This is so true. It's really shocking how little effort and originality some/most people go to in getting the job they want.<p>I have a similar story, although nowhere near as much effort. When I was 20 and hating life in school, I really wanted to work at Shopify. At the time, they were maybe 80 people. I've never made a resume and didn't feel like that would get me noticed. Sio I simply sent a cold email to Tobi, our CEO. It was basically "Hey, Tobi. I don't know anything, and I have no skills, but I love your company and I want to be involved. Give me a chance, I'll work for free."<p>I got an email a week later from someone else on the team saying that I started the next week.<p>When I asked why, I was told "this worked because you were naive enough to think that this would work". I've been here four years now, and it's still the most important email I've ever sent. Maybe luck, maybe naivety, but I'm thrilled it's worked out.
An intermediate step between "send in a resume and cover letter that no one reads" and "send in an unsolicited blow-their-minds project", which may well bounce off the same spam or attention filter which bounces a resume, is "convince one person in the company that they want you to apply there."<p>This is much, much less difficult than engineers think it is. People with hiring authority are on the same Internet you are. They use the same email / Twitter / etc. THEY WANT TO HEAR FROM YOU. Engineers are in incredible demand.<p>They get a steady stream of resumes from people who are wildly unqualified for the job. That is one reason why they're not going to read your resume when you send it in unless their prior expectation is that you're interesting.<p>It is not harder to be interesting than "someone I've never heard of or met." "Hey Bob, I watched your presentation at $CONFERENCE last year on Youtube. Great stuff; loved what you did with $FOO, in particular $COMMENT_PROVING_YOU_KNOW_WHAT_YOU'RE_TALKING_ABOUT. I'm also a $FOO developer. Do you have a few minutes to chat on Thursday about what you guys are doing?"<p>You're not proposing marriage here. You're asking for 15 minutes to get to know them. You do not have to author a heartbreaking work of staggering genius to make this call happen.<p>Your goal for the chat: get Bob enthusiastic enough to either suggest "Hey you should apply here" or be receptive to you suggesting "Hey, I really like what you're doing, and would like to see if I could be a part of it. Can you get the ball rolling for me?"<p>n.b. If you want to knock someone's socks off with a demo of e.g. an application which uses their API, use the above to get one person enthusiastic about reviewing the demo, <i>then</i> implement. If you can't get one person enthusiastic about the prospect of looking at your work, there's sharply limited odds that actually doing the work meaningfully advances your interests.
Great story, and I love the author's initiative.<p>The author overlooked the first major factor in their success - finding the startup they wanted to work at! I actually think the more specific you get in your job search the more successful you will be. People often think that by being 'flexible' in what they want to do they are increasing the number of companies they can work for. That is true, but you aren't trying to work for a bunch of companies, you are trying to work for one. By being that general you will never find the place where you specifically are the best candidate.<p>To be concrete, I'd rather find the 5 companies that are really aligned with my skillset and target them very specifically than apply to 50 random companies looking for someone kinda sorta like me.
Years ago we were working on the first PC-based phone gateway, which allowed you to use your phone line and computer as a call gateway over IP.<p>A guy called up because he wanted our linux drivers.<p>We didn't have any linux drivers.<p>So he called back a while later and said <i></i><i>"Here I wrote the linux drivers for you."</i><i></i><p>He had reverse engineered the board and wrote the drivers to make it run on linux based on all the specs of the various chips on the board.<p>We hired him on the spot.
It's a high risk method. But it's much more effective than traditional job applications. So if you weigh the time spent (10-20 hours building custom thing for company) vs spending 10 hours filling out 30 applications, I would guess this is a better approach.<p>It's also a method described in "guerrilla marketing for job hunters". There's others in the book if you're looking for a little lower effort non-traditional methods.
I once applied to Heroku; I wrote a song about deploying to Heroku, made a video for it on Youtube, deployed it to Heroku (of course), and applied (via their site and Twitter). Never got an email back, not even a "we received your application". Was bummed out for a while afterwards.
