My friend, this isn't personal, but a fact: you're privileged.

I sense you've never been in a position where you have $3,000 in the bank, your wife is depending on you to get through college, and you have to get a job or you lose your apartment.

Out here dropping stories about Evan Spiegel; gimme a break. Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.

The funny part is, I agree with your premise. You are indeed presenting the best way of opening doors. It's worked for me, and has opened many doors.

But only when I was in a better position. Till then, it was one of the worst things I could have done. Focusing on playing the hiring game would have put me in a much stronger position.

The comment you made is slightly out of touch. There's nothing wrong with that, but I think you'll maybe look back on it in 10 years or so with a wince.

In the situation I described above, where you absolutely need that job, all the people you mention have a good chance of forgetting about you due to day-to-day politics. Guess who won't? That recruiter. Because they get a cut of your salary.

Oh man, only if you truly knew how off-base this is :) My parents moved to the US with $2000, two kids (I was 11), and two carry-ons. But I'm not here to compete in the Victim Olympics.

> Most people don't know any CEOs, PMs, or hiring managers.

Good thing attending a hackathon is free. Good thing you can interact with literal SV royalty here on HN for free. Good thing you can contribute to famous OSS projects with minimal investment...

> In the situation I described above, where you absolutely need that job, all the people you mention have a good chance of forgetting about you due to day-to-day politics. Guess who won't? That recruiter. Because they get a cut of your salary.

Yeah, I disagree with this. I've been "forgotten about" and "ghosted" by more recruiters than I can remember. Not to mention that half the time my area of expertise wasn't even lined up with what they were looking for, and as soon as they hear about a potential pivot (front end to back end, engineering to product management, etc.) they jump ship. But people I've impressed (old bosses, old PMs, people I met through hackathons, obviously old founding partners) are always willing to come up to bat.

"A recruiter is your pimp and you're a prostitute. Work with them so they get you better dates." Was all she really told me on the matter.

From there, I reached out to recruiters and worked with them. I ended up choosing to just take contract jobs for the 1099 pay and flexibility. Plus, the guy I ended up working with was able to pimp me out more often and made more money. I got more and better work. Plus, they're stellar on re-writing your resume for you.

7+ years after leaving that, I still have a few emailing me with jobs. No one forgot me because I didn't let them. Recruiters are only shitty bottom feeders to folks with shitty, privileged attitudes. They like working with partners, not self-centered assholes.

Also, I call bullshit on your pivoting/jump ship comment. They jump ON folks that they can pad their resume and pimp them out for more money. The more roles you "could" fill, they can translate to a vertical and horizontal experience spectrum that crushes the competition, which they then sell you for double even though you're still only doing one job. They're the salesmen. Let them sell you.

That and my parents came with $15 bucks and a kid to the USA with the state funded sponsor disappeared with their grant the day before they landed. But hey, just like you, I didn't mention that to podium in the Victim Olympics. One thing I learned about all of us first-gens, we're all equally angry cunts.

Speak for yourself :)

it's survivor-ship bias at its most obvious. Most people are not getting jobs by doing something extraordinary at a public event and getting offered it right on the spot.

Yes, thanks for naming it. Most of the stories above this comment all have it to varying degrees. It’s funny to me how they all write that they do not want to put forth an entry for the ‘Victim Olympics’, yet they all do share their story anyway...

The fact that this term is even used by these folks (and this is the first time I’ve seen it), to me shows that there is an (possibly unconscious) underlying contempt, as well as a lack of Class consciousness. Which is quite scary for the power dynamics present in Silicon Valley and the still-early-days -digital realm, what with the dogmatic idea of ‘Intellectual Property‘, etc.

Instead of ‘Victim Olympics‘ we would all benefit from talking about ‘Magical Voluntarism’, as well as to take part in further critiquing the underlying systems.

I got a good college education and have a cushy software gig. Now I sit on my butt all day drinking LaCroix watching the checks come in. I sure as hell consider myself privileged.

