My personal experience has been quite different. I got a bit burned out on my job and sent in my resume to 10 new places. All remote, some a bit of a stretch, others I was well qualified for. (Data science management and senior DS IC, respectively).
I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen.
Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That, or remote jobs are far more competitive.
Consider the fact that many desirable jobs get hundreds of applicants. It's entirely possible that even if your resume is top notch it got lost in a huge pool of candidates. You need to send your resume to hundreds of companies. I have a top-tier resume, and when I job search, I aim to send my resume (and cover letter/email) to 10+ companies per day.
On the other side, last time I was hiring, I was shocked at the low quality of a lot of applications. Applications that weren't complete, didn't have a resume, cover letter and work samples of some kind got immediately sent to the trash.
Why do you care about cover letters? I haven’t written one of those in probably 20 years. If I’m hiring and a candidate includes one, I usually ignore it (when hiring for an individual contributor, engineering role).
The complete mystery re: which elements of an application and interview are must-have or must-ace and which are ignored entirely, downplayed, or even taken as "red flags" ("what might that be?" wearing a suit to an interview, or just dressing above business-casual—required some places, practically a guaranteed "no" others) is one of the most frustrating things about interviews. Which is saying something, really, because most things about interviews are pretty frustrating.
I'd recommend presenting yourself and dressing as you'd like. You'll attract companies that are a better fit than one where you're fumbling for the "right" way of doing things.
A cover letter is an introduction. It's easy, and polite. Skipping it communicates low effort and poor communication skills. I don't want to work with low effort, poor communicators, even if they're genius programmers.
To me they just seem copy-and-pasted and therefore of very low value, almost noise. I want to know if you can get the job done, and that is what a resume and interviews are for.
There could be a couple factors here. The first is that recruiting at most companies prefers to reach out to candidates then the other way around. My suspicion has been that they get inundated with unqualified resumes via direct applications and just don't want to spend the time looking through it. You should try going back through linkedin over the last 6 months and messaging recruiters who did cold outreach or directly ping a recruiter at a company you want to work for.
The other area is that DS means something a bit different at each company you could work for. Some may want SQL experts, others want SWE's with some ML and still others expect 100% modeling all the time. You may get filtered out if you don't have the appropriate buzzwords/skills listed on your resume e.g. AWS, BigQuery, Java, python, Tensorflow etc.
As someone that was educated in computer science and moved from software engineering to working in the data science world, I find applying to DS positions to be much harder and more painful than CS jobs.
CS is easy: Do you know the languages they want, know some algorithms, are you familiar with the same tools and libraries, how's your experience working with people on big projects?
DS: The field is so broad and so deep, you need know everything and if you don't, be prepared to be shredded. Your interviewer may have a PhD in physics, or a master's in economics, or maybe they're just a math major that did a bootcamp course. Do you know NLP and how to build a pipeline? I feel like I get whiplash when I look at DS job postings they're so all over the place.
The interviews and take-home tasks are all over the place as well. Some of them are pretty reasonable machine learning take-home tasks, but others range from Leetcode stuff to ridiculous 30-hour projects.
Even the potential audience of your work is all over the place. As a software engineer: your audience is the software's users. As a data scientist: Its the software's users, its the developers, its accountants in the finance department, its other researchers at a conference, its the general audience reading the corporate blog, its the marketing department, its whatever C-level executive looking at report. All of whom have vastly different needs and expectations.
I have a similar experience with a twist. I rarely even get called for jobs I apply for, but by setting my LinkedIn profile to the equivalent of "Actively hunting," I get lots of calls by recruiters. Again, they call about positions that I'd NOT apply to but hey, they still pay well. And they're remote.
If someone’s going to hire you remote shouldn’t you demonstrate your ability to communicate well in text and elaborate on what makes you a good choice in a well written, directed cover letter?
yeah the cookie-cutter cover letters are useless, but i've hired people who write: "i love you are working in machine vision, i've worked with x,y and z tech to build _. I could augment your efforts in these fields...".
Call it what you will a cover message or note perhaps.
I hire and pay top of market and I definitely look at cover letters, at least scan them (some are huge tells that they don’t even know what we do, so it weeds out the candidate), and often they’re the thing that differentiates the various candidates who have similar backgrounds. I’ve also hired lots of people without cover letters. I don’t think spending a few minutes writing a paragraph like another poster stated above is a waste of time.
No one cares about cover letters, but you do have to put in some effort towards marketing yourself. Have an up to date LinkedIn profile. Reach out to the company's recruiters and ask to schedule a call (instead of just applying online). Try and get an internal referral through friends (or friends of friends, friends of friends of friends).
Maybe not all tech is benefiting as evenly? My company is mostly data science. We don't seen to have an issue filling those spots. Software engineering job postings have been open for months and as far as I know, nobody has been interviewed.
This is kinda of discouraging. I want to bring my income up soon and was wondering since people say the markets so good if I could spend some months skilling up and then trying to send out some resumes. Also I don’t really have the resources to move and was mainly going to target remote roles.
