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Comment by bigtunacan | Hacker News Reader

Disclaimer - This is all gut feeling and anecdotal evidence so feel free to ignore.

I suspect that jobs being posted to smaller niche job boards (such as Authentic Jobs, which I hadn't heard of until this post) is down overall, but this doesn't reflect the state of job availability.

I believe larger job sites are having enough of a network effect that these boards are becoming less relevant. Most tech job seekers I talk to are going one of four routes.

1) LinkedIn (Facebook for job seekers)

2) Indeed (since it aggregates)

3) Direct application (when you know a specific company you want to work for)

4) Recruiters (Let them do the work for you...)

On the anecdotal front (within the past year) I have been contacted twice by recruiters that took me out and bought me lunch to try and woo me to another job and once contacted directly by the CEO of a company who did the same thing. I want to make this point clear; I'm no one special just a regular software dev with 15+ years working experience.

During one of these lunches the recruiter said to me, "It is so difficult to hire qualified developers that I would say there is a NEGATIVE unemployment rate currently."

I have spoke with multiple company owners, CEOs, and others who are in the hiring position and the general consensus is they can't find qualified help.

This is just my experience.

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I can tell you from my own experience that the "negative unemployment rate" comment is false. I have been unemployed since March, and I've had no less than 12 in-person interviews, some out of state, and countless other contacts all resulting in rejections.

These were positions I am qualified for, and that I know I would have succeeded at. I've been told it would take me 6 months to start contributing to a Python codebase even though I have significant experience in the language and the problem domain for that project. I've been told I have too little experience mentoring a team despite doing just that at my last job. I've been told I don't have enough JS experience for a position that did not ask for any JS experience.

The market right now is poor for a developer without a fancy CS degree, or one without the luck of a golden pedigree from a previous high profile company.

There's also a bias against the currently unemployed. It took 6 months of hard work for a friend of mine to find a job after he quit one after 3 months without anything lined up, because it was such a bad fit that it was making him depressed. Up to that point, he had zero problems finding a job, the only difference was his employment status while job hunting.

Yes, I think that has contributed to it as well. In retrospect I should have started lining up interviews when I saw the company might fold, but I had never had any issue finding employment in the past so I didn't prioritize it over trying to right the ship.

2 years ago I moved to SF from a shithole city. I had taken off like 3 years to work on my own projects. It was more difficult than I expected to find a job without any connections. Took about 3 months after moving here.

I think there's at least some bias against people who have taken time off because they appear comfortable not having a job and therefore the company has less leverage over them.

I think the bigger bias at play is the just-world fallacy. Employers assume that everyone who is unemployed must be unemployed justly because something is wrong with them (e.g. they're incompetent, slackers, toxic, etc.). That's the problem my friend had: the company that eventually hired him admitted they spent a long time trying to figure out what was wrong with him, even though they liked him.

I concur. Any gap looks bad.

I'm trying to tread carefully to avoid insulting you. You are very likely more talented than I am, so please take my input as just one data point.

An outsider perspective: 12 in-person interviews is a high amount of interviews without receiving an offer. I've failed my fair share of interviews but never that many in such a short amount of time.

If I were in your position I would try to get as much information as possible why you weren't accepted. Anecdotally, Austin should be a promising location for tech hiring. It may be a personality clash or a lack of preparation. I have bombed several interviews because I didn't take the time to practice Google-style interview questions. It took me 2 months of practice before I was ready to interview successfully in SF, coming from the East Coast.

Fancy CS degrees and golden pedigrees get your foot in the door. The technical interview is up to the applicant to pass or fail. It looks like you get your foot in the door pretty well. Now it's time to focus on what you can do to convince these businesses that you will help make them money.

No offense taken. I fully admit to underperforming on some of the whiteboard sessions I was subjected to. I also don't think I performed so poorly on all of them to get nothing but rejections. I am not a rockstar, but I am competent at what I do - but what I do is not whiteboard code toy problems.

I always ask for reasons for the rejections, but I rarely get a response. Some will give insight (as I stated in my original comment) but the vast majority will not tell you any reason.

