Ask HN: How do you look for jobs in 2023?

I’m steadily looking for new opportunities, but am increasingly annoyed by the LinkedIn / Indeed grind. I feel like half the jobs are recruiting firms or very bloated positions with >500 applicants.

I love the monthly “Who is hiring?” thread — these positions almost always yield more responses and suffer less from false advertising.

Are there other sites I’m not considering? Methods I’m not using? How do you find good (defined as not bloated and optimized for LI) job opportunities in the current market?

Once you've moved beyond a junior-level of experience, I'm not sure if there's a better way than working your network for opportunities. In my experience there is never, and will never be, a shortage of business people looking for technical problems solvers.

The truth is, most jobs these days are rather bloated themselves. I do wish you luck in finding a job, but I would also give you this following piece of advice: at the same time while trying to find a job, think about strategies where you can work less and contribute more to society in your local community.

I truly believe that the real opportunities out there are those which are mostly divorced away from the typical LinkedIn posting where it's just some company trying to push more consumerism on the world.

LinkedIn's easy apply helps mitigate how tedious and soul crushing item three can be.

Set up an alert for new jobs that meet your requirements and be consistent. Set a goal of applying for five a day. If you apply to more then great but meet your goal. I'll add each application to a log that has the company, when I applied, the position, and something I found interesting about the posting. Helps remind me in a month when I hear something back.

Just remember, you have zero information on where the company is in on the hiring process for this position. They could still be in the 'collecting applications' phase and won't really take a look at the applicants for days or weeks.

In my experience, very few companies look at applications as they come in. They have a target date where they do a first cut and then move onto the next. This creates those situations where you hear back from an application weeks and months later. This also creates that soul crushing feeling of "I've applied to 20 positions this week and haven't heard ANYTHING."

Apply to a few each day and move on. The companies are doing everything they can to maximize their efficiency with this process, including bad behavior's like ghosting / posting jobs just to meet regulations when they already have who they are going to hire / etc., so there is nothing wrong with you maximizing your efficiency where it makes sense. Apply and move on.

Side note, don't forget item one above, personal network. It feels great to me to get a job offer from some company where my personal network wasn't involved in any way, but the reality is that most jobs are filled by someone already aligned in some way, aka personal network was involved.

Conferences are a great place to network and find companies or people working on projects you’re interested in. These past two years, I’ve purchased my own ticket to the AWS re:Invent conference. I’ve made new connections and gained new insights by attending. I’ve also learned of some companies I’d be interested in working for in the future. Even though it’s expensive to attend, I view it as a good investment in my own career for networking and continued learning.