Ask HN: I’ve been applying to a million jobs

1) Work experience. Let's face it, this always looks good to everyone looking over your resume. We all know that people hiring for an office have a bias for work you do in an office. I'm as guilty of it as the next guy.

2) Side projects. For me at least, starting stuff from the ground up (no matter how silly or niche) shows me the kind of code you write in your free time, which is a much better measure of your ability (but possibly a less rigorous measure of your success) than what you do at work, where you're constrained by deadlines, code reviews, and "best practices".

3) Open source contributions. This one is trickier; usually when you contribute to Open Source projects, you're doing small pieces of the big work that needs doing, and there isn't much decision making/architecting going on. Speaking as someone who's currently trying (and failing....) to get into Linux kernel contributions, 90% of the issues you're going to come across that are within your abilities to fix are the kind of thing that a more experienced dev could do in 20 minutes, but doesn't have the patience to sit down and do it (due to being busy with more important/pressing work). So, the vast majority of the work you'll do (especially early in your career) is going to be bound in scope by your lack of experience, and won't be as impressive as engineering something from scratch.

In general, WRITE CODE. WRITE LOTS OF CODE. And show off whatever you can. And try to follow best practices, e.g. using CI/CD, writing good tests, using proper style, designing and documenting your architecture, etc.

You're correct about generalizing duties and skills. Bullet points on resumes that talk about non-specific day-to-day responsibilities are mostly filler.

I second what fecak and others have said which is it's much, much better to be very specific about what you want and spend much more time on a few applications than generally put your info everywhere. You also need to be specific and tailored about your skills and the role you're looking for because it's hard for companies to know what to do with generalists.

And don't lose hope!

More important, if you're hired for visuals I have to see that your style can be a good fit for my company. For most designers I'd hire, this usually means they have past (or hypothetical) work displayed ranging from cutesy bakeries to engine manufacturers, with your typical corporate sites mixed in. It's hard to see how your git log -like look and tables of data or pictures represent you well.

If you're hired as a programmer, your JS screenshot tells me "this guy is very junior". Some thoughts that popped into my head while reading through it: your profit function does a lot more than calculate profit. It also reconciles dates (moment.js is a good sign), and computes interest at a hard-coded 9% (red flag). I have no idea what the 10 and 20 magic numbers are in the if statement, or why it's so repetitive. You also declare today on line 55, then essentially do it again on lines 67 and 68 without a good reason (from what I can see). Moreover, from looking at your table of data, you're clearly calculating the fees elsewhere which tells me you may be cutting-and-pasting code to get your profit number. Your text input experiment is great for learning but not something you should show off. It strikes me as a first-day jQuery toy for self-teaching.

So where do you go from here? I'd get a new URL (olivierbreton.io, maybe), clean up the design, and post more sophisticated examples if possible. Tell us what tools and technologies you know and what you're learning now. Don't try to sound like you've got 15 years of experience. Target a junior role with phrases like "I'm eager to work hard and learn". Apply to junior-level jobs you'd actually like to have and know about the company you're applying to. Hope that helps, best of luck!

> I'm completely agreeing with you, but I cry a little tiny bit inside. Sad that its this way.

Me too. When did tool jockeying and lib/api wrestling become equivalent to "skilled techie/engineer"? Oh you're into algorithms, programming languages, realtime performance? Pooh-pooh on that, tell me your decades-long "experience" as a [cloud stack X] / [reactive framework Y] / [agile scrum devops continuous integration yadda-yadda Z] .. "engineer". Yeap that's what we call nowadays what you old grumpy neckbeard geek (rather than fashionista bespectacled over-groomed metro "geek") still call inane trivial "habits/rituals not skills".

Rant over =)