I am just offering a piece of data to refute the "negative unemployment" claim and its ilk.

I appreciate your contribution to the discussion. Different opinions make HN special. I empathize with your situation; getting hired while unemployed is much more difficult than under better circumstances.

I wonder if there is something in your personality that turns people off? Are you overly aggressive? Do you seem unfriendly? Honestly, it sounds like you just might need to sharpen your people skills a little bit! Those are important too :)

I can't figure out what, from the parent's comments, would make you draw this conclusion that it is a people skill problem when it sounds like a classic "whiteboard interviews are a total crap shoot" problem.

This experience is not even at odds with the original quote from the recruiter - when the recruiter says "qualified", all they mean is "able to succeed in the hiring process companies are using". Unfortunately, that definition of "qualified" often doesn't have much in common with the usual definition of "capable of doing good work". The parent commenter may well be qualified in the second way but not in the first.

I hope there isn't something I'm doing that indicates I'm not good to work with, but I haven't ever gotten any feedback like that. I try very hard to be even-handed and pragmatic about how I speak and treat others, and I'm always willing to help or chat about... anything really.

Perhaps you happen to suck at interviews, or at least parts of interviews like whiteboarding. For me, there's a reason why I don't go to Trivia Night at the Programming Saloon despite interviewers enjoying playing Trivial Pursuit during an interview.

"Practice Interviews" are a thing. Have you considered trying such out?

This is likely. I am deficient at whiteboard "coding" to solve toy CS problems, which is de rigeur for developer interviews right now. I think I've gotten better with practice over the past months but this doesn't seem to bear results. I have gotten to actual, workable solutions on the whiteboard numerous times and still nothing.

I haven't done a practice interview, but another poster offered to help me with that. I may take them up on their offer.

I always ask for reasons for the rejections, but I rarely get a response

It's unlikely you'll get a response like that after a 'no hire' from legit companies. They avoid giving that kind of feedback because of legal ramifications.

My situation was possibly relevant, although atypical. I moved back to SF after decamping to NY after the dot.com crash. I started a company there which failed after five years, and then consulted for around three. Landed back in SF and had a terrible time finding employment in a very tight job market. The strikes against me were consulting, starting my own company and having a skill set that did not include several trendy buzzwords that were not in demand with the folks I had been working with. And, possibly, being honest about that[1]. A fuzzier but no less real problem was that the network of folks I knew in the Bay Area shrank a lot, and that's how I've gotten most of the work I've ever had.

I did finally get a position. It sucked in a lot of ways, and my commute really sucked. But after a year, I was coming from a recognizable, local name and that appeared to make all the difference. So now that I actually like my job, I filter head-hunter mail to a separate mailbox and write pro-forma 'no thanks' in batches.

[1] I am mostly honest in my work history. I suppose I lie by omission - I don't want to ever write Java again, so I've purged references to it from my resume. But it seems that a lot of folks find creative definitions for words like 'experience'. I know some whom I didn't hire did, and people I know are not terribly embarrassed by admitting it. It would be interesting to see some anonymous survey stats on the question.

Resumes are marketing documents, so there's no need to be thorough.

Hang in there! It took me closer to 25+ in persons during my last search. Of course once you get the social proof ignore offer everyone else gets in line. :-)

"It would take me 6 months to start contributing to a Python codebase even though I have significant experience in the language" - Python, specifically, suffers from its own "ease of use" when it comes to hiring and "years of experience" listed on resumés. A hacker who happens to use Python to automate some tedious task but has no clue about how to actually write idiomatic, well tested and maintainable code can claim "4 years of Python experience", for example. To sum, it's very easy to write and maintain truly shitty Python, and "years of experience" mean especially little.

I agree, which is why I always make a point to go into specifics about what I did in Python, what the product does, and that it is still used at the company I created it for.

This might be part of your struggle, perhaps, as those kinds of things ("product did x y and z, I wrote it by myself, it's still in use", etc.) fall into the "solved a problem" category (valuable, don't get me wrong) rather than the "built a clean, maintainable system" category ("100% test coverage, followed sem ver and git flow, maintained a 7+ on pylint, used these design patterns", etc.).

