certainly don't count on finding a role, or giving up, any time soon...

I must be incredibly lucky, because every job I've gotten the past years have been through the "normal" channels, meaning that I found the job listing on some rather huge classifieds website. I then just typed up a honest job application, updated my resume, and applied for the jobs. Always got a reply, and eventually a job interview.

Should be mentioned that I live rather rural, and have experience (analysis and engineering) which makes me stand out from most other applicants.

Since 2004, I've sent out under 20 job applications. The past 5 years I've switched work twice (better jobs and higher salary) - so I don't know if I'm a good representation of the job market.

But most of my ex-colleagues that work as devs seem to get their interviews through their network. Usually goes something like this:

1) Company needs something fixed, or increase their headcount to meet goals

2) Dev: "I know this one guy/gal, I've seen his work and we worked briefly on a project"

3) Manager: "Great! Reach out to them and see if they're interested!"

Honestly just look for companies that have bounties on tickets in their open source software and make a name for yourself that way. They'll know your name when you apply. You'll start to make money right away too. [1]

[1] https://github.com/djadmin/awesome-bug-bounty

Once you've moved beyond a junior-level of experience, I'm not sure if there's a better way than working your network for opportunities. In my experience there is never, and will never be, a shortage of business people looking for technical problems solvers.

My data suggests that wages are down about 15% from their peak 2 years ago.

When I see people with 10+ years of experience struggle to get jobs right now it's almost always because they're filtering out good opportunities with their comp expectations.

For more junior folks the market is tough right now. It's going to be a grind but I'd highly encourage you to consider working with a third-party recruiter. You may need to try a few different ones before you find one that can get you placed but a good one will be worth it. All the normal advice applies: leverage your network and debug the problem. Consider where in the process you're dropping off. Are you not hearing back at all? Are you getting interviews but not offers? Work from there.

Dev wages have to come down. The last 10 years have been crazy. Lots of devs are paid like doctors, without the limited supply or years of expensive training. It wasn't going to last.

Also worth discussing: once you start interviewing, what can you do to get an offer?

Personal anecdote: I was laid off ~4 months ago. It wasn't that hard to get interviews. But then I bombed the coding interviews for several appealing positions.

I'm a very experienced developer, but I didn't realize just how much my programming-during-an-interview skills had atrophied. IMHO those coding tests were properly weeding me out, because it really looked like I couldn't program.

I'm now making time to work on practice problems, and I think they're really helping. I expect future coding interviews to go much better.

Conferences are a great place to network and find companies or people working on projects you’re interested in. These past two years, I’ve purchased my own ticket to the AWS re:Invent conference. I’ve made new connections and gained new insights by attending. I’ve also learned of some companies I’d be interested in working for in the future. Even though it’s expensive to attend, I view it as a good investment in my own career for networking and continued learning.

I don't. I gave up. It became an impossible task for me due to the lack of feedback in any possible action I take. I feel like I'm playing tennis alone in the court.

LinkedIn is still the main source I use. But sometimes I search on ATS boards to explore opportunity. For example, use operators like "site:greenhouse.io" and "site:lever.co" to search if there is any interesting opening.

My own search has been on LinkedIn, as well as sites like Otta. The key for me to get more callbacks has been to personalize my resume for each job description (I even made a tool to do it for me [0]) and then to follow up with the hiring managers for the job.

Out of the stacks of resumes that get submitted to the black hole, it really does feel like a grind, but the little bit extra by reaching out to the recruiters/hiring managers seems to make the boost to at least get to the first round screen.

[0] https://resgen.app

No one else has mentioned it but my last role was applying on the website of a company I wanted to work for. I chose 20 big companies, applied for 1-2 jobs each. This relies on internal recruiters that in many companies do nothing but some companies actually works.

Usually the form was one of those oraclecloud forms that take a while to complete. Half the companies I never heard anything but a few I got phonecalls and ended up with something I really wanted I was lucky. This was still early 2023 though.

I'm a new grad and I was extremely scared because of all the doom and gloom on HN and reddit. I also felt like new grads would be hit the hardest.

