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

And don't worry about the frustration. A lot of people had to apply a gazillion times for various things before they got one chance to show what they can.

None of the products look like something I'd expect from a "Product Designer" and even less so from someone who is "passionate about all things visual". I am not a designer but I've worked with a number of highly talented designers and none of these designs really impress me, in fact almost all of them nibble at something in the back of my head proclaiming them as slightly "off". I can't exactly put my finger on it but they just look out of place for some reason. I can get past the style of the main website (though I think it's in the style of a programmer and less of designer) but the things the OP has worked on just don't seem that... good. The "quirky equipment" with text inputs is confusing on a number of levels: What is this trying to show? Why is it listed at all? How is this innovative/interesting/or even cool? A tiny bit of JS strung together with some CSS animations doesn't strike me as worth sharing. Lastly, and a tiny thing at that, o23.io works find for a dev/designer name Olivier that is 23 years old but.... Did he buy o24.io-o100.io as well? Just seems like an odd choice of domain.

What actually matters is your resume. That's the document that every single person is going to look at. Not everyone is going to read it over carefully, but everyone who is even remotely interested in you is going to look at it and for most of them, that's the document that matters most. I haven't seen your formatted resume, so I can't give you specific feedback, but maybe these tips will help others reading these comments:

* If you have fewer than 10 years of experience, keep it to one page (exceptions are academia and possibly roles in Europe). I know people with 40 years of experience who use one page. If they can squeeze it in, so can you.

* Keep the page clean and minimal. Black type on a white background with plenty of white space. It should look clean.

* No pictures or graphics. A lot of people will be turned off by this. Virtually no one will be turned off by black and white, text only.

* While we're at it, no funky fonts. Serif, sans-serif, it's not gonna matter much. But don't try to get cute.

* No typos or grammatical errors. 80% of people seem to have them. But this is a one page document and if you can't show that you can write one page without typos or other errors, what does that say about your attention to detail?

* Have someone proofread it anytime you make more than minor edits.

* I personally think that a statement of purpose line at the top can only hurt you by putting you in a box and rarely helps you. I've never looked at a well formatted resume and said "why doesn't this have a statement of purpose?". Just highlight your experience, contact info, etc and that's it.

* If you want, you can have one line at the bottom that talks about your hobbies that aren't directly relevant to your job. Sometimes your love of golf will be a good talking point for interviewers. But limit it to one line (or better yet, don't put hobbies in at all).

* PDF format! This means that it'll look the same on everyone's computer. I made this mistake in college when I sent out my resume as a word document. It looked great on my mac but I realized later than on Windows, the text went one line over the first page which looked terrible. That's when I started using PDFs and PDFs only for my resume (I format it using LaTeX but using Word or similar is fine as long as you save to PDF).

I've seen a lot of resumes for developers and you know what sticks out? A clean, well written resume with no typos. Because it's much rarer than you'd think. Most have typos. Some are too cluttered. Many list experience that I don't give a damn about. If you went to a college, then I don't really care about your high school experience. I also don't care about your babysitting experience if you are applying to be a developer. If you need to show work history then keep the irrelevant parts as short as possible.

But the main point is this: Well written resumes stand out because they are rarer than you would think. I used to think the opposite; that most people write good resumes and maybe you need to try something bold to stick out. But when I got to the other side of the table where I was looking over others' resumes, this turned out not to be the case. The resumes that tried to hard to stick out looked tacky to me. And finding a well written resume with consistent formatting, a nice layout and no errors seems to be rare, at least among junior hires.

OK, so now you've got a great resume. You send it to a thousand websites. Well, here's the bad news. No one is going to read it. I'm sorry, and it sucks, but it's the truth. But the good news is that today, there are many ways to contact hiring managers directly. You can message them via LinkedIn. You can go onto company websites and find email addresses. At small companies, those messages will often find their way to the CEO. You wanna really make sure it gets to the right person? Print it out and mail it in with a short cover letter. No one gets snail mail anymore so it's almost guaranteed they will have a look. Submitting a resume online for a large company is kind of like throwing your resume in the garbage and hoping someone will pick it up, unfortunately.