Folks in the latter category don't need 6 months for any Python-based system. Folks in the former category are useful in certain ways, but difficult to plug into a larger team, and if companies know enough to know they need a "Python" developer, that's because someone technical already picked Python, and the position is to work with at least that one other technical person.

It's likely similar with JS, Ruby, and other "newer" languages that have reputations for being "easy to pick up".

After my very first job, all my subsequent jobs have been to work with people I have worked with before.

Do you have any connections like that? People who you worked with, who know you are good, and want to work with you again?

It is a lot easier to find work when the people hiring know that you can do the job because they have seen you do it before.

I do, but it is relatively small. I've worked at smaller companies or smaller teams since I've been in Austin. A few of the interviews I mentioned were through people I know and who personally vouched for my capabilities. It didn't change the outcome, unfortunately.

The market right now is poor for a developer without a fancy CS degree, or one without the luck of a golden pedigree from a previous high profile company.

Or "pedigree" in the form of recent experience of certain high-value technologies or frameworks (as if most of these weren't trivially learnable).

I also have the sense that there's a "J-curve" of sorts with regard to demand: certain categories of developers are deemed "hot" and are in very high demand, for certain reasons; for others, it might as well be the mid-2000s, for you -- especially if your skillset reads like it would have been "hot" in that era.

And as usual, should you have the misfortunate to be unemployed for whatever reason, for any lengthy of time -- you're fucked, of course.

Getting reasons for why you're not getting hired from companies is basically not an option- even if they tell you anything it's likely safety speak BS unrelated to why.

As a guy who's been on both sides of the metaphorical table I know what it's like to bomb but it's almost worse when you feel like you did well and then really have no clue, so I empathize with you for that.

From the other side, I implement an everybody says yes hiring scheme. If an interviewer says no we talk about why. We've had most technical no's overturned when the other interviewers relate a positive interaction in a similar technical area and we come to a conclusion that it was as simple as how the question was asked, or maybe that is a specific weakness made up for in another area.

The no's that are almost never overturned are the ones where an interviewer just didn't seem to like the candidate personally. I don't expect everyone to be friends, bristly people are fine if they're generally capable of some team play, but if someone walks out of that room saying I couldn't stand to spend more time with that person than my family, that's it- we're not going to hire.

I don't want everyone on the team drinking from the same kool aid, and we don't have to be friends or even that friendly. We have to be able to work together and get shit done, and if one of my employees I trust enough to do interviews says no, then even a very talented developer isn't going to join the team.

With all that being said, I don't know what kinds of teams you're interviewing for, it may be a niche thing or it could be they don't like you- it's a relationship though, you will eventually find a decent match.

If you want to do a trial run through with me with a no bullshit no PC response as to my opinion on it I'd be happy to carve out some time. Message me on Twitter @ashurexm and we can set something up. You've got to have pretty good skills to get 12 in person interviews in a shortish amount of time.

@jakebasile, Whether you take manyxcxi up on this or not; I think s/he is making a great suggestion here. 12 interviews and zero offers is a lot of interviews. A few feedback style interviews with some candid feedback might do you some good. Technical skills aside it is possible you just are not interviewing well.

Also a couple of somewhat related questions.

1) How well are you at reading the interview outcome? Do you leave these interviews thinking you will be made an offer or do you leave with a pretty good idea that a no is coming your way?

2) Rather than waiting for a rejection and then asking "why not", have you tried asking for the "why not" during the actual interview? At the end of almost every interview someone will wrap it up saying something along the lines, "Do you have any more questions?" I have had plenty of candidates ask me (and I myself ask if I'm the candidate), "What do you think I could have done differently today to improve my chance of success with your organization?"

This is usually met with a more honest feedback than the ask after rejection for numerous reasons.

1) Less HR cover my ass BS; after the rejection companies are worried anything they say could be used to sue them.

2) More people in the room so you may get more than one perspective.

3) You haven't yet been rejected so you may also hear some positives; "Well you really impressed us on X, but you could focus more on Y." This can help you to play to your strengths in the future as well as areas you need to work on.

