Ludic's Guide To Getting Software Engineering Jobs
The steps in this guide have generated A$1,179,000 in salary (updated 13th April, 2025), measured as the sum of the highest annual salaries friends and readers have reached after following along, where they were willing to attribute their success actions in here. If it works for you, email me so I can bump the number up. I currently run my business out of my own pocket. If I don't make sales, I lose savings, and it's as simple as that. I am all-in on creating work I love by force of arms, and I'd sooner leave the industry than be disrespected at a normal workplace again. The impetus to run that risk comes from two places. The first is that my tolerance for middle managers jerking themselves off at my expense is totally eroded, and I realized that I either had to do something about it or stop complaining. I'll happily go to an office if I think it will produce something I care about, but I will not do it because someone wants to impress a withered husk who thinks his sports car makes him attractive to young women. The second , and what this post is about, is that I am really good at getting jobs, and have friends with a very deep understanding of how the job market works. In Australia, when you apply for a job without permanent residency, you are filtered out of all applications immediately. It is the first question on all online application forms, and the reason is that companies do not want to deal with visa renewals and they have far too many candidates. This leads to a situation where any characteristic that is remotely inconvenient but not noticeably correlated with suitability for the business is grounds for rejection. It is not uncommon for immigrants to take months, sometimes over a year, to find their first job actually writing code. Despite being a non-white with no professional network in the country and an undesirable visa, I had my first paid programming engagement lined up before finalizing the move off my student visa. I had a full-time job on A$117K lined up for the same day my full work visa kicked in. I continued to dig up work whenever a contract was expiring, even landing a gig mid-COVID, and while most of these jobs left much to be desired , I believe this has more to do with the state of the industry in Australia than anything that I did. And I have only gotten better at this over the past two years, because while I despaired about the state of software in general, I never stopped thinking and experimenting about how to regain some control over how I'm treated. Almost everyone I spend time with now has walked away from a job without flinching. I've done it . I once caught up with a friend, and he said "Work is stupid, I'm going to Valencia for a year." I said, "W-what? Valencia? When? For a year ?" "Yeah, a year. I'm going in two weeks." And then that glorious son of a bitch did it . Came home. Had a job waiting for him. Quit that job, got another job at more money. Quit that job, got one interstate because he felt like it at similar pay for half the work. All in a "weak" market. I get a lot of emails from people who despair about the state of the industry or who otherwise can't find jobs, and I always end up giving the same advice. I don't have the time to keep doing that. So in this post, I'm going to attempt to convince thousands of people that you should have much higher standards for what you tolerate, that you can build up the reserves to do your version of going to Valencia (this could just be staying home and playing with your kids for six months), and that it is immensely risky not to have this ability in your back pocket. Along the way, we will answer questions like "How long should a CV be?", "What should go on it?", and "When will this suffering end?" From Scott Smitelli's phenomenal The Ideal Candidate Will Be Punched In The Stomach : What was the plan here? Why did you leave a perfectly sustainable—if difficult and slightly unrewarding—job to do this crap? What even is this crap? You are, and let’s not mince words here, you are a thief. That’s the only way to make sense of this situation: You are stealing money from somebody, somehow. This is money you have not earned. There is no legitimate way that you should be receiving any form of compensation for simply absorbing abuse. These people, maybe the whole company but certainly the people in your immediate management chain, are irredeemably damaged to be using human beings that way. They will take, and take, and smile at you like they’re doing you some kind of favor, and maybe throw you a little perk from time to time to distract you from thinking about it too hard. But you? You can’t stop thinking. You can’t stop thinking. You can’t stop thinking. If you're in this photo and don't like it, this blog post is for you. We have one end-goal. A career where you're paid well, are treated with real respect, and we will not settle for less. And I mean real respect, as in "we will not proceed on this major project without your professional blessing, and you can fire abusive clients", not "you can work from home two days a week if the boss is feeling generous". I had a brief email exchange with Erez Zukerman, the CEO of ZSA last year, and asked how their customer support is so good — it's the best customer support I've ever experienced and there's no close second. He replied: For support, the basic understanding is that support is the heart of the business. It is not an afterthought. Support is a senior position at ZSA, with judgment, power of review over features and website updates before anything is released (nothing major goes out without