Blog 4: Surviving the 2025 Software Job Search

Table of Contents

This post is dedicated to my old team at paycom. I hope your careers are bright, and I miss working with you all.

This past year I recently made a career move, which took considerable time and energy. I was working as a dev for Paycom, and as my wife was graduating college we had decided we wanted to finally move back to Colorado. These conversations started partway through her fall semester in 2024, but solidified with me taking 4 months across over 150+ applications to get 3 (maybe 4?) phone screenings, that only moved on to 2 sets of interviews and 1 offer, which was a great offer I gladly accepted at Angi (where I currently work as of time of writing).

Through this experience, and knowing how bad the industry has been for finding new work, I’ve been trying to give advice to help everyone I know get a leg up in this crazy mess, as the job applications of 2015/2019/2021 are insufficient, and competition for roles is now worse than ever, especially remote jobs. If you want more of a professional’s opinion, The Pragmatic Programmer’s weekly newsletter has an article on this very subject. It’s a good read.

In this post, I will outline my recommendations, and go into some detail on the why so you can know what’s best for you.

Acknowledgements

I wanted to get a few of these “unfairnesses” out of the way, as I think it’s important to recognize personal privileges before giving anyone advice, as your experience may not apply to them. During my job search I:

  • Was working full time
  • Had experience in two companies, in different spaces, giving me a diverse set of listable skills
  • Had been working on my engagement with work such that I was reading a lot of technical books and doing some minor technical leadership with my direct team, encouraging best practice, helping a lot, and generally trying to be a blessing on my manager
  • Was coming up on a senior promotion, which while it never became official because I quit before the paperwork was finished, I did list on my resume from the time the expectations rose.
  • New in advance, and searched for a while, and had been searching on and off while at Paycom.
  • My weak spot has always been landing interviews, but I perform pretty well in an interview.
  • Angi’s Interviews were amazing at testing real on the job skills, rather than leetcode competence.

Without further ado,

The TLDR for the impatient

Here’s the biggest points, and we’ll break them down in later sections:

  • Bleed through your network for interviews before joining the application rat race. This point is for your own sanity.
  • Do not apply to jobs on linkedin/indeed more than 24 hours after posting.
  • Use more than one platform to find jobs.
    • I used Linkedin and Welcome to the jungle
  • Write your resume for recruiters, and ATS systems
    • Your resume is not for your future manager, it’s for getting an interview. Treat it as such.
  • Know this is a numbers game. Be one of the first people on a recruiter’s desk enough times, you’ll be picked for an interview (assuming your resume is good enough)
  • I gave up on cover letters; not a single company I wrote a cover letter ever got back to me, and I consider this type of tailoring to a job to be a waste of time. This is in contrast to some people’s

Clean up your linkedin and resume

This one tends to be roughly self explanatory, but what changed this time is I really tried to optimize for the recruiter’s experience. Understand that recruiters have to go through hundreds of resumes to pick who can go on to phone interviews, and this is after the ATS filters. The most helpful resource for me in getting in this frame of mind was watching Headless Headhunter’s resume review series, as I stumbled across him when he was still new.

Tell him devhoolagin sent you! He also helped me get in the frame of mine that 50~ applications to 1 interview was a relatively good conversion rate, and that I needed to apply, and apply LOTS.

Apply Fast, Apply Often

When I got in the thick of my search in February I had a goal when I was in the peak of my applications before I really got any interviews that I wanted to get out 10 applications to each platform each day during the work week. This is a lot, and requires loosening up your requirements, but remember, you can always turn down a job offer if it doesn’t work for you.

This video by Mark Bacon is absolutely fucking fire. Consider it required reading.

I applied on Linkedin, trying to apply for location based jobs (I was looking in Fort Collins some but primarily Denver) avoiding the remote competition, and hoping they’d be able to pay for my relocation. For these, if there were more than 100 applicants or it was older than 24 hours, I skipped it. I also applied using Welcome to the Jungle, from the recommendation from mark bacon, a site that I felt gave me higher quality applications, and had a lower chance of just not being cleaned up like linkedin. This is unfortunately the engineering funnel, hundreds of applications, several first interviews, few final interviews, to a couple offers if you’re lucky.

Reach out to your network

Short section here, reach out to people you have good relationships with, see who’s hiring. Check with old bosses, co-workers who left who you have a decent relationship with, basically anyone who would be happy working with you. This is the best conversion into interviews that exists. Treat people well, be gracious with their time, help them next time you get a chance.

Succeeding in interviews

I think I don’t have great advice for this one, grind some leetcode, have good STAR answers to common behavioral questions, and generally have a good story about your job search. For me, I was a senior looking to move to Colorado who had to get a new job to do so, and was incredibly valuable to my boss at the time. I loved helping my peers and wanted to do my best to keep our code solutions at a high quality, and I wanted to bring that to a company that would let me work in Colorado.

Know your No’s, and your worth

As a last note, in the job search taking any job that comes your way can be tempting, especially if you don’t enjoy your current work. My short advice is to do your best to have a feel for warning signs, check glassdoor, and maybe even reach out to old workers of a company on linkedin to check culture. I had some things I wanted to make sure my next role had, and I did not budge on them.

Also, get a realistic number to give people. I asked for what would roughly be my salary post promotion adjusted for cost of living in Colorado. This gave me a number, which then turned into a 10k range that I could give to recruiters, and potentially negotiate at the end. Thankfully Angi gave me an offer I was happy with at the beginning, and was super flexible with me during a time of changing jobs, my wife graduating, and doing my first out of state move.

Homework

Watch headless headhunter, the mark bacon video, the pragmatic engineer article, and READ THE SOFTWARE ENGINEER’S GUIDEBOOK (or listen to it on spotify with your subscription if you can). This, right now, is THE MOST VALUABLE thing for newer software people, and even some more experienced people. Get to know your industry, yourself, and your place in it.

The job search is hard, but you can do it. Your new job is just around the corner!