Yes, I've replied to them separately. I think it would be valuable as well.

I gave up on trying to gauge the outcome of the interviews. Most of them I thought I did very well on, some above average, and a few I knew went poorly. All of them had the same outcome.

One interview battery in particular stands out. I interviewed at least 6 times over two weeks, some 1:1, some 1:many. I interviewed with the team, an unrelated employee for a culture interview, the VP of engineering, and a C level exec. All felt great, all feedback from the recruiter was positive, but after everything was done I was told the position "wouldn't challenge me enough" or something similar. I was devastated.

I have never thought about asking for interview feedback during the interview. That is a good idea.

Are you possibly aiming too low? I know that one thing that is a huge red flag for me is an apparently overqualified candidate.

It's tough to gauge, but the jobs I apply for seem right to me based on listed requirements, years of experience, etc.

"but it's almost worse when you feel like you did well and then really have no clue" true, true Had that experience at a certain CIA backed entity in the west village. Really wished I could have gotten a post mortem.

Sometimes it is purely economic - I had an offer withdrawn back in 2009 and later had it reoffered when the company was in better times.

It sucks to have something go sour when the interview process has positive momentum

mbubb,

Along the lines of your "offer withdrawn"; in 2004 I had an offer from Acclaim. We agreed on a number and HR said they would be sending me over the official offer letter and start date by the end of the week.

The week comes and goes, but no contact. The following Monday I give a call and leave a brief follow up voicemail, "Hey, haven't received the offer letter, just checking in." (something along those lines). Finally about three weeks later I get a call from this poor HR woman; she tells me that Acclaim has declared bankruptcy and she is really sorry she didn't contact me earlier, but that she had shown up to work one day and the doors to the office were literally padlocked shut and under guard since their assets had been seized for auction.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply and generous offer of help. The responses I have received indicate (if they mention anything at all) that the team liked me, thought I was a professional and friendly person, good at conflict resolution, and so on. As you say, it might just be a smokescreen but I have no conflicting information from anyone I know or previously worked with telling me that I'm not a good teammate.

I'll send you a message soon, it would be helpful to get an outside opinion.

All one can do is go by what they say. There is a third option that I've been on both sides of as well: they think you're too expensive and/or you'll be a flight risk.

I've had a number of occasions where the feedback was overwhelmingly positive and I just knew I was having a great run only to not get an offer and an explanation via the recruiter (mine or theirs) that they just couldn't afford me. This is a totally valid reason, but I usually make it clear that $X or the general vicinity plus other considerations is the starting point and give them an opportunity to bag out early- so this is an outcome that pisses me off with the caveat that I've had the budget reduced for a position mid-hiring process so I know it's not necessarily BS or intentional time wasting. The one time it happened to me I let them know for real what the reason was and they wound up working for us a year later.

Whenever I say someone's too expensive internally it has meant that they don't come armed with the tools I'd expect an $Y per year salary would warrant. Sometimes they're our best candidate and we just "pay and pray", other times my feedback is just that, "We don't value what you bring to the table at the same level you do," and we try to negotiate.

The flight risk is the trickier one, rarely will people even hint at this. They're either worried that you're going to be bored quickly (which comes up a lot depending on the role) or that you seem to be chasing money and/or titles.

If it's the former I specifically tell them we like them, we want to make an offer, but we're worried that the day to day work may be unfulfilling in the long run based on what they've made us think about them during the interviews.

By the way, my anecdotal track record for this is pretty good- these people are usually gone in 18 months, which is just about the time you hit your stride and go on auto-pilot plus a few months to figure out you're really effing bored. I can't recall anyone we've thought this about that stuck around past 30 months.

The job hopping and money chasing is what it is. If it's true or not, you can't really unbrand yourself of it when they perceive it. I don't begrudge anyone for doing it, I have never been at the same company (whether for myself or others) for more than 4 years. I think everyone should be looking out for the best interest of their careers and families, your tenure at a company doesn't guarantee a thing, just do your best and be ethical while you're there. Be that as it may, if I've got two generally equivalent candidates and one is perceived to be more likely to stick around, s/he'll get the first offer.

