Ask HN - Where do you look for jobs? - <AUTHOR> Here are my sources:<p>* HN Monthly Hiring threads<p>* GitHub<p>* Reddit<p>* 37Signals Job Board<p>Any other sources? <comment><USER2> I don't look for jobs that have been posted — my feeling is that jobs that make it to Reddit / GitHub / Craigslist / Monthly Hiring Threads, are all jobs that have been picked over by people working at (or close with) the company.

I make a list of the type of company I want to work with (I want to be paid $X, they should use this technology, I want to solve this problem or work on this project) and then I backtrace it and figure out which companies match those criteria.

Then, I contact those companies. I set up meetings when I can. My goal is to learn:

      * What sort of projects they work on
      * What challenges they're facing (geez, our biggest client needs _IDEA Z_)
      * What skills they look for in new hires / freelancers
      * Other companies in the area / tech / market

When appropriate, I tell them about my background and skills and ask who I should be in contact with to learn when new opportunities open up.

Then, I do two things

If they mentioned a huuuuge problem / pain point they're facing, I send them a follow-up email talking about the problem they mentioned, what I can contribute to solving it, and suggesting a time for another meeting.

I follow up with any other companies / people they mentioned and set up a quick coffee meeting.

Periodically, I'll check in with my contact. Nothing spammy, just an update about something relevant to their industry / problem.

Rather than fight over the same jobs that everyone else sees on 37Signals / Reddit / GitHub / HN hiring / Craigslist / LinkedIn / Etc, I want to be at the top of mind with the companies I want to work with.

Every job I've had — salary or consulting - has come from someone inside of the company calling me up, telling me about a position they have, and asking me if I want to interview. This bypasses the slog through submitting a resume and fighting against 20+ other candidates for a position. This gets me the positions I want working on the problems I want to solve.

<comment><USER3> Can you be more specific about this part:

"Then, I contact those companies. I set up meetings when I can"

How do you contact them, how do you pitch the idea of meeting with you?

<comment><USER2> (Thanks for asking! I'm about to meet with a client, so this is pretty stream of consciousness. If you have any questions, leave them here or shoot me an email at email@example.com!)

I pitch the meeting as an informational interview to learn about the industry. I let them know I'm active / looking to enter the industry and I have a few questions for a 15-20 minute meeting.

I'll check LinkedIn / my personal network / company website to find the name and title of the person that I want to meet. It's generally the owner (smaller companies) or project director / department director.

If their email address is public, I'll send them a short (~5 sentence max) email. If it's not, I'll use LinkedIn / Rapporative / Spokeo / calling the company to dig out their email address.

I'll send a short email saying something like:

(I do marketing consulting, but this has worked for my buddy who is a Python Developer, and my ex-girlfriend who does front end design)

"Hey,

Do you have 15-20 minutes free this Friday for a short informational interview? I'm a Marketing Strategist in town and I'm curious about the skills you look for in marketers in your industry.

Would you be free to meet this Friday at 1:00pm? (If that time doesn't work, just let me know when a good time for you would be).

Thanks!

Kai"

If I don't hear back from them in 1-2 days, I'd do a quick follow-up call.

"Hey, this is Kai. I sent you an email a few days ago about setting up an informational interview. I'm curious, would this Friday at 1:00pm work or would there be a better time?"

If the meeting is set up, I'd write down the top 10 questions I have about the industry and bring the notes + a notebook to the meeting with me.

My goal is to keep them talking. My goal is to learn what problems they're facing as a department / as an industry, what skills they look for in new employees / freelancers, and who is the best person to know to find about open positions.

<comment><USER4> I'm really intrigued by your approach. But doesn't this come across as nagging? I get the first email, and it's perfectly fine by me. I wouldn't mind receiving such an email. But the second one seems a bit spammy to me.

Can you share what kind of feedback you got from those emails? What is your success ratio?

<comment><USER5> It's worth pointing out that Kai is a marketing specialist, and this is fairly normal (read: not bad) behavior when it comes to doing marketing. Keep in mind that he's spacing it out by a few days, which matters, and the follow-up actually demonstrates that he's (1) a human and (2) very interested.

