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How to get hired by an exciting tech startup in 2023

· 6 min read


The future is a strange place. We’re not entirely sure what it will look like, but we do know that it will be shaped by the choices we make today. And while I can’t tell you exactly how to get a job in 2023, I can help you set yourself up for success by showing you some of the best ways to build your career today.

Everyone is doing the same hacker tests. Being good at interviews will no longer suffice to get a job in top tech company. Conventional CVs are too boring. Recruiters may like what they read, but this doesn’t make them think any further about a person and think “wow, we really need someone like them”.

Ultimately, a CV cannot demonstrate creativity and in my opinion, to be a top engineer you need to be creative. Often there isn’t an easy straightforward solution and being creative is what distinguishes top tier engineers from medium. I wrote a post about this here.

Below I will let you know my views on what I would do to get a job at an exciting tech startup.

Work on open source projects

Open source is a great way to build your skills and get your name out there. It’s also a great way to make connections with other developers, which can lead to referrals and job opportunities. If you want to show that you’re a good engineer, open source is an excellent opportunity. This is because it allows you to demonstrate your problem-solving abilities, while also improving the codebase of a project that is potentially used by thousands of users — and because the project is open source, it never dies.

But which open source projects should you choose?

I’d say that there are two routes that you can take here. You can select the project based on your own use case or you can be strategic about it.

Own use case

Don’t overthink it. The world of software is built on top of open source. If it weren’t for open source, we would be living in the year 2000 or less. This means that your favorite apps are relying on open source projects, which you can be a part of!

This means that you can:

  • Contribute to an open source library that is used by a project that you like. E.g. someone from our team is a cpython contributor.
  • Contribute to a product that you use that is Open Source. The advantage here is that you are able to literally customize the product that you are using.

With Red Hat in the 90s this open source movement is starting to be a very hot topic. Joseph Jacks from OSS Capital is one of the best investors (if not the best) in this space. The chart below that he put together illustrates well the growth of open source (shared in this tweet)

image

Strategic

If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that you want to make a positive impact on the future of technology. If so, it can be helpful to consider how your work will affect the lives of others. Take some time and think about what kind of role you would like to play in shaping those futures — are you someone who wants to improve people’s physical well-being through health innovations? Or maybe achieve more efficient energy use through new technologies? This will help determine which companies or projects might be best suited for any given career path.

Once you figure out what motivates you, select an industry where you wish to find a job.

Then there are multiple paths that you can take:

  • Look into the signals provided by top venture capital firms in that selected industry. I.e. see what open source companies are being backed in that space.
  • Look into the developer engagement around the open source projects in that industry. You can not only use GitHub stars and forks, but you can use tools such as https://analyzemyrepo.com or https://ossinsight.io/
  • Cold email VCs to ask them about which open source products they are excited about. I say VCs because often their job is to find these startups early, so usually they have more recent information. But talking with devs or listening to people that you respect in the industry is equally valid.

Note: By being an early contributor of a promising open source startup, you can become a core maintainer of a project and even make it to the founding team. This is how I met James, OpenBB’s co-founder. He was an active developer in my own open source project, and I invited him to be part of the main maintainers of the project. When we built a company, he became a founding member.

Develop your own open source project

I strongly believe that being able to successfully build your own open source project is severely underrated. There are so many components that you need to get right from so many departments that it shows a lot about your strengths as an individual and a preview of the value you could add to the team.

You may think that the only thing that you are demonstrating is your ability to write high-quality code since it will be open to the public. Well that’s wrong. Here is a non-exhaustive list of skills that you show off

  • Solution to a real-world problem
  • Design around the product
  • User experience
  • How you prioritize task and how fast you can ship high-quality code
  • Interaction with others
  • Marketing
  • Listening to feedback from users

This is what I did with OpenBB Terminal: https://github.com/OpenBB-finance/OpenBBTerminal and it has single handedly changed my life.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a job in 2023, the best thing you can do is to contribute to/develop open source projects.

You should be aware that you can also add value to an open source project by reporting bugs. You can even do more than just report a bug, but suggest a solution or workaround for the problem — this shows that not only are you paying attention to what’s going on around you, but also that you have some ideas about how things could be improved — a combination that any hiring manager would love!

I hope you found this post insightful.

Any feedback is welcome.