Whatever you do, do not under any circumstances go through the company’s HR department to get a job. I work in one of the best tech companies in the industry, a

Whatever you do, do not under any circumstances go through the company’s HR department to get a job. I work in one of the best tech companies in the industry, and our HR people frequently reject highly qualified candidates we’d like to talk to before we even see their resumes. We know this because these same people often know people on our team, or on our friends teams, and we get their resumes through back channels. We almost always hire these people instead of whoever HR sends us. As an example, about a decade ago, I saw an opening for someone with vector processing experience. I applied and highlighted my extensive experience with AltiVec processors in Macs. The recruiter actually sent me back an email asking why I had included all this irrelevant AltiVec stuff. It turned out he had no idea what vector processing was and didn’t realize I had exactly the experience he was looking for. Later, when they had an even better opening, I just emailed a guy on the team that I had met once or twice and he was very happy to pass my resume on to the hiring manager because he knew I had the experience needed from being on some mailing lists with me. I got the job and have been at it for 8 years. My boss’s boss at the time said it was one of the best hires they’d ever made.