Jobhunting Competition Begin

Last week I was laid off. So if anyone needs a good software/game developer in the US, PM me!

Looking for a job as a programmer in the US is basically hardcore. The main problem is the filters in HR's search systems. It even turned out that writing a resume is just as important and responsible a process as passing a technical interview. Moreover, if for some reason the system doesn't notice you, you'll never find out why. And on top of that, literally THOUSANDS of people from all over the world apply for every vacancy.

On the other hand, it's like developing a mobile game - you need to constantly change the content depending on reality, run A/B tests, analyze the results. Marketing and selling yourself as it is.

Anyway, while I was recovering from everything that happened, I vibecoded a small helper to manage the job search process. And honestly, it's long overdue to bring everything into one single resume source. Because right now it's one thing on LinkedIn, another on Indeed, a third on ZipRecruiter, and even the PDF itself gets out of sync.

I called this utility CowWorker. It's just a funny wordplay which I came up with many years ago. Now the job search process will run only through it. By design, the user will have their own Journey, made up of various career stages - a kind of timeline of events, whether it's changing jobs or finishing school.

The very first thought that comes to mind with all this is to set up an AI to open a job search page once an hour and look for matches by keywords in the vacancy. And a lot of people do exactly that. And I don't like that. But because of that, LinkedIn can simply ban you for it, and to get access to the Indeed/ZipRecruiter API you need to register a company and make an official request.

So for now vacancies are added manually. But you can also just throw the internal AI agent a link to the vacancy, or even just take a screenshot - it will recognize it, fill in the fields, and add it to the database.

Added the ability to specify an API key for Claude or Codex in the settings to enable AI operations. Right now there's only the option to parse imported vacancies and make better text itself.

I don't know yet whether this will help or not, but I decided to take a break and picked up Rust.

P.S. By the way, this is the first attempt to make a post via my blog platform called Cedar Clerk. I want to tell more about it a little later.