Just because you started out lacking privilege, doesn't mean that you don't have it now.

There is a huge element of luck or privilege in having the intellectual space to be obsessed with code/math/business/design/etc at all, which factors in heavily as a filter, but yes, you need to do hella work as well. Being naturally smart is super helpful, too, and can cut the amount of work by a large factor, but by itself it's not enough.

If you think for a minute your experiences can be translated and reproduced by the masses, you're kidding yourself.

It doesn't work. Too many variables in life to capture all of them.

I'm imagining 20 years from now someone making IntervieweeBot, who will pass all the tests and STILL not get the job because the interviewer didn't like that indignant look in the robot's eye. Or MLHire, a machine-learning algorithm that reliably fails to predict what the employee will want to be doing at the end of their contract. It will make millions in a Series A, become hugely popular, then promptly forgotten after [Elon Musk-like in 20 years] fails to deliver.

EDIT: 80% chance of male pronoun considering the industry, but wasn't sure.

My parents also say this, except they say $40. But US immigration policies generally require immigrants to have some way of supporting themselves. While my parents didn't have much cash, they did have college educations and my father had been accepted to a PhD program — which is privilege.

I'm not trying to assume your parents' particular situations — just that there are things we unconsciously take for granted.

Refugees/Asylum-Seekers don't follow the same requirements. It's super hard to nail down as there are different types and most (that I've been aware of) are case-by-case situations. You have war, religious, political, stateless, there's many types and yea... I wouldn't discount what your parents told you. There might be more to the story they don't want to share.

Edit:- Apologies if I sound like I'm using a lot of anecdotal evidence/ grand-standing, but I had to disagree with that comment, and the best evidence I had was my own, although there are a lot of similar stories in the Street.

Edit 2:- I should add this too, since it is highly relevant to the linked topic. The people who referred/hired me later mentioned that a key reason for them taking me on was my startup experience, which was what the original link's author would call a "side project".

To be clear, I would always 100% recommend trying your approach. It's how I even got my start, back when I was 17. It really does work.

But it's also more effective when you're a young, wide-eyed student. People see in you what they saw in themselves: a young person, eager to learn and to do a good job.

The older you get, the more strings that attach. And you lose the charm of being a young ambitious person. People have more history by which to judge you. No one expects a sub-3 GPA student not to have resume gaps, or a degree, or leadership experience, or any of the expectations that come with age. It's just a fact of life. Even if it's technically ageist, I'd rather play the game and win, not argue the game isn't fair or that it should change.

The moment I read bottom-feeder, "bottom-of-the-totem-pole, recruiter," etc, my recruiter buddy from St Louis immediately popped to mind. We weren't friends outside of work, but he placed me at two big financial companies over the course of two or so years. When I was fired from the first one solely due to showing up late (because undiagnosed narcolepsy), I was worried the recruiter's firm wouldn't want to do business with me anymore.

I shouldn't have been worried at all; they care about their cut, and I cared about not running out of money.

But I probably would have worried a lot more if I had secretly thought of him as some bottom-feeder loser, rather than a key who could open a door that was mutually beneficial. Because (a) business partners can sense when you think poorly of them, unless you're really, really good at hiding it, and (b) it would blind me to the fact that I needed him.

He was a cool guy on a personal level too. Had a house, dog, family, took me out to lunch a couple times, etc. He was doing better than I was at that point, for sure, even if I was in a stronger position long-term.

I guess the takeaway is, do the cold-email thing if you can (twitter DM works shockingly well for this); if not, try to find someone you know who might be looking; then recruiters as a fallback plan. But boy oh boy, if those "bottom-feeder recruiters" weren't there for me, I would have been screwed. :)

The privilege is simply thinking that you're better than the recruiter doing his job, or the woman at the store bagging groceries, or anyone else. A little twist of fate, being born to slightly different parents, not having the right mentor in your life, not having access to a computer when you were young... any of these things could easily have put you in their shoes, almost regardless of inherent ability. So it was just super shocking, I suppose, to hear such "honesty" about my cool recruiter buddy with a dog.

