Unraveling of the tech hiring market | Hacker News Reader

Unraveling of the tech hiring market

blogs.janestreet.com

98 pointsluu65 comments

I've been facing the opposite problem. I've been in a lengthy job search and despite being in a situation where I really need a job, I've been forced to reject all the offers that have been made -- because the working conditions are just too unhealthy.

The article mentions that a side effect of exploding offers is that you don't get to see the full landscape of opportunities and trade-offs you're facing before you make your decision.

On the other hand, after a year of job searching, hundreds of technical phone interviews, dozens of take-home & interactive code tests, and a significant number of job offers that I have turned down, what I can say is that I think I have a pretty good picture of the overall tech job market, and it is exceedingly depressing.

For instance, I have a mild case of misophonia, and so being seated in an open-plan office layout is simply not doable for me, physiologically, and listening to headphones obviously doesn't make sense if the problem is misophonia.

Many companies have been excited about my skills, experience, work ethic, and my ability to communicate.

But they have been 100% no-questions-asked outright indignant at the idea of a candidate negotiating the ability to work in a private office.

Even if I explain that it is related to misophonia, and the extreme aversion I have to ambient noises, conversations, small movements, and so forth, they don't seem to care. In all previous jobs, my teamwork ability and my effort spent collaborating was always praised as one of my best attributes. But in today's job market, collaboration == sitting in an open-plan office.

Far from worrying about exploding offers, I am worried about the overall industry shift that has happened to make it so that it is effectively impossible to work in a private space as a developer.

I feel bad for all of the intrinsically introverted people who are nonetheless excellent collaborators and developers -- the very nature of physical workspaces is harmful to their cognitive health, yet employers outright, under all circumstances, refuse to negotiate about it.

I've never been very interested in the idea of a software union. But the egregious lack of privacy in the workspace has made me start to feel like a union would be truly the only possible solution.

How about consulting? Since consultants contract for the work they produce and not their availability to do the boss's bidding, most companies that hire them are much more amenable to remote work. It seems tailor-made for your situation - someone with good development and communication skills who doesn't want to work in an office.

I actually very much do want to work in an office. I worked remotely in one position, and while that solved the privacy and noise issues, I did not like being away from my colleagues.

Working with adequate privacy and quiet does not mean the same thing as holing up away from everyone. I still enjoyed talking shop over lunch, jumping up from my desk to go and assist someone with a bug, attending research and tech presentations, and all the other good stuff of being in the office.

I also feel I am not well-suited to consulting because I significantly prefer to work with a more or less stable technology stack, in which we invest time to properly refactor, write tests, and design things so that the system we maintain and grow over time can easily adjust and expand for new business needs and new functionality.

With a lot of consulting, especially in my area (machine learning and scientific computing) you are always at the mercy of whatever technology stack you walk into, and whatever state of disrepair that code base is in.

In a lot of consulting, there can also be unforeseen traps. Sometimes you can get into a situation where a client can require you to come to their office, or work in some other sort of field site situation that is insanely horrible, and you can't get out of it without basically quitting and thereby burning a bridge and negatively affecting your consulting reputation.

Just because I happen to have a strong preference for mental health affirmation through adequate privacy and quiet doesn't mean I am looking to bottomlessly compromise on all the other working standards I have too, such as quality of the work, adequate pay and benefits, and so forth.

Unfortunately, no one has even offered me these other compromises. No one has said they would consider a private office if I accepted less pay, fewer vacation days, etc. They just simply say it is in principle impossible.

I'm not defending the companies per se, but perhaps they are worried you will be particular and awkward to work with beyond the points you discussed with them. Simply because truly difficult people rarely advertise this up front, they may feel they'd rather avoid the risk.

I am certain that at least some of them feel this way, especially given how many tech candidates are willing to work in an open-plan setting without even batting an eyelash about it.

But I don't know of any other way to ensure that I can have the adequate privacy and quiet that truly is physically necessary for me. I've just come to accept the fact that this means extremely lengthy job searches for me, and a need to do the really hard thing and reject some otherwise pretty good job offers if they can't provide an office.

