How I got a job from a Hacker News post

"Given enough exposure, the impossibly lucky becomes the inevitable."

Nice story, but I don't know if I would go that far. You don't have an unbiased sample, so you don't know how many do exactly the same thing and nothing comes of it. It's the classic "what do successful people have in common" fallacy. An equally justified conclusion, based on "the hundred ways I failed leading up to this moment" might be "the chances of success are about 1%".

The "what do successful people have in common" fallacy is more commonly referred to as survivor bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias

My last full time job I got by leaving a comment on Fred Wilson's blog. He shared my info with a bunch of investors in my area and they connected me with people in their portfolio who were hiring. About 3 weeks from comment to my first day on the job.

This is Networking 2.0. Good on you, but hypothetically if you hadn't gotten "lucky" by having the predictable consequences of directed effort come to pass, you (and similarly situated geeks) still had options.

1) What if big names in your space hadn't retweeted you? Well, since you know who the big names in the space are, you take an hour or two to lookup their email addresses. Then, you send a one-paragraph email:

Hiya Bob,

My name is $NAME and I really like your work on backends as a service at $COMPANY. In particular, your post on the blog last year about $TOPIC was really insightful. I was able to apply a few ideas from it to my work.

I just wrote a post on BaaS myself. $LINK

I'd appreciate any thoughts you had on it.

Regards,

Anyone who writes you back is no longer a stranger. Instead, they think you're intelligent about a field where they currently cannot hire for love or money. You can then followup with "As it happens, I'm looking for opportunities to put further my interest in BaaS professionally. Do you happen to know anyone who is hiring?"

2) What if he wasn't really close for coffee?

Planes, we've got them. I am totally serious. A day off and a few hundred bucks versus a career upgrade, which has the higher NPV? "I will be in Boston for one day only on XX/YY (or, alternately, week of XX/YY). Would you let me buy you breakfast to talk about this?" is a very compelling offer psychologically. Your time is scarce, and hence valuable, plus you've already demonstrated three things they'll get out of saying "Yes." (Food, interesting conversation, and "the ability to get to know someone whose comportment suggests that he is going places.") Note that that is the only decision they need to make - after you have yes, then you can schedule the details.

3). What if he wasn't hiring?

He knows someone who is. Get warm intro.

There's so many possible answers to this question but the easiest possible one is to go to a conference in the industry, on your company's nickel if possible (trivial), and start making friends. Or you can use existing contacts in your Fortune 50 network and get warm intros to the right sort of people at peer firms, clients, vendors, etc. Or, since I'm guessing one does not become an Internal Auditor the first day out of high school, you work the alumni network at your college.

Also, even if nobody in your industry blogs, doesn't mean you can't start to generate a portfolio for yourself. How many blogs have you ever read by Japanese salarymen who do Enterprise Java development? Can you think of any which had an article or two that suggest maybe the author is smart enough to take out for coffee? (You can totally do this without bringing down the wrath of God on yourself for spilling company secrets. Just talk in very general terms about challenges in Internal Auditing and how one could overcome those, optionally with heavily anonymized anecdotes.)