Finally, talk to recruiters. Email them out of the blue. These are the only people who are incentivized to scrutinize your resume more carefully. They will give you frank and honest feedback on your resume because that's what they do. As an employed developer you will get reached out to by recruiters all the time and will become annoyed by some of them (and possibly angry at some of the less ethical ones). But at your stage, you may need to reach out to them. And the good ones will actually help you. Their livings depend on getting your resume into the hands of people who hire.

Anyway, I'm sure there are those who disagree with some of my points above, but I think this is applicable to the majority of people, especially those early in their career.

Small Context:- Apart from things you listed above, I have experience in Ethical hacking and data analytics as well. Built many products, some good , some bad. Helped many people (freely) to build their product and their internal engineering infrastructure for facilitating other developers to contribute smoothly. On Business side, I'm strong in crafting various monetization strategies and know that I'm pretty good at predicting the market trend and reflecting things in my product roadmap. So, I figured it our that best way to keep me motivated and contribute in a significant way WAS to get into product management. Be it as general product management or Technical one. I just don't have superficial knowledge, like know the interface of products and stuff... but literally enjoy to dwell into the core implementation of products/softwares which enables me to think from top of the stack to all the way to below underlying NAND registers. It's not like I had mastered every layer in between but I have enough enthusiasm to understand the WHY behind everything. This applies to both my technical and non-technical stuff.

BUT being said that, I have noticed that people generally don't believe in what we write on our resume/website. Because they feel that this guy is certainly bluffing. One thing I noticed though, whenever I meet someone in person, they instantly notice the difference. And they tend to seek knowledge from us. But again here my shyness kicks in I can't ask them for job directly. Can't even start a conversation, feels really odd. If you can try some offline aproach and are good with initiating conversation with people, you might find yourself better opportunities.

Why I failed in my startup? Answer - I specifically lack in Sales. I'm introvert. And my major failure is that I didn't hired or had resources to hire a proper sales team. Ideally, I'm fully aware and believe that founders should be a good salesman as well, but I'm now learning to do that.

My Advice for you- Brainstorm a little bit, imagine a situation where one founder gave you full liberty to help him for his product. Where will you will help him the most and at the same time will also enjoy for yourself. For me, it was Product management. I somehow feel the same for you BUT please spend some time to think on it. Once, your somewhat zeroed on your position, second step is to check the job descriptions of that position. Check 2 things there, 1) Does those job responsibilities excites you? 2) Do you have most of the "requirements" mention there. By requirements I want you to focus on the "skills / knowledge areas" mentioned there. If these 2 things resonate with you, you'll instantly know that where you fit the most. If somewhere things like "experience years" seems to be a hurdle, don't get discouraged. Still reach out to the recruiter and help them understand that you really know your shit and well experienced to handle the job swiftly.

Other Stuff-

Let me share one irony with you. While working on my startup, I gave chance to people just because they had enthusiasm and adaptability. They had literally zero knowledge in computer world. I on-boarded them, taught them programming right from some basic concepts of versioning to all the way to deploying and managing servers using docker or even VM based approach. Many of them got a job somewhere after working with me. But I feel pained about the same thing, I had not yet came across same people like me who believe in giving chances to people based on their enthusiasm and willingness. But I still believe that I need to find more of such people, who truly believe in a caliber of person. For them, a person is more important than the piece of paper.

NOTE: If some people are interested to atleast talk with me, please mail me at away8600@gmail.com

OP - If you feel, please get in touch with me at away8600@gmail.com ... We'll plan something. Since we both have nearly same attitude and way-of-life .... we'll try to figure out something concrete.

2- my advice would be to remove "Franco-American". If you want to profit from your dual experience, say you're American on the CV you send in France. Say you're French on the Resumes you send in the USA. But it's not obvious that it would be an advantage (depends on the company), so you may just say that you're American in NY, and that you're French in Paris.

3- search jobs locally. If you want a job in NY, go there first. If you want a job in Paris, stay here.