<comment><USER2> Well put!

I'm approaching this from a marketing perspective and effective follow-ups can make the difference between a lead becoming dead or turning into a prospect.

It also proves that I'm human and not an automated mass email. (We all hate those).

Thanks Michael!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I haven't looked for a job actively for about five years or so and I hope that I don't need to ever again. Instead, I get contacted regularly by recruiters, founders and other hiring agents who, unfortunately, I mostly need to decline. (Otherwise I wouldn't be getting any actual work done!)

Chasing listed jobs is a mug's game for two reasons: (i) you need to compete with a mountain of applications, and (ii) people often list jobs that they aren't entirely serious about filling. Even if you have a strong resume and put 30 minutes into writing a good cover letter for each applications, the odds really are against you in this case.

Factor (ii) is still a problem if you get an interview because many organizations put multiple random barriers ahead of applicants. For instance, if you don't pass some test or flub a question or one of the fifteen people who talk to you just doesn't like you on an animal level you've wasted all the time you've put into the process.

Anybody who's using a recruiter, on the other hand, really wants to fill the position. The odds are in your favor because the recruiter is going to walk if the company keeps putting candidates through the gauntlet and rejecting them.

So how do you get people to call you?

Be active on the web. For me that's meant developing a few side projects and also developing connections and adding some content to LinkedIn every day... Even when I'm not looking for work.

If you get yourself known you can quit wasting time looking at job boards.

<comment><USER7> Can you expand on what you do for adding content to linked in every day? And how does that help?

<comment><USER8> I'd also like to know why, mainly because I decided to finish off my LinkedIn profile during a lazy afternoon and for the past couple of days I've had recruiters from Google, Microsoft and loads of other companies sniffing around my profile and on my website/github profile.

Perhaps it was coincidence, or perhaps putting the right things in your profile tends to get you noticed?

<comment><USER9> Would you give me an example of "putting the right things in your profile" ? Might be far-fetched but, if I could see an example of "Mr.X"'s profile, that would be great starting point.

<comment><USER8> In my case it was just a matter of playing the game.

I added people that I had interacted with at my previous companies as connections, I listed any articles I've written, put up links to personal projects/sites and reduced my skills to a small list of strong skills. I also joined a few small but known groups related to my work and made a couple of posts. Nothing too special, just a few posts here and there to answer some questions. Finally, I added my Stack Overflow reputation and any "out-of-work" stuff I handle. Basically, going from 30% completeness to 100% completeness on my profile.

A few days later I checked back on my profile and found that my profile views had gone from zero to around 10-15 a day. I tend to get a lot of recruiter spam on there but have had a few EMEA recruiters from Google, Microsoft and Facebook stop by my profile. No offers, but always nice to see people interested in reading about me.

<comment><USER10> I'd expect that in addition to 'completeness' you're also landing at the top of the 'last updated' sorting as well.

<comment><USER8> Aha, that'll do it! I never knew that there was a "last updated" list.

What worries me is that recruiters must think that this is a legitimate way to source talent...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I don't want to sound like a douche but I've never looked for a job on a website. Each time i needed a job i got an offer from a company or from someone in my network.

To grow your professional network I would recommend to attend to meetups, hackathons, user groups or even better to get involve in the organization. It worked pretty well for me.

I met some incredible people and got some good jobs offer.

<comment><USER12> > To grow your professional network I would recommend to attend to meetups, > hackathons, user groups or even better to get involve in the organization. > It worked pretty well for me.

Everyone of these meetups I've been to feels so...forced? I don't know but I've never really felt comfortable at these kinds of things. It's always so contrived?

<comment><USER13> I mostly just go to reddit meetups in Boston, so my perspective is slightly skewed, but I find the biggest problem is usually the venue. Very few places can seat more than 6 people or so together comfortably.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I wrote a long post about job boards for programmers that was on HN a while ago:

<http://www.maxmasnick.com/articles/jobs/>

<comment><USER15> What a coincidence. I emailed you about 10 minutes ago regarding this exact post!

<comment><USER14> I just saw your email!

