[tlogan]

First, it is very hard to hired by just applying - you need to find somebody in the company to introduce you. In relatively long career as a dev manager in a big corporation, I have not hired a single engineer via job post (HR will forward resumes that were never even near match - it was so bad that before I left VP hired a special recruiter just for his team).

Second, find a good recruiter. They do help to find an exact match.

Third, you probably need to be looking into Informatica, Microsoft, Oracle, etc. - companies which are "product development" oriented. It seems like Facebook, Amazon, Google, and Twitter are really not "product development" oriented companies: they use technology but technology is not their product. So my feeling is that they are looking for more "very very smart and sharp people" than "I can ship people" (I read somewhere how it is easier to get hired in these companies if you are "smart and did nothing" then "smart and here is what I did"). [ I'm just saying that they weight candidate characteristics differently - nothing wrong with that approach ]

[throwaway1001]

Thanks for the advice. Recruiters are a specific pain point. When looking for a bank job, they help a lot because they push candidates ahead and because bank jobs are all alike. During the current job hunt, I encountered recruiters that were trying to place me as an IT person at Heathrow Airport. I don't apply to positions advertised by recruiters any more — descriptions are always misleading and they care very little about what you actually looking for. Do you think it's a wrong thing to do?