Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I got my first job in the U.S by emailing the local PHP user group introducing myself. The CEO of a dev agency was on the list, and 2 weeks later I had a job offer.
Moving to a new country not knowing anyone and with barely any money, fair to say that one email changed my life.
by ralfhn - You joined a special interest technical group which is specifically for professional networking and informal meetups and you sent a general email to the entire group which led to a hiring process. Nothing about that is “cold calling” or “cold email”.
Likewise, the posted article describes a Tweet from someone who announced they were hiring specific skilled professionals for an open position, and the author privately responded to that informal job posting. That is not a “cold call” or “cold email” just because you didn’t go through Indeed dot com.
But if you do send actual cold emails, then you undoubtedly have the prerogative to post and say that “<Company> Ghosted Me During the Hiring Process!!1” /s
- Hold up.... you created good-tutorials in high school? I credit that site with launching one of my first 'hobbies' back in middle school and teaching me a new skill I was able to use to help friends/family for years to come. Thank you!by arinazari
- Cheers! That era of the internet was such a fun chunk of time. All the little design tricks and bite-sized approaches people shared… it was a lot of fun.by holman
- One key turning point in my life was approaching Red Whittaker, the head of the Field Robotics Center at Carnegie Mellon. I knew who he was and had met him briefly before, but this was pretty much a “cold call” even if happened to be in person. I was finishing up my degree at CMU and felt like if was going to stay in Pittsburgh, I wanted to work somewhere that was working on really cool projects. My degree was a BFA in sculpture, but I guess my enthusiasm and interest in novel mechanisms was enough for him to take a chance and make a position for me. I learned a lot from (and with) the team of PhD students and staff. The job had me starting to use parametric CAD at very early point (Pro/E 6.0). After a few years I moved on and eventually left Pittsburgh for SF, but without taking that chance, I really don’t know what path my life would have taken.by s1mon
- As to what to write as a "starting point" in a cold email:
It's nice to write nice things about the things that person has done. nice tweet, nice post etc.
But it's nicer to write about things they've created and you paid money for. a book, a course, a software etc.
('nice' in this context means the chance of getting a reply.)
My own cold email story:
I was in a paid telegram group of a fitness guru I followed on Twitter. He once complained about how he's having a hard time managing his many info products, emails, having to write promotional content etc.
I then spent the night collecting all the things he's could do better: dusting off his unused wordpress site to keep as source of content rather than just tweeting bangers and let them be forgotten due to the algorthm after some time, writing better sales copy for his copy instead of just trying to list its merits in every tweet and email, new ebook ideas based on stuff that people in his telegram group are already complaining about (how do I recover better?!) etc.
I didn't expect much out of this. It just felt nice to come up with ideas honestly. but he replied with with 2 sentences: "How can I pay you" and "When can you start?".
That started a 2 year sidegig as a copywriter, a profession I didn't know I was interested in at all before this, lol.
Hmm.. thinking back.. have I learned this lesson myself? I can't think of any other instances where I replied to people's stuff that I purchased. But maybe I forgot. I'm going to think about it though, and write hot cold emails!
And thanks Zach for this. The one thing I remember about you from your early blogging days. That "glue technologies" blog post - where you said about how things like bash, sql, server management etc.. are all not main character skills, but are glue skills that are still important. That term stuck with me, and I do see their importance.
by npras1 - So you were a customer, and this business owner created a job opening, announced the responsibilities to a list of his paying customers, and then he offered one of his existing customers a job while making it seem like it was your idea.
Networking. It's called "Networking".
- I got my first job (an IT traineeship) because after my interview, I rang them every few days to ask how I did and if they were keen to progress further. In the end they said they gave it to me because I was obviously SO keen, what withi the ringing every other day, and I had interviewed well.
Anyway my point is, as the author implies, showing interest is key. I genuinely wanted that job and I showed them that.
