Fifty Applicants Deep

A book about looking for work as a software engineer in Ukraine in 2026, and about the system I built because looking by hand stopped working.

Part I is the market: eighteen years in which recruiters wrote to me first, and then a year in which I wrote to them and mostly heard nothing. Part II is the evolution of my tools, from a single HTML table to an autopilot that got my freelance account suspended. Part III is JobPilot, the system that runs my search now.

Most of the evidence is my own: a ledger of 687 vacancies, my mailbox, git histories and agent logs. Employers that interviewed or rejected me are described, not named. I used AI agents to search records, draft chapters and draw diagrams; I read, corrected and rewrote the result.

This book is not a serious literary work. It is mostly an experiment in what you can do with your history of communication with AI agents.

Draft of 31 October 2026. Not proofread.