I think data science roles are not nearly as in-demand as software roles are. Remote positions for software seem to me at least to be pretty easy to come by. If you are in the data side of things but really need a new job, adding software skills would be a relatively easy lateral move (at least compared to switching to a non-technical role or field anyway).
I can’t capitalize on my interviews but I get a few through recruiters. Just get into one system - like CyberCoders or teksystems and you will get bombarded as resume gets passed around. They have a relationship w the companies so they forward you directly
I'm going to throw my voice into the ring on this specific line; recruiters get a bad name (often deservedly), but I found my current job (coming up on 3 years) through a local recruiter that contacted me. The whole job search once they got involved turned into an incredibly fast, easy process; they were great about finding companies that matched up with my skills/conditions, they even did some salary negotiation (which I am terrible at).
It was a really positive experience. I'm not going to say every recruiter would be like that, I'm sure many (even the majority) are not. But if you're looking for a job and having a lot of difficulty just finding places to apply, think about finding a recruiting firm to help.
Do make sure:
- A) that you aren't required to apply through them for every job. My recruiter let me keep applying for my own jobs on the side while they scouted out.
- B) that they actually have some domain knowledge about the industries you're applying to.
- C) that they're actually meeting with you and putting in some effort to understand what your goals are, not just trying to pressure you into taking every job offer that pops up.
I think if you're already a qualified programmer, recruiters can fill in a lot of the groundwork of finding out who's hiring and getting your resume in front of companies, and that just increases the number of options you have. I expected to completely hate the process and instead I came away feeling like it had made my life a lot easier and a lot less stressful.
Same, for both my current and previous. The two before that were via a recruiter relationship. Before that was through a friend who works there, and before that was a de facto apprenticeship, also via a friend already there. I have never gotten a job in this industry by submitting a resume cold. From this I conclude that the point is not to need to.
You need the LinkedIn profile to look good both to humans and to robots, and a worthwhile recruiter will give you substantial help tuning both that and your resume because these will both help them place you, which is how they get paid. Make sure a new recruiter clearly understands this and is happy that you clearly understand it, too. Those who fail this test are not the ones you want to work with.
It will be harder to work with top-tier recruiters if you're working your way up and not yet established. That's not fair, but it's the way of the world, and as always you mistake the ought for the is at your peril. If you're smart and capable, just not yet tested and proven, the ideal is to find a recruiter who will invest in helping you develop. This is tricky and I lucked into it. The best advice I can offer there is, bigger firms with deeper pockets are more likely able to support that.
The unequivocally good news is that there is a lot of interest, money, and good roles sloshing around the market right now. While that's less good for a newer junior than for a proven senior, it is still good for us all.
Don't wait. The article compares the tech industry labor market to the housing market, which I think is accurate. It also compares now with the boom before the 2000-2001 crash, and I think that is accurate too. We can reasonably predict another crash. We cannot reasonably predict when. So get while the getting is good.
They usually give you info like size of company, stage of company and general business area the company is in, which is usually enough to know if you want to set up a 15 min call with the recruiter and ask more details like the company name so you can look it up and see for yourself what they do.
I've had calls with recruiters; during the call, I told them "that's not something I'm looking for and thanks for your time" and moved on.
I've also had multiple late-stage interviews that started this way and my current job was found this way.
do you have any tips for finding a good recruiter? I've never actually searched for one. I get recruiters contacting me on LinkedIn and they are pretty bad in my opinion. The ones I've followed up with know very little about the job they are hiring for and trying to get useful answers back from them is a giant pain.
Select the best-looking roles from the contacts you get, then audition the recruiters. Depending on your experience, this may mean relying on your gut. It also means meeting in person if possible, or at least on the phone. You want synchronous communications and the highest semantic bandwidth you can get. If they won't give you half an hour, that alone is a huge red flag. There's some other pointers in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28029857
Keep searching and hang on to the ones who are funny and genuine. I've failed to get a job with an awesome recruiter and ended up getting placed with them for a different role 12 years later.
None of them know tech but a few of them are smart enough to understand that they don't know tech and to focus on mastering the social market.
I think the problem is the focus on data science. Companies are realizing that their money is better spent on software engineers rather than data scientists, especially now that data science has effectively been "democratized".
Someone recently pointed out to me that overfertilizing young trees makes them spindly and prone to leaning or even breaking. The wood is just not strong enough.
In the 90's they scoured every math and science field for people to throw into 'web developer' positions. When the bubble collapsed a few of them had learned a lot and stayed around, the rest had to wander off and find something else to do, often back to what they were doing before, if they still could.
The data sciences growth was not organic, which means it probably isn't sustainable either.
nah don't do cover letters, but let a recruiter shop you around, they have backchannels into a lot of companies that otherwise don't really check their inbox
consider setting your linked in to "looking", which might cost money, but this gets the attention of even internal recruiters
I got zero hits. Not a single phone screen.
Honestly I was pretty lazy about it, and didn't write cover letters or anything. That might be a contributing factor. That, or remote jobs are far more competitive.