Sadly these days (that happened to me in ~1998) it's so, so much harder to stand out. There's a wall of bits and "employment services" between you and the person who'd hire you, and I don't know how the younger generation is going to be able to navigate that easily.
by muppetman - In the late 90s I was a huge Michael Schumacher and Ferrari fan. I found Jean Todt’s (the Ferrari F1 team principal at the time) email address and wrote a passionate email asking if there was any way I could join their team - even if it was sweeping the floor. Never got a reply :(
Previously I worked at Auth0. I joined fairly early, just a couple of years after their founding so the company was still small. I remember one of my collegues who joined around the same time got his job by sending (multiple) cold emails to my manager at the time telling how much he admired the company and wanted to join. Eventually he gave in and gave him the job. The guys stayed on long after I left so it obviously work out well for both parties.
by jerriep
My mother convinced me to do the same after I was also wait-listed at my top choice university. I sent them an email updating them on things I had done since applying (in May, two weeks before graduating), and two days later, I got my acceptance letter.> but my dad kept saying it wouldn’t hurt to really make it clear I wanted to get into the school.by Ozzie_osman- Look at it from the school's point of view. They already spent time evaluating your credentials and decided you were qualified for the "waitlist" pool of applicants. They aren't going to want to invest a lot more time in further evaluating or stack-ranking those people, so anyone who stays engaged and communicating will probably be favored over those who just passively wait.
Worst case, those applicants are already ranked by whatever metrics they use and they will just pull people from the top of the stack as they need. Your continued efforts won't help in this case, but they also won't hurt. And there's a good chance that many of those people already accepted other offers, so the school might prefer to save time and only deal with people who are obviously still interested.
by SoftTalker - This is a great read, but I wonder how effective cold messages are in the AI era. I now receive customized cold emails and LinkedIn messages. There are several tools like Clay that make AI messaging effortless. It is becoming increasingly difficult to determine if message are AI-generated or if a human actually took the time to write them and care.
I see in-person networking becoming increasingly valuable. Unfortunately, for me, I live in the Detroit Metro area. We just don’t have the tech community that other areas like the Bay do, and despite several people‘s best efforts. We don’t have the best networking opportunities and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
by cebert - > It is becoming increasingly difficult to determine if message are AI-generated or if a human actually took the time to write them and care.
Could you share some examples? Based on my experience (and other replies here) it's exactly the opposite, and you could easily see if the message was AI-generated.
by zahrevsky - I'd suggest writing by hand as a proof of work, for now at least!
- Yep they went from a rare to an almost daily occurrence for me this summer. It upsets me because I have met so many interesting people through my inbox.by nicbou
- I started to write my story here along the same lines. Perhaps more along the lines of don't be afraid to ask. Almost every job I got, and they've mostly been pretty fantastic, I got cause I called and ask for it. I was told some of those jobs just weren't available or impossible to get but I called and got them. One job the manager wasn't even thinking about it till I called but I got him thinking about it and he hired me. Two impossible to get jobs I got cause the secretary left her desk for a moment and the manager answered the phone instead. I got two half hour interviews in prime time for someone and his business cause I called someone and asked for it.
It never hurt to ask.
- "It never hurt to ask."
Rejection can hurt if you are fragile, but one can learn to handle and accept it.
by lukan - I'm probably somewhat older than most here. What OP is describing is what used to be normal and should still be!
In the past it was normal to write a CV (resume) and a covering letter that was mildly tailored to each target firm, either in response to a job advert or on spec. I'm not talking quill pens here - you'd do a mail merge and buy a really large book of stamps.
Linked In is possibly the worst thing that ever happened to HR but it was inevitable and someone else would do it instead if they did not.
The whole point is ... show interest, actual interest in an employer you are interested in and whatever they are doing. Find a way in. If they only use LLM based 'bots and can't be arsed with a 'phone call then fuck 'em!
by gerdesj - In a world with LinkedIn perhaps sending a letter is a good way to bypass the hordes.