a green line from every member of support), the power to fire customers (!), real flexibility when it comes to the schedule, etc. There are also lots of ways to expand, like writing (Robin has been writing incredible blog posts and creating printables), recording (Tisha recorded Tisha Talks Switches which thousands of people enjoyed), and more. Anything short of that isn't real respect. Not a special parking spot. Not the ability to pick up your kids sometimes . Not a patronizing award on Teams. Most places fall short of this, and because we have all agreed to demand better for ourselves, we are going to consider all of these places as mildly abusive. A lot of office jobs seem like a slow death of the soul — better than the swift death of the body that careers like construction work offer, but that isn't a reason to stop striving. Shoddy work. Hour long stand-ups. The deadlines are somehow always urgent and must be delivered immediately, but are also always late and everyone knows they'll be late from day one. This is delightful at times — office scenes in improvised theater get funnier the straighter you play them — but many people eventually feel that something vital is missing from their work lives. I really enjoy David Whyte's The Three Marriages as an antidote to the tedious objection of "Work to live, don't live to work". It's a part of life, and while it isn't all of life, being bored and treated like a disposable cog for eight hours a day shouldn't be any part of your life. If you're happy to coast, adieu, catch you later. This a no judgement zone for the next five minutes. Here is a quick reality check. I have, by virtue of hundreds of people reaching out to me over this blog, seen the "I want to leave my bad job" story play out far more times than a typical person does in a lifetime. It always plays out in one of two ways. The first is that the person immediately and aggressively looks for new jobs. This usually goes well. If it does not go well, they can always find a new job again. When the job is pursued through "normal" mechanisms, such as cold Seek applications, these jobs almost never meet the standard I set above: great pay, great team, great interview process, and whatever office arrangement you prefer. But they've always been doing better along at least some of the four measures. The other story is much more typical, and it goes something like this: I'd love to leave, but there's something keeping me. One more year and I'll get a new title, and then I'll be so well-placed for a new job. I've heard the market is bad, so I should wait until it picks up again. I'll get a raise soon, then I'll negotiate for a new job. I'm scared of keeping up with mortgage repayments. I just need a year to finish up this project, it'll look great on my CV. My network is terrible , so I don't have the same options open to me. I think I can make a difference if I'm given a few more months. In two years, this second approach has never gone well. Never, ever, ever. Consider this real exchange, copied verbatim and redacted. May, 2024: Me: I'm a little bit concerned that the pathway above leads to delaying indefinitely (there's always going to be a risk of moving then getting laid off - so what risk level do you actually tolerate, and how is that balanced against [COMPANY] being run so badly that you can get laid off there too?) but you know your situation better than me. Reader: Well, the company was bought out and seems to be stabilizing. July, 2024: Reader: Got some fantastic news! Gonna get a raise at [COMPANY], 20%! It came as a surprise, apparently they think I earn too little so they're giving me a raise because of that. November, 2024: Reader: Wanted to let you know I got news, I'm gonna be fired next month. This happens so often that it's actually boring for me . I've had exchanges like the above often enough that I know the person is finished months before they do. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. They will either be let go, burn out and quit, or burn out and stay there as their health deteriorates. No one, at any level short of executive, has managed to have the impact that would be required for them to feel it was worth the cost. The thing that is missing, to my eyes, is some sense of confidence and self-respect. I hear lots of supposed barriers to getting a better job, but almost none of them are convincing, especially from people in the first world, so what I'm actually hearing about are psychological barriers. It takes a certain degree of confidence to know that you have worth, because a great deal of our society, whether by coincidence or design, causes people to feel like they're not desirable. If you don't have confidence, you feel trapped at the current situation, because what if you can't find something else ? What if you're not good enough? This is a real risk, but guess what, life's risky! Two months ago, one of my high school classmates, one of the fittest people I know, died of an aneurysm at age 29. Think about it this way: enough people read this blog that if you are reading this sentence , you have just drawn a ticket in the "heart attack kills me by December" lottery. This isn't hypothetical, this will happen — someone reading this will die having spent a few hundred hours on spreadsheets this year, and perhaps even have time to think "I wish I had listened to Ludic, he is so smart and wise." 1 And on self-respect, I will concede that you're getting the vestiges of my time spent in psychology, but why would anyone respect you if you let someone do Scrum at you for hours ? No one respected me when I let people do Scrum at