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Comment by dman | Hacker News Reader

Get off recruiters as soon as you can. They are very risk averse and follow the sage advise for bankers - 'lend money to those that dont need it'. ie if your job search is not going great to begin with its unlikely a recruiter is going to put in the effort to connect you with an opening.

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Yeah, just like Facebook and Gmail, "if you're getting something for free, you're not the customer, you're the product". I'm definitely feeling like a product.

But I thought I was doing things "in the ways of my people", that posting your resume to sites like Dice etc. just gets you lots of spam from recruiters etc.

Bear in mind that I haven't looked for a job in, lets say, over 12 years, and really don't know the best way to go about it. I'm on LinkedIn, of course, I get the occasional "jobs you may be interested in", someone else mentioned indeed.com, any other suggestions for good sites?

Hang in there, things will get better! Job apps are a stochastic process, just have to keep plugging until you get through.

What would you replace recruiters with? There is certainly a hierarchy of "Best way to get a job" (from worst to best):

1. Send resume cold

2. Send resume through a recruiter

3. Get introduced through a coworker of an ex-coworker

4. Get introduced by the current hiring manager (or one of her managers)

5. Be a rockstar programmer that everybody knows (ala DHH or Zed Shaw)

What is there between two and four? Whatever it is seems like it is impacted by things like open source projects and general visibility in some community.

Couple of things between two and four

a) Meet people at local tech meetups. Really prep hard before you talk to people though.

b) Contribute bug fixes to any open source projects the company has

c) Do a survey of what skills existing holders of similar jobs have. Invest strategically to acquire those skills before applying for the job

d) Reach out to people via Linked In

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