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Comment by jonwinstanley | Hacker News Reader

Why not document one of the projects you have been working on, maybe a medium post, a Youtube video and link to them here. Make sure you mention all the skills/techniques required.

Next time someone is looking for those skills, hopefully your name will show up in their Googles?

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This is a good idea, twofold: (1) marketing so that potential employers can find you, (2) demonstrating that you can articulate the problem-solving steps is valuable to any team on which you might work. All that time people spend interviewing candidates is trying to discern, "can I work with this person?", "Do they understand the skills they claim to have on their resume?", "Can they be a productive part of this team?", etc.

Never even thought of that, hence my reason for asking here. Thank you for replying.

Since you are looking to connect with new people and new work, you might want to include your contact info in your public HN profile.

You can crank the Medium post or Youtube video strategy to the max by targeting the people you want to meet. First make a list of all the most prominent and connected people in your field of interest, say "reverse engineering". FollowerWonk is one place to start that list, e.g.:

https://moz.com/followerwonk/bio/?q=reverse%20engineering&q_...

Now start a blog, or maybe a Youtube channel, where you post about reverse engineering topics. Approach a target for an interview about reverse engineering today, and how they and their company are approaching the issues, because you are passionate to learn everything about reverse engineering. Make the post all about them, with their picture, their bio, etc. Almost no one turns down such an offer. Your interview post becomes a line item on their resume, and they share the link to all their friends. Do ten of these. Ten leaders in reverse engineering now know your name and return your phone calls. Let it be known you are open to new opportunities, and they may direct you to their friends who are hiring, etc., etc. You end up with some of the top search results for current topics and issues in reverse engineering.

Not OP, but, interesting post, thanks for writing it out.

Have you used these tactics yourself?

Not yet, but the basic idea is laid out in the ebook by Robert Graham about cold calling for customer development. Here is his blog post about it:

http://blog.asmartbear.com/cold-calling.html

A careful listening to Mixergy interviews shows two or three of his guests have used the same strategy to get started. It is a very general technique, but it also has a significant level of effort, so you can't really do it in multiple niches at once. Thus, any one person won't have valid statistics about it.

Someone should really write an entire book about this general approach. I think it would still work even if your targets knew what your goal was.

This, very much this. If you can, try to build something that you can open source and put on GitHub as well.

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