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Ask HN: How do you search for jobs?
About 3 or 4 years into my career and I've decided to look for a new positions. Unfortunately, in the past few years I got really jaded and depressed and never bothered to enhance / modernize my skillset. I've been working with .NET the past couple years, but I haven't done much .NET core or worked with cloud technologies or a lot of other necessary stuff nowadays. Very recently, I've managed to regain my ambition and have been working on learning stuff that's much more interesting to me, but I'm far from skilled enough to get a job in that stuff. Looking on different boards, the jobs I'm actually qualified for look terribly boring or like they would be a negative experience altogether (I'm not trying to work somewhere with outdated tech for another few years)
I've heard the just mass applying to online positions on such (which Is what I normally do) is bad and that it doesn't often lead to a great job, but I have no ideas what else to do. I get recruiter spam, but always for A) really bad contracts or B) jobs that look good, but had the recruiter taken even a cursor look at my resume, they'd have been able to tell I'm not remotely qualified for the position. What other ways are options for finding new jobs?
- dpezely 7y agoDetails may change every few years but overall, it boils down to two main approaches: 1) find a position through your professional network, as an estimated 80% of jobs come through such connections; 2) be discoverable for the other 20%. Be active in both. Present something at a local meeting/event. Often, it doesn't have to be fancy or overly polished. Some events on meetups.com have a few people present for 10 minutes each. Which leads to #2, be discoverable: put those presentation materials on GitHub or GitLab. Additionally, there are common interview questions (whiteboard and/or code challenge) such as URL shortener (e.g., TinyURL) or anagram solvers. These have come up a number of times in my interviews over the past few years, so I wrote the code and pinned these on my GitHub profile. (Same user id as here, if you're interested.) I decided to go a step further and give each the full dev-ops treatment: Dockerfile, Makefile, etc. But give them a solution, not a problem. Avoid relying upon AWS/GCP/Azure proprietary offerings unless that's precisely what you're demonstrating, and make it work as-is: fetch all dependencies with version pinning (if possible-- else put versions in README), so then you know that it will build for them exactly as it did for you.