Do you bring this up before you get the offer? You need to wait to get the offer and then negotiate an office for yourself. It is as much a benefit as salary is, though it is sad to have to call it a benefit. Once they go through the red tape and legwork to get you an offer, only then is the leverage in your favor.

Edit: sorry, it sounds like that's what you're doing already. Just re-read your post more carefully. Anyway, I wish you good luck in your search and I hope you're able to find a suitable job situation. Maybe it would help to classify this as a disability somehow? I think they have to provide "reasonable accommodation" under the ADA act but that could mean a pair of noise cancelling headphones.

I'd guess most are more concerned that if they give you a private office, others will request one and they aren't equipped to give lots of private offices. And if they give just you one, it will cause resentment in the team that isn't worth it.

I think that's very true, but it makes the situation even more frustrating. Going all the way back to books like Peopleware, it's been well-known for a long time that even in dense urban areas like Manhattan or San Francisco, it is more cost-effective to provide private and quiet space for knowledge workers than to attempt to "save" short-term money by buying open-plan office space and increasing worker density.

There's a ton of quantitative evidence supporting this. Yet employers persist in only ever buying open-plan space. Established companies that already had private offices sometimes even spend money to tear down the privacy features and remodel the office to function as a type of fashion signalling that they are "cool" like what they perceive start-ups to be. So they actually pay money to destroy productivity, so they pay money to move their business into a state in which the business makes less money.

Then you also see firms spending money on needlessly opulent lifestyle masturbation, like moving their office to some expensive downtown location with a roof deck. Or building a rock climbing wall in the office.

So you know it's not an issue of lacking the money for buying real estate that would support private working conditions. It's just a lot of issues about status and opulence.

So while you're correct that given their current office layout they might be unable to accommodate giving someone privacy, it's disheartening that they were ever in that situation to begin with since it would have been demonstrably more cost-effective for them to have built privacy features into the workplace from the beginning.

It has really caused me to see office space as a major red flag about a company. It says a lot about what the management of that company cares about.

Do noise-cancelling headphones not work for you?

Not even close. For one, listening to actual sound like music or a podcast is even worse for me than the dull ambient backdrop noise. On rare occasion I can listen to music for a brief period of time, maybe 1 hour. But any sustained sounds longer than an hour and I start to feel the type of tiredness you feel when you pull an all-nighter. That's just how sound affects me. I can't "tune it out" like most people can ... it just grates on me and, whether I choose it or not, induces me to be hyper attentive to it, especially to human voices.

Noise-cancelling headphones can take away dull background chatter that's far away. But in open-plan offices, usually without even so much as differentiated desks or cubicles, when the person sitting next to you decides it's cool to bring a remote controlled helicopter to work and his friends are all laughing about it with him 2 feet behind you (true story), it just doesn't help.

But even in less extreme places, where it's just normal, good-intentioned colleagues chatting about their weekend plans or something, it's still a huge disruption for me, and noise-cancelling headphones don't solve it.

Actually, I can remember one of the most insane attention triggers I had to deal with was when I actually worked in a cubicle setting and the person in the cubicle next to me had some kind of smart phone that must have doubled as a sex toy or something because when it vibrated it was insane. I could feel his phone vibrating in my forearms resting on my desk while I was typing.

That one drove me absolutely insane.

There's also a huge component of this that is just based on natural human fight vs flight reflexes.

If you have a bunch of vague, large mammals kind of walking around right behind you where you can't see them all day, it just causes anxiety. Some people (especially many extroverts) can deal with this without a problem, and it can even be comforting to them.

But for others (especially introverts) the constant triggering of the "what's that, who is walking behind me" reflex is extremely exhausting, and it gets stimulated by pretty much everything, noise, casual movement, ping pong, whatever, going on in an open plan office. The office layout in and of itself is just intrinsically unhealthy for these people.

And I fall very, very far on that spectrum towards the introverted side. It doesn't mean I'm shy (I actually love public speaking) ... what it means is that little unplanned social interactions or hints of social interactions are a huge, constant energy drain for me.

I talked to one former boss about this and his immediate reaction was something like, "Look, you are really good at getting your work done. You don't have to worry if someone's walking by and they see you've got ESPN pulled up on your monitor or something ... we know you're getting your work done."