Come application time... it was totally normal. Had some interviews and some rejections. Ended up getting multiple offers with very competitive compensation.

While I may be the exception rather the norm, there are definitely companies that are still hiring and some that are just getting head count for the upcoming quarter. I would not give up hope.

A lot to unpack in the comments here and I'm ready for the downvotes!

First of all the credit market is in a crunch now and has been for some time. This makes investment rounds for small to medium sized startups both more difficult yield less. That means that hiring is slowing down if not straight up stopping for these startups.

Second, there's a lot of pessimism here but I think the future is still bright. We definitely have more developers looking for work than ever before which is part of why there's such a crunch. The good news is that most of these develops are boot-campers who only got into coding because they heard somewhere they could live in a van and make hundreds of thousands of dollars. Their lack of talent, is your ticket in.

Why do I throw them under the bus? Well, I think the industry has found that the truly 'talented' are actually passionate about software and didn't go into it just because Obama told them everyone needed to learn to code. We're seeing that although the market is flush with developers most of them can't code their way out of a paper bag. If it's not a basic CRUD system they're lost.

So invest in yourself and you should do well. Diversify and show your potential employer that you can wear MULTIPLE hats. Someone who can spin up a basic react app, debug a firmware project over JTAG, and train their own model with Pytorch is going to catch my eye in this market where everyone and their mother knows how to make a website and code up some JS.

Long story short - the market is tight right now. Low investor cash meets huge pool of wanting developers. Solution? Invest in yourself, diversify, stand out.

1. The numbers LinkedIn show apparently track clicks, not applications.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/mitch-king_have-you-been-put-...

2. My take on applying for jobs is that it's become so easy now to apply, that recruiters and companies are utterly, utterly swamped with applications. I suspect normally at most only the first 20 or 30 are examined.

3. I work as a contractor, and I'm on good terms with a number of agents. Speaking to one last week, he said his application email inbox has like 700 unread emails. It's impossible to process. Most of those emails will never be read.

4. The approach I'm now taking is to contact the good agencies I know, have a chat, explain what I do, and leave my CV with them. I think the majority (75% perhaps) of roles are filled before they are advertised.

5. A key necessity I've found is being prepared to relocate; it's often unlikely work will be where you happen to be living.

The cost of everything has risen tremendously the last few years. Profits are soaring. Do not accept a job that doesn't pay you more than you made at your last job. Investors are making a killing right now.

I was laid off 2 months ago as a fallout from pandemic and war (fullstack dev with 17y experience). i sent my resume to about 30 job posts on linkedin (nearly none with cover letter, as i just cannot possibly write 30 unique cover letters even with chatGPT) and wrote a “looking for job” post in 3 tech discord servers i was an active member on. The 30 linkedin applications totaled in one job offer and the three discord posts lead to one interesting job offer each. it took 1,5 months from start to first offer and 2 months to competing offers, decision and signing a contract. Pre pandemic it would take about 2 weeks for a first offer and i would mostly get them by recruiters contacting me on linkedin which is completely absent now. Bottom line is be active in tech communities you are excited about and reach out in the dedicated job channels on discord.

1. Personal network of non-recruiter acquaintances.

2. Recruiters (it's popular to hate them but they can help you land a job).

3. Scan the "open jobs" on LinkedIn and apply for them.

4. Post on some big board like Indeed (I set up a junk email account for this because 98% of the replies are junk/low-ball offers).

I'm a UK accountant, so not IT. But I never apply direct. I always use recruiters. I think the benefits are:

- recruiter usually only sends 2/3 resumes to employer, so better candidate-job match

- recruiter has relationship with the client, so is more trusted - recruitment is a sales job, so they want a better match.

- your first interview is with the recruiter, so less formal. If that goes well, they will make more effort to see your skills and expertise over other candidates.

- better jobs come thru recruiter. These are ones that dont get publically listed

- recruiter will pre-screen roles based on your salary expectations, so you do not apply to roles that have no salary. Saves everyone a lot of time

- you can ask recruiter more about the person the client is looking for, so know how to angle interviews and sole the clients problems

I've done a lot, got a load of interviews and it's all just dried up. It's pretty depressing too. I'm fortunate I can retire in a couple of years but I'd love a change to sink my teeth into before I finally put my feet up.