I got my first real startup job by submitting a bunch of bugfix patches to their open source offering. It was relatively easy - they had a public bug tracker, and I just picked the things I thought I could figure out, and after one weekend, I had a job offer.<p>I was there for two years, and I never saw another candidate try to do that. We kept doing technical interviews that gave mixed signals - plenty of people got turned down because we didn't have an effective way of measuring their abilities. If they had gone through the code review process, they would have had a much better chance of getting the job. (In hindsight, I'm not sure why we didn't include "submit a bugfix to our open source project" as part of a standard interview process)
At my previous company, someone walked into our office and asked if we had any openings for engineers. Given that we were hiring anyway, we said sure so we talked with him. Unfortunately because of visa issues we couldn't hire him but if not for that, we definitely would have. It was a case of right-place-right-time, but it definitely was something we talked about for a while afterwards.
The largest thing that stops me from being able to apply for a job as a college student is that every job I am interested in, mainly back-end/low-level software development, say that they require a "MS in CS and 5 years of experience."<p>These job postings are for entry level positions and internships, nothing higher.<p>Is this something I should be worried about? Should I just apply to this kind of work anyway?<p>How do I find companies willing to hire me as a college student with no official experience?
This is a great story and kudos - it looks like an awesome piece of work for a weekend project.<p>As a counterpoint, I did something similar (replicated a barebones version of a tool that a company I wanted to work for had) and sent it off and didn't even receive a courtesy "thanks but no thanks" email. Them's the breaks I guess.
I don't get why you have to go to such extremes to get hired. In my experience getting hired at a startup is like getting hired anywhere else - in fact generally it's easier. You send in a CV, attend one or two interviews (personal and technical), and get a decision. I'm not sure what it's like now but weren't companies finding it really difficult to find engineers in SV not that long ago? That should make things even easier.
I think everyone is ignoring the fact that he really wanted to work there. If you're in that boat then yes this makes sense.
But if like most people you're not exactly gaga over the company but value other factors like pay and lifestyle then the traditional approach could yield more dividends. Return on time invested after all is important.
I did something very similar and approached the hiring manager to show him what I've done. While he appreciated my work, he wanted me to work (for free) on the company's Github stuff and said he will call me if that something opens up.
PS: I am okay spending my free time on his cool project but it progressively looks unsustainable.
This boils down to being able to show the potential employer than you can be of immediate, tangible value to the company, which <i>should</i> be the main goal of anyone looking for work. A resume is one way to do this (albeit not great), building a valuable, relevant prototype is another. There are many alternatives along that continuum.<p>But really, are talented, creative software people really having trouble finding work?
Anecdotally, that's how we hired our designer - her last "mockup" project matched exactly what we were working on next - the hiring process was super fast, and there are a lot of benefits to hiring someone who has already spent time thinking about the same problem space as you did.
Great approach. I would hire someone like this. You're gonna be a legend the day you join. Probably easier to be noticed/hired this way with smaller companies.<p>Even if you don't get hired, you've learned something new and produced something cool which you can show in your next interview, and only lost a couple of days of your time.
Yep. I think people are getting caught up on the 'startup' part of this.<p>Roughly this is how I've met every mentor I've wanted to and then gone on to work with them.<p>Demonstrate value by investing time/effort in your interest, and build on that through communication until an opportunity to work together presents itself.
I've done something similar. I wanted to branch into a new discipline, so to show off my ability to pick up a new skillset, I learned how to juggle. At first it started off as a joke, because their jobsite said "juggle multiple things."<p>I spent a couple of hours, recorded video of my progress and posted it to YouTube. I didn't get the job. I actually went out on a limb and reached out to somebody privately to make sure it wasn't too "out of the ordinary" and that I didn't ruin my chances for anything in the future. Thankfully, mostly everyone forgot about it. I guess it wasn't unique or clever enough?