And I'm just like, "umm ... it doesn't work that way. I don't give a shit if you see me playing Minecraft on my computer during work hours. It has nothing to do with that. It's a physiological response to the environment itself. I can't just "switch it off" because you try to assuage my anxiety."

When it comes to this introvert/extrovert spectrum, I think it truly represents a component of workplace discrimination that really damages a lot of people, but for extroverts and managers, it just never even crosses their mind that it could even be happening at all.

One thousands times, that. Noisy office layouts are a non-starter for me. Fortunately I've been working at home, or in a small office of friends for 20 years now. But back in the day I had to have the most remote, unpopular cubicle by the fire escape to get anything done at all. Just to have some peace to think.

As someone with a similar issue, I have settled on a combination of brown noise and indistinct human-like voices. (I use babelbabble on iOS but would like to find a webapp equivalent. I hope you can hold out for the right job.

This is remarkably similar to the set up that David Byrne describes in his book How Music Works.

I had a colleague who used the kind of ear protection that airport employees wear out on the tarmac. In order to get his attention, you'd literally have to tap him on the shoulder. I tried it myself and it was eerily quiet...you couldn't even sense when someone was standing behind you.

Have you tried these? Combined with a desk that faces a wall, I'd bet you'd find yourself in your own little world, oblivious to all that was going on behind you.

How many tarmac earmuff people do you see getting promoted to a senior position?

This sort of thing, even if it's unfair, absolutely lowers your status in the company.

In one previous job with a noisy open-plan office, I actually tried wearing some factory-grade ear plugs, small little yellow ear plugs that you couldn't see unless you came up close.

They weren't perfect, but the ambient noise was so distracting that I gave them a try.

Within a week, my boss had a 1-1 meeting with me to tell me that some people thought it was very rude that I was wearing earplugs, and that it made it seem like I was unwilling to participate.

I was actually training an intern and helping a team of three others with a software tool I wrote for them, so I was far from not participating, and all of my peers were vocally supportive of me wearing the ear plugs if they helped.

I learned later that one of the C-level executives had made a walk through of the research work space and he just simply "didn't like" seeing someone with ear plugs.

Headphones == acceptable, possibly even sexy cool start-up geek.

Ear plugs == tacky, borderline Aspbergery nerd who isn't being good enough office eye candy

I'm a big supporter of wearing the ear plugs. They're better at blocking noise, and turning the volume up on headphones to drown out background noise will leave you deaf.

But, you do look like both a tool and a jerk if you're wearing earplugs in an office.

I started putting headphones on over earplugs. All the benefits of earplugs, none of the drawbacks.

You should apply to Facebook, when I was there special accommodations were made for people who required an office.

That is a mind-boggling comment. I've mostly avoided applying there because they are so over the top with advertising their extreme investment into huge open-plan spaces. It was such a huge cultural turn off that I figured there was no way they would even consider someone like me.

Do you have any links to anything they've written about this?

Sorry, I do not. But the option was twofold when I was there:

1. Engineers have a choice of open plan or a shared (2 person) office depending on preference. 2. Engineers who have special circumstances can request their own office.

I don't think a union is the way to go. More like a professional association like the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, AICPA, etc.

Have those organizations successfully negotiated working conditions? I mean we do have things like IEEE, ACM, various societies. Membership in them pretty much doesn't mean anything.

I'm also starting a job search soon and also concerned about finding an actual office these days, or even a cubicle. Maybe I'll end up working remotely, but there ought to be a better answer.

"But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less) hard deadlines. Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers for signing early. Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for this one, next year will come with even earlier offers and worse conditions."

Will you name the companies, and give further specifics? Otherwise it's hard to tell what really has changed.

I'd say this is not new, nor unique to tech. Finance, consulting et. al have been dealing with this for years - both with new grad offers, and with banking/consulting to PE/HF offers (often analysts have their next job within 6mo of starting their first job).

From personal experience, I can say that Google was only willing to extend an internship offer a week past their initial two week deadline. This is despite the fact that I was still interviewing with other companies at the time. From speaking with my university's career center I am not the only person this happened to.

