I held my ground in a technical interview

Last month I wrote about the latest interview for a Senior Distributed Systems Engineer and chose in the piece not to name the company out of respect for them. In addition to respect for them, it's also so they don't get free publicity either. Getting called out by a Staff Engineer for running an flawed interviewing process is a humbling experience that many organizations would pay to go through if the results of the audit were kept private.

Providing anonymity to the company in question allows for them to internally adjust based on the knowledge that they know that I am talking about them.

The Broken LinkedIn Strategy

Many engineers are quick to comment that AI powered ATS is filtering them out before a human ever sees their resume. While that is mostly true, the solution presented to the engineer is to tune your resume to each job description and application. I did this. It was tedious. For each job I was:

1. Reading the Job Description + Company Website + Company News
2. Rewriting my Resume to match the job description
3. Write a Cover Letter for the company, tying in their website language, recent news, my relevancy to the job description, and the opportunity of what working with me would look like

Each position I would find myself investing between 1-2 hours from the moment I saw the listing and I finished applying for it. I did this hundreds of times and found that it was a deeply flawed and wasteful effort.

Cold applying to jobs on LinkedIn, especially with the Easy Apply button will generally mean that 99.9999% of the time, your resume will never be seen by a human on design. That's what companies are actually paying LinkedIn for — to not see your resume when you submit it to them. If they see your resume, then it means that the AI powered ATS is not working properly.

Even when I take my resume and cover letter to spend an hour tailoring it for company specifically, so I can have a human to human connection for even just 30 seconds to see if I can even interview the company too. No, not with AI. You are the commodity being bought and sold. It truly feels dehumanizing to be a software engineer in the age of AI.

If you're applying to jobs on LinkedIn using this strategy, you will not get a job. It's identical to playing the lottery at this point and if you get selected for an interview, its just evidence that the company didn't actually spend 30 seconds looking into you, before they wanted to start training their AI on your answers during a job interview.

AI has broken the hiring market for tech.

A New LinkedIn Strategy

I do not apply to jobs that are posted on ATS systems. I will not apply to Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn, Doghouse, Ashby, Hired, micro1, etc. These automated systems are the bane of my existence and they are what drive me to question my profession entirely. These companies represent to me the worst of the industry.

I spend my days on LinkedIn replying to posts, writing content about the job search, writing on my blog, and sharing stories about developer success with others to be inspired by.

I have more traction in getting face to face conversations with either recruiters or hiring managers than I ever did working on my resume and cover letter for each role and cold applying to them. Replying to their posts, calling them out, or complimenting them is a way to get attention.

It's far more effective than cold applying.

Spend a few minutes of your job search day on the platform. Give the replies effort. Contribute to the conversation in a meaningful way. The human to human component of hiring will override policies for CodePad or LeetCode challenges.

In 2026, if a company asks me for a LeetCode or CoderPad challenge, I will decline their invitation to interview. It's as simple as that.

Instead, what works is posting like this.

You'll get connections and followers when you post regularly and your content will actually be seen by other humans.

I've been invited to more in-person interviews doing this latter strategy than I ever got last month doing the former strategy. Maybe by September I'll be employed, but it won't be at any company that asks a Staff Engineer like myself to do a CoderPad / LeetCode challenge in front of them, counting islands, when in truth, they wanted to know about recursion and I could have shown them half a dozen examples of recursion used in my open source programs and why I did what I did. That would have measured a better engineer way more than any CoderPad challenge could ever dream of doing.

Best of luck to the companies that continue to use antiquated hiring practices in 2026 in the age of AI. Hopefully you won't become antiquated like your process because top talent avoids you like the plague.