If you&#x27;re primarily interested in getting a job, and can cold email a company and get an instant onsite, then going for that is a <i>totally</i> valid option.  The most time-efficient way to get job offers is to get introduced to hiring managers (self-intro if necessary), make a good impression on them, and ask them to jump you along in their firms&#x27; hiring practices.  I&#x27;ve said that here for years; I&#x27;ll continue saying it.<p>There exist many engineers in the world who either a) cannot cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, b) do not believe they can cold email $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and be guaranteed of an interview, or c) are not comfortable executing on the process of emailing $DESIRABLE_SOFTWARE_COMPANY and getting an interview.  Those are three subtly different problems.  We are a partial way to address them, and other problems besides.<p>a) A very talented engineer might not have a resume&#x2F;background&#x2F;etc which pings the radar very hard at a software company.  If you do, great, more power to you.  Try to put yourself in the shoes of someone without a great educational pedigree whose last couple of jobs look something like &quot;IT at insurance company.  Responsibilities: rebooting printers.&quot; or &quot;Network administrator: CISCO routers, light systems administration.&quot;  That person might <i>also</i> be able to black-box cryptosystems, find RCEs in Rails given a day of effort, or program trading algorithms, but the company won&#x27;t find that out because they likely won&#x27;t even be offered a phone screen.<p>b)  You know how impostor syndrome is a thing?  Oh boy, do a lot of very talented engineers have it.  If you can program, many desirable companies like e.g. Stripe would love to make your acquaintance.  If they don&#x27;t offer you a job they <i>will not feel like talking to you was a waste of time</i>.  There are a lot of people who <i>do not get this</i> and benefit from being told some variant of &quot;I understand that you feel like you&#x27;ve still got lots to learn.  I&#x27;ve got lots to learn!  And I&#x27;ve been doing this for 12 years!  But I see from your demonstrable performance that you&#x27;re <i>actually good at this.</i>  The folks at Stripe trust my judgment about this -- if I&#x27;m making a mistake about this, well, that&#x27;s on me and not on you.  Why don&#x27;t you have a call with $PERSON there?  I predict that they are super-inviting wonderful people who will want to geek out with you about tech stuff; if a job offer happens after that, wonderful.  But I can almost guarantee you that no job offer happens without you talking to them.&quot;<p>c)  Many engineers are afraid of selling themselves, for personal reasons&#x2F;cultural reasons&#x2F;etc which our community unfortunately frequently amplifies.  Even if you tell them &quot;All you need to do to get a job is a) meet a hiring manager, b) convince them you&#x27;re not an axe murderer, c) get a coffee date and do your thing, d) say yes to the job offer&quot;, they&#x27;re not willing to take the clearly valuable first step of sending an unsolicited email.  I am totally willing to send a (very) solicited email on one&#x27;s behalf, if I feel like a candidate and a client could have a productive conversation together.  I&#x27;m also pretty good about writing that email.<p>Also: for the right kind of person, the challenges are fun, in the same way that chess or poker or Starcraft or sudoku are fun.  Except with more REST API.