Thread by @AustenAllred

There are 229k job openings for "software engineer" in the United States on Indeed.

I wonder what the response/interview rate would be if you had someone with a solid portfolio, no degree, and no experience apply to, say, 10k of them? Just a cold application.

...brb

Let's say you apply to 10k jobs, which is a trivial amount of the total software engineering jobs out there.

If your interview hit rate is 1% (v low) you're talking 100 interviews. Could easily be 500 interviews (!)

if you can land 10% of the interviews that's 10-50 jobs

One human could probably apply to, say, 10 jobs/hr. You'd have to automate or outsource or you're looking 1,000 hrs just submitting applications.

If you have a virtual assistant that was $5/hr *just* manually submitting applications you're looking $.50/application.

🤔

Of course, this is the worst way to think about actually getting a job, but if you wanted to solve a problem with money...

your odds of getting a job would be awfully close to 100% if you had a solid resume, portfolio, and spent $500 on an assistant just spray-and-pray

It's a pretty crude way to think about it, but even a monkey throwing darts is bound to hit the bullseye multiple times in every 10,000 throws.

If a throw costs $.50, and the payoff for a throw is the average increase of a Lambda School student (just north of $40k), throw darts

This probably breaks down with scale, but it's also completely unoptimized. Not sure we've ever had a student apply to more than 200 jobs without getting an offer.