I’ve been on the other side of the table now. Hiring a founding engineer at Cevi, hundreds of applications, real interviews, real decisions.
And here’s the thing that should scare you: I genuinely cannot tell anymore if someone is real just from a conversation. You can fake a résumé. You can ChatGPT your way through the interview. The whole apply, interview, get judged system is broken, and everyone still lines up for it like it works.
Around 8% of applications get any response at all. Eight percent. You have better odds at a roulette table.
stop chasing butterflies
Jobs are butterflies. Chase them and they fly off. Build a garden good enough and they land on their own.
The garden is your body of work. Public, real, undeniable. Here’s the whole playbook, and it’s boring on purpose.
Get genuinely good at one thing. Not “familiar with.” Good. When I was coming up I did Kaggle 12, 14 hours a day, not because a job post asked for it, because I was obsessed. Depth beats breadth every single time. A mile deep and an inch wide wins.
Document in public, every day. Not bragging. Documenting. “Here’s what I built, here’s what broke, here’s what I learned.” Do it for a year and you’ll have an audience, a reputation, and a receipt of your own progress.
Ship one thing that actually works. Not a tutorial clone. A real system that solves a real problem for real people. That one project beats 50 LeetCode problems and every certificate you were told to hoard. That’s literally how I built Cevi. From scratch, not from a job post.
Then reach out with proof. Not “I’m passionate about your company,” I delete those. Send: “found a bug in your repo, here’s the PR.” Or “built the thing your users keep asking for, here’s the demo.” Give before you ask. Always.
the uncomfortable part
Nobody is coming to discover you. The résumé was always a lottery ticket. The garden is the only thing that turns you from an applicant into someone people email first.
It takes longer than applying. It also actually works. Go plant it.