- Sift through the buzzword crap. Be prepared to spend days looking at company web pages and job listings without applying to any jobs at all. I'm not intereste

- Sift through the buzzword crap. Be prepared to spend days looking at company web pages and job listings without applying to any jobs at all. I'm not interested in web3, AI, fintech, or adtech. So 90% of jobs go straight to the trash. But it's worth digging into some opportunities in case they're just effective marketers using buzzwords to bring in more applicants, with a genuinely interesting actual job. - Set up recurring searches with diffs of new jobs that match your language/framework/environment preferences. Much better than continually sifting through the same listings. Better yet, find something that'll allow you to blacklist crappy companies you'd never work for -- Facebook, Google, IBM, Oracle are on my blacklist. - Find niche communities with hiring listings that better align with your interests. I work in documentation, so I'm a member of Write the Docs, which has its own job board. Hacker News Who is Hiring has a lot of companies that are too small for my liking, but medium size places do occasionally advertise -- it's your job to find them. - Don't go to overboard on filters. I learned this from apartment searching: listers frequently make mistakes. Filtering too hard on "2+ bathrooms" would have omitted my current rental, which was erroneously listed as 1 bathroom. If you filter too hard for "MUST HAVE >150k COMPENSATION" or any other criteria, recruiters will post incorrect listings that you'll end up missing. Human intuition on an unfiltered query can often find diamonds in the rough that no amount of filtering would ever identify. So occasionally just... look at the HN Who is Hiring page, with no filters, and click on things that look interesting. You might be surprised at what you find. - ABI (Always Be Interviewing) -- the more you interview, the better you get at it. Interview candidates at your company to better understand the interviewer side of things -- it'll make you perform better in interviews, too. There are all kinds of recruiter tricks used to manipulate you. There are all kinds of tricks YOU can learn to better learn about a company before you sign an offer. You should try to learn as many of these tricks as possible so you won't be bamboozled by them in the future. But it mostly comes down to time and patience. Great jobs are few and far between, and often have Achilles' heels of their own as well -- a crappy vacation policy, no 401k match, etc. Figure out what you're willing to compromise on, and wait for the opportunity to arise. And when it comes, don't be afraid to pounce.