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Tell HN: My advice after I applied to 450 positions before getting hired

123 points usernamed7 | 1 comments | 30 Aug 25 10:46 UTC | HN request time: 0.261s | source

I wanted to briefly share my experience as a senior engineer with 15 years of experience trying to find work in this market, because it was exhausting for me and i'm sure others will appreciate the perspective.

As the title says, I have applied to over 450 positions. Most companies did not even send me a rejection. Ghost jobs are a thing, so are fake roles to get you to signup/join some rando job board.

I interviewed for a director of engineering role, and all interviews went well, but they ghosted me at the end.

I did several take homes and all were accepted, but companies dragged their feet on next steps.

I did reject a few kinds of roles: ones that used AI for interviewing me, ones that had me do a coding challenge as the first step, and jobs that had "no working hours" and expected you to be "on" 24/7.

Many of the job applicant expected me to answer asinine questions like "what excited you about this role?" and would say things like "don't use AI! we want your true self" or would go so far as to try to get you to agree to their AI interview policy. As If.

I eventually did get hired as a software architect. the company that hired me was very professional, respectful, forward thinking (i used windsurf during the interview) and did not play games with me. They had a 4-step interview process, and asked a lot of good questions. One of the best interview processes of my career.

My advice to other engineers on the job market:

  1) Spray and pray. If its vaguely a fit, apply. It's a numbers game. Be shameless. 
  2) Always be willing to walk. Protect your time. Don't waste your time on lengthy job applications that take too long to complete. Some hiring managers will gladly waste your time. (one job application explicitly wanted you to spend 20 minutes filling out theirs)
  3) Don't do coding exercises before you interview with someone, be weary of asymmetrical time expenditures. see #2. 
  4) You can probably do a lot of different roles, "prompt engineer" is a real job title companies are hiring for, for example. 
  5) Work a couple of different job platforms. For example I used linkedin, dice, ziprecruiter, weworkremotely, and rubyonremote and a few others.
  6) Use AI to generate your resume, but feed it all the context of your work history (don't misrepresent your skills)
  7) Use AI to fill out asinine job application questions, but if they ask you thoughtful questions answer those yourself. I got the interview for director of engineering because i answered authentically to thoughtful questions.
  8) Pace yourself. Spend a few hours a day at it then come back in a day or two and go again. 
  9) Work on a side project or learn a new lang/framework in parallel. 
  10) Interviewing is like dating, everyone is looking for something different, and some don't really know what they want. Not a you problem.
  11) If they use workday for their job applications, bounce. It's the worst. 
  12) It takes time as roles become available. The job you end up getting might not open until 2 months from now. see #1.
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dakiol ◴[30 Aug 25 12:07 UTC] No.45073928[source]▶
I don’t know in what world you live (or in what world I do live for that matter). I used to apply to one or two jobs in the past when I was looking for something new. I prepared each interview in advance for a couple of weeks. Nowadays it’s harder… but I apply to 3 or 4 job ads, not 450! It’s harder because obviously it takes two or 3 times what it used to take me. I have around 12 years of experience in a few different tech stacks, I read tech books regularly, I don’t have a good professional network, I do find jobs via linkedin, I’m based in western europe, and I have a masters degree in comp sci (but no one ever has asked me to show my degree).

In my cv I care a lot about the details: the typeface, margins, grammar (I use llms since i’m not a native speaker), bullet point order, succinctness, etc. Perhaps that counts for something. Then if I get an interview, that’s like already 50% of the job done. Im an easy guy imho. I have failed mainly systems design interviews, so that’s where I put some work nowadays.

replies(3): >>45073944 #>>45074065 #>>45075756 #
Eduard ◴[30 Aug 25 16:07 UTC] No.45075756[source]▶
when was the last time you applied for 3 or 4 jobs and already got a job? Things got complicated quite recently, maybe since only one or two years.
replies(1): >>45078008 #
1. dakiol ◴[30 Aug 25 21:07 UTC] No.45078008[source]▶
3 months ago. Again, I do deep research for every company I apply for (e.g., search for employees in linkedin, check glassdoor reviews, check for potential code tasks in github, read the company/employee blogs, etc.). The research could take me several days up to a max. of one week (because more is just too much info too). I tailor (to a degree) the cv for the job (I try that at least I do have experience with 50% of what they ask, but let's say they ask for Python and I have mainly Ruby experience, well, I dedicate a week or so to brush up on Python and then I swap Ruby for Python on my cv. This doesn't work with every tech stack, of course, but works for the mainstream ones).

Another "trick" (common sense from my point of view) is to schedule if possible the first interview in the middle of the week. Typically I would schedule for a Wednesday/Thursday so that the second interview can land on the next Monday or Tuesday, that gives me at least 4-5 days to prepare for it. I try to avoid first interviews on Mondays because then it's more difficult to schedule something for the following week. I also notice that interviews with engineers scheduled in the afternoon (between 2 and 4pm) are rather "softer" than those in the mornings (I don't know why, perhaps everyone is just a bit sleepy after lunch perhaps?). I wear a white t-shirt to avoid any kind of subconscious prejudices on the side of the interviewers (you never know what kind of people are on the other side of the screen). And many more "tricks". I know that the core of the matter is to pass the challenges, but I do care about every single detail. I write down exactly how I'm gonna introduce myself, I prepare in advance potential questions like "tell me a project you've worked recently" to the point that I feel super confident talking about them. I don't leave anything to chance, but of course I may fuck it up sometimes (and I did 4 months ago in the systems design interview).

In any case, I could easily submit my cv dozens of times, but I find that preparing exhaustively for a couple of weeks for 1 or 2 jobs works best for me (based on previous experience. I have worked for around 5 companies so far in my entire career).