I always felt discouraged from even applying to those. They usually say they're only hiring one candidate and I know a ton of other hackernewsers are applying to the same posting who have a good chance of being much more tryhard at fleshing out their github portfolio et cetera.
I don't mean to push back too hard, but this is pretty defeatist. You really have no way of knowing what exactly the person on the other end is looking for. There's a very real possibility that you are an ideal fit for some teams out there, but you'll never find out if you don't even apply. Regardless of your qualifications, it's a numbers game.
As an aside, my more general advice is to find the one thing that makes you stand out among the sea of other candidates, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant it is, and focus on that in your résumé and cover letters. I have been hired at past jobs for all sorts of crazy/dumb reasons. After I got hired at my first "real" (9-5) software engineering job, my boss later told me that he picked me because I mentioned Clojure once on my résumé and he thought that was cool, and I didn't even have any professional experience with it, just a curiosity for it. (This was over 12 years ago when Clojure was still relatively new.)
I must have applied to hundreds or even a thousand jobs in the months after graduating college. Besides the standard good GPA etc. I had a significantly above average amount of experience and knowledge at the time, glowing recommendations from my internship, my own website/github stuff/etc., all stuff that's baseline on this website but was far and above the norm for my average classmate.
It was radio silence for almost a year until I eventually lucked out and got contacted by a recruiter for Tata Consultancy Services. From what I hear they only really cared about GPA and it may have only been part of a hiring glut that had something to do with increasing on-shore employment numbers for some political reason.
Once I was actually in I was able to luckily get a great career going and join another company some years down the road.
My experience says that applying to jobs as a general activity is a total waste of time, you can essentially only get a job through luck and increasing the surface area of that luck with networking. Even now I dread the thought of having to job search again. It's like none of the postings are real, for reasons such as the posting is only there to satisfy a legal or HR requirement but they already had a specific person in mind. I've never had anything good come of sending in a resume. I have no reproducible steps to give advice to anyone coming into the field how to get a job though except to apply to something like Tata.
Over the last 10 years, I've gotten every job except one through Hacker News or a referral from a co-worker I met at a job. I got way more callbacks fresh out of school as a 21-year-old living in Canada (aka no USA work permits) via Hacker News than any other channel.
Focus on sending 3-4 _excellent_ applications a day rather than 3000-4000 AI-generated garbage ones. Also, go through your text message history and text every person on there the following:
```
Hi $NAME! I just saw you on $SOCIAL_MEDIA doing $THING and I thought about you? What's the latest with you? No rush to respond if you're busy.
wait for response
Great to hear! I'm currently looking for a software engineering job, do you know anyone who's hiring?
```
You do those two things consistently, you'll have three job offers within 3-4 months.
Now the tricky part is getting the confidence to ACTUALLY DO THE ABOVE. What helped me is going outside and getting involved in ANY club. In the past for me it's been salsa dancing, stand up comedy, and taking a cooking class. Replace those with any other activity you're remotely interested.
Good luck. You got this. The first job or two in tech is tricky. After 3-4 years it gets way easier.