I wish I knew more about the UK job scene....I'm in the US so I don't have any personal experience there. Are the big job boards the same there? (I'd guess Github, StackOverflow, 37s, angellist are the big established boards everywhere, but not sure.)

<comment><USER15> All of the above are relevant. Tech wise there are few that stick out aside from those which is why we are really pushing to be a bigger player as we reckon the UK tech job scene needs a lot of TLC.

<comment><USER14> Agreed...do you have any idea how effective the big job boards are? In my experience (one post for a somewhat weird job), we didn't get any hits from the big boards.

Is there any sort of public reporting/metrics for the effectiveness of these boards, or do people use them because every other company does so it seems necessary to compete for candidates?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> I found my current position via LinkedIn. I also searched with StackOverflow Careers, the HN monthly hiring threads (which weren't useful due to a lack of posts for my area), and the job pages of local companies. I probably would have used more sources if it had taken any significant amount of time to find a job.

My previous position was via a university career fair when I was still a student.

<comment><USER17> I also used StackOverflow Careers and found the position I just started.

I also tried the Who's Hiring HN thread, but I didn't find it very useful because of the small number of posts in my geographical area.

I tried LinkedIn, but found it very hard to filter down to a decent match for my skill set.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I haven't used it personally, but Angellist jobs looks interesting: <https://angel.co/jobs>

I like that they have to disclose ballpark salaries. Makes it easier to get a sense for how the company values developers.

<comment><USER19> We're creating a more targeted platform than AngelList called EquityLancer, aimed at providing a marketplace where equity is used as a currency. In doing so, the jobs on our site are guaranteed to offer equity.

We've seen more than 90% of the jobs posted on our site also include salary. After reading many of the posts in this thread, I'm eager to expand the functionality of our platform's tools to include many of the methods described in finding a job outside the popular platforms.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> You can check <http://roundabout.io> too for London jobs. A good UK job board, not yet mentioned is <http://www.coderstack.co.uk/>

<comment><USER21> thanks for mentioning these!

</comment></comment><comment><USER22> When I was looking for a job I would routinely go through:

\- careers.stackoverflow.com \- prospects.ac.uk (Though you need to have been a student to register) \- s1jobs.com (Mostly so I could have at least seen one ad a day) \- talentscotland.com \- workinstartups.com

<comment><USER15> As you're UK based, check out our site next time (if there is a next time) <http://hackerjobs.co.uk>

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> Last time I was looking for a job, it consisted of posting an update on Facebook saying that I was back on the job market. I got six promising leads to follow up from friends in about 12 hours. And in most cases, it's from someone who works there, or even the person trying to hire.

(Sadly, the same trick doesn't work for boyfriends.)

</comment><comment><USER24> I found my previous job through a local Ruby User Group meetup. At least in Atlanta, pretty much every company that attends is always hiring. I currently average about three recruiters or hiring managers a week contacting me on LinkedIn, which is how I found my current job.

</comment><comment><USER15> <http://www.hackerjobs.co.uk> if you're looking for UK based work. We occasionally get some European roles posted too. Had a few Irish & German jobs in the past.

</comment><comment><USER25> This is going to sound arrogant and troll-y, but I assure you it isn't.

I don't look. When I want a new job, I stop ignoring recruiters and wait to see what comes along. I've never waited more than a few days to have a pile of interesting opportunities. (I also end up with a much _bigger_ pile of bullshit talent-trawls, but that's beside the point)

I wish I could say this was a function of my being awesome, but I think it has more to do with the job market in my area (PDX). There just aren't enough senior developers to go around.

</comment><comment><USER26> I have never really looked for a job honestly, but if I were going to here's what I would do.

Find the type of company you want to work for. Narrow your list down to about 5 of those companies you'd like to work at.

Now sit down and write a personalized cover letter for each of these companies and the role you'd like to play in said organization.

Now email each of the companies hiring depts, founders, etc with said letter and sit back. If you wrote a truly compelling cover letter (you should have if you are actually passionate about working for the company) you will most likely get some sort of response.

Rinse and repeat if no success.

As a multi-time founder and hiring decision-maker I always enjoyed a good cover letter and great interview more than a resume. Even when it comes to technical knowledge the most important thing to me is that if you did not know it you were smart enough and capable of learning it.