I don't think recruiters ended up recruiters due to familial circumstances though - many of them I know worked in the same fields they help recruit to, and largely pulled out due to burnout or some other unintentional consequences.

Also it is to be noted that recruiters are usually the only way forward once you reach a level of seniority - you won't be able to cold-email after a while.

My comment was largely targeted at the above comment which said that it's only possible through being part of the privileged.

However, in the common use on the Internet, this word very often just stands for "you're better off than ${some group}, so your opinion is invalid and you should repent" dismissal/personal attack combo. Which makes knee-jerk reactions to its use, if not justified, then at least not unexpected.

LinkedIn exists for exactly this reason: as a directory of hiring managers you can connect with.

Cold-emailing / cold-calling people for finding roles is a good way to accomplish this, if you craft your pitch right and do your research well on how you can deliver value.

That's basically what branding is about, isn't it? Identifying where and how you can make a difference better than other people, making that your elevator pitch, and broadcasting that to people who need that difference in their lives.

I'm not impressed by the other comments arguing reaching people in positions of impact is next to impossible, at least in tech. There are two high-schoolers right now in the latest batch of YCombinator who literally cold-called Sam Altman for funding, and got it (see https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2017/08/11/2-t...).

This isn't even that crazy a way to connect with people. I once knew a recruiter who was fanatically inventive about connecting with people - he once got a cybersecurity consultant who was perfectly happy with his existing job to switch roles by (1) using the Wayback machine to find copies of the engineer's (taken-down) personal website, where he had his Foursquare link, (2) using the Foursquare API to figure out he enjoyed playing chess at his local club and would frequent a bar, (3) showing up at said bar, striking up a conversation about chess with him, getting him to talk about his job, casually slipping in that he's a recruiter for company X looking for someone exactly like him, and leaving a business card behind.

This is not an endorsement of that guy's method - just a reminder that there are crazier things in life to do than picking up the phone and trying your luck.

The whole point is that impressing these people is _pointless_ because they'd be impressed by a snow globe and mostly know nothing about tech. They're just a roadblock between you and the other technical people that you have to go round.

It's totally a shit job in a ton of ways but the best recruiters absolutely make a killing. It's a sales job though so what makes a recruiter good from an engineers prospective is orthogonal to what actually makes them good.

Everytime I ear people here bashing recruiters I feel the urge to shout: It's not about you it's STEM. Enjoy your prized ticket but be humble.

It might actually be 10000 to 1. I HAVE worked with tech recruiters (I can think of a specific local company) that were good, but it's incredibly rare outside maybe a major metro.

When I was at my lowest point I was delivering sushi rather than waiting for a job that would look good on a resume. Most of the people in desperate situations like that aren't (don't have time to be) padding their resume with side-projects, and therefore aren't the topic of the original argument.

It bugged me at the time, but I’ve come to accept he was probably correct. It’s not a good idea to bring attention to matters that might work against you. Focus on selling yourself, and treat your business associates as customers (in the sense that you work hard to please them, in exchange for getting what you want). http://www.paulgraham.com/judgement.html

It’s important to know how people in better situations open doors. Because you can play that same game, with crafty use of time and words. And you might have more time than it seems, even in the position you mentioned (though I would not ever say it’s a guarantee): between Uber shifts, I’d park in a random store parking lots and build things, partly to keep sharp, but partly to get a job at a certain place, since the work was related. I didn’t get that job, but I gained so much knowledge that turned out to be much less obscure than it seemed; I still use it to this day.

You’re right in general though. People on a strong upwards trajectory have different concerns.

Sanitary worker turned software engineer is a very powerful story that can help you get a job, since if you’ve shoveled shit, fixing a nasty bug or doing a menial task wouldn’t be beneath you, and you’d make sure you do a good job. Managers seem to like that.

I drove from PA to CA when I was 18, working along the way on my own business, and got a job in SV on my third interview as a "software engineer" making 65k. Bottom of the barrel coding job.

