- Don't apply to 50+ companies at one go thinking only a % of them will call you. Choose ~5 companies, do a lot of homework about their business & write to key people at these places telling in ONE paragraph what you can do for their business. If it fails, choose next ~5 and so on.

This is one of the best advices for people starting their careers. This comment should be at the top of this thread!

EDIT: Formatting

No, no, no, arghh no! No matter how much you research, study, network, and prep for any one special particular company, if you are the one to reach out you’re going to get ghosted a certain percentage of the time. If that percentage is around 90-95%, which is what it is in my experience being in the industry for 20 years, then focusing on 5 companies may mean zero callbacks. You need to cast a wide net, especially as a junior engineer.

I’ve tried this strategy of targeting an insider in my network and pitching myself through him. Several times. It has never worked for me. Ultimately it ends up at “Whelll, nice talking to you! Next step is to apply for this job id online. Good luck!!” What does work is if conpany initiates contact, THEN you go through your network to gather information about the role and hiring manager, and so on. Having an insider pushing for you after company has already expressed interest has been a lot more reliable to me.

I think the key is that you need to motivate them for why they should hire you. I recently went through the job interview process and I got ghosted by a company with a job opening on LinkedIn that I know I was qualified for. I reached out to the recruiter and within a week I had an interview scheduled, and within two weeks I had an offer.

Sometimes you need to just get a human's eyeballs on your resume.

I think you misunderstood the parent post. They didn’t say only apply to 5 companies. They said don’t send 50+ Low quality applications in one go. Send five high quality ones to places you think are a good fit, follow up, and then send five more.

I think it’s good advice. Although the points you make are generally true too.

This has been my experience as well.

I'm really interested in an answer for this question, since WhatsApp is the only Facebook app I have installed/keep an account.

Unfortunately, everyone uses WhatsApp in Brazil, and very few people uses Telegram, for example. This makes it kinda impossible to be Facebook-free here.

Yep

That, and it's also almost impossible to run Windows 8 or 10 with a HDD drive, even for basic stuff like internet browsing, etc.

SSD is basically required now.

Sad, because Linux is still pretty fast with HDD for basic usage.

Can confirm, had a huge "WTF?" on installing Win8 on an HDD and seeing the friggin' OS UI pause constantly for no obvious reason. It was like running Win98 on a 75Mhz Pentium with 16MB of RAM. On my beefy quad-core Intel with 16GB of RAM. Added an SSD, problem went away. They're relying on the SSD to make up for some really lazy crap in their code.

> So is there a build tool that fixes these problems, instead of just replacing the parts of make that actually work well?

I created something that tries to improve some aspects of Make. In particular it allows setting multiple outputs and use checksum instead of timestamp for build caching.

Don't expect a perfect tool, though. This started as a toy project, but evolved with time.

https://taskfile.dev/

> I often have a lot of intermediate build artifacts/stages

I don't know your use case in depth, but I don't see why Task wouldn't work for you, since it's similar to Make in this regard.

You can have multiple tasks (for each step) and then either set dependencies or have a task that call all other tasks in the right sequence. And, of course, you'd have to enable [this](https://taskfile.org/#/usage?id=prevent-unnecessary-work).

Anyway, seems that Make is already enough for you, since you're used to it's quirks.

> I still often use rake, even tho it does make some golang people vomit

LOL.

I love both Go and Ruby. Each of them shines on different scenarios.

It's not solely about syntax.

Have you tried using Make on Windows? I know, I also prefer Unix-like systems over Windows (and I barely use Windows these days anymore), but for those that need Windows support, it's a miserable experience trying to use tools that barely work there.

Checksum based (instead of timestamp based) up-to-date resolution is also nice. Etc, etc.

In short, I don't think Task is perfect (far from it), but we desperately need better alternatives to Make.

Thanks for these words!

Although I don't think this tool is perfect, I created Task exactly due my frustration with Make and the lack of decent alternatives.

Let me know if you any feedback after you try it.

After giving a quick look, my tasks are twice faster with make.

So I was curious to know why and I tried to clone the project to debug it, and could not figure out how to setup the dependencies properly.

You should add a section how to contribute/develop.

Yeah, a contributing guide would be nice. Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm curious on why Make runs twice faster to you, since in most cases the difference should be negligible (i.e. the Task overhead should be insignificant compared to the time it takes to run the command).

Maybe you're running really lightweight, like `cp`? Otherwise I'd consider it a bug. Could you open an issue, then?