Timing, luck, and connections. I decided it was time to look for a new job, and that evening I went to Craigslist, just to see what jobs were listed there. I had never looked at them before, and didn't have much hope, but one of the ads was for exactly what I wanted, working at a company that I built part of the initial proof of concept for a decade previous, and had done a small consulting job 5 years earlier. I reached out to the CTO via e-mail, he asked if he could take me out to lunch the next day, and 2 days later I was in the office setting up my credentials and fixing some problems in their infrastructure so the CTO could go on vacation the next day. A few weeks later we negotiated the deal and I started my new job.
Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
101–110 of 213 posts
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#102I graduated in anthropology. In the last year of the course was doing Erasmus in Brno, Czech Republic with a friend and we both noticed that a forensic software tool used by all forensic anthropologists for biological profiling was really bad. I mean, so bad it was almost divination. Because it's difficult to find a job in anthropology, we decided to create a startup and develop a new better tool. So we learned R, aggregated a lot of human skeletal data (it was so hard because there's a "GDPR for human anatomical data") and even published papers on it. It was a success except that nobody bought it. I mean nobody, they all used our papers and online code to do their own thing. In retrospective we were both idiots with no business sense. So of course it failed hard and had to find a job somewhere else. From there on it was always on LinkedIn: I worked for an environmental consulting company until they fired me and other colleagues because they couldn't pay us; then moved to a Japanese zaibatsu where I lost my mind wrangling spreadsheets for the quarterly reports. It was a lot of work and since this was a nearshoring job the pay was very very low. So I kept my LinkedIn profile as "actively looking for opportunities" and a recruiter for an investment bank contacted me about a position in banking operations. I went to the interview and left in the middle of it since that job consisted in copying and pasting stuff in Excel all day long. A week later she called me back, apologized for wasting my time (!?) and offered a position as project management officer for a team that implements some machine learning stuff and bots across the whole company. No experience in PM at all and with a basic understanding of Python and R so impostor syndrome kicked in really hard but after 6 months here I am, doing just fine. I want this to be my last job, I'm learning more statistics and python so that I can make my own forecasts and trading bots.
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don't beat yourself up about it, you made it in the end.
Is Amazon “making it”?
For that goal sure. For life, I am sure s/he has moved goalposts like we do :)
I have a reverse question for you though: has this kind of questioning worked out fine for you till now in real life?
An unwanted tip fwiw: it comes across as belittling an achievement (whatever it might be) from a quick glance. You probably don't mean it that way- in which case do look at rewording that into something like 'has it been everything you hoped for' :)
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who works at Amazon and has been rejected by Facebook, don't hinge your happiness on something as random as an interview decision. There's a lot more to life, and you deserve to be happy regardless of whatever else happens.
I failed a FB loop a few weeks ago despite studying really fucking hard and doing pretty damn well on the questions I got. I’m afraid I’ll be stuck at Amazon, which nobody is actually impressed by, if I’m lucky and not PIPed out.
You are a very good troll, Sir
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#105I kept getting calls from recruiters. After 3 recruiters called me about the same position at this super large company I gave the interview a shot.
As a senior JavaScript developer with open source projects and military leadership experience I don't really have to look for jobs. I put my resume up on places like Monster or another job site. It takes about 2 two weeks for the resume to be populated to various other places and the flood of calls start coming in. The recruiters seem to indicate the placement bonus for somebody with my experience is huge so they are willing to move mountains at lightning speed for me, but really I just think they are working fast to prevent my access to other recruiters.
The total turn around time from resume update to sitting in the new office employed is about 4-5 weeks including interviews, 2 week notice, criminal background check and so forth. The good thing about that timeline is that you can escape employment, really quickly, that isn't going well with minimal financial risk. The bad thing is that if you move too fast you aren't shopping around and can miss out on something that better fits your interests.
In my case I needed to move as fast as possible. I believed I was facing a discrimination issue at the prior employer, even though the company was a great place to work and really took all appropriate steps to mitigate discrimination, and I thought my job was in peril. Instead of challenging the issue and waiting for an investigation I started looking for another job. The group that hired me is bigger than Google and has the best time off and benefits I have ever seen. They got back to me the same day I interviewed and ended up offering me a really high rate of compensation. These were also desirable perks and they were moving fast to bring me in.
I know the grass is always greener on the other side. One thing to always consider is the bigger the company the longer the time frame between project start and project publication. Larger organizations have more regulation to comply with, established services and architecture to wrestle with, and many more constituents to please. If you want greater benefits and financial security be prepared to work with a greater diversity of experience levels at a much slower average pace. If you want to move fast and live dangerously you generally have to look for employment with a less established organization.
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#106I was presenting at a conference, the CIO came to me after the presentation and we chatted about her company. She ended up offering a great position. Funny that I have never heard of this huge company (and uber cool), some of the great ones are just not visible to outsiders. 10 years later I still love it.
That’s so neat. What was the conference / company name?
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#107I visited the library, and saw an advert in the local newspaper about a programming job in a neighboring city (~3 hour drive). The day I saw the ad was the deadline for sending an application, so I hurried home and threw together an application, along with my CV. After just a few days, I was asked to come in for an interview where I got a small task that I then went home and worked on the task for a day or two before sending everything back to the company. They loved both talking to me and what I had done on the task and I was offered a job just a few days later.
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#108I was headhunted away from a long-running contract by a recruiter I'd been in touch with on and off for years. She pitched me the position, I thought "...that does sound like me," I interviewed, and got an offer.
My two favorite gigs so far I got that way (current one and a stint at MapQuest back when it was in Lancaster, PA).
Having a reasonably active GitHub profile helped, too, and has gotten me cold-contacts from people recruiting for Apple and Facebook (didn't pursue either of those because I value living near friends and family more than working for a BigCo [and have never liked Facebook since the first time I heard about it]).
I guess my recommendations would be to network and to build up a portfolio of work anyone can see. Networking gets your name in front of a lot more people than you realize, and if you have a portfolio it makes more of an impression it goes a long way towards making people want to contact you.
I'd also add to take the time to be polite even to recruiters who haven't done their research. Talking nicely to them as long as they're not just spamming form letters has been a policy of mine for years just on the grounds that they're people too and should be treated kindly.
That policy directly got me the referral to MapQuest - when I explained what kind of work I actually was interested in, the recruiter who'd ignored my skillset passed me along to a contact of hers who was looking for devs like me.
The resulting gig, while maybe not amazing by Silicon Valley standards, remains one of the best ones I've had here in central PA.
(Of course, then upper management cut the entire Lancaster office, the majority of their technical staff, but that's another story...)
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I could pass a Facebook interview I could finally be happy. I envy you.
As someone who works at Amazon and has been rejected by Facebook, don't hinge your happiness on something as random as an interview decision. There's a lot more to life, and you deserve to be happy regardless of whatever else happens.
The worst part of my rejections is that I cannot even pass recruiters - apparently I cannot sell myself good enough despite that I’m somewhat confident that I’ll do good at technical interviews. Looks like a common problem to introverts.
Re: Ask HN: How did you find your current job?
#110I was working at a large tech company with awesome coworkers and cool technology, but I wasn't applying my experience/time/skill towards something I cared about. But I likely would have stayed if it weren't for my SO getting an opportunity for a position in an awesome new city/country.
I have been interested in education, healthcare, gamification, and video games for a while. When my SO's opportunity came up, I found that one of the companies I follow and that is focused on most of those interests of mine (gamification of education, educational video games) was located in the same city.
I applied, went through the interview process completely remotely, and was eventually offered a job.