It really depends on how much they want you, and how you negotiate. I recently changed jobs. I ended up getting multiple offers, and for all but 1 of them, they were willing to wait 3 weeks for me to make a decision. I was very upfront about that if they were not, I wasn't interested in them, however.

Interesting. From "Work Rules" by Google's head of People Analytics. "I think they [exploding offers] put a lot of unfair pressure on the candidate, who should be free to make the best decision for herself without duress. After all, companies have lots of employees, but each person holds only one job. It should be one they are sure of."

Same with Amazon for the most part. Returning internships are only allowed 2 weeks. Full time offers after internships are given 2 weeks, but you can ask for an extension which does last a couple months. However, you're given a questionnaire on the type of team you want to be on and the longer you wait to accept your offer, the lower on the queue you will be for getting the team you want.

I'm not a new grad, but when I last switched jobs, I had to negotiate very aggressively to even get two weeks to consider other offers that might roll in before I had to make my choice. This was between a number of companies in the Seattle area, both big and small. I'm glad I negotiated to, because I got an offer that was >10% higher than my second best offer, and it came in about six days after the first (of four) offers I got.

I think the problem is that corporations value certainty as much as developers do, so they pressure people to make their choice now, so they can send rejection letters to other candidates, get the ball rolling on HR papework, etc. as soon as possible. For example, let's say an employer interviews 5 candidates, 1 per day, Monday through Friday. They conclude that their best candidate was Mrs. Friday, the second best was Mr. Wednesday, and so on. If they give Mrs. Friday a week to decide, and she rejects them, they might find that Mr. Wednesday has also accepted an offer in the meantime, and so is off the market as well.

That's why employers pressure you accept (or reject) them as soon as possible. They want to know whether you're going to accept or reject, so that they can move on to their next choice, before their next choice disappears as well. It's a way for the employer to minimize the opportunity cost of extending you an offer.

Helpful context, since Jane Street may be an unfamiliar company to HN users: Jane Street is known as one of the companies with the most technically difficult interview processes, so that gives then a unique perspective regarding tech hiring.

How do their hedge funds perform compared to benchmarks?

They're proprietary traders (that is, they trade with their own money and don't have clients - unlike a hedge fund), so they're very unlikely to tell the world what their performance looks like. If it's bad, they'd not want you to know, if it's good they'd not want their competitors to know!

It looks like they are a high frequency trading outfit.

It would be interesting to know how these private black box firms actually performed compared with the returns on a transparent security like the Vanguard S&P 500 fund.

They're not really a high-frequency firm by most definitions. They use some high-level strategies that high-frequency firms also use (ie market making) and have some automation, but don't optimize for latency. Nothing about that is high-frequency trading per se—in many securities, you can make markets manually or semi-manually.

Market making as a strategy is more like providing a service on the markets than it is like investing. You don't make money by holding a security until the price moves; indeed, you try to limit you exposure to the security as much as possible. Instead, you maintain offers to both buy and sell a security at any given time and make money on the differences between them (the "spread"). The main value you provide is liquidity, making it easier for other people to buy and sell the security quickly, rather than price discovery or the like.

While Jane Street does a lot of different things, they're mostly known for market making on ETFs. This makes them more a normal company that happens to operate on public markets than a fund of some sort.

Depends, you can make more money as a market maker by expanding the spread than collapsing it. Though this is obviously a risky move.

How is your comment related to tikhonj's? It seems like a non-sequitur.

Market making as a strategy is more like providing a service on the markets than it is like investing.

I was pointing out that 'Market Making' is not always a good thing. In the broadest ters it increases costs for some trades, and decrease costs for others. So, it's not always good for the market.

This doesn't make sense to me. Say I'm a market maker. How do I make the spread bigger than it would have been if I was absent? I suppose I can hit any orders anyone else places inside my larger spread, but that just gives anyone the opportunity to pump money out of my accounts...

Not only this, but they are well known to only recruit at a very particular set of top schools as well.

Meaning they are very selective? Their blog post says they consider anyone who applies.