If you can knock it out of the park on a cover letter and show why you're excited to be a part of said company then they would be foolish not to hire you.

EDIT: Obviously you should still send a resume as well. But sending one without a cover letter in my opinion is the equivalent of career suicide.

</comment><comment><USER27> <http://careers.stackoverflow.com/> has been a really good source for me

<comment><USER28> I found my best hire to date using this. As soon as I put it up he emailed me his resume and we made it happen. He's been a great asset.

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> This seemed like a good question that could be elaborated and stored on Quora as well. I compiled most of the sources as well as the original thread and put it on here:

[http://www.quora.com/Web-Development/Where-do-you-look- for-d...](http://www.quora.com/Web-Development/Where-do-you-look-for- developer-jobs-online)

</comment><comment><USER30> Any tips for new grads? Currently in my last semester of undergrad.

<comment><USER31> I recently graduated (at the end of August 2012), and I have been looking for a full time Android Developer position in SF Bay area since then. Here is what I did:

\- Cleaned up my Linkedin profile. Set my title to my desired position (Android Developer). I worked on my resume and made it as detailed as possible but still fit in 2 pages. In the Linkedin "Summary" field, I put in my objective, goal and my "Professional Summary". Then I filled in the experience, courses and projects. I got endorsements and recommendations from my former colleagues. Next; I bought "Job Seeker" membership from Linkedin, put on the "Job Seeker" badge, and opt in for OpenLink. This made it easier for people to find me and message me. After all these, my profile views and search appearances skyrocketed. The next thing I am considering is, setting my Linkedin location to San Francisco (I am temporarily in Chicagoland) so that recruiters in SF can find me.

\- I built a single page resume site (<http://bit.ly/aydinli_resume>), put links to my Linkedin, AngelList and Github. I also have Google Analytics. Nothing fancy, and mobile compatible. I also had business cards with a QR code linked to my resume site.

\- Here is a list of websites I use to search for jobs (in no particular order):

      + Indeed
      + SimplyHired
      + Startuphire
      + Startupers
      + Glassdoor
      + UseTheSource
      + DeveloperAuction
      + AngelList jobs
      + Github jobs
      + Mobile development groups on meetup.com
      + Interviewstreet
      + Dice
      + VentureLoop
      + Startuply
      + Linkedin
      + Crunchboard
      + VentureBeat jobs
      + Hacker News Who is Hiring xxxx 201x?
      + Reddit SfBayJobs
      + 37Signals Job board
      + JobScore jobseeker
      + Sometimes Quora
      + Directly from the websites of well known companies

Currently, I don't have any problems finding jobs to apply. I search for jobs, if the project seems interesting, I apply and ask for more information. The problem I have is; companies don't have to reply to your application whether good or bad. It doesn't matter if it is a giant company or a startup founder that gives out his/her personal email for applications, you rarely get an answer. Even with tools they have, like jobvite, resumator, jobscore, etc., they very rarely reply. I am getting used to it though.

<comment><USER32> If you want a job in SF, move to SF now. It will be lot easier to meet people and get hired. There are tons of job openings.

<comment><USER31> I thought about doing that, but then I couldn't find any advantages. I can move there, change my Linkedin location to San Francisco, and that would bring more recruiters. I can try going to meetups in the area and try to network. Aside from those, what do you think I could do? I have a very limited amount of time to find a job.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Other.

I'm a freelancer, and most of my work comes via referrals now. Not always, but it's been the case for the past few years.

Wasn't much different back when I was looking for full time work though. Even though I only worked for 2 companies, I use to get interviews through referrals, or through past colleagues that left and wanted me to come aboard.

</comment><comment><USER34> Have a well connected and up to date linkedin profile, abd accept the random friend requests from recruiters.

go to offline networking events.

get to know your local group for whatever you program in. Seattle-python- interest-group has periodic job emails, and more importantly if I asked them for help I would probably get a couple responses.

