Ask HN: How do you find jobs to apply for? What's your main pain point?

Here's my big thing - interviews, recruiters, hiring managers are all trying to do one thing, and one thing alone - fill that spot. Many times, I don't think they care if it's a great fit for the candidate, and will paper over workplace issues or culture. In the end, sadly the problem is that the people doing the hiring and the person getting hired many times have completely different goals. Same for compensation.

Whereas for the candidate, it's really about picking the right company to work for and interview at.

People are really on their own to find the right fit, and it's certainly not easy. Finding your own fit can be tricky especially if you are changing roles and your resume doesn't look like what the hiring manager was expecting.

  - excellent senior developers already have golden handcuffs
  - there is high opportunity cost for switching jobs when senior 
  - for average price you get average talent, people with empty years

The second big problem is proving my abilities. Coding test might be good for baseline ability but you will not discover person leadership skills, organization, drive and mental health/strength. I have very little time to prep for advanced algorithm questions and my CS background is weak. My open source contributions are mostly drive by.

Third is the level of dysfunction in organization. On interview company would pretend how modern and forward thinking they are but in reality everything have yearly roadmap and pets servers on RHEL 5. Glassdoor is helpful but you can have great teams one part organization and terrible in another. By accident, you might join a manager building empire without interest in actual product. On the other side are teams driven by Product with painful level of tech dept.