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!
> Something I learned awhile ago is that most people that I consider "celebrities" really aren't that famous
Yes. I've experienced this in many fields, from reaching out to the founder of a magazine, to several big name fans (artists and writers) in fandom, to touring hip hop artists (!!!), to people steering a programming language.
The first time, you can't believe they responded. But if you pursue excellence in that same field, eventually you realize y'all are peers, and then you get someone freaking out that you responded.
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!
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.
Well my little company has at least three employees that came back again after leaving. Two of them are still here. We are not particularly interesting ...
What I'm advocating for here is trying out new (old) methods of waving your CV/resume at an employer.
I graduated as a civil engineering technician (BTEC HND) in the UK in 1990. I did a "sabbatical" ... cough rag (basically pissed up for a year for charity is a fair description of that).
The building industry in the UK collapsed in 1991 along with a rather nasty recession.
Obviously I ended up in IT! It took a while but I completely reskilled and to cut a very long story short in 2000 me and a couple of other chaps formed a little company that is still running.
Enough of me.
Getting hired is hard but I would suggest that you don't simply rely on Linked In.
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.
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.
Is human-like cold emails (with stuff like :D) better or worse than professionally written formal emails? Im a student and would like some tips. I know it depends on the situation but what would you rather see? And based on your experience, what would you respond to more?
Definitely short and informal. You should have a legitimate reason to email (like, tell the person genuinely why you respect them or what about them you like), and a clear ask if there is one (asking for help, looking for a job, etc).
Don't talk about yourself, except if it's directly relevant to them.
I can easily tell when someone wrote 100 of them generically, vs when it's genuine, and I'll always respond to the genuine ones.
(And to be clear, I'm referring to the type of cold emails Zach is... people wanting a genuine connection. This doesn't apply to trying to sell something.)
Best emails I've gotten are terse (nice subject line getting to the point) and a no-nonsense body.
I think trying to make a "playful" personality turns off some people and is more work than just getting to the point. Opening with "here's the thing I want/what I'm reaching out for". then reasons. Then close out with a thank you.
Added bonus: short emails tend to get replies more often in my experience.
You need to provide the reason in the first sentence. Sure, once in a while a do read some cold emails but most of the time if the one-line snippet in the list of all other messages doesn't provide a reason - it goes to the trash.
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.
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
Almost all of them are salespeople, sometimes finding my phone number and calling me on my personal number, even early in the morning. Insane stuff. That's 90% of cold calls. 8% are recruiters (also salespeople) telling me they either know a genius candidate or they can get me. 2%, that's probably the topic of this thread.
I read a dozen inbound cold emails every day. I used to love it. I don't anymore, because every other single email uses The Sentence. Or, The Paragraph.
Whatever model these people use, it always always puts in The Sentence (I don't want to disclose it publicly! I'm running an experiment. I'll write it up when it concludes. :) ). Or, worse, The Paragraph.
Please use models to research people and learn about them. But please write the email yourself.
It's instantly obvious. And even though I do my best not to hold it against someone, I would be lying if I didn't say that it isn't a bit annoying.
Imagine reading endless variations of The Sentence 3,240 to 4,000 times a year. It feels straight out of the Twilight Zone.
There’s such an opportunity, it has never been easier to differentiate oneself now, all you have to do is ignore whatever online advice or LLMs say and do your own thing, it’s sad that almost nobody does it.
This makes me think of an email support request I got at a job a long time ago that began with the words "Fucking cunts how fucking dare you", before gradually cooling down and gesturing broadly at what the problem was, without ever reaching for the crutch of punctuation. I printed it out and stuck it on the wall.
HN reader, now you too know what it takes to make a powerful human impression via email.
Zach is good people. I still can’t believe I met him at a random meetup in SF once and he walked up to me to say hi and I didn’t connect the dots until many hours later that he’s the Zach whose blog I’ve been reading on and off my whole career and is one of the inspirations that got me to Silicon Valley.
The author is doing his article a disservice by calling this cold email. He just sent a few one-off emails to strangers. That's quite different than the BDR team at Startup Du Jour scraping LinkedIn and blasting out an enless stream of "hope this message finds you well" slop.
I'd wager that the majority of us do not differentiate between cold email and spam, especially in the AI era.
