[welshwelsh]

I generally agree with most of what you said but I also think cold applications work.

I'd like to use the cliché "finding a job is a full time job."

Many people interpret this to mean "jam as many keywords as possible into a crappy resume and spend all day spamming it to every job posting you see." That's not gonna work well for juniors (although the most dedicated will still find something).

Applying to a job is more complicated than that. First of all, you need to understand the job you are applying for. That might involve researching the company and the project. You should make sure you are comfortable using the tools listed in the description and performing the role described. If you aren't, you need to practice before applying, which usually means building something.

When I started job hunting after graduation, it took three months before I sent out a single application. That's because every job posting listed responsibilities I didn't know how to perform or tools I've never used. Of course I'm not going to apply for Angular Frontend Developer if I've never built any frontends using Angular, that would be unprofessional. But after I made a couple simple projects in Angular, I would apply to these roles and got callbacks even from postings asking for 2-3 years of experience.

[solar-ice]

I wish I could say I had the same experience. I don't know what to say. My experience of applying for jobs that were well within my skillset, where I had projects showing off my non-industry-specific skills, was... either silence or being chucked out of the pipeline after the first interview or two, repeatedly. I'm not the only one.

Maybe this works if you live in a tech hub where there's venture capital to spend on masses of junior devs?

[benttoothpaste]

My experience is similar. All my carefully crafted resumes with cover letters were not even acknowledged. So I had to resort to resume spraying. After applying to 100 openings or so, I got one phone call which led to the interview and a job offer. I was not a great match for the job but it worked out fine.

[R0b0t1]

Same experience as you. I did eventually find a place, but it was not with a very good employer. Since separated. I remember getting tons of flak in theses posts. My CV is actually very good. No degree is a much larger problem than most people want to admit.

I am well past junior dev stage. Still no bites.

[ManlyBread]

>Many people interpret this to mean "jam as many keywords as possible into a crappy resume and spend all day spamming it to every job posting you see."

But this is exactly what landed me my first job back when I was a junior. As someone with no experience I could not afford to be selective and the more I spammed my CV the more interviews I was getting. It also works because the person who does the initial screening is usually not technical and is actually doing nothing more than matching the keywords.

> First of all, you need to understand the job you are applying for. That might involve researching the company and the project.

My experience is that the average job posting has close to no information about the project and the company does so many different things that it's impossible to get this information through your own research. Even if you do find some information it is utterly meaningless because this is NOT what the company is looking for when posting a job advert and this is NOT what the average candidate ends up doing. The company not looking for "someone who understands the company or project" - they're looking for a software engineer. That's it and nothing more.

>You should make sure you are comfortable using the tools listed in the description and performing the role described. If you aren't, you need to practice before applying, which usually means building something.

I've learned most of the tools I know on the job. Trying to learn something you don't know for the sake of the company that might not even give you an interview is a waste of time. Either they won't mind you learning on the job or they want someone with actual job experience. Large companies are also notoriously slow when it comes to organizing everything you need to do your job so the first week or two are usually filled up with nothing which is a perfect opportunity to learn something new.