UPS is paying $100-200K for drivers and I can't find a decent plumber, electrician, roofer or concrete installer without paying insane costs and/or waiting for months. Something to consider!

The first step in looking for a job is not “apply for a position online”

If you are experienced, you’re much better off with: reach out to anyone you’ve ever worked with who is now at a company you might want to work at.

Google for them, guess their new company email, contact them on LinkedIn, DM them on Instagram.

Once you have a warm intro your chances of landing a job go up by 2-20x depending on the company and their funnel.

In the sense that it's primarily startups, YCombinator's workatastartup and Wellfound's job board are similar to the "Who is hiring?" threads, so you might have more success with those in terms of replies. Though as someone applying for 2024 New Grad positions neither seem particularly great for that, unfortunately.

In April last year, I developed a Python scraper that monitors several job sites and boards, and sends new STEM-related job offers to a couple of Telegram channels using a webhook. That way I'm always on top of which companies are hiring in my country, and what they are looking for in terms of positions and technology. I also monitor LinkedIn job offers, but when a new one comes from them, I try to find the original offer on the company site itself, and then add the company's job board to my bot.

I've applied to very few interesting positions and got a couple of interviews, but that's it, haven't changed jobs yet.

In any case, I've definitely noticed that some companies post job offers and conduct interviews just with market research purposes, they probably don't intend to hire anyone in the short term, or at all.

For all of you hiring managers out there, what's your opinion on product-focused engineers? Is that a desirable trait? Or would you prefer a candidate who could care less about the product he works on and only cares about the technology?

Question for the community: we're building a "talent pool" on top of our mass psychometric testing SaaS (hrpotentials.com). Our key thing is testing cognitive ability(ie ability to learn and problem solve) with computer generated tests, remotely.

Anyway: would you join such a talent pool (and submit yourself to free testing that takes an hour)?

We know it works in less in-demand fields as a way for employers to more objecitevly rate candidates. But the question is, if we can turn it into a tool for employment-seekers to get better opportunities.

I just figure I must be doing something wrong. Of all maybe 2 people capable of full time commute to an office in my town with a top secret clearance, 10 years experience with Node.js, and a CASP or CISSP I still can’t get invited to an interview for a job where those are the minimum mandatory requirements.

Check out https://simplify.jobs

I wonder what's a rough estimate of how many people find a job by first finding a company they want to work for?

I've been looking for a job for some time and I don't understand the complaints. For every job opening that is available for someone in Asia (that's me) there's like a hundred openings that are US-only.

Last time I looked for a job I figured out the segment I am interested in (IoT in my case), then promising companies, and then scanned those companies' websites for "careers" section.

I am a freelance software developer. While most of my work is from repeat customers or referrals, I actively look into the HN 'Seeking Freelancer' thread for interesting opportunities.

Jobs that are posted on companies' web sites (not on recruiting web sites) give a much greater response rate.

You’re probably not used to thinking with a “sales” hat, but you are selling yourself. Find the contact of your potential manager (engineering manager or whoever) and find a way to directly reach out to them and pitch them and the call to action is a phone call.

Cut through all the noise. This is the way.

Tech is a choked industry right now. Pivoting is probably smart if you’re able to do so. If you look on /r/forhire nearly 50% of posts are devs looking for work

you're not missing anything, the market is really that awful right now

Check out our job board at https://levels.fyi/jobs

We’re constantly iterating on it and the cornerstone of our board is the ability to filter opportunities by compensation. You can also set alerts for specific filters, and we’re always open to feedback!

Step one: Give all your bank passwords, employment and payroll information to some VC-infused startup run by foreign nationals who think of you like a farm animal and let them begin maintaining a record of your income, account and work history activity.

Step two: Give complete strangers at various companies you are interested in working at your permission to subscribe to that record.

Step three: Wait to be living in the street pushing a shopping cart and having the not yet fully matured descendants of very wealthy people bear false witness against you to try and get you to move along as you find new levels of dying.