Day One of the Job Hunt
Started the day brushing off my resume and tailoring a cover letter for what might be a dream job. A company that actually aligns with how I like to work. Calm. Intentional. No stress theater. They use Rails. They’re pragmatic about JavaScript. What’s not to love?
It reminded me how much I used to enjoy watching JavaScript grow up—when real engineers started taking it seriously instead of just designers duct-taping scripts together. That shift was exciting… until we took it too far. Now every project starts with React or Vue or whatever framework’s hot this quarter. Mention jQuery and someone looks at you like you just booted up IE6. Vanilla JS? Might as well be writing COBOL. But I digress.
One Down, Who Knows How Many To Go
37signals was the first listing that made me actually want to apply. So I did. First and only one so far. I spent way too much time tweaking my resume. Used ChatGPT to help iterate on it—and no, I didn’t just slap in some AI boilerplate. I edited, rewrote, gave feedback, rewrote again. Still, it cut the cycle time in half. I think the final product is actually solid.
I tailored the whole thing for this specific role. Which is great… except now it’s too specific. Applying anywhere else will mean editing again.
Then came the code sample request. I wanted to send something Ruby-flavored, but it’s been seven years since I wrote anything public in Ruby. Everything I had back then was either on a hard drive I can’t find or on a cloud account I don’t remember. And back then, GitHub private repos cost money, so no way I was pushing client code into public view. So now? Nothing to pull from.
And apparently GitHub has profile READMEs now? Had to slap one of those together. Also rebuilt my LinkedIn because it was a ghost town—just a graveyard for recruiter spam.
The Grind Begins
I know better than to stop at one application. I’ve got to keep moving.
But man, I’m not looking forward to the interview gauntlet. The whole “study leetcode to pass the gatekeepers” thing is absurd. I haven’t needed to implement a sort algorithm manually or invert a binary search ever in the last 20+ years. Give me something real. Something you actually need built.
The last time I went through this circus, I got surprise-tested by a puzzle company that wasn’t even the one hiring. Indeed had outsourced the technical evaluation to some third-party riddle mill. It was less “can you do the job?” and more “how good are you at prepping for interviews?” Ridiculous.
Rant over. (For now.)
Only Human
Quick update: I realized after I submitted everything… I forgot to include my phone number. Incredible. After hours of obsessing over every detail in my resume, reviewing the cover letter, picking a code sample—I forgot the most basic piece of info.
Does anyone really call anymore before emailing? Probably not. Still, facepalm.