me, and that was my fault . "It what der street trolls make when dey is short o' cash an' ... what is it dey's short of, Brick?" The moving spoon paused. "Dey is short o' self-respec', Sergeant," he said, as one might who'd had the lesson shouted into his ear for twenty minutes. So where do we start off? Well, the first thing to do is bury the idea that you need this particular job, or that you are otherwise unworthy. And we're going to do that by getting really good at getting mediocre jobs, and we're almost always going to want to be doing day-rate contracts. We are going to do a lot of things that I do not endorse when going for a good job, like sending your CV anywhere, talking to recruiters, etc. Regular full-time jobs obtained through mass-market channels have dysfunctional social dynamics that are too complex to get into here. Patrick McKenzie writes : Many people think job searches go something like this: See ad for job on Monster.com Send in a resume. Get an interview. Get asked for salary requirements. Get offered your salary requirement plus 5%. Try to negotiate that offer, if you can bring yourself to. This is an effective strategy for job searching if you enjoy alternating bouts of being unemployed, being poorly compensated, and then treated like a disposable peon. Working jobs like the above comes at a real cost, even if you can get them at-will. I had an episode of intense burnout which resulted in a year of recovery , and I had to think very hard about how to not feel trapped in a bad situation again, even if the business fails. I do not want to attend hour-long stand-ups anymore. This section is about how to get the above jobs as effectively and painlessly as possible, but they will still not be great , and if you do them forever then I will be very disappointed in you. In any case, if one must engage with the market in this way to build confidence and a reputation, then day-rate contracts are amazing. I am heavily in favour of contracting. The day rate is much higher. You are forced to continue searching every few months, which means you are also forced to always be aware that you have options, and we will discuss how to minimize the pain of this. You will meet far more people because you will be at a new workplace every few months. Here in Australia, a weak contracting job will pay A$1K per day, which is approximately double what a permanent employee earns. I.e, for every six months of contracting, you can afford six months of unemployment, and you're still as well off as you were if you had been permanently employed over that period. Contracts are terminated more frequently, but you're also in a much better position because you've saved way more money per day worked, you've met tons more people, and your CV is always up-to-date. And you also knew it was going to expire in six months, so having it end three months early isn't a horrible shock to your planning. You are also excluded from the most mentally draining practices in a corporate environment, and afforded a higher status than regular employees. You will usually not be asked to attend pointless meetings, and instead be left free to execute on technical work, particularly if you indicate that you can manage scope independently. If someone does ask you to attend a pointless meeting, you can recite the Litany of a Thousands Dollars a Day in your head over and over as the project manager attempts to flay your mind. You know that delightful period after you've submitted a resignation and you're about to get out? That's the whole contract . A six month contract feels like handing in a resignation with six months of notice. When the CEO says "Can we put GenAI and blockchain in the product?", you can close your eyes, my God you are so happy, and whisper "Inshallah, I will not be on this train when it derails". None of these jobs will be great. This is not a good way to get jobs in the long-term. This is a boring, soulless way for someone that does not have any appreciable career capital or networking ability to generate adequate jobs on high pay. We only bother with this so that you know that if your business explodes, or the cool non-profit you find fires you, or if a new boss comes in and abuses you, you'll know deep down that you can walk right out that door and tell them to get fucked. I should note that the advice in this section was heavily contributed to by a friend who wishes to remain anonymous, but let us all send them silent thanks. Anyway, we take Sturgeon's Law very seriously on this blog. Ninety percent of everything is crap. It is with this understanding that we must proceed. There is a pathway to navigate that relies entirely on the broad understanding that: Let us begin with recruiters. Recruiters are an unfortunate reality of the industry. I still haven't worked out why they exist when a company can just post a job ad themselves, and their talent team has to filter out the candidates themselves anyway, but whatever. They're here, and I've learned enough about the world to accept that it's 50/50 on whether their existence is economically rational. In 2019, about a month into my first full-time programming job, I received a call from a recruiter. They were looking for someone with Airflow experience to work a contract with Coles, a massive Australian grocery chain. I had no idea what to really say to this, being inexperienced and hugely underconfident, so I just listened to his questions and answered them. Most of my answers were a sad: "Ah, no, sorry, I know what AWS is but I've never used it before at a real business. I know what Airflow is , but I've never..." Until finally we come