Thanks for sharing. I agree with doing the unconventional, and I think it comes down to making a very clear case to the founders that you can add value off the bat when joining the company. Given the limited time and resources, it's hard for the company to pass on hustlers who can get shit done right away.
I was interested in working with the Data Science team of one of India's leading e-commerce startups.<p>Later, I ended up doing a project[1] where I have collected and analysed the user order data from their order tracking portal.<p>Now I feel that they won't take me back because I kind of played like a Black-Hat instead of a White-Hat by not notifying them about the little loophole that made it possible for me.<p>Before this, I was an intern there and got that because of one of my past project. This method does work.<p>[1] <a href="http://pravj.github.io/blog/indian-ecommerce" rel="nofollow">http://pravj.github.io/blog/indian-ecommerce</a>
The short version: show that you fucking care!<p>People love to hire people that care about their mission and show that they're capable of supporting it. It's really that simple.
My approach. Either do the job (I'm a marketer and built a landing page for one company with bootstrap to show I could), or find a common connection. In my current job, the hiring manager formerly worked with a good friend of a guy I helped out 4 years ago evaluate two job offers. that's how weak ties work. Also the benefit of paying it forward, never know how that connects back to you.
I feel like this approach is easier for smaller startups. But what about bigger places like google, apple, or facebook. My background isn't your traditional CS background but I have over 4 years of experience on a site that does million+ in traffic but I can't even get my resume sniffed at by those companies.
If you're the author:
Typo here (I assume):
> At they time they had 10 employees<p>I found the Raleway text really hard to read, personally changed it. It might just be how it looks on Mac or Mac retina, but it was very light.<p>I think there's a middle ground in there somewhere
Years ago, during the original dotcom crash, I was working in banking. All the banks were firing, not hiring. I got an interview at Morgan Stanley by contributing a feature to their open source A+ project[1]. Running code counts for a lot!<p>[1] aplusdev.org
I've done something similar by creating a 3rd party companion website for an online marketplace (which has ~50 employees), but haven't contacted the company directly. Now I'm stuck. What Shane did requires not only hard work, but the guts to engage the company and knowing what it is that you really want. If you're considering this, make sure you're resolved to a particular course of action.<p>My site targets sellers from that marketplace and provides a search of information scraped from the official source as well as detailed sales statistics which are not available from the official source. For active users, these two things can easily save several hours per week.<p>The 1st party company has acknowledged the existence of my site and indicated to their users that they'll allow it but are unaffiliated, which is completely understandable since they have no idea who I am. My companion site was created out of necessity and receives about 20k pageviews a month (approx 2000 users).<p>Currently, I am not charging for the site but a half a dozen people have suggested charging for its use or contacting the 1st party site to license it to them. The people making these suggestions are the marketplace sellers from the 1st party site (the users who are common to both sites).<p>But now there are difficult decisions to be made. I've worked from home for over a decade and loathe commutes, even those measured in minutes. This company is 2.5 hours away and best-case public transportation would have me out for 12-14 hours per day. This company makes no mention of any kind of remote work possibility but my impression is that it's done some of the time by some of their employees. I wouldn't want special treatment even if they offered it. With all of that said, if I did have to travel to work... this place looks like the kind of place I'd enjoy working. It was relatively easy to find about 1/4 of their team on social media and get a feel for their culture, even found some video of their office on a regular workday.<p>If I did join them and the commuting situation were overcome, would that constrain my freedom to make the new features and enhancements that the community wants? Contacting them with a laundry-list of questions feels wrong.<p>If I didn't join, would enough of my currently free users convert to paid to make it worth continuing? What's the optimal price to balance the seesaw of retention vs dollars (number retained free users * price per month)? Is it unknowable? What percentage of the existing users might actually pay? It's all very uncertain. It'd be great to get some feedback from everyone, maybe with your own experience(s).<p>Shane's idea is great but it doesn't magically fall into place, relationships are complicated!