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.In my experience it’s much better to spend much more time on a target application to a company you’ve researched and maybe reached out to people or met current employees.
An applicant could probably get the best of both worlds by creating a preferred and a fallback tier; fallbacks get the spray and pray, and the preferreds get a customized resume.
Spray and pray overwhelms the employers with low quality applicants, which leads to a lot of broad generalizations and generic qualifications being used to weed things down to something manageable.
For those who don’t want to put effort into applying, they should just be throwing their resume into a pool, imo.
I say this as someone who just posted his resume on a job site and waited until I got a call. It took about 8-12 months, but have been working at that job for almost 20 years now.
When interviewing people, a big pet peeve of mine is when the person seems to have no clue what job or company they are talking to. It implies spray and pray, and even when they got a bite, they couldn’t be bothered to look us up and see what we’re about.
This is very, very far from the reality we're currently in.
I mean yeah that just demonstrates poor judgement. The hitrate from interview is enough higher than from application that "spray-and-pray" should no longer apply, the whole point is to save effort for jobs that are worth taking seriously and bothering to interview you is a strong signal of that.
Perhaps the future will be people of various talents and ability levels first applying to various resume pools, which job offerers then use as a first pass filter for high quality candidates. Then down the line these same candidates, if they do apply for a new job directly, might list "I belong to So-and-so Pool" as a line item to separate themselves from the pack even among job offerers who don't actually dip into that pool. Not entirely unlike working at FAANG today, to open up interesting new positions tomorrow.