across the fateful question: "And do you know Linux?" Why, yes, I do know Linux. At that stage of my career, it never even occurred to me to ponder what knowing Linux is. Do I even know my keyboard if I can't construct one from scratch? What does he mean know ? How deranged would I have to be to say I know Python, without qualification, without being a core contributor? But none of that occurred to me, I just said yes. He is delighted, we get to chatting, and we quickly realize that we're both working our first jobs! He is a year younger, also nervous about his job, and is so happy to be talking to someone that just sounds like a normal person. He is soon comfortable enough to ask me a very vulnerable question: "So what is Linux?" I answer, and I've been doing nothing but teach psychologists-in-training statistics for a year, so the explanation is good. Each good explanation leads to another, until I'm fielding questions like: "What is Airflow? What is AWS?" We hang up, on good terms, and I stare at the wall for a long moment. There are people out there just like, calling around and functionally asking "Have you used FeebleGlorp for eight years?" with no internal model of what FeebleGlorp might be? That can't be right. Everyone at school told me that affairs would be very serious in the real world. Affairs are not very serious in the real world. Affairs have never been less serious. I told myself for a while that this must have been because he was so young, but no, they're actually almost all like this. I have only ever met two recruiters with intact brains 2 . To quote a reader with extensive HR experience who attempted to explain this dysfunction to me: While there are professionals that specialize in tech and with time develop enough depth to understand the discipline and move the needle in the right direction, for most recruiters it is not an economic advantage to do so; as the winds of the market are ever changing, recruiters are always the first ones to go into the chopping block when there are layoffs. Better to be a generalist recruiter and keep your job options open. I.e, the recruiters you are talking to probably go out of their way to avoid learning anything, because they may be recruiting in a different industry next month. This means a few things. I normally do not send CVs anywhere and decry them, but I've reversed my stance. They're a terrible way to get good jobs, but a heavily optimized CV will demolish most other candidates, who are about as unserious as the recruiters. So how do we optimize? Well, we're trying to get past recruiters. On your CV, quality indicators only matter if the recruiter can understand them, and as per the above they do not understand anything . At 12:34 PM today, while writing this blog post, I got a call from a recruiter and I asked them a question for blog material. "Hey, question about my CV, would it be better if I mentioned that I'm well-regarded by Linus Torvalds?" (This is not true, we don't know each other.) And they said, "Uh, I'd leave that out, these are very busy people and need technical credentials." Recruiters are only looking for one thing. They are looking for the number of years of experience that you say you have in buzzword, and possibly that you've worked somewhere like Google — but I've never seen a Googler compete for open-market contracts, so don't feel too disadvantaged. Years of experience with buzzword is the only thing that matters. Delete everything else. Link to your GitHub profile? Goodbye, none of these people are going to read that. I've been assured that the typical talent team spends five to ten seconds per CV . I am a passionate front-end developer with a drive for — no one cares, and if you reflect on how you felt even writing that sentence, of course no one cares. You didn't care. My CV used to say things like "deployed a deep learning project in collaboration with Google engineers" and it had sections like this: Some of the most talented people I know in Australia have told me that that this would qualify me for an instant interview on their teams, but this CV does not work because the person reading your CV will not care about the craft. If someone that does care reads it, it will be after four untalented people decided it was allowed to land on their desk, and at that point they're going to interview you anyway so your CV doesn't matter. The ideal CV starts with lines like this: Five (5) years expert skills in cloud database development and integration (Databricks, Snowflake) using ETL/ELT tools (dbt and Airbyte) and deploying cloud computing with AWS (EC2, RDS) and Azure (VM) cloud platforms The rest of the CV should be more lines like that , nothing else matters. A senior talent acquisition nerd at McKenzie told me that CVs should be one page, because it shows that the candidate is concise. Their counterpart at another agency said that you need three pages or you can barely get to know the candidate. Which of them is right? Both of them had no idea what they're talking about, because both of them are just eyeballing it, coming up with post-hoc rationalizations for their behavior that ignores the real hard question of why they specialize in hiring talent in fields that they cannot describe. I now trend towards a three page CV for no reason other than it looks like I must have more experience if it won't fit on one page, and it gives me more space to put buzzwords in. And when I say buzzwords, I mean you need the room to write things like "Amazon Web Services (AWS)" because some of the people reading the CVs do not know they are the same thing . Act on the principle of minimum