Job Search 2022 Update: Week 1

Week 1 of my job search is coming to a close. Here’s an update on what I’ve been up to and where I’m at.

First off, I’d like to thank the people who’ve reached out to me in various ways since my first post, as well as people I’ve contacted for the inside scoop at various places:

• Adam Reinhardt
• Andrea Gunn
• Andrew Cholakian
• David Golden
• Dylan Martin
• Emily Shea
• Heidi Gider
• Joelle Maslak
• Jordan Adler
• Karen Etheridge
• Konstantin Narkhov
• Mark Fowler
• Miguel Mateus
• Pete Sergeant
• Ryan Gerry
• Tatsuhiko Miyagawa
• Neil Bowers
• If I forgot to put your name here let me know, and I’m sorry!

Several of these folks have submitted me as an internal referral, which is always a huge boost for an applicant.

I started off the week by looking through a very long list of bookmarks I’d been collecting since I left my last job in October. This was mostly companies that used Rust or had 4-day weeks or for some other reason had caught my eye. This list came from “Who’s Hiring” posts on Hacker News and the Rust subreddit, as well as looking at various job boards and my own research.

I first made a spreadsheet to track the status of all my applications. I borrowed from the one described by Phil Calçado on his blog. Here’s an example version of the Google Sheet I’m using. Feel free to make a copy of it for your own search.

As of right now, I have 93 entries in my spreadsheet. That’s clearly too many to apply to.

I ended up filtering based on the “My Interest”. If a company seemed promising but didn’t have any open roles that fit me, I marked them as a 0. They might be a fit in the future. I also marked a few companies as -1, which means I should probably not consider them in the future. The reasons for that include:

• I applied and was rejected (just Google right now).
• They cannot hire in Minnesota (Bolt).
• Their published salaries are way below my desired range.
• They are in a field I don’t want to be in, like cryptocurrency.
• They expect > 40 hours per week of work (Wallaroo).
• They exclude Colorado or NYC residents from applying for positions¹.
• Someone works there that I don’t want to work with².

That left me with a range of 2-4 for the remaining companies. I started by giving a 2 or a 3 to any company that seemed particularly appealing because:

• I use and like their product (Discord, GitHub, Netflix, and others).
• The position seemed particularly interesting (for example, Grafana Labs has a position working on OpenTelemetry that I’m intrigued by).
• They use Rust (Fastly, OneSignal, Oso, and others).
• They have a 4-day week or might be willing to offer me one.
• I know someone who works there and they tell me it’s a good place to work (Elastic, Fastly, MongoDB, and others).
• They are known to pay obscene amounts of money (Netflix and others).

I’ve applied or had recruiters submit me for 17 companies so far. Those companies are:

• Array
• CircleCI
• ClickHouse
• Discord
• Elastic
• Fastly
• GitHub
• Google
• Grafana Labs
• LogDNA
• MongoDB
• Namely
• Netflix
• OneSignal
• Onna
• Oso
• Wallaroo

I was really excited about the position at Elastic I applied for, but it was already filled³. I talked to a recruiter from a different part of the company, and they were very interested in me, which felt nice!

But the positions were on all-Java teams, involved very little coding, and I think they want someone with more cloud deployment and storage expertise than I have. There weren’t any other positions at my level that felt like a good fit for me, so I decided not to move forward with Elastic. This is too bad. My good friend Andrew works there and I’d love to work with him, plus he’s told me it’s a great place to work.

Of the remainder, I talked to one earlier today and I’m scheduled to talk to four next week, so that feels like good progress.

I’ll try to write weekly updates as I go forward, so stay tuned.