Ask HN: Jack-of-all-trades of HN, how do you approach job search?
Background, I&#x27;m very much a jack of all trades; I can do stuff from up and down the stack, for example:<p>- phd in biochemistry, can do molecular biology, synthetic organic chemistry, etc.<p>- wrote a test framework for debugging the machine code for a chip that hadn&#x27;t been built yet (it taped out shortly thereafter with bugfixes for a ton of critical bugs I discovered)<p>- designed research alternatives to IEEE floating point, cited by FB AI, live-demoed at a lecture at stanford<p>- wrote from-scratch orchestration software for linux containers (didn&#x27;t hit prod) and virtual machines (went into production)<p>- assembled physical hardware to go into a rack that is a staging environment for the vm orchestration system<p>- network admin (switches, etc) for the above system<p>- wrote a layer-7 TLS-terminating reverse proxy server for jupyter notebooks<p>- several small-time web-ish things for myself, in various languages over the years, none publically hosted (so, yes I know the principles and basic howtos of a rest-ful server, and wrangle react, but I&#x27;ll be slow at it at first).<p>Most recent experience (past 2 months):<p>I can&#x27;t pass a standard FAANG interview for shit.  I couldn&#x27;t give a damn about finding mindepth for a binary tree.  It made me angrier that they conducted the interview over coderpad and had disabled execution.  I wasted precious time commenting-out the instructions that the interviewer pasted into the coderpad.  (I&#x27;d given interviews in coderpad before, and the interviewer asked me if I&#x27;d used it before, so I assumed I knew what I could do).<p>In the past, all of my jobs I&#x27;ve gotten &quot;because I knew someone&quot;; this was the first time I applied to jobs via &quot;normal employment track&quot; and I&#x27;ll admit I was a bit jaded about the process.<p>My strategy was to focus on companies that were hiring for the language that I was the strongest at.  Relatively niche, so over the last couple of months I only really saw about 10-12 realistic opportunities go by.  One strength is that I have a ton of open source libraries that I&#x27;ve written over the years and I made sure to pin these to the top on github.  I also took care to make sure that the documentation is above average on all of these libraries (and the readmes all link to them).  I figured I have some runway to apply to &quot;other stack&quot; jobs later.  Might as well optimize for developer comfort.<p>Actually only got three interviews.  A lot of the &quot;bigger names you have heard of&quot; that use this stack passed on me immediately, probably because I don&#x27;t have any publicly visible webdev chops.  First one kind of wiffed on me by trying to make me a contract tryout (and the team felt super strange, too).  Second one, which was a fantastic interview, I failed the tech exam (debug this miscoded UX experience) because I had forgotten how one of the macros that I don&#x27;t use in the web framework works, forgot to check the network pane in the web console (I don&#x27;t do a ton of frontend so it&#x27;s tool I reach for relatively late), and didn&#x27;t notice that the central problem was a misnamed variable, even though I intuited (and verbalized) that this was likely the problem early on.  Third interview didn&#x27;t have a tech component at all.  I guess they can see my output and they trust it?  Anyways, got an offer after some short chats, it&#x27;s in a vertical that I find very appealing, so I&#x27;ll probably be starting there soon.<p>Pipeline ~12 -&gt; 3 -&gt; 1.   Not bad.  Definitely stress-free.<p>Specific advice:<p>If you think you will fail standard tech questions, focus on startups, I think they&#x27;re bimodal in their attitude towards FAANG-style interviews, some cargo cult it like they&#x27;re gonna try to scale to a billion users in the next year, and some avoid it like plague).<p>I would say, try to find a niche-but-provably-valuable (obvi don&#x27;t shoot for &quot;I can program in zig&quot; companies) skills, especially if you would enjoy working in it - and try to find a company that matches this.  Your life will be easier, you&#x27;ll probably have a greater chance of avoiding the FAANG questions.  Make sure your resume&#x2F;github highlights real work done in this niche.<p>Finally, maybe a positive is that in an early screen, the CEO asked me, &quot;do you know anything about X domain&quot;.  I kind of demurred and said &quot;not really&quot; and then explained that I thought it meant &quot;&lt;x keyword&gt;, &lt;y keyword&gt;&quot; and used those terms correctly, and he was impressed, saying that I knew more about the domain than most of the programmers currently on staff.<p>Disclaimer:<p>probably a lot of this is stochastic, 12 is squarely still in the &quot;statistics of small numbers&quot; range, your experience and tech stack may not necessarily make this possible.  For example if you&#x27;re a java wizard, I suspect you might have a harder time pulling this off, just statistically due to cultural buy-in to the enterprise mindset.... It might be time to break out the cracking the coding interview in that case.<p>Good luck!