If you've ever run a company, you know how bad people's CVs can be and what you need to do to stand out. I recommend it to everyone. I would get 15-20 CVs for a small company, and I didn't even closely look at 10-15 of them because it was clear people were just writing random shit or applying without even looking at what we wanted.

I suspect it is a similar ratio for any software company.

My best hire ever was a math teacher in a previous career that wrote his own tools. Worst hire ever was a guy with a PHD that thought he was still in university.

Second this, try to stand out in some way. I mostly receive floods of terrible resumes, spam and obvious LLM generated text.

The worst hire I made also had university credentials and apparently wasn't educated in how to deliver anything but academic noodling.

I have Facebook recruiters chasing me (and many of my friends). So I don't think it's that hard to get in.

(I even worked there briefly for six weeks. But that's another story.)

Here's the thing - having worked there briefly you are now on the top of their lists. You're part of the exclusive club in recruiters' eyes, whether it actually sets you apart or not. I worked at Amazon for a few months, and regularly get contacted by Amazon recruiters. But never Facebook, etc.

I did not notice much of a difference in recruiter intensity before or after my short stint there.

(But I was at eg Google before at some other point in my career.)

The way you write this suggests that for each engineer at Meta there are 15k other people who applied for the job and didn’t get it, so their ~40k engineers correspond to a pool of 600 million potential employees. This is obviously nonsense. There are a few ways to explain your number:

- the same unsuitable candidates apply many times. This is not so surprising: suitable candidates get jobs and so stop repeatedly applying

- perhaps many people can be hired for a single ‘open position’, eg perhaps one is ‘software engineer based at headquarters’

- if many applicants are from people who are grossly unsuitable, eg maybe you must demonstrate job applications to get some state unemployment assistance

- maybe Meta aren’t hiring much at the moment and so it is harder to get in than other companies that are hiring

- the number might be misremembered

The downside to applying is trivial so even if chances do seem low, it can still be reasonable to apply. I think the probabilities implied by the comment I’m replying to are so extreme that you should have some higher estimated success probability from also considering the chance that the comment above is misleading.

The thing one often sees about automated cv filtering systems is mostly widely-believed nonsense. It is a story that is told to job seekers to sell cv-optimisation services. That’s not to say automated filtering doesn’t exist – a simple case is filtering out candidates that were recently rejected – but I think even if a lot of people are filtered out, that doesn’t mean you will be.

You don't apply thru flood gates because it doesn't make sense. You reach out to your network to get a referral.