The word "consider" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

Considering how much the school you attended is a proxy for your race, gender, veteran status, socioeconomic status, etc., it would be incredibly dumb for them to say anything different.

Yes, but "consider" also implies a lot of things not so sinister. In that way, the discriminatory aspects you bring up are being euphemized and hidden within an otherwise positive or innocuous term.

Consider, yes. Seriously consider? No.

In comparison to the Duke, Harvard, CMU (or similar level) grads the number of state school grads working there is minimal, especially with respect to who is hired out of school. Which is a shame, really - I'd be really interested in working in fintech/trading someday.

Also, they work a lot in OCaml. There have been a few posts about OCaml and Jane Street here on HN, IIRC.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=OCaml%20Jane%20Street&sort=byP...

> In a matching market each person wants only one of each item, each item is unique, and each item can be given to at most one person at a time. Jobs are a classic matching market, and just like any market, matching markets can work well, or poorly.

People may be unique but the dynamics of unraveling are showing either that they are fungible or that recruiters can convince themselves quickly that they are seeing someone better. The latter psychological dynamic is more of the problem but fungibility is too.

Unraveling probably happens in dating too. Dating is a matching market. Maybe the job market is Tinderizing.

"Unraveling probably happens in dating too."

Absolutely does, but in my observations, this has lead to the dating market bifurcating. There are some people who are seemingly always in a new relationship, two weeks after they got out of the last one, which often exploded in flames 1-2 years after it started. And then there are some people who are really picky, who go years single before finding their soulmate, who also went years single.

The two groups largely don't intersect. When someone from the latter meets someone from the former, the former person tends to end up in a relationship with someone else well before the latter has made up their mind.

I wonder if something similar is happening in the job market. One set of candidates can't afford to be jobless long, and so they will pick the offer in hand without waiting to see if a better one is around the corner. Another set can afford to be picky, so every job search involves multiple competing offers, and they'll hold out for the job that they really, really want even if it means passing up good immediate opportunities. Oftentimes, because they hold out for a job that both compensates them well and makes them happy, they can afford to be picky in their next job search.

I wonder if Jane Street is trying to position itself in the latter camp and attract more candidates who are picky about their employer with this article.

For anyone interested in a deeper dive into how labor matching and employee/employer bargaining is taught in macroeconomics:

http://coin.wne.uw.edu.pl/wincenciak/adv_macro_made/adv_macr...

Is this not a self-correcting problem? The companies that impose the unrealistic deadlines are going to be more likely to miss out on the better candidates, who are more likely to have other offers, and in the long term that will be self-defeating for those companies.

Maybe eventually. But, usually such things take a long time to play out. People generally don't act independently, but more like a flock of birds. Occasionally, a singleton will appear to successfully break the equilibrium, but it doesn't happen often.

You would think. I remember reading about how finance firms and maybe also consultants increasingly interview and make offers earlier to college seniors. If you have lots of debt and the company is a good enough name and they're paying good enough money, people take the offer. People are increasingly anxious, and this helps them know they have a pretty good job, for sure, next year.

This trend helps bigger, more established companies. E.g. Google or Microsoft know they will need many someones next year, and they have the resources and hopefully the desire to train up the people they hire. Startuply Inc may not be around in 9 months, and doesn't really know what they'll need then. Maybe the current sentiment of startups = good helps counterbalance this a little.

This has always been a difficult challenge when job hunting for me, and I'd be curious to hear how others deal with this in their careers.

Nearly every job offer I've encountered expects a response within a few days. In practice, I'm usually interviewing at multiple places and at different stages of the interview process at each. The 'exploding offer' system makes applying to multiple companies near impossible for the job seeker.

Sure, I see how it creates leverages for the job offerers to get candidates to accept. However, the flip side is that turns the hiring process into a game of forced, snap decision making, which doesn't necessarily seem to be in everyone's interest, either.

It depends on the job. For a rare skillset the rational strategy is to ignore the explosive nature since it's very unlikely there are any other candidates lined up and the explosiveness is just a way to make you take a worse offer than the current market. In fact, getting this offer is a big clue to shop for better offers. There is no rational reason to go through with rescinding the offer after the deadline so, if it actually happened, you could be relieved that you have dodged the bullet of working at a crazy house.