- When applying for jobs I often wish I could just have 5 min with the "boss" in charge of the given role. Or even just have them do a video talking about what they do... that's it, that's all the meat. I'll happily watch thousands and skip what doesn't fit me and pick what does ...
But everything is hidden.
by duxup - And what is your advice for the employer to actually reciprocate that interest instead of treating their employees like cattle? Both sides of the equation have changedby altmanaltman
- I feel like companies that are genuinely interesting are pretty rare.
Then you'll still get two rounds of leet code and system design.
by tayo42 - The craziest part is that this tailored approach is now a red flag, because HR just assumes your covering letter is LLM-generated.
“Damn kids, they're all alike” vibes.
by zahrevsky - I abandoned cover letters when I showed up to an interview and the interviewer complained that my resume was too thin. That was on purpose because a lot of the meat was in the cover letter that he never received. I just merged them and gave up on customization when ATSs started being used to cull 99% of applicants.
- One thing about this is you never can tell how one thing will lead to another, so even if you don’t get a good response to your cold email, if you do it well, it can still unlock doors later on that you never expected to.
To illustrate this I’m going to share a personal anecdote that actually isn’t a cold email, but it’s similar enough that hopefully it demonstrates the point. I made the crucial connection in a meeting, but it could just as well have happened from an email.
I was co-head of a startup that built enterprise saas risk software of a highly specialised type and one of our investors convinced me to take a meeting with a very successful and highly-regarded hedge fund. I was expecting a very initial call, but when I got on the phone it was just me, the COO, the chief investment officer, their head of trading and their CTO. So pretty much the top of the house.
Now, I could have just gone straight for the big pitch and tried to sell them on our solution but it was super obvious right at the beginning of the call that we were solving a problem they just didn’t have, and there was no pivot we could make that would make our software relevant for them. So I did the high-integrity thing (even though we were pretty desperate for clients) and said that to them, thanked them for their time and ended the call cordially, but early.
Years later I got a cold call from a recruiter working for two founders looking for a CTO for a fintech. Turns out she was the wife of one of the guys on the call that day and he had told her about it, said he had been impressed by how I handled the situation, so when the opportunity arose I ended up on the shortlist (and got the gig btw) for a job I would never even have known existed yet alone applied for.
The point is sometimes if you just do the thing it may not even work out in the immediate short term in an obvious way, but could have positive long term ramifications that you can’t necessarily know ahead of time, whereas if you do nothing, nothing will happen.
by seanhunter - That's such a nice story! I'd like to think that having integrity pays off on the long run.by vdanielpop
- Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous, and as such are generally pretty happy to respond to emails.
In ~2014 I sent an email to Joe Armstrong (one of the creators of Erlang) asking some questions about concurrency because I still didn't fully understand why Erlang was supposed to be better for it. I expected him to just point me to an FAQ or simply not respond [1], but instead he wrote a very long, detailed explanation about the rationale of Erlang's design. It was well-written and it made a lot of things "click" in my brain.
That simple act by Joe was extremely instrumental in my career, I think for the better. I became very interested in Erlang, but also just concurrency theory and distributed systems, and I would like to think I almost understand it now :)
He and I would exchange emails occasionally over the next few years and he seemed genuinely enthusiastic about programming, Erlang, and people using it, and despite me barely knowing the guy, I was genuinely pretty sad when he passed away in 2019.
I think about that a lot; if I hadn't sent a dumb cold email my entire life would likely be very different.
[1] Which, to be clear, would have been perfectly fine!
by tombert - Will it b possible to share the problem and the insight he provided?by danieldc
- The people who are celebrities, or public figures, or likely to receive a lot of email, also have secretaries, or PR/social media managers who open all their messages and respond to strangers.
This is why it can be so easy to find someone's contact email address, versus phoning their office and trying to get past the voicemail or front desk.
- Yeah, genuinely sad when he passed. He's not the most influential person in computing, but for some reason, he was the one person I most wanted to meet. Probably the way he presented himself. Seemed like a genuinely good guy.by abrookewood