I'm somehow privileged now? Because I worked literally every day from the time I was 17 in high school until I got a full time job. Right.

Yeah. Lots of privilege.

Anyway, no need to defend yourself against random internet people.

In the end it’s all down to hard work and a bit of luck (the people not doing the hard work part will never be in a position to make use of the luck).

We actually ended up loosing the farm house to the bank. I say farm house because that's an easy way to describe it, but it was really just a house on the edge of another farm in the middle of nowhere. Lots of peace and quiet. :)

"a special right, advantage, or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group."

In this case, the "advatange" would be 'able to find job without going through recruiter' and the 'particular person or group' would be 'the group of people who (through their hard work or otherwise) are sufficiently talented/and or secure enough in their career'

Anyway it's sad this this word has such a negative smell attached to it now, thanks to people using it to shame people on the opposing side of internet arguments.

Frankly, the recruiter route is simpler and has a higher success rate than what you did.

You don't need to know them personally. Most companies (small companies at least) post job advertisements on their website and you can apply via email or a simple application form that goes directly to the hiring manager.

I managed to get my first dev job with zero professional experience (and I mean zero, I'd literally never worked any job before), zero "networking" activity, and only high school qualifications using this method, and it's only gotten easier since then.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars / But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Your implication is precisely that recruiters are useful as a last resort. Wisdom beseeches to avoid decisions where that becomes necessary. Where, clearly, the recruiter is just using you and you are using them as a stop-gap measure.

Yet wisdom is considered privilege now?

It’s an advantage to conceal that fact, and the one company I did disclose it to, fired me about a month later. For completely unrelated reasons that totally didn’t violate any disabilities laws, of course /s.

It was also partly my own fault, but in hindsight I wasn’t able to recover until I even understood what was happening. I wrote a bit about it several years ago, shortly after being diagnosed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10984478

So my career progression has been more of a stochastic random walk. And I’m fine with that. :) Ended up being able to contribute one or two things to the ML scene, which is all I really wanted anyway. Just a scientist at heart, I suppose.

There’s nothing wrong with being used, and using someone, by the way, if it’s mutually beneficial. Aligned incentives are how society comes together.

Ideally people are able to work with each other’s upmost abilities rather than view people as a threat to their own job security and career progression. :(

Lol of course disadvantaged minorities were treated far better in the olden days. /s

No matter how we feel, the process still goes through recruiters.

In a company I used to work for, we built a way where we removed the company and uni name to remove biases from recruiters. Most recruiters flat out refused to use it and trust us because they considered that a very important signal. The decision is not upto just developers.

> I heard a fun anecdote of Evan Spiegel attending an LA hackathon maybe 6 or 7 years ago. Some nerdy engineer showed him that he figured out how to get around Snapchat's spam filter. Spiegel offered him a job on the spot.

I am sure we will all have our anecdotal examples like this and I am not against side projects. I agree with the post author that side projects are great, but don't expect them to count towards your next job. If they do, then great.

That's right and they simply look for keywords on my various online profiles and send me the standard "I'm really impressed by your experience, I think you'll be a great fit" message, even though 50% of the time I'm clearly not a great fit. Why do they get this wrong? Because they are "are bottom-of-the-totem pole, lowest-common-denominator bottom-feeders" to quote the parent post...

PS - I wish it weren't so.

I heard a recruiter once (socially) tell me that they ignore all resumes with foreign names for sales positions because on average their yield on such calls is too low to bother.

Fair -- absolutely not.

Optimal to recruiter -- probably.

Good for the organization - no.

Good for society - no.

I'd love if there was something company owners and operators did to prevent things like this which are local maximums but globally inefficient (as well as unethical and unfair)

Well, continuing your line of thinking: what's the incentive structure for company owners/stakeholders? And how does it stimulate them to seek global efficiency?

In vernacular, "theory" is completely different from the scientific jargon meaning of a "theory", which leads to people saying "Evolution is just a theory".

