For the past six months, I’ve been looking for a full stack developer job. It turned out quite difficult to find a position that matches my needs. I applied for 18 jobs until I received an offer that I accepted. Inspired by Jamie Tanna’s contemplation on his job hunt, hereby I’m sharing the retrospect of my journey of finding a new job.
My main criteria for the employer were:
- it’s an ethical company
- allows me to work fully remotely
- allows me to work part-time (24 hours/week)
- pays me a fair salary to earn a living
Overview of my applications
Company | Role | CV screening | 1st round | 2nd round | final round | Offer | Notes |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Crowdfarming | Frontend Developer | ❌ | They never got back to me. (This was the second time I applied for this company because they had now a hybrid-remote policy because of Covid. My first application they rejected because back then they only offered an on site position.) | ||||
IronHack | Lead Instructor - Web Development | ❌ | They never got back to me. | ||||
Electricity Maps | Fullstack Developer | ❌ | They rejected my application because they wanted someone full time, on site. | ||||
Gymglish | Python Software Engineer | ✅ | ❌ | Passed the take-home test, but then they found a candidate better fitting their needs. They received a huge amount of applications, it was a competitive market. | |||
NoRedInk | Full-Stack Engineer | ❌ | They rejected my application because they wanted someone full time. | ||||
CARU | Full-Stack Engineer | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | The company had another candidate with a very same profile as mine, but the candidate was open to full-time. The company chose that candidate. |
Global Ecovillage Network | IT Coordinator / Web Developer / Platform Design Lead | ✅ | ✅ | - | - | ❌ | They rejected my application because they found a candidate better fitting their needs. They believed the other candidate was more capable of managing the three roles at the same time. |
McMakler | Senior Frontend Engineer | ❌ | They rejected my application because they wanted someone full time. | ||||
Ecosia | Full-Stack Engineer | ✅ | ❌ | Although initially they considered my application, eventually they rejected it because they wanted someone full time. | |||
SuperCast | Software Developer | ❌ | They never got back to me. | ||||
GitLab | Frontend Engineer | ❌ | They never got back to me. | ||||
BernoulliFinance | Elm Developer | ✅ | ❌ | They found another candidate with stronger technical background. | |||
Follow Alice | Full Stack Software Engineer | ❌ | They never got back to me. | ||||
Zulip | Senior Full Stack Engineer | ❌ | They rejected my application but were a bit vague on why. They recommended to have "a friend review your resume and intro letter for spelling, grammar, and clarity of communication". | ||||
Distru | Senior Software Engineer | ❌ | They never got back to me. | ||||
Cogo | Senior Full Stack Software Engineer | ✅ | ❌ | They found another candidate with stronger technical background. | |||
Sellforte | Web Developer | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | Although throughout the whole process it was clear that I was looking for a part-time position, eventually they rejected my application because they wanted someone full time and with more hands-on experience in their technical stack. |
Habyt | Full-Stack Engineer | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | I received an offer and I accepted it. |
Take aways
- Throughout the six months of the job hunt, I screened like a thousand job offers. There were almost no part-time web developer jobs offered. Several hundreds of open positions were posted to the HackerNews thread Ask HN: Who is hiring? (June 2022). Only a few percent of them were part-time positions. See my reflection on part-time work and why this is insane.
- I initially looked for companies based on their profiles and checked their job openings. I set up some alerts to get notified if their career pages change. I also subscribed to the feed of We Work Remotely and scanned their job listing daily, and monitored the jobs section of the Python Weekly Newsletter and Elm Weekly Newsletter. Eventually, I stopped doing all this because it was a lot of effort with little result. Instead, I reached out to people I worked with in the past to see if their employers have any relevant open positions. This led to finding a new job in one month.
- I applied for 18 jobs in total. Every time my application got rejected, I emailed them back asking if there was anything specific my profile lacked. I included these potential insights in Notes column.
- My application got rejected six times (33%) because they wanted someone full-time. In two of these cases, I would have received an offer if I was open to full-time. Five times (27%) companies thought another candidate had a better matching profile. Finally, six times (33%) I never heard back from the company about my application.
- Most full stack/backend developer jobs I came across required knowledge of NodeJS, Go, and GraphQL. I saw little interest for Python/Django.
- Most full stack/frontend developer jobs I came across required the knowledge of React and VueJS. Surprisingly, there were quite a few Elm programming jobs too, however, most of them required a US location.