charity, and accept that this version of your CV will never get you a great job. We know what we're optimizing for at this stage, and it isn't amazing colleagues, it is the ability to refill your coffers very quickly and with minimal pain . Okay, but which buzzwords do you pick? If you hop onto a job search platform, you are going to see many jobs that are essentially asking you to cosplay as a software engineer. For example, I have just hopped onto Seek and punched in "data engineer", my own subspecialty. This immediately yields this job from an international consultancy whose frontpage reads: GenAI is the most powerful force in business—and society—since the steam engine. As software and code generate more value than ever, every worker, business leader, student, and parent is now asking: Are we ready? Wow, that sure is something! I think speak on behalf of all of us when I say "please stop, you're hurting us". Also it looks like there isn't a single mention of AI on their website in 2022, so I'm really impressed that they've become experts in a novel technology just in time to cash in on over-excited executives . But what does the actual job listing entail? Proficient in Azure Data Factory, Databricks, SQL Server Integration Services (SSIS), and SQL Server Analysis Services (SSAS). And from this, by mental force, I can tell you everything you need to know about the job. My third eye is fully open, and the recruiting department's pathetic attempts to ward off my psychic intrusions are but tattered veils before a hurricane. They are almost certainly recruiting data engineers for a company with a very weak IT department, probably a government client, that is in the middle of a failing cloud migration. SSIS is the phylactery of a millennia old lich-king, a piece of software that runs out of SQL Server on old government data warehouses everywhere. The first time I had to fix an SSIS production outage, the senior engineer on my team told me to "untick all the boxes on that screen, then re-tick them all and click save", and that actually solved the problem . The entire point of a cloud migration is to stop using SSIS and use something better, but that would require you to be good at your job, so instead consultancies sell Azure Data Factory. Azure Data Factory is notable for having been forged in the hottest furnace in Hell. The last time I used it, I clicked "save" on a slow internet connection and it started to open and close random panels for five minutes before saving my work, which I can only assume means that the product has to open every component on the front-end to fetch data from the DOM to populate a POST request... which is, you know, is certainly one way that we could do things. Why use something so bad? It's because Azure Data Factory can be used to run SSIS packages! So now you're on the cloud, and have a new bad service running your old bad service, all without actually improving anything! And of course, they are both tools that do not require programming , so the consultancy can sell you a team of non-programmers for $2,000 per day. I've worked alongside one of these teams. They had one good developer who desperately tried to handle all of their work at once, and I shit you not, four "engineers" that spent eight hours a day copying-and-pasting secrets out of legacy SSIS packages into Azure Data Factory's secret manager for weeks on end. With a bit of experience, most job listings are simply an honor roll of dead IT projects. And because many executives hop onto the same bandwagons at the same times (but call it innovation), there seem to be specific patterns for the type of cog that companies are pursuing at any given moment. The friend who gave me most of the tips in here has an "Azure Data Engineer" CV, where he removes all mention of AWS work he has done so that government recruiters don't hurt their pretty little heads, and vice versa. Companies on Azure want Databricks because you can spin it up from the Azure UI, and companies on AWS similarly use Snowflake because of groupthink. Just smash those words onto the page. Every field can think of some variation of this. If you're a data scientist, it'll be a few common patterns to try cram LLMs into things. If you're a front-end developer, it's probably going to be a soup of React and its supporting technologies. Again, no one reading your CV until the final stage will know anything. Once, a recruiter had coffee with me, and they asked me why Git is such a popular programming language. I write my CV in Overleaf because I can make faster edits during the early phases of figuring out which patterns work, and fidgeting with layout is probably the most annoying part of any sort of CV-writing. This is a tough situation. What I did was looking up a few "easy" jobs, like data analyst, hop onto LinkedIn, navigate to that company's page, then navigate to someone that looks like they might be leading the relevant team. Do not message HR. They, as a rule, do not have human frailties like mercy and kindness while they are at work. Go straight to someone that actually cares if you are good at the job, and impress upon them that you are a real person, who either has a very cool life story about changing career pathways late in life, or who is an adorable graduate UwU. If you are super, super, super desperate, my company has an unpaid internship for graduates that really, really, really think that they just need a tiny bit of experience to get taken seriously. Once you're done scrubbing all signs of personality or competence out of your CV, leaving only eight (8) years of experience, what then? If you're going to be doing