lossforajob

I regularly message/email my group of contacts asking about job openings, but they always say some form of "sorry, I don't know of anything right now" every time. Could be just a lot of bad luck and timing, I guess?

Buying someone a drink becomes surprisingly hard to do with only $48 in the bank. Some of them I can't meet locally, also, because they have moved out of state.

Saying it's straightforward is not the same as easy. Step 2 is definitely not second nature to me since communicating well on the job is different from communicating your skills well on an interview. I can do the former just fine, but not the latter.

Personal website:

This is something I don't have at the moment, though I don't quite agree it's truly necessary because the majority of programmers don't have/need one. So I could just aim to be like them. Since they "clock out" their mind after 5 every day not thinking about code and still be able to hold a career, then having a website seems irrelevant. They're able to hold a career by doing less than the recommended.

Projects:

I already have several on Github, some that have impressed bigger companies like Cloudflare and Coinbase and prompted them to give me an interview.

When I prepare for an interview I don't really do grinding for technical questions, or review things on a sheet of paper. I like to wing it and give it my honest try, because my mind is clearest when I don't have to consciously think of any body language or verbal cues over the phone.

Grabbing a coffee with people:

A lot of my colleagues live out of state right now so it'd be impossible for them. For others I'll see if I can actually balance my budget around it as silly as that sounds but like I said I have $48 and my next month's phone bill is going to use some of that.

I also regularly message/email my group of contacts asking about job openings, but they always say some form of "sorry, I don't know of anything right now." Every time. Maybe I have really bad luck and bad timing with talking to them.

I'm gonna try another side project but it's starting to get less motivating to do so when you want more instant gratification the more time passes by.

But it seems like nothing else matters to living on the grid if you can't grok one thing: job interviews. It's crazy to think one's entire livelihood revolves around that.

I keep hearing about the FAANG companies and I have to wonder what can I do to make my proactiveness pay off in getting into the running for job interviews? I feel like it's easier to get their attention as a CS student seeking internships than as a self-taught mid-level developer (which I am).

I have interviewed on two separate occasions by Amazon, and only contacted by Microsoft (submitted some forms, but they never called me back). Both times, it was from an internal recruiter making first contact with me. But when I try to reach out to them first (applications or LinkedIn), nobody answers.

Are these FAANG companies usually recruiting candidates on the basis of "don't contact us, we'll decide if we want to contact you"? Other than knowing an acquaintance that works in the company I see no other way to get into an interview more quickly.

My experiences from startups have been underwhelming for reasons similar to yours. I haven't been part of an autocratic ego-centric management, but I still felt like I didn't deliver any real impact. I was just told to fix bugs, close tickets, etc. Same cog in a machine feel but without the benefit of working closely with people to mentor you.

In the last startup I was in, even though we're in a team of only 3 engineers, implementing design changes was an uphill battle. The senior engineer lives in Eastern Europe so communication time was difficult, and he had a very impractical way of doing things (preferred his own hand-made JavaScript framework over third parties, no modules, no integrated testing). These things lead to making myself a harder sell for companies that follow less unorthodox software development practices.

Yeah, they can often be more freeform, but also by giving you the illusion that you can flip things around, or be a big fish in a small pond. Being that big fish is not good if the pond itself stinks.