Ask HN: How do you find jobs to apply for? What's your main pain point?

I've only been doing internal postings for the last several years. Although I have looked at external postings.

The main issue with both of them is that everyone wants "senior" developers (the definition seems to vary). Nobody seems to be willing to provide any training. Sure, I have AWS certs, but they don't mean much when each company has their own policies and architectures.

I consider myself intermediate because the tech stacks I have used vary greatly and have switched every few years. I was a senior dev and even a tech lead in FileNet work (unofficially), but there's not much work for that.

I agree, many of these job postings use misleading terms.

Regarding your use of your personal network and talking directly to companies, do you feel this approach has always worked well for you or do you feel like something is still missing whenever you search/apply for new roles?

I feel like I've been lucky and realise that one day my network may not have any good offers. It worked, but I wish it didn't have to.

Too much freakin noise on job boards and not enough filters. When I look at say LinkedIn’s job boards I see maybe 20-30% percent spam postings from many different faceless agencies all trying to recruit for the same garbage positions and maybe 70-80% jobs that the board determines as similar enough to my current and previous work which is not always why I want. It’s so bad to the point where I can search for a job completely separate position, completely unrelated to programming and a number of the hits will be generic software development jobs. Now there is one thing I will concede that LinkedIn does alright on the features. There are separate filters for job position and company industry. This is really nice if you’re interested in hunting out something specific. Most other job boards I’m familiar with have all the spam and filter problems without the annoying “smart” features.

Aside from that most of my issues are with job listings themselves and the lack of useful information in them.

As someone who's not from a traditional background and currently in an odd area of 3 years split between regular software dev and SDET, I genuinely feel like everyone at every stage of this is a failure point (including the engineers) but this is a people problem that you can't solve with software.

Trying to find a job that looks like it'll pay me a living wage and put me on a good career path is a struggle. There are things on LinkedIn and Indeed that look good but are just re-routes to knock-off job boards with names like Nevoo and IFindJobForYou, and these are links from what are supposed to be the big names in job searching. Those redirects never take me to the job position, and when I go to look up the company and see if the posting is on their careers page, it usually isn't. Other people on LinkedIn have noticed this but the moderator response at LinkedIn says that these redirects are legitimate. The fix is "easy" but the politics to get it to happen is hard, good luck with this one.

One thing that's caused me a lot of trouble is that people (HR, engineering) don't actually read my resume because they have to deal with so many, even after I've gone through the process of making it as easy to read as possible, including constant revisions and peer reviews. They'll look at my resume when I submit for a junior position despite having balanced and sufficient experience and just throw my resume in the trash because I don't know one piece of tech on their laundry list or I'm somehow overqualified despite fitting the position's experience range, aka I get an email saying that while my credentials were impressive, they've selected another candidate. However, some companies will deny me that junior position and somehow think I'm qualified for a senior developer role. These are definitely people problems: what assumptions are being made here that I'm somehow not qualified for a more junior role but somehow qualified for a FAR more senior role? Who's making these assumptions? Another people problem.

Interviews are a mixed bag. For SDET positions, I've had good interviews since they're more on the behavioral side where the interviewers want you to talk about your experiences with software development, and their technical questions are mainly shibboleth tests to ensure you didn't lie your way through HR. I've only had one bad SDET/QA interview, and it was for a fintech company trying to test me as a senior software engineer when the job would be manual testing and DevOps-like work because the guy giving the interview was a Caltech graduate ubermensch who probably hasn't been aware of other people's emotions and backgrounds for many years because he's been in "startup mode" or whatever. Again, a people problem, but I don't think that this one is even solvable.

Software dev interviews are honestly far worse: I've had automated code screens where the platform didn't support modern language constructs and made simple tasks needlessly complex and I'm tired of having to play Russian Roulette with interview questions as to whether they're Leetcode Mediums or obtuse math-derivative questions. I rarely get to talk to engineers, and when I do, they mostly just say "here's your question good luck" and vanish.

I had one positive software dev interview with Bloomberg, where it was more traditional and the dev was actually trying to follow my thought process as I solved a problem. This might not seem like it's a people problem, but it is: your Leetcode Mediums and your Bachelor's in CS are useless if you're not going to engage with me and gauge my competency in some meaningful way. If software developers are so overloaded by work, going through resumes, and coming up with non-asinine questions, this looks like a great people problem to solve: introduce a sales engineer-like team that can have its members divided between various engineering teams that can handle non-managerial but people-focused tasks.

I could write about the oddities and various people-based quirks of this process further, but I'm probably getting near the character limit. Really hope that you're not trying to make yet another website, OP.