Similarly, the economic jargon term "efficiency" is not at all the same as the commonplace definition you used. The economic definition barely covers anything beyond profit maximisation and cost minimisation and is precisely the reason we see so many externalised costs. Companies are "efficient" only in monetary terms, but that doesn't preclude waste, missed opportunities, myopia and environmental or societal fallout.

There probably are some high-quality-only recruiter groups out there, but they're not what most companies use. Which is probably why referrals are so valued in many places.

Does it? Idk, maybe it’s because I’m not a SV SWE, but I’ve found all my jobs through my network.

The other is how are you getting the job. Are you sending in your resume through a jobs site or are you calling your old friend the startup CTO to see if you can help out? Side-projects, failed startups, and networking will make the latter strategy easier for you but won't help much with the former.

Looking for a senior role through an impersonal application process depends very heavily on your primary, full-time employment track record. Otherwise I think there is still real value in developing along other lines.

I've been doing freelance for a few years now, but when I was hired at two startups prior to that, in each case it was clear that my side projects were the driving factor. (The first time, it was an offer directly in response to a ShowHN I'd posted; the second is harder to explain since it comes down to a series of calls/emails with the guy who hired me, and the fact that my unimpressive formal schooling was in stark contrast to everyone I worked with.)

In any case, during that time I'd turned down many inquiries sent to me by people potentially interested in hiring me, and the only places I applied to I was hired at.

More recently when I've tried applying for positions it's like my portfolio is irrelevant. Where previously those projects were met even with astonishment at times, and frequently with what seemed like genuine curiosity, now it seems like people are more interested in 'gaps in my resume' (where I was in fact working on more research or entrepreneurial software projects).

What's strange to me is that I wasn't particularly young during the first phase I spoke of: I posted the ShowHN that landed me my first real startup position when I was 27 (I'm 34 now)—so it's not like people's reactions to my projects were about it being impressive 'for my age' or something.

It seems like more and more the work I've done on my own on is irrelevant or even seen as a negative, while more traditional resume items take the forefront.

Reading your story I would not be surprised if the problem was that the side projects strategy has topped out for the current level of impressiveness and publicity. I bet increasing either would improve results. If you look at Greg Kogan’s website[1] since he’s a consultant too there’s nothing about any impressive educational background. It’s all research and case studies. Blowing your own trumpet more, whether by speaking at meetups and conferences or creating digital artifacts that anyone can find on your website and then telling ten people who might be interested and might share might help. Both of these help more as they are performed more consistently, obviously.

[1] https://www.gkogan.co/

The later rounds you are going for experienced positions, they have much higher expectations. They want to see successful experiences at previous companies, building things (preferably the same thing they are doing), working with coworkers, delivering in a more-or-less corporate environment. It's completely different expectations. A side project is out of touch at best.

Really what happened was you spent 4 years on an entrepreneurial journey that involved products, services, and R&D. That the services side provided the revenue to support the other segments is exactly how that business is supposed to work. It's how IBM works.

1 was from a college recruiting visit.

1 was from a direct, blind application.

1 was from an in-house recruiter.

2 were from third-party recruiters.

There's a pretty simple flow chart for getting hired at a bay area company:

1. Go to MIT, Stanford, Cal, an Ivy, or CalTech and make sure you have linked in.

2. If 1 isn't possible then make a friend who works where you want to work and get a referral.

3. Cram leetcode

That's basically it.

Don't give up doing side projects and things you actually enjoy because that's how you learn.

I think you're also overly harsh on recruiters (they're not 'bottom-feeders'), they're friendly and can help you out - but they're just looking in a very narrow subset. Basically the graduates from those schools and people already employed at FAANGs.

Disclaimer: I don't have a FAANG on my CV.

This is also true, fwiw, of how I recommend switching teams within a company. Go sit with them, see what they're up to, establish a mutual fit, then ask their manager to sort out the transfer with your manager.