</comment><comment><USER35> One strategy if you're already in SF or SV is to figure out the places that tech folks congregate and passively get leads while doing other work. When I moved to SF a few months ago and was jobhunting I would go to Four Barrel Coffee in the Mission while I was writing my cover letters and doing recruiter correspondence. I'd make a point of talking to anyone who came in the door with a startup tee or hoodie on and tell them what I was doing.

This meant that my list of places to apply to actually grew every time I went to go and knock a few off my list. I met a lot of interesting engineers this way and generated a lot of leads that I wouldn't have found through HN Hiring or other boards. In some cases I found jobs that weren't posted online until after I found out about them in person.

</comment><comment><USER7> How do you look for them on Reddit? I hadn't heard of that.

<comment><USER36> <http://reddit.com/r/forhire>

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I like the new Coderwall team pages, they showcase the team members, their stack and other cultural bits that fill in the gap that typical job posts create.

<http://coderwall.com/teams>

</comment><comment><USER38> I have found that Dice.com is a great place to post for Technical jobs.

<comment><USER39> I 2nd this. Dice has always done great things for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> Offline - local meetups and user groups

<comment><USER41> I second this ... every job I've had (with the exception of my first programming job) has come through contacts made at meetups/user groups. Although, secondary to that has been keeping up a laundry list of secondary projects that I work on on my own personal time.

<comment><USER40> Also agree on side projects. In my opinion both show eagerness and give people the opportunity to get to know you/your work so it lessens the risk of hiring.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> Social networking has consistently produced job offers for me, but I did also get one job through my undergraduate college career fair and my current academic position through ACM jobs.

</comment><comment><USER43> I browse on indeed occasionally. I'm a senior in college though and am applying to grad schools right now, so I've never seriously looked for a job before.

</comment><comment><USER44> See if there's a job-specific mailing list for the language you're interested in.

Get involved: speak at user groups and conferences. If possible, step up and manage. You'll get work sent your way, and once you've built up a reputation (like when people come up to you at conferences and know your name but you don't know theirs), you can often drop the idea of needing work on Twitter and get a good response.

</comment><comment><USER45> I just put together a tool that aggregates developer jobs tweeted on twitter - you can see jobs by area and type.

The best part is that it also shows jobs that haven't made it to formal listings yet.

It's at <http://www.jobquacks.com> \- regrettably I haven't built in support for mobile yet..

<comment><USER31> A similar web site is: <http://jobstractor.com/> . Though I think I like yours better.

<comment><USER45> Thanks!

I didn't realize job tractors was out there when I made this. @meaydinli -- did you find the site useful at all? What would make it better?

<comment><USER31> Yes, it was useful. I actually found an opening somewhere. What would make it better? A couple of suggestions:

      - It defaults to Milwaukee. Maybe ask for a zip code?
      - I like that it loads more as you scroll down, but it also loads the same things so there are lots of repetitions.
      - No filter for android/ios/mobile
      - Highlight the words that I filter for; ex: If I choose Android, color the word Android in the page yellow.

Best of luck to you!

<comment><USER45> Thanks a ton for your thoughts and i'm really happy the tool helped you find an opening! To your points:

-I just added a mobile filter (includes all mobile dev) so take a look! hope this helps.

-highlighting filtered words is an awesome idea and it's now on my list.

-Obviously there are still some bugs in the geo-locating and scroll stuff - where are you located?

-I'd love to hear more about what kind of jobs you're looking for and why the opening you found was useful so I can understand how to make the tool better. If you have a second to respond here I'd really appreciate it, or you can tweet/email me @orrenkt/orrenkt at gmail

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've been working in the same place for 11 years now! I know it's startling but it's a pretty sweet place and I've moved myself up through the ranks so- to-speak. I have perused a few jobs on Stackoverflow careers a few times but never applied. They tend to have pretty decent places with interesting work.

</comment><comment><USER47> ZipRecruiter is a good one. It has some useful features that I haven't seen in other job board sites. Some features include, total number of candidates that have applied, including AND in the search query, and a few others. Worth giving them a look.

</comment><comment><USER48> A lot of good advice here that almost never applies to or works for those entering the work force out of school with no work experience. That's exponentially worse, especially outside of tech.

