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1,200 Applications. 4 Offers. Here's What Actually Got Me the Product-Based Role

Varshith V Hegde on June 26, 2026

I am going to start with a number most people will not say out loud. 1,200 applications. That is how many jobs I applied to over 3 to 4 months tr...
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itskondrat profile image
Mykola Kondratiuk

i'd flip the headline honestly - 1200 apps for a 0.8% call rate isn't what got you the role, the mdf parser story is. most people would've gotten to that story with 50 targeted applications

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Varshith V Hegde

Yeah🙂

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Mykola Kondratiuk

yeah, call rate sounds efficient, parser story sounds capable. employers want the second.

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varshithvhegde profile image
Varshith V Hegde

True I should have focused on targeted applications rather than randomly applying evrywhere . Thanks

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itskondrat profile image
Mykola Kondratiuk

exactly — and targeted means you can actually prep the stack conversation before the call, which is where volume-appliers always lose out. good luck with the next run

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UnitBuilds

I feel that, 1000+ customized CV's sent, 20 responses saying 'sorry, we chose someone else', not a single interview.

I'm smack dot in the middle of nowhere, so no local jobs... Multiple open-sourced projects (that are pretty incredible if I'm going to toot my own horn). Yet I never even get an interview because of 2 reasons (atleast that's my suspicion). 1, companies dont hire abroad if they dont have to. 2, they never look at my git, even when I write a 'demo' app for them that secures their entire pipeline and saves them 90% on infrastructure cost, with sub milisecond failover protection... Literally tailor made for them, just to get an interview, it took me 2h30m to build their entire system from scratch and it outperforms theirs by scales of magnitude.

So what would your suggestion be to someone like me, cuz I'm pretty tired of writing blazor as a day-job.

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Nazar Boyko

Funny how the Rust rewrite wasn't really the flex. The flex was that you could answer "why not Go or C++" without blinking, because you'd lived through the wrong turns to get there. A tutorial project can't give you that, and it shows the second a follow-up question lands. That's why "work on things you can defend" is the line in here that actually holds up.

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xulingfeng

The intentional mistake trick is wild — as a QA, I love it 😂 But the one that hit me the most was 'most developers have nothing publicly visible.' That's just the truth. A few posts and a decent GitHub profile already puts you ahead of most people. Congrats on the offers, sounds like you earned each other.

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Varshith V Hegde

Thanks
Yeah the intentional mistake actually works 😂 it's a risk that I was willing to take

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Greg Ruminski

AI slop. Get lost dude.

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