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.This is horrible advice and exactly why the job market is so broken.
For the poster: was their method a good use of their time? is the job "found" a good fit really? will they last in this position?
For the hiring company: was their method a good use of their time? is this person in any way a great fit? will they last in this position?
The poster complains that few companies sent him a rejection note! Why in the world would they? The poster was protective of their time, and should rightly expect the hiring companies to do the same.
Yes, the job i found is a perfect fit for me and my skillset. I did not fake my way into something.
and my point is: if you genuinely apply to a position and you never even hear back from them, not even to reject you, it doesn't make sense to only apply to a handful. again, emphasis genuine application; answered all their questions and the role is a fit for my resume. That's why you have to spray and pray.
You may have indeed found 450 real and fictitious openings that would be a great match for you. Yes, not impossible. Still the practice puts the employers themselves in a position where these resumes and answers cannot possibly be read. Not carefully, not at all. Again no blame one way or the other. I'm just arguing that we cannot expect the employer to carefully consider all these applications. There is no point in being shocked / surprised / whatever by this. The sprayed and prayed applications will not be read carefully. The employer will find whichever shortcut to sift through the pile and will carefully consider only a handful of all these applicants. Or hopefully, will see the light and consider other kinds of applications - such as network leads (but there are other options.)
My argument is about what we do next. My answer is that it cannot be job postings and answers to job postings. That ship has sailed. (And nonetheless, congrats on your new job.)
I think you misunderstand. I did not apply to the same job 450 times. These were 450 different companies/positions that aligned with my resume.
> I'm just arguing that we cannot expect the employer to carefully consider all these applications. There is no point in being shocked / surprised / whatever by this. The sprayed and prayed applications will not be read carefully. The employer will find whichever shortcut to sift through the pile and will carefully consider only a handful of all these applicants.
Which is exactly why one needs to apply to many jobs. Almost every job on linkedin has had over 100 applicants after it's been up for a few hours. If you just apply to a handful, there's little chance you'll find success.
I didn't mention it before, but a CFO friend of mine is the one who told me to spray & pray because it's what she had to do and encouraged me to do the same. She was initially against doing it herself, but she changed her mind. And she is a C-suite and is someone with a large network.
No misunderstanding. Since lots of people operate like you did - more or less - that's the more or less result.
> Almost every job on linkedin has had over 100 applicants after it's been up for a few hours.
Well yeah. If your job search is going to be answering postings on anything - if you START with the linkedin posting as a given - then you will be competing with hundreds of garbage applications. Yes of course. Which means the employer won't read these all carefully (not possible). And the interview process for these will be aimed at filtering the garbage. And you won't like it. Etc etc.
And no argument that sometimes it works. Of course. It's a common way to go about a job search and on average people do get hired in the end, after a lot of nonsense. Everyone also complains a lot about a broken and inefficient hiring process. The inefficient hiring process is co-evolved with this approach.
People also mention approaching the right people and being fast-tracked through the hiring process. That is also a thing.