I agree wholeheartedly with this article and this is something I'm struggling with my daughter about: the worst thing anybody can say is no and in some cases, they already said no. If you ask (or ask again), you might get a really good answer or more.
Build up with small challenges. Not sure how old your daughter is, but, for example, our 7 year got a gift card. They wanted to know how much it was worth -- so they were the ones who had to go up to the counter to ask the employee. Just practicing going into uncomfortable or unfamiliar situations is valuable, and leads to confidence for the bigger stuff.
This is why I tend to write real letters using my IBM Selectric III and send them via physical mail. I enjoy writing. Writing with purpose is time well spent. 90% of the time I get no response. I’m not actively trying to find the next recipient, it just comes naturally, so I see no reason to stop.
When is the last time you got an actual typed or hand written letter? That’s my advantage.
I got a cold email recently and was happy to engage, but I warned them upfront that LLMs change the game, and asked for more info about their background (to authenticate them as a human). They replied with another unnecessarily long email that was light on details and reeked of AI Voice, so I ghosted at that point, unconvinced they were acting in good faith.
Demonstrating authenticity and effort are super important in this space.
That's been my biggest annoyance lately. Everyone's trying to AI these sorts of things, but for people who get a lot of these frequently, it's pretty easy to spot. Talk like a human and you can go pretty far, though.
I think another aspect of this is that the author experienced positive feedback from this approach early on. Rejection is tough to deal with, but having an instance that turned out well in mind is a huge benefit.
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!
Yes. I've experienced this in many fields, from reaching out to the founder of a magazine, to several big name fans (artists and writers) in fandom, to touring hip hop artists (!!!), to people steering a programming language.
The first time, you can't believe they responded. But if you pursue excellence in that same field, eventually you realize y'all are peers, and then you get someone freaking out that you responded.
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!
Then you'll still get two rounds of leet code and system design.
What I'm advocating for here is trying out new (old) methods of waving your CV/resume at an employer.
I graduated as a civil engineering technician (BTEC HND) in the UK in 1990. I did a "sabbatical" ... cough rag (basically pissed up for a year for charity is a fair description of that).
The building industry in the UK collapsed in 1991 along with a rather nasty recession.
Obviously I ended up in IT! It took a while but I completely reskilled and to cut a very long story short in 2000 me and a couple of other chaps formed a little company that is still running.
Enough of me.
Getting hired is hard but I would suggest that you don't simply rely on Linked In.
It never hurt to ask.
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.
Don't talk about yourself, except if it's directly relevant to them.
I can easily tell when someone wrote 100 of them generically, vs when it's genuine, and I'll always respond to the genuine ones.
(And to be clear, I'm referring to the type of cold emails Zach is... people wanting a genuine connection. This doesn't apply to trying to sell something.)
I think trying to make a "playful" personality turns off some people and is more work than just getting to the point. Opening with "here's the thing I want/what I'm reaching out for". then reasons. Then close out with a thank you.
Added bonus: short emails tend to get replies more often in my experience.
I ignore cold emails anyway.
Moving to a new country not knowing anyone and with barely any money, fair to say that one email changed my life.
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
Tweeting a job posting is a solicitation for applicants.
Whatever model these people use, it always always puts in The Sentence (I don't want to disclose it publicly! I'm running an experiment. I'll write it up when it concludes. :) ). Or, worse, The Paragraph.
Please use models to research people and learn about them. But please write the email yourself.
It's instantly obvious. And even though I do my best not to hold it against someone, I would be lying if I didn't say that it isn't a bit annoying.
Imagine reading endless variations of The Sentence 3,240 to 4,000 times a year. It feels straight out of the Twilight Zone.
HN reader, now you too know what it takes to make a powerful human impression via email.
I just read your post on hacker news about people using The Sentence, and couldn't agree more!
Zach if you’re reading this, thanks
I'd wager that the majority of us do not differentiate between cold email and spam, especially in the AI era.
> You can’t win unless you skate to where the puck is going to be buying a lotto ticket.
When is the last time you got an actual typed or hand written letter? That’s my advantage.
Demonstrating authenticity and effort are super important in this space.
And no, personalizing your spam doesn't make it any less spam, especially with AI these days.