Job search has been painful.
Last week a technical recruiter from Aha! found me, and I got an interview. I really liked their company and their employees seemed to be really happy. I especially liked that they bootstrapped themselves and didn't take outside venture capital.
I had a great initial screening but sadly the team didn't want to move forward with me to the technical interview. Maybe my recent work isn't good enough, wrong hiring time, not senior enough, or they found somebody else. I'll never know! But I was grateful to see how their process worked and it made me realize how rusty a lot of my interviewing skills have gotten.
The Circus
Interviewing for software engineering jobs is an entire job and skillset unto itself that has little to do with the job you will actually do.
I recently started trying to improve my job hunting skills using Taro. They have a lot of very helpful courses that help software engineers level up at both getting more interviews and learning how to pass the brutal technical interviews.
However, it also reminds me that this whole process is an ancient circus and I am merely one of ten thousand other code monkeys screaming and trying to jump through the flaming hoops in hopes of landing in a hell realm that is slightly more comfortable than unemployment.
Brute Force
So far I've applied to ~200 positions over the last couple of months.
The general consensus of the experts is that this is not enough, and that I should be aiming for around 1,000 applications to get more interviews that I can fail and learn from before getting an offer I am willing to accept. It's a numbers game and brute force is the current meta.
The average job funnel right now seems to be:
- 1000 Applications
- 30 Convert to Initial Screening (3% conversion)
- 3 Convert to Technical Interview (10% conversion)
- 0-1 Potential Offers after passing (33% conversion)
So... I gotta get my numbers up.
Song of the Week
There was a song that I was looking for a few months ago. I spent several hours combing through my songs looking for it but to no avail.
It popped up again for me today as part of a random shuffle, and I'm so thankful to hear it again. It's gorgeous and gives me goosebumps every time I hear it.
Thanks for reading :)
-Jason