For a commodity skill it can be legitimate. There are likely other candidates who will take the offer if you pass the deadline. However, the market for these skills is also more transparent so there is usually enough information to decide if the offer any good.

The one time I've been offered an exploding offer, I told them that I couldn't respond in the next two days as I was interviewing elsewhere, and that I was also concerned at the level of compensation. They came back with a higher offer with a longer timeline. I would suggest refusing exploding offers as a matter of principle, and if they merely "expect" a response soon, it's totally fair to push back, say you're still interviewing elsewhere, and give them a rough timeline as to when you think you'll be able to give a response.

If the offer is one you are seriously interested in it is best to not flat out refuse an exploding offer. An alternative I have found effective is to stall a few days through further negotiation of the offer, with steps such as:

- I have some more questions about the work environment, can we setup a phone call with one of the developers

- I would like to learn more about company benefits, can you send me the relevant information about healthcare options and prices for my review

- the salary offer is slightly below my target, but I am willing to consider it if we can improve the PTO offer: is this a possibility

One piece of advice I can give is to try and line up interviews at the larger, more slow-moving places before you do the interviews at smaller firms which move a lot faster. Bigger places have more of a process in place for hiring so it can be a while before they can get an offer out to you, while smaller places can have an offer out in a day or two.

By following the above strategy, you can narrow the window within which you receive multiple offers to a few days, making it easier to ask for more time from any of the companies if you need it.

The idea of an 'exploding offer' seems a bit odd to me.

What makes it one-sided exploding? Are people being asked to actually start work in three days time, or just accept the offer?

What happens if you say 'yes' and continue interviewing? Does a big guy with a sword turn up at your front door and chop your head off?

Are people just trying to be polite and not burn bridges? Why would you want to be polite towards such a ridiculous employer?

'Negotiating' in this situation just feels really odd to me. Reply: "Okay, I can start in a few weeks' time". Phone down.

I am exceedingly uninterested in bending my life around employers - that's a world I left behind when I left my job as a retail clerk.

This may be the best advice in the whole thread. Once in the Real World, you are free to be an asshole about how you negotiate and just...not stick to your statements of obligation. You suffer consequences only if you have to deal with the exact same person again. But if the org is big they won't really notice.

We're just all so used to schools setting up all the obligations for us and monitoring everything, that taking a more freeform approach is unsettling at first.

If anyone wants to do a case study into how a matching process can utterly break down take a look at how federal judges select clerks and how that's changed over the last 15 years or so.

The blogger is writing about what's happening in maybe 4 (top) schools. The rest of the country doesn't have this "problem."

Why the downvotes?

It's happening outside of schools. In my own network I know roughly 100 or so junior to mid level devs who have sought jobs in the last year and roughly 25% of them have dealt with exploding offers from NY and SF companies -- most frequently from the smallest and/or lowest-paying companies.

One of my friends saw an offer explode in less than an hour. They had emailed him at 3pm on a Friday and had made another offer and received an acceptance from somebody else by 3:45 and didn't tell him till he emailed his acceptance around 6pm. I've never seen someone so pissed off.

What makes it really fun sometimes is when a company ignores you or just dithers for months and months... and then out of nowhere comes at you with "Ummmm, so we'd like to hire you, can you decide in the next 48 hours?"

Yes!

Even better than that is when you turn them down (for offer or interview) because you have another job already and then a month or two later you receive _their_ rejection letter saying that you're not the right candidate.

And I was an employee referral that time -- thanks Mattermark!

While that absolutely sucks, I would say that he dodged a bullet there.

If a company is willing to pull an offer in a hour, there's a very good chance you don't want to work for them.

Total agreement there. There's so many indicators like that though and it's hard to find a company that doesn't tick one of them during the interview process. I lucked out with my current job, for sure, because even though they're sometimes disorganized, my work and my person are valued and treated with respect.

True but I find behavior during the hiring process to be a useful indicator. Purely anecdotal of course but I dissuaded my partner from taking a job because I felt that they did not negotiate in good faith. There was some resentment until I was vindicated several years later when said company was fined millions for fraud.

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