Ask HN: Should I checkmate my employer?

For years and years I've had this horrible experience interviewing. Go all the way to the final round of on-site interviews (the panelists, day-long, etc.) then get rejected and nobody will tell me why. It's awful, beyond disheartening, and expensive in that it forces me to waste 60+ hours per company for absolutely nothing in return.

So this time around when I started looking for a new employer, I took a slightly different approach. Just like you I'm applying only for jobs that I'm qualified for, but instead of agreeing to just any interview with any company I could get even a modicum of attention from, I changed my way of thinking to "I want to LIKE where I work and the people I work with, and I want to do something more than make some Ivy-league rich kid even richer; I want to have a positive impact on people's daily lives somehow."

That led me to refocus the kinds of firms I was interviewing with. Instead of fintech, devops, or some other silicon-valley elitist crap, I paid special attention to small/mid-sized employers, particularly those who work with charities, non-profits, the poor, unemployed, or the government.

I took some other interviews with the other kinds of aforementioned places, and instead of just sucking it up and desperately suffering an insane interview process as usual, I screened them this time around. I asked recruiters and hiring managers what their interview process was like, and in several cases I ended up telling them I wasn't interested and refused to suffer their insanity. I went so far as to tell one guy his process was elitist bullshit and I had more sane options elsewhere, so why would I bother with them?

Probably not the smartest move, but I was pissed off. Haha :-)

In the end I wound up getting an offer from a government contractor (US) for $40k a year more than I'm making now. Health benefits are roughly equivalent, the retirement plan is better, I get to do the kind of day-to-day work I enjoy (I don't get to do this where I'm at now) and best of all I get to build/improve systems that help people and their families. And that means a hell of a lot more than grinding a job I hate all so some fortune 500 exec can get his next massive bonus while i'm drastically underpaid vs. market rate.

Another little tidbit I've personally noticed is that every job I've ever been hired for had an ex-military person in the hiring process, or as the hiring manager (or their manager). Every single one. I come from a military family (US Navy), though I never served myself (my loss). So my next job hunt I'm going to look for opportunities/industries with ex-military people involved specifically, and I'd be surprised if my luck didn't improve.

That's precisely how your bosses are thinking.

The key to negotiating job situations is to have several other offers lined up. Fix your CV and skills so that you're more desirable and the problem becomes considerably more tractable.

As a hiring manager, I don't care that you filled a 42U rack - I care about why. What did it accomplish? Did you do it with cost efficiency? What impact did it have on the business? What was the ROI on filling that stack? Why do you feel it is better to have filled a rack than to have scaled in the cloud?

Same with LOC and number of repos. Those simply are not meaningful numbers. I could go put 20K lines of code in 20 repos here in the next hour, that doesn't mean I accomplished anything. Tell us what that code does.

You say you need a larger staff, but you don't say what tasks they would do. What is not getting done? How are you managing to keep things running without staff? What more could you do with more staff, and again... what would the impact be on the business and at what ROI?

In short, if you want to tell a story that sells who you are, you need that story to be about how the business is a better place for your being in it. Less facts, more impact.

As for landing a new job with the salary you want, it’s a numbers game. You just have to keep searching, keep sending out resumes. And after a couple years at each job you often need to do it again if you want to move up.

I’ll throw in some of my job hunt tips (I just signed an offer this week after a two month search):

- Write cover letters. What I do is I take whatever they wrote in the job description about the skills required, and I jot down one bit of experience I have for each one that’s applicable. Then I massage that into a brief cover letter.

- Look for reasons to say no. Companies can tell if you’re just telling them what they want to hear. It’s important that you’re doing your half of the job, which is thinking about what kind of work environment you can be effective in, and discarding opportunities that don’t fit. This doesn’t have to be a lot of opportunities, but it should be some.

- Be interested in the people and the position. When given the chance to ask questions, act like you already have the job and start asking about the actual work. You should come across as interested in the work, and this also creates opportunities to show off what you know.

- Have a reason why you’re applying. I know the real reason is “I need money” but it’s important to have a story about why this company. Do you like the mission? Do you have an impression of what the people are like? Are you interested in some technical aspect of the work? Have a story from the start, and refine that story as you go through the interview process.

- Enjoy the process. This is hard, because you need to pay your bills, which ramps up the pressure. But it’s really important to find ways to enjoy the people and the process of interviewing. How you relate to people in the interview is how they’ll assume you’ll be in the job. You need to be someone that the interviewer would like to spend an hour with. Enjoy the moment to meet a new person. Enjoy the chance to talk about interesting subjects. Enjoy the game of solving a problem.

- Embrace failing and not knowing. It’s ok to screw up, but if you get scared and sad because you screwed up that’s usually game over. You should have two modes: 1) killing it, and 2) understanding, cheerfully, the specifics of how you’re not killing it. If you don’t know an answer, say you don’t know and be inquisitive. Try to learn something about the subject or the role in that moment. This buys you time and you might be able to course correct as you learn more. Worst case you might learn a little more about what to study for next time. Or you might learn about what kind of positions you’re not qualified for.

- Fudge your experiences a little in the positive direction. Every project has things go wrong, but you don’t need to focus on that. Emphasize what worked, to start. Don’t talk about sour relationships or your coworkers failures. It’s OK to have rose colored glasses about your work experience, the interviewer doesn’t know, they weren’t there, and it helps you come across in a positive light.

- Although you should emphasize positives in your career, don’t be afraid to talk about “learning experiences”. A perfectly acceptable anecdote is “we did X, and had Y go wrong, so I do Z now when I’m in that situation”. That shows critical thinking, adaptability, and honesty which are all positive traits. It can turn a failure into a positive in the interviewer’s eyes.

- After each interview jot down a few words about your takeaway. This can be a positive or negative note. These will help with the earlier point of knowing when to walk away from an opportunity. Also if you can note one thing you did poorly and what you should’ve done instead. Interviewing is a game, and you’re going to lose the first few no matter how qualified you are. You can’t improve unless you analyze your game. Don’t dwell on it, just note one takeaway for next time and move on.

- Lastly, just grind. I’ve got 25 years of experience and I think I’m very hirable, and I still have to send out dozens of pretty high quality applications to get an offer. It’s a funnel, and most of the reasons you fall out of the funnel have nothing to do with how good you are. You’re going to get rejections from companies you were excited about and you’re going to feel sad. Let yourself feel sad. Take a break and do something nice for yourself. And the next day get back in the saddle and send out a couple more applications. Don’t think if it like an ended relationship think of it like a missed basket, or a shot that went off the goalpost. You don’t stop playing because you missed a shot, you take another shot.