Just wrapped up a search and I’ll be starting at LanceDB in October. I’m excited! It seems like a great group of people, a solid product, and a good match between what they need and what I’m good at.

If I learned one thing, it is that applying to jobs does not work at all right now. I was applying mostly to senior/staff engineering roles, focusing on frontend or full-stack (depending on what “full stack” means at each company), at small and mid sized companies (not fangmans). My salary requirements are kind of high (200k+), but I didn’t get too picky, figuring that 1. advertised ranges are starting points, and 2. There’s a big equity component that’s not included there anyway. I don’t think this was unreasonable, given my 5-15 years of engineering experience (roughly 5 eng, 5 data science (which was tbh mostly engineering so I’d count it), and 5 grad school (which… Idk, I’d count that as 1-2 years))

From 20 cold applications, I got 5 auto rejections and 15 ghosts. One of them had a coding challenge even, which I did perfectly. I wrote them all a custom (short) cover letter and I think those were apparently a waste of time.

I had 4 lukewarm applications, by which I mean “applications with a friend who works there”. Used to be that that would be enough to get at least a phone screen, if you’re qualified! It did not; this led to 3 auto rejections and one ghost.

I had 3 warm applications, from friends who knew me and the hiring managers very well. These led to phone calls and interview processes.

I had 2 very warm opportunities: former managers (both of whom I’d love to work with again) who had roles open that weren’t quite right for me. I bet I could have at least gotten a phone screen for them though.

So the surprise was on many levels:

• I thought cold applications were not worth zero. I am effectively now counting them as zero.
• I understand everyone’s overloaded with resumes, so I thought a coding challenge might be a useful costly signal; not enough sample size to tell but it didn’t seem to help
• I thought lukewarm applications would usually get you looked at.

The search was not that long (~30 is not a ton) so maybe I would have figured out how to do it better with time. But glad that it worked out. A world in which cold applications are worth zero feels kind of sad, but hopefully it is kind of a blip before people figure out new ways to hire.