career

3 posts with the tag “career”

Hiring without feedback is broken

Mar 31, 2026

I pass every screening call. I answer every technical question. Then I get rejected — and nobody tells me why.

The pattern is always the same. Screening goes well — experience aligns, good conversation, we move forward. Technical round — databases, architecture, system design. Nothing that makes me pause. I answer everything.

Then — a week of silence. And either a polite “we went with someone closer to our stack,” or nothing at all.

You can’t debug a process that returns no error message.

From 85% rejections to interviews

Mar 25, 2026

Aleksandr Kondaurov

Software Engineer

I kept getting rejected — and I couldn’t figure out why.

Job searching is hard. Remote job searching is harder by an order of magnitude. I was sending out 30 applications in a couple of days. Getting 25 auto-rejections back. My experience was relevant, my skills were real.

Then I realized: the problem wasn’t my resume. It was my process.

The generalist's hiring problem

Mar 17, 2026

Aleksandr Kondaurov

Software Engineer

I know too many things. Apparently that’s a problem.

I started with PHP. Then spent years in the JVM world — Scala, Java, building distributed systems. Did backend, DevOps, CI/CD, built frontends with React and Vue. Now I’m deep into TypeScript, serverless, and cloud infrastructure.

I could pick up Go or Python on any project — learning new tools has never been the hard part. The hard part is convincing someone to let you in the door.

But try explaining that to an ATS.