Remote Job Hunting Resources for Turing Grads and Anyone Else

7 min readFeb 26, 2019

This post started life as this gist, and existed in that state for a while. I’m pulling it into a slightly more visible location, and updating/modifying it, hopefully to the betterment of all future readers.

This is a collection of resources that come from a range of conversations I’ve had with Turing students. Some of it is specific to getting/working remotely, but most of it is (in my opinion) useful for any sort of role. Finally, I think “advice to others” is a tall order. All I know is things I did, and what seemed to correlate with good results. Correlation is not causation, etc.

Where do remote jobs “live”

I’ve had the most success getting email responses from a few places:

http://weworkremotely.com/

Second, hacker news’ “who’s hiring” threads, like this one from December 2017: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15824597

oh, and with the hacker news posts, they’re often hundreds of entries long. I.E. hundreds of potential jobs.

Use this tool to filter the above “who’s hiring” posts by keyword, like “remote” and “ruby” : https://kennytilton.github.io/whoishiring/

https://nomadlist.com/ is also worth a mention.

What sort of things did I do to actually get the job

My goal was to telegraph competence to anyone I interacted with. So, one of my main goals was to create visible evidence that I am competent.

That’s not helpful, Josh. How do you do that? Do you run around screaming “I’M COMPETENT” at everyone you meet?

No. I just type things on the internet, and make those easy to find. My email signature has a link to my website, which has a smattering of technical and non-technical posts, and my “about me” page makes sure to also telegraph competence. If you don’t have a website, just hop onto Medium, and start writing some things. Here’s examples of my “technical” posts:

My “about” page is fairly friendly and comprehensive: http://josh.works/about/

None of these posts are earth shattering (actually, they are all very basic) but it telegraphs:

I have some initiative. Not necessarily a lot, but at least a little
I can write words in a legible and readable fashion. This is valuable in a remote work environment, as almost all communication will be written. (I.E. writing skills are particularly valuable.)

Jason Fried, founder of Basecamp (and a bunch of other stuff) wrote in his book Rework:

“If you are trying to decide among a few people to fill a position hire the best writer. it doesn’t matter if the person is marketer, salesperson, designer, programmer, or whatever, their writing skills will pay off. That’s because being a good writer is about more than writing clear writing.
Clear writing is a sign of clear thinking. great writers know how to communicate. they make things easy to understand. they can put themselves in someone else’s shoes. they know what to omit. And those are qualities you want in any candidate.
Writing is making a comeback all over our society… Writing is today’s currency for good ideas.”

So, writing is valuable. Write stuff, and make it easy to find.

To further make the point, Brendon Caffery in Writing Will Always Be the Hot Sauce says:

Communication is key to any team environment. These days engineers are expected to engage via Slack, JIRA, GitHub, Basecamp, Trello, Asana, Google Docs, StackOverflow, and more. Oh, and also email and Twitter and LinkedIn and…and…and. What’s the common algorithm to solving problems on these platforms? What’s the common API? Writing.

Outreach

Cold outreach. It’s hard, right?

I agree. If you don’t like sending people emails out of the blue, I have a suggestion for you. Role-playing!

You’re going to roll-play someone who likes to do sales-y activities, and that person is going to get you a job.

You’re “selling” the product of your own development skills. So, get into a sales mindset, and you’ll do just fine.

start here: Dear HN “Who’s Hiring” responders, and read this entire comment carefully. Then go apply it in your emails.

I see the whole process of cold outreach as a collection of microskills, just like a complicated operation in Ruby or Javascript. You break the big complex task into classes and functions, for example:

The big complex task: get a job

progression through microskills:

write emails that get responses
write emails that start conversations
respond to emails in a way that lead to further responses/conversations
have conversations where someone thinks about if I can/cannot do the job
in a converation, convince someone I would be a good culture fit
telegraph technical proficiency in the course of email correspondence

etc.

All of those are tiny sub-skills of the job-hunting process. if you can do the first three, getting a job is just a matter of volume. one email or one conversation won’t turn into a job. but ten might.

Twenty almost certainly will.

there’s a #cold-outreach channel in the Turing slack that I’d recommend joining. the woman that started it is great at putting stuff together around cold outreach. the hardest part of cold outreach is just starting it. there’s 100 things you can do that make you think you’re making progress, but besides actually sending an email to a stranger none of it is effective.

Patrick McKenzie is one of my favorite folks on the internet. He wrote this piece on salary negotiation which is still the gold standard on the topic.

Even though you’re not “negotiating salary” until you get an offer, you are negotiating it by proving your worth and showing you have value to bring to a company, and by being professional in your communications. All of that can be done in the first email.

Here’s an inspirational tweet:

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) is a good person to follow on the internet

He wrote https://stripe.com/atlas/guides/starting-sales. Scroll down to “How should you communicate with customers?”, and mentally swap “customers” with “potential employers”, and go from there. within reason.

I recommend you follow Stephanie Hurlburt:

There’s tons of people that she retweets that are tweeting some variation of

I’d love to help people with {topic}, and DM’s are welcome. please ask me for help

Reaching out to these people would be a good place to get practice w/cold outreach.

I have a bit of an advantage because I’ve done sales in the past. Most of the skills for sales translate well to getting a job, so… as much as you can, imagine you’re a sales person, but the product you’re selling is your own skills as a developer.

You might think you have way more competition than you actually do

I once was helping hire for one of those sweet remote roles posted on weworkremotely.com. We got 300 applications within a few days.

I dismissed 280 of them out of hand, based on the email preview alone. They all began with either

Dear Sir or Madame…

or were some variation of

Here’s my linkedin/CV, let me know if you’re interested

Why did I dismiss these out of hand?

Zero effort to differentiate themselves.
They obviously did zero research on our company, our team, or our product.

In this situation, how did someone differentiate themselves?

We had one guy email me directly with questions about the role before he applied. He asked good questions, and did at least a few minutes of research on the role. I floated his application to the top and was pulling to hire him, without knowing anything else about him, on these facts alone.

This is a phenomena sometimes called The Craigslist Penis Effect (that link is safe to click).

The Craigslist Penis Effect describes situations where everyone else is so horrible that, by being even half-decent, you can dominate everyone else and win.

So, just see competative job postings as a numbers game:

300 applications per job minus 90% of those applications (because most job applications are a dumpster fire) leaves 30 tolerable applications per job.

So, if you’re in the 50% percentile of the remaining applications, every dev role comes down to you and fifteen other people.

As a Turing grad, i’d bet you’re closer to 80th percentile for that pool, so you’re now down to competing with ~10 people for every one of those jobs.

In summary, get good at:

showcasing your work (I.E. a personal website that proves you can write some tolerable code, or have an aptitude to learn)
telegraphing competence in basic email communications

and you’ll do just fine.

Write personalized, engaging emails to fifteen people, and you will guaranteed have a collection of interesting email responses, and will have a few interviews lined up.

My offer to you

If you email ten people, and don’t get a response, ping me in slack. (@josh_t). I’ll read over the emails you sent, and figure out how to tighten ’em up.

If you’ve still not sent any cold emails, send me a doc containing the details you have for three companies you’re interested in, as well as the contact person or contact email, and a draft of the email you’d like to send.

I’ll help you get the emails ready to send.

quick aside: in the year and a half since I’ve written this gist, it’s been starred 11 times, forked four times, and at least fifteen people have personally reached out thanking me for putting this together. Not a single person has asked about help composing emails. Maybe all of y’all are great at writing emails and have cold outreach down pat, or maybe some of you should ask me for help but are not. This offer still stands.

This article was originally posted on https://josh.works.