Field notes
Insights on the job search, careers, and landing your next great role.
Latest writing
Eight hundred people replied to one Ask a Manager letter about tracking job applications, and no two of their spreadsheets matched. What that comment thread, and the actual research on why weak ties work, says about running a search on memory alone.
The applicant tracking system is not a robot that auto-rejects you, and the recruiter after it barely beats a coin flip. What the data on both passes actually shows, and what to do about it.
What "competitive compensation," "wear many hats," and "we move fast" actually mean in a recruiter's first email — and the specific question that gets a real answer instead of another phrase like it.
A reader told Ask a Manager they wanted the job search over “before the sun runs out of fuel.” The exhausting part was never the hours — it was the twenty open threads nobody, including them, was tracking.
Recruiters are fielding 412 percent more applications than they were in 2023, candidates are paying twenty dollars to auto-apply to hundreds of jobs at once, and interviewers can no longer tell who used ChatGPT and who didn’t. An honest accounting of what AI has actually done to the search, including where it’s made candidates worse off.
Weak ties move a job search more than close friends do, an event with a talk beats an open bar, and the first message needs no ask — with the actual scripts to send.
What it actually takes to be “not looking, but open” instead of just saying it: a brag document nobody reads until they do, a network that owes you nothing, and the discipline not to let momentum decide for you.
A blunt sort through an engineer's public work — personal site, open source, writing, side projects — by how much of it a hiring manager actually opens.
Why the company already expects a counter, why naming your number first gives it away, and the specific things worth asking for besides base salary.
A short, opinionated list of what to read and where to show up while you look for work — grouped by what each one is actually for, plus the ones I dropped.