this all the time, how do we make it relatively painless? The first thing is to hop onto a bunch of job platforms and upload the CV. That's simple enough. This means that recruiters will start reaching out to you every week or so, and some of them will have jobs for you. 90% of them will fail to secure you an interview. I start the conversations with something like "In the interest of making sure we're making good use of time, what's the expected compensation for the job?". They'll say a number. If the number isn't high enough, thank them for their time and hang up. Don't waste your time. They will not present you to the candidate if you ask them to do any work beyond sending a CV and collecting a commission — from their perspective, you are cattle to be sold. If I was desperate, I would take the first job offered to me at any pay, then not slow my search down at all. Most contracts allow you to quit on very short notice, so use that against the employer instead of having it used against you for a change. The second thing is that you can start testing out the CV in the lowest-effort manner possible. The recommendation from my friend that has experimented the most is to grab a job platform's app on your phone, and to apply to maybe three or four jobs every morning. Don't bother with ones that ask you to make accounts on new job platforms, or write cover letters, or anything like that. Save a filter that removes anything you aren't willing to do, whether it's pay that's too low or a long commute. Err on the side of being picky, and do this every workday , even if you already have a contract. If the list of jobs becomes empty, then you must either relax your constraints or move to a new area. Sorry! If you get as far as a call with a human and are later rejected, ask them, especially recruiters, what employers want to see. They will tell you which buzzwords are good. If there is any conceivable way that you can claim to have experience in an important buzzword, write it down. This is incidentally how the strain of doing this is best managed — by not doing anything more arduous than reading a few jobs and clicking "apply", then not thinking about it until the next day. Don't apply to so many that it feels like even a bit of an ordeal. Do not let rejection affect you, most of the people involved in this process do not deserve your respect in this instance. I am sure they are lovely husbands and wives and sons and we don't care right now . It has taken up to two months before calls have started rolling in, and that is why I'd suggest doing this more-or-less constantly, even when settled into a contract role. You want to know if jobs have suddenly started to dry up, or if you need to make adjustments to your buzzword soup. A fair number of these jobs won't do any sort of diligence. The interview will be fine. Questions will sometimes be on the level of "Do you know Python?", a real question that a real director asked me before paying me hundreds of thousands of dollars. I've done a few more unpleasant interviews, detailed here , but at this point they don't bother me. If I found myself in another one of these situations, I would hang up mid-call. Eat your assertiveness vegetables, they'll put hair on your chest. Quit. You got this job, you'll get another job. Don't quit, duh. Listen man, I didn't design the industry, but I rolled brown skin and an Indian name at character creation. I'm just doing what I've gotta do. All those jobs will be mediocre, but you won't feel like any particular person has too much power over you. But still, the second job market is where you actually want to be. This is the promised land where people have functioning test suites, the executives know something about the work being undertaken, your colleagues are not Senior Void Gazers who have been so thoroughly beaten down by the industry that they dully repeat "it's a living and I have kids", and as a bonus you're probably paid about 50% more. It is so totally divorced from the first job market that people in it sometimes do not understand that the first job market exists. Famous Netflix-guy-turned-Twitch-streamer, the Primagen, has never even heard of PowerBI , what is probably the most popular analytics tool on the planet. These people are blessed . It is not accessible via Seek. It is accessible entirely through having well-placed friends and a reputation for being a cool person with a modicum of self-respect. You can't generate these by pulling the "apply for job" lever over and over. This way you don't have to pray that your friend's companies are hiring at any given moment, you'll just always know that you've got an interview every few weeks. Because getting in here isn't very predictable, this section is general advice in no particular order. If the company asks you to do Leetcode stuff, my opinion right now is that they're probably at least a bit serious, but I don't think a place that asks you to grovel before entry is a great place to be along non-technical dimensions. Erik Dietrich calls this type of interview "carnival cash", rewarding compliant employees and middle managers with the opportunity to terrorize their fellow humans instead of with money. I'm not that sure about this point. I'd probably be bad at a Leetcode interview, so I'm biased against them. Maybe they're correlated with high quality programming performance in some way that I don't understand. People often say "I don't have any connections" or "My network is terrible". This was a 0% judgement zone earlier. It is now a 0% sympathy zone. There is a phenomenon I refer to called "trying to try". It can be broadly summarized