I’m a fairly high level software engineer at a massive tech company. I only graduated college less than 7 years ago. I climbed the ladder pretty fast at a startup, then moved over to a large corporation once my title was high enough.

I got the job I am currently at by literally just applying on their website. It took a couple of months for them to get back to me, but once I got that initial email, I had an interview within a day or two, and had a job offer after about a week.

That said, this was 2 years ago when companies were desperate to find engineers. Now the economy has taken a bad turn and many companies aren’t hiring engineers. I know mine isn’t right now. In fact, we laid some engineers off a few months back.