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

Please post your anonymized resume online and we'll be able to advise you.

In my experienced, people rarely get rejected -millions- of time for no reason.

I can't tell why you were rejected, but I can offer you something to help bide the time: freelance work.

I was in a bit of a hole financially and getting a full time job would have killed my startup ambitions, so after failing to get any clients on sites like Upwork I applied to Toptal: https://www.toptal.com/#contract-just-respected-software-arc...

They screen their freelancers which means they've got fewer but higher quality workers. Your skills are similar to mine, so you should be fine to get in. Just don't give up, I failed the first time around but then I brushed up on my code solving abilities and got. Didn't take me a week to find my first client and I couldn't be happier with him or him with me.

I found an old HN discussion about Toptal after I got in, and realized it was mostly people screaming about not being able to get in, or considering themselves above solving code challenges. Just don't let that hold you back.

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That aside, I do have tips on your job hunt!

Right before I got into toptal, I began having conversations about employment through the HN hiring posts, but I had a better process than (I suspect) most.

1. I copied all the posts from Who's Hiring into a spreadsheet 2. through them all by hand and wrote a single paragraph about why I think I wanted to work for their company 3. I extracted email addresses into another field 4. I composed an email about how awesome I am 5. I combined all of these through a Mail Merge and sent out 10 emails a day, keeping track of them through Streak's pipelines.

I recommend this project. After this, I know I applied to exactly 53 companies (felt like millions) and received no replies from 27, and was rejected by 21 because of visa issues.

Streak's Career Search Pipelines are awesome. :)

Exactly. My first real job out of college was due to a referral. Girlfriend's stepdad put in a good word for me a a major engineering firm. I went to the interview open-house and realized quickly the people around me seemed much more accomplished and more knowledgeable about the company and the industry its in. I had some interviews later, they seemed to have gone ok, not awesome but not a disaster. Then the VP of engineering comes up to me and tells me how excited they were to have talked to me. This threw me because it all seemed way out of my league but I didn't see her approach anyone else except for a couple other candidates. I ended up getting an offer a month later. I knew my gf's stepdad definitely put in a good word for me, I just wasn't expecting it to help me that much.

If I tried to get an interview from this company through the job fair at my school, I would have most likely not even gotten a phone interview. The only thing, I haven't told any of my coworkers who referred me. I'm not totally sure how prepared I am for this work and I wouldn't want any poor performance to reflect back onto him.

This is a great illustrative example of why those numbers are informative - most developers are like you, and can't do that, but the reason is not in "CV writing" but in actual content of the work.

From what you say, it sounds like that whatever you did was driven by (initiated by, started because of) (a) technical need (b) order from above or (c) guessing. However, what people mean by "show the impact" is that they are looking for someone who has already done work mostly driven by their observations of business needs, their initiative to improve specific business results by technical means.

If you had no idea "how much revenue these features are going to help bring in or how many sales they'll generate" then you were performing a different role/function than e.g. a person who looked at a need to increase sales (or whatever else was the main business/strategic goal of their company at the time) and figured out a software feature to achieve that. Perhaps you are capable of more than just implementation, but how would a potential employer know? It's not like they'd just ask you, they want to see evidence that you have done this before, that you have been not only implementer of ideas but initiator of changes driven by your personal understanding of business needs - not matter how your role was called or what your nominal job description did/didn't include.

Yup. Timezone differences, flying people back and forth overseas, dealing with international payments and employment law and visas and such is a hassle. If you don't have a visa already, you'll have to convince some company that you're so much better than all of the people they could hire locally that they're willing to put up with it for you.

At the beginning of your career, you aren't going to be that interesting. Look for some local jobs first.