as any set of behaviors where someone has not seriously engaged their brain, does not really believe that they're doing anything with a serious chance of success, and are more-or-less just looking for reasons to say that they tried but failed. This happens in subtle places — for example, when training with beginner sabre fencers, you can stand perfectly immobile and they will very consistently hit your blade instead of you. They are so panicked and upset that their body is not trying to win , simply going through the motions of what fencing looks like. This manifests in all sorts of ways that I'll talk about one day, but it's so apparent in the job search. "I've applied for fifty jobs and no one responded". A good indicator that you're trying to try is that you are: Most people tell me they've applied for jobs and didn't get responses. Slightly savvier people tell me they've sent some cold emails out. Some people beyond that say they've started attending Meetups but had no luck. None of them have done anything remotely interesting or otherwise indicative of novel thought. I got my first programming job by emailing Josh Wiley from my psychology degree, a man who did not know me at all, but I had been in one lecture with him, and his wife was the only senior academic honest enough to tell me not to undertake a PhD. I still have the original email. We had a brief back-and-forth, and two weeks later one of his colleagues said "One of my PhD students is freaking out because they can't process some data in R", and that got me my first paid programming job, processing microsaccade data in sleep-deprived drivers. A few weeks later, I saw that a data analyst job was up for grabs at a nearby university. The smooth brained thing to do would have been to apply via Seek and get ignored. I instead went on LinkedIn, looked up the company, look up the word "lead" and cold messaged someone who seemed like they might have something to do with the job. This led me to Dave Coulter, who I still catch up every few months, and a job offer that let me skip straight to being a mid-level engineer. During the interview, when they asked "Have you programmed professionally?", I described the microsaccade project and they hired me. I didn't mention that it was about thirty hours of work in total, and they didn't ask. I actually lost the original position to someone with six more years of experience, who was offered the original data analyst role or a much more highly-paid contract. They wanted the stability, so they took the permanent role, leaving me with a massive pay bump for the contract role, and we both quit at the same time anyway. And they do not conceptualize it as losing tends of thousands of dollars, but they were functionally unemployed for months relative to what they could have earned. Score one for contracts. Those still ended up being mediocre jobs, but I just wanted to illustrate that there is a level of trying that looks more like "there is a gun to my head and I'm willing to do unorthodox things to survive", and the people that email me for jobs have never reached the unorthodox part of that. Presumably the people that do reach this point do not need to email me for jobs. I woke up this morning to an email from Dan Tentler from Phobos about safe ways to run Incus with NixOS images pre-loaded with Airflow and an overlay VPN to client sites. Dan learned about Phobos from a group of hackers in Oslo. I learned about overlay VPNs in December from the CTO of Hyprefire , Stefan Prandl, when asking for advice on network security. I have a discussion about something like this every day, even if it isn't in the tech space. Before that, at a relatively "decent" engineering company, the most complex discussion I had was trying to explain to someone that their Snowflake workload was crashing because they were trying to read 2M+ records into a hash map and that this takes a lot of memory. I have learned more in the last three months than I have in the previous three years, basically along every dimension of my profession. I'm trying to catch up for years of working with mediocre performers, and it's hard . It's definitely doable, and remember that I'm doing this while spending half my time on sales so you can do it faster than me, but there is a real cost to not working with really great people. I've studied hard over the past few years, but nothing comes close to just having awesome people around you. This matters because really good teams don't hire total scrubs that haven't taken control of their education. The first job market does not reward skill or personal development. The second one does actually require you to be good. The best offer I've received from a good company (A$185K) was obtained not through Seek, but by meeting my current co-founder Ash Lally during the preparation for a game of Twilight Imperium IV where I absolutely smoked everyone . The only other place that I've considered might be acceptable to settle down, much better than the offer I received through Ash, was the result of getting coffee with a local reader, then eventually being invited to drinks with their team a few times. We mostly talked about split keyboards and Star Citizen. It has been a few months since I quit my last job, and I used to say all sorts of conciliatory things like "Sure, that engineer is terrible, but most of them are good!", but money talks. I only offered one of them a job with me. In retrospect, most of them had the potential to be good, but enough years in a typical corporate setting will ruin this. When I was 20, people were happy to hire me because I had potential. Now, potential