Ask HN: Do I have to go through recruiters nowadays, how do you find new jobs?

Depending on the market, recruiters can at least be a useful signal for directing your search for companies that are hiring. Not in silicon valley, but I like to do my research and on at lest one occasion the obfuscated description about an opening was enough for me to find the company directly after about 10 seconds of Googling.

Why is the business of the new employer to know how much I was making at my previous position? If they would agree to pay me for my skillset alone, that'd be one thing, but otherwise they'll simply use the information from my previous position to give me a de facto raise. Two can play at that game.

Also, I could be wrong but I don't think a new employer will contact a previous employer to specifically learn how much a particular individual was earning.

I never read the cover letters, nor the "objective" on a resume. I do invest a lot of time finding the right people to join our team, but in a resume, my choice to move you to a phone screen will never hinge on those details, and nothing in your resume matters much once we start actually talking.

I don't mean to detract from your overall assessment -- i think you've made good points.

Edit: My resume advice? Give me your work history with a few sentences for each one, and if you have a "skills summary" section, list only the skills that you've fully mastered. Include only the relevant jobs. This is a resume, not a CV, and it's only goal is to get you to the hiring manager who can make a decision to give you a phone screen.

You can also try company bots on CodeFights : https://codefights.com/bots if you win and apply your information gets submitted to respective companies directly.

I could not disagree more about listing only skills you've mastered. As long as you're honest about your proficiency, you should absolutely list skills apart from just what you've mastered. In every job I've ever had, skills that fell way outside the core areas that I have mastered have been critical for success, and skills that were huge parts of the job description, hazing interviews, and smack in the middle of my core areas ended up literally never being used and having no impact on the work whatsoever.

This has even occurred in jobs with highly specific needs. I got grilled on GPU programming, then never wrote or read a single line of GPU code. I got grilled on how the Buffer Protocol works in Python, then never implemented an extension class making use of it and never touched anyone else's class that did either -- even though it was "critical" for someone to have "significant experience" in these technologies when I was interviewed. As it turned out, my limited exposure to Python's setuptools and distribution/package management, and my (very limited) experience with an open-source optimization library called CVXOPT ended up dwarfing the usefulness of GPU or Buffer Protocol experience, and neither package management nor quadratic programming were even mentioned anywhere in either of those job listings, nor spoken about at all during interviews.

Employers, generally, are utterly terrible at communication or understanding what they need in their next hire, and they revert to simple heuristics, like algorithm or programming language trivia, just to avoid that hard work.

There has always seemed to be this silly and inexplicable emphasis in hiring on acting like candidates need to be perfect. They can't say they have a skill unless they are the world fucking grandmaster of that skill. Any honest admission of weakness means you're garbage, instant rejection. It's the same with performance during an interview. Someone clearly articulated an O(N^2) solution under time pressure? Firing squad. If they can't rattle off the optimal solution without hints then omg how did they ever get a college degree?

It's just nuts. People don't seem to think much at all about the person's aggregated productivity over time, what they can learn on the job, how their performance in a real-life, low-pressure situation will be different than a gimmicky interview. It's just all of this "we only hire the best" nonsense that leads to an arms race for candidates to overfit to interview processes and creates a whole generation of vapid engineers with no substance beyond looking pretty on paper.