Well that's not entirely true, I did finally get an offer last week but it was downgraded from the advertised offer to "let's try out 3 months contract first".

I've never seen any medium-large company where any single person was able to take a decision. Large companies cut all hiring power from their middle managers, forcing to interview with a whole panel, this prevents manager from favoring friends and building a fiefdom.

> An individual example is useless when the question is about if something works at (even minor) scale

That is incorrect. The plural of anecdote is data.

Someone wins the lottery every week. What are the odds of winning the lottery? Is playing the lottery a good strategy to make money?

"Usain bolt won the olypmic gold medal many times (n=8).

If winning the gold medal was so rare, what are the odds that people like Usain Bolt exist?"

I do like that phrase a lot, though it does have its limits

I guess maybe that’s counterproductive for a job as garbageman, but...

At the start up I interned at during the beginning of my career, I got the interview and the job because I knew one of the developers. Every other job has been bog standard: apply , talk to recruiter, do phone screen, do onsite.

Recruiters are just people just doing their jobs. It's a shame that you've labelled a diverse group of people so heavy-handedly.

Outside whatever thin veil of prestige your job offers you, the larger world couldn't care less about what you do or what you make.

I don't know whether this is a flippant answer... but to get a job so they can eat.

Assuming he's in France, by "recruiter" he means company recruiters / HR. Your CV and first phone interview always go to a recruiter at the company, that's the first person you have to talk to (and impress) to have a shot at any job.

American might understand recruiter as an external agency, there's no such thing in tech in France. There's no CEO/CTO either, they are sitting idle out of sight collecting money never interacting with the company or any employee.

In large US companies, they're more a public figure and who negotiate large contracts in person and send regular emails to employees telling them they are the greatest company and the greatest employees in the world.

In French companies. CEO/CTO are basically absent, they don't exist and don't send any communication. You can ask some French workers who are the executives of their company and they probably have no idea. The startup scene being pretty weak with no unicorn, there isn't any example you could quote either, there isn't a French Zuckerberg or Elon.

If you wonder who's there for real, there's a bunch of rich folks who sponsor one another to board and executive seats of the 100 largest companies and that's about it.

I just want to say there is at least one unicorn in France, BlaBlaCar. Granted, it's not as big as FB. But unicorn nevertheless.

This reads like an overly pumped up alpha macho business guru telling his disciples how to "crush it".

I’m not going to go through and read a bunch of random code by myself, when I can just ask a couple of questions, and get the same information quicker. They are just too many resumes to read.

Seriously, all side projects tell me is that you spend your free time coding, instead of hiking, or some other hobby.

The idea that you need hobbies that match your work is as dumb as expecting a funeral director to embalm cats on the weekend.

Also the higher your position the less side projects matter because it's your main job responsibilities and performance that's in focus, not what you do on your own time.

But for a lot of people, recruiters reaching out or applying through a portal is the start of many new positions.

Yeah, they are. They're also how most people find jobs before we reach the career stage of being able to call a friend who knows a guy who works at a place.

Secondly, Bottom of the Totem Pole is actually the revered position[1]. Bit of an amusing cultural knowledge oversight on the OPs side ;-)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totem_pole#Meaning_and_purpose

Hah, this is super interesting. I'm almost certain that I heard or read the "bottom-of-the-totem-pole" saying before, but you're totally right that I may have reversed it!

OP disparages people in my sister's line of work as "bottom-feeders", which is just a more euphemistic, if not cowardly, way of saying 'parasite', or 'scum'. My point is to draw attention to the decent people who work as recruiters (I'm implicitly holding my sister here as the archetype of a good person) and expose the original insult as unwarranted. An axe murderer is clearly someone who is indefensible, so could never be invoked as a positive example in argument with a statement like "Axe-murders are the worst people ever!"

Also, an 'axe murderer' is a caricature of a real murderer, used in comedy, horror films etc..., and not a honest counterexample to my sister.

But I digress..., thanks for the note on Totem Poles, I was unaware!