</comment><comment><USER49> * Hackerspaces * User Groups * Hackathons * Tech Happy Hours * Friends and Family * Monster, or company-specific job boards * Classifieds * Mailing lists, local or tech-specific

</comment><comment><USER50> If you're a mobile app developer - <http://www.BigBangJobs.info> could be a good choice to find exciting new projects to work on.

</comment><comment><USER13> Gotta plug one of my weekend projects - <http://careers.sh>

It links to a bunch of job sites. No referral links or anything.

</comment><comment><USER51> For Perl specific jobs I look at <http://jobs.perl.org>.

</comment><comment><USER52> I used Indeed to find my current job. Great free daily email of top jobs based on role/geography

</comment><comment><USER53> Local [language-of-choice] meetups

</comment><comment><USER54> LinkedIn is quite good too.

<comment><USER55> I also find LinkedIn very helpful.

</comment></comment><comment><USER56> related question - if I wanted to, what'd be the best method to post tech job ads to my site <http://hackerbra.in> ?

</comment><comment><USER57> Dribbble Behance Authentic Jobs Folyo

I'm a UI designer</comment>


We've got a Butterfly Labs Bitcoin miner, and it's pretty darn fast - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2013/05/weve-got-a-butterfly-labs-bitcoin-miner-and-its-pretty-darn-fast/ <comment><USER2> Is it just me, or is there a huge variance in the wattage drawn for the 5GH/s miners? The article measured the power drawn at 50W, while David from Coding In My Sleep [1] measured it to be 30W [2].

[1] <http://codinginmysleep.com/bfl-jalapeno-unboxing-and-demo/> [2] Around 7:33</comment>


Real democracy? Hungary to give mothers an extra vote for each child - <AUTHOR> http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/17/hungary-mothers-get-extra-votes

<comment><USER2> This idea was scrapped after some public polling, see:

[http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&h...](http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Findex.hu%2Fbelfold%2F2011%2F03%2F28%2Forban_meg_harcol_a_csaladi_szavazatert%2F&act=url)

Some blame the result of the polls on fears that the idea would give extra votes to the roma minority, who, on average, have more kids and larger families than the non-roma.

Some more background info: The population of Hungary is shrinking, which will cause big problems after some decades with regard to funding pensions and such (as you will have a shrinking working population having to finance the pensions of a growing populations of pensioners). Also, the retired pensioners form a large and easily mobilized voting force which means that politicians are forced to pander to their interest by raising pensions and such. The plan to allow children to vote (either directly or by giving extra votes to their parents) would help somewhat with both issues.

</comment><comment><USER3> This seems to go against the principles of feminism and the women's suffrage movements where equality was the goal. Instead it would give mothers a privileged position in Hungarian society at the expense of males and women without children.

If this is acceptable to Hungarian society, why were previous privileged classes, such as landowners or aristocrats or male heads-of-household or Communist party leaders, morally wrong and subsequently vilified?

If this passes, I expect that that in a few decades, or less, mothers will be vilified and used as scapegoats for whatever social ills ail Hungary simply because they would be the privileged class in power.</comment>


Porting Perl 6 to the JVM - <AUTHOR> https://6guts.wordpress.com/2013/02/02/a-look-at-the-preparations-behind-the-jvm-port-and-a-progress-update/

<comment><USER2> Successful and widely-used scripting languages like Python, Ruby, Tcl, PHP and Perl 5 all have one thing in common: a main implementation consisting of a relatively simple interpreter written in C.

Yes, they have other implementations targeting the JVM, the .NET CLR, or some other virtual machine. However, these are only slightly better than experimental software in the best cases, and not really suitable for practical use. Serious users almost always use the interpreter written in C.

It should be clear to the Perl 6 community that their past implementation attempts have not been successful. Aside from a very, very small handful of people, nobody wants to use an incomplete Perl 6 implementation written in Haskell, or NQP, or Perl 5, or even Perl 6 itself. Since targeting Parrot hasn't been successful, it's likely that targeting the JVM won't be successful, either.

I think it's really time for them to do the right thing, and implement a Perl 6 interpreter using C. It's an approach that has been shown to work extremely well time and time again.</comment>