I have made a point to indicate I am very negotiable with compensation to help my chances, but that doesn't seem to ever come up. The recruiter asks a number, I give a guess based on my experience and my last salary, and it never comes up again. No one seems to take up my offer to negotiate.

As to job hopping, I have worked at 3 companies my entire career, each about 2.5 years. I had good reasons to move each time, and I didn't do so lightly or recklessly, but there's nothing I can do to change that. With my experience job hunting, I'd be very happy working at the same place for a long time.

How often does that happen? I feel most people kinda like or are neutral on most other people. I can't remember the last time I met a developer I thought I couldn't work with because of his personality

I've only ever come out of an interview one time thinking that the guy I was talking to was a real jerk and I'd never work with him. I've come out of most pretty meh, just as you said.

For a stretch we probably did 70 interviews a year for 3-4 years spread across 9-15 participants. It seems like every year there was at least one HELL NO candidate on personality by someone.

How do you market yourself?

I was unemployed for 10 months recently.

I think a lot of it is the new "100x developer" mentality.

Companies have become insanely picky. I've had lots of interviews, many of which went really well that never panned out. I've completed significant projects for companies, and I have some open source software out there too.

Companies have become convinced that 99% of developers are as valuable as a pile of dog shit they just stepped in, and its changing things. If you're bad at marketing, you're in for rough times ahead.

Consider Supply and Demand. The probability of being hired depends on available supply of applicants.

Graduated from UC Berkeley, Regents Scholar, Computer Science. Depths of the 1989-93 recession, I graduated in 1991. Had 4 job offers! All 4 were scut work jobs. But I got my foot in the door when the rest of the economy was AWFUL. "Dang, I was the top of my class in CompSci (software) at Berkeley, yet I cannot get a better coding job offer than these 4?"

LATER I REALIZED: The recession started in 1988-89. By 1991 when I graduated there were a lot of HIGHLY EXPERIENCED and TALENTED software engineers looking for work. The Supply of engineers was high; and demand was low.

So yeah, I got 4 scut job offers because firms had their pick of great, experienced talent. The fact is, I was lucky in 1991 to have gotten 4 offers at that time; George Bush the 1st lost the election in '92 because of the bad economy.

The 1989-93 recession was BAAAD. Not as bad as 2008-09 but lots of homes in foreclosure, hiring was zero.

When 1993 rolled around, the supply of talent had been TAKEN, the tech economy was hiring. It became MUCH easier to switch to an area of software completely unrelated to my old job.

But then 1999 rolled around -- the big crash, the Dot-Com Bubble Burst. Now, despite 8 years of experience, again the supply of engineers was very high and it became difficult to get a position.

If the Supply of Talent looking for work is High -- 12 in-person interviews and no job is MUCH more likely than in boom times.

Take off the blinders people. If it feels like it suddenly has become more of an effort to get a job, MAYBE the supply of talent on the market has increased.

When I hire and the talent pool has swelled, I can sit back and be picky. I have the leverage. I am the Demand for talent. You are the Supply of talent.

If it seems harder/longer to get hired all of a sudden despite what you've described -- "highly relevant experience" and a few years in the industry --

it's quite possible that you're competing with MORE ENGINEERS for that position just now.

And as I hiring manager, I know dam well the resume quality has jumped and there are more quality resumes than I've seen in the recent past.

"Ah-HA! I finally have some leverage over the applicant pool! I'm gonna be picky!"

Right now we have about a half dozen open developer positions that we are so far unable to fill. The problem is the vicious intersection of relatively dull work and relatively low pay. We've had to increasingly go the route of hiring contractors since we can pay them basically anything, whereas actual employee pay is set by the legislature who don't win points with voters when they spend more on state employee salaries...

So, if there was a legitimate tech job shortage, it would be trickling down to more applicants coming to us (which has happened in the past). Right now, I'm not seeing it.

Do you mean you work for the government somehow?

