That's fascinating. I know only a handful of people who got their jobs through cold applying. The majority of my friends were either referred by colleagues or received inbound recruiter email. That is, with the exception of my cohort in CS undergrad; we attended our university career fair for out entry into the workforce.
It's heartening to know that the cold apply method can be successful.
Cold applying works reasonably well IME, but you have to be able to nail the interviews for it to make sense. I'm great at what I do, I only apply to jobs which should be a good fit, and I still only get interviews 1-2% of the time. I then get offers 95% of the time, which keeps the process manageable.
I've gotten 3/4 of my tech jobs through cold applying though [0], and been offered many, many more. I know it's possible.
Ok that note, I love my current job, and I would've never found anything like it through my network. Cold applying was a literal game-changer in that regard.
[0] One was through Google Foo Bar, and one was through Codefights (now Codesignal or something), so those were slightly more tailored than cold applying.
Every job I’ve ever gotten has been cold apply, with no degree except a GED high school diploma equivalent. You can certainly get jobs through cold apply, I get a job offer for basically every job that gets to the interview, even when I hadn’t worked as a dev I had two job offers I had to pick from. I like to think my passion, knowledge, and genuine interest shines through in my cover letters and my interviews.
When did you last do that? I’ve heard from multiple friends that the job market has completely collapsed in the last couple of years & that it’s much tougher than in the past.
For me it is more curiosity about what they are doing. If you work in the same field you should be able to have a chat. If it doesn't flow you can't work there if you get along perfectly it would be dumb not to hire you.
The thing is, some people don't view "maintaining networks" as work, and it's something that not only comes naturally when they do it, but they actually do it naturally, automatically.
These people have a real advantage.
It's like how I may have a real durable advantage because I really enjoy reading about software, computers, etc, so I just consume a lot of information passively.
Or maybe how I get a lot of practice arguing or convincing people on reddit or space battles.com.
If someone viewed reading Hacker News as work, I'm not sure they'd EVER do it.
There are times when I want to argue that the solution is to make the question one of truth rather than guilt or innocence, but any solution runs up against human nature, my first experience of which was when playing sports and being told by my team mates that I should state that the ball fell on the side of the line which was advantageous to the team, rather than where it actually fell.
This looks LLM-written. Also, it doesn't match the writing style in your other comment history. However, It could be the difference between an effortpost and a quick thought.
I have also been accused of a robotic writing style, so I don't want to judge too harshly.
It's an understandable mistake to make; culturally an engineer is defined by the building of physical objects that have extremely high reliability expectations. But "engineer" originally referred to someone who used their ingenuity to build or do things in a manner not routine or primarily physical [1]. Basically an inventor who produced. The main engineering accreditation body in the United States adds the requirement of a professional education, but it is more or less the same [2].
For an environmentmaxxer, eliminating upper-middle class jobs is extremely effective, as this group consumes the lion's share of resources and bears the greatest impact on carbon emissions. Remember that the majority of industry is upstream of consumption.
Not endorsing this world view, just noting that the wealthiest 1% of people in the world (encompasses most US citizens) have an enormously outsized impact on climate.
The "upper middle class" is not strictly defined, but they are pretty clearly the folks below the wealthiest 1%. You can't be in the middle without something on either side.
They certain consume far more than the poor, on account of having resources, but they also consume far less than the wealthiest 1%.
You are almost certainly in the global 1% of the wealthy [1]. Compared to developing nations' residents, we have an order of magnitude greater impact on the environment.
>Remember that the majority of industry is upstream of consumption.
People forget this. Oil companies may have dug up the oil, but they did so because we paid them to, so we could use the energy for good and useful things.
Climate change isn't 'evil billionaire companies are ruining the world', it's 'these things we did to improve our lives turn out to have side effects'.
Mac OS comes with the purchase of the hardware. For mobile and tablets, yes, there is a strict walled garden. But I've been programming on Mac OS for longer than the age of this HN account, and even longer on Linux. In practice there's not much beyond the window manager and containerization that are impractical on Mac for every day programming compared to mainstream Linux distros.
The family computer is set up to boot into Ubuntu; booting into Windows 11 is the exception (games, iTunes).
Not giving Apple money means no Apple hardware. I've gone decades doing it and haven't regretted it once. I've turned down work because it involved having to work with Apple devices and software. It's really, really easy to not give them money.
Pirate everything if you have to, but stop feeding the companies that are making everything awful.
It's not rational to expect owners to discard equipment long before the end of its service life, especially when the operational costs are not an order of magnitude lower.
Without time travel or CCCP circa 1955 property controls, a 100% EV ownership benchmark is unreasonable.
It's not a fully consensus view, but a majority of sociologists agree that high severity deterrence has limited effectiveness against crime. Instead, certainty of enforcement is the most salient factor.
Correct. We also have evidence both from cheating in sports and in academia that stiff punishments do not work. Many people hold the false belief that if it is easy to cheat then the punishments must be extremely severe to scare would be cheaters. It just does not work. Preventing cheating is way easier said than done.
> We also have evidence both from cheating in sports and in academia that stiff punishments do not work.
Maybe so, but there is evidence that lack of punishment also don't work.
Neither extreme "works". Just because terminal punishments do not prevent the worst cheating does not in any way imply that slap on the wrists reduce incidents of cheating.
Are you claiming that one of the extremes "works"? That the "light punishment" route reduces cheating? Or maybe has no effect on cheating?
There are two extremes; I am not arguing that the one extreme (terminal punishment) reduces cheating, I am saying that the other extreme (light punishment) does not reduce cheating!
You say that stiff punishments have no effect on the cheating rate, right? Compare to what exactly? Compared to no punishments? Compared to light punishments? Compared to medium punishments? Compared to heavy but non-terminal punishments?
Now that I've reread your comment, I'm extremely skeptical that terminal punishments have no effect on the cheating rate compared to light punishments or compared to medium punishments.
It's an extraordinary claim, so I want to see this "lots of evidence"; the evidence should basically show no correlation between cheating and punishments.
That's not true. People still pick up USB sticks from the street, people still fall for scam phone calls and people still click on links in mail.
Just because a method was successful once does not mean it was 'burned', none of these people will be checking each and every future pdf or passing it through a cleaner before they will do the same thing all over again and others are going to be 'virgin' and won't even be warned because this is not going to be widely distributed in spite of us discussing it here.
If anything you can take this as proof that this method is more or less guaranteed to work.
Yup, precisely this. Doing something bad is rarely a rational commitment and cost of benefits. Likelihood and celerity of getting caught seem to be the driving factors.
It makes honest people feel rewarded, valued and acknowledge. It teaches people who wish to follow the rules and conform to social norms what those norms are and where we actually draw the line in practice.
Looked at slightly differently, given a split between high trust and low trust preventing conversions from high to low is similarly important to inducing conversions from low to high.
If you can hoof it all the way to Fairfield (2.5 hours from Y Combinator HQ in SF; Muni->BART->Amtrak->taxi), you can get a 7 year old Model 3 for $14k tomorrow.
It's heartening to know that the cold apply method can be successful.
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