is still important, but it's important that I've at least demonstrated that some of it is manifesting . Many engineers have pathologies that I think make them unsuitable for work on a healthy team, in the same way that some people need to do some self-work to enter a healthy relationship. For example, I know many people who feel guilty taking time off, so they'll burn themselves out without someone constantly getting them to slow down. I'm sympathetic, but a team as small as mine doesn't have time to walk someone through that level of self-harm and still deliver for clients reliably. We help each other through lots of little quirks we need to deprogram out of corporate contexts, but we need to be starting from a place of some progress. An example that Modal's Jonathon Belotti sent my way is that Modal's most high-performing team members will get a two week deadline, then confidently spend the entirety of the first week reading a book on the technology they're about to use. Most engineers I know, including myself a few years ago, would rather hack incompetently for two weeks. The essential reason for this is being too underconfident to act on our beliefs about how engineering should be done (or worse, not having those beliefs at all), and we'd rather fail in the approved, was-working-visibly fashion than risk looking unorthodox. "I programmed the whole two weeks and failed!" feels easier to justify than "I read a book for one of those weeks and failed!". But team members should be picked for their judgement, and if they are good for the team in proportion to the quality of that judgement and their willingness to exercise it in the face of orthodoxy . People are awful at asking for work. Here is how I advise people do it. If you don't have a good time, just leave it be. You're here to rekindle old relationships and meet interesting people, and maybe they can help you out. The moment you start asking people for help that you don't even want as friends is the moment that the entire endeavour becomes sleazy. I think of each person I know (in the context of job searching) as some sort of machine that randomly spits out jobs in a uniform distribution over a year. Let's say each person has a 5% chance of turning up a job every month, maybe more or less depending on the market. If you want an 80% chance at a job every month, you have to have enough people with you in mind that you're rolling the dice enough times to get that number. Many people tell me that they attended a few Meetups and had no results, even though that's what you're supposed to do. It's good that they tried, but most large Meetups seem to be populated by people who are ineffectually looking for jobs. Don't be ineffectual. Large Meetups were frustrating when I was a student because everyone interesting was swarmed by students trying desperately to look employable without being needy, and it is frustrating as a non-student because now I get swarmed. People go "Oh, I am a data scientist, I will go to the Data Science Meetup". That's better than not going out at all, but strictly inferior to going to a tiny Meetup with ten nerds that are deeply into Elixir or some other niche bit of technology. You will form real connections with the latter, and the fact that you know what Clojure is will be enough to make many people at such a place want to work with you. If you are in a city with a functioning tech industry and can't think of any interesting technology, then it's going to be really hard to justify why you deserve a spot on a good team, so maybe solve that problem first. If you're decent at writing and have opinions on something... write. It's amazing for meeting people. I have several readers that have sent me their writing, and without any intervention from me , about 30% of them hit the front-page of Hackernews on the strength of their material. There are surprisingly few people putting out good material on almost all topics, especially in the age of LLM slop. Reader Mira Welner wrote about something as generic as Git checkout and hit the front-page. Bernardo Stein, mentioned in various places on the blog as the guy that coaches me through my worst engineering impulses from my corporate career, has front-paged by writing about NixOS . Nat Bennett, who I've been getting advice from for months and am now hiring to coach my team, front-paged Hackernews writing about the notebook they keep at new jobs . Even Scott Smitelli, who I quoted earlier for having wrote this fantastic piece emailed it to me, and before I could finish reading it people were already recommending it to me through other channels. It's super easy to meet people through writing if you aren't afraid of pushing out your real opinions and indeed, you will see extremely stupid comments on all of the above writing, so you will need to be unafraid. Fine. Tell people that you, personally, are ChatGPT. Someone else may lose their job and think "I wish I hadn't listened to Ludic, he is so stupid and foolish", but I refuse to acknowledge them. ↩ The main one is Gary Donovan who I didn't even meet in the wild. I met a reader for coffee, and that reader worked with a really nice engineering company. That company said Gary is their favourite recruiter. The first time I called him, I said something about Lisp and it turned out he had a copy of The Little Schemer in front of him at that very second, and we later had a great talk about engineering culture in F1 over ramen. I am still reeling at the implications in neuroscience of a recruiter that can read — is it possible that some of them are sentient? ↩
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