Yes, an employee of Washington State. The state government is divided into agencies, who can approach hiring differently (some almost exclusively use contractors, other try to use exclusively employees). Contractor pay is negotiated by each agency with the contracting firm; but employee pay is set all the way from the top (the state legislature).

So, for example, if I say "I can't hire anyone that meets your 'expert' qualifications for $65K/year", there's nothing my supervisor, or his supervisor, or the CIO, or the agency director, or even the governor can do; other than recommend we switch to using contractors which has its own downsides.

There's been an increasing push that has been heard for IT salaries to be "re-evaluated", but it's suffering from politics and all the usual high-level government malaise. It'll be at least 2-3 more years before anything happens, and there's a 50/50 chance that the outcome is "we should pay you more, but we won't."

That's the same excuse they've used for not giving "cost of living" increases most years. :)

> but employee pay is set all the way from the top (the state legislature).

Can't fix that broken of a compensation model without significant work (having intelligent representatives run for office).

When I mentioned the problem to one of the state HR folks working on the compensation thing for IT, she said, "Ask not what your state can do for you, but what you can do for your state." Which is a fine sentiment, but doesn't help me actually fill positions with people who won't be a net negative to the team.

Have you thought about hiring people for those positions as full time but actually only working them part time? You could probably find good people who don't want to work normal full time jobs but would like the benefits that usually only come with full time employment.

This does not sound legal to me, though.

Doing that at some of the agencies I've contracted with in the past would take a mile of red tape.

> Have you thought about hiring people for those positions as full time but actually only working them part time?

In state agencies, that's a pretty good way to get yourself and the people involved fired (and possibly worse), since its essentially a conspiracy to defraud the government.

In some/many government agencies, this is the nudge-nudge-wink-wink way things are done. Explicitly planning to do this, however, would probably not end pleasantly for the parties involved.

Any email address where you could be contacted? I looked around your website and blog but only found links to linkedin and facebook. Thank you.

Depending on the content, you can either email my personal email: steve (at) kolls.net

or send official business to my state email: Kollmas (at) wsdot.wa.gov

Thank you, sir. :)

One way to address this is by getting jobs reclassified to higher pay grades. It's not easy, but it might be possible over the course of a few years.

Usually it requires a mission critical task and an inability to hire. If it's important, the leaders will do what it takes to make things happen.

Given that you can hire all the contractors you like... couldn't you just set up an external NGO consulting agency, which you contract work out to, and which has a "deal" to provide their employees insurance/benefits/pensions through you equivalent to what you'd provide—and then making your "hiring" process into a "certification" process that gives people exactly the credential said NGO cares about?

In other words, why not do what the military does, and branch off a civilian subcontractor?

I'm looking for a junior dev position. Does the state hire many junior people?

Some agencies more than others. I've recommended we move to hiring "in-training" positions to enable us to pick up sharp junior devs andd give them rapid advancement (within the very limiting structure we have, of course).

Some agencies hire exclusively junior devs and leave all the higher level architecture, etc, to contractors.

Our agency tries to hire almost exclusively senior devs, and has a real hard time of it. Getting junior devs is easier.

If you're interesting, go to careers.wa.gov and do some searchers. It will show all agencies and you can see salaries and requirements. Entry level developer position is generally ITS 3; ignore the "2 years experience" or whatever. We routinely hire ITS 3 positions with no formal experience, just with either some schoolwork or "learned on my own" programming, or both.

Thanks, I'll check out the website.

Or create your own junior devs and turn them into mid-levels in a couple years. Take a look at the University of Texas's Software Developer Training Program[1]. They have similar problems with respect to hiring, with the additional problem that there is a lot of legacy code in proprietary technologies to maintain. So as a solution they began hiring for aptitude, not knowledge, and putting their trainees through this ~6-month program. The net result is specially tailored devs who know their systems pretty well. They have a strong community of developers who all have a certain background in common. There's a tacit understanding that trainees will stay on long enough to make the University's investment "worth it," but I don't think that's much of a problem. I think most trainees are "grateful," so even though they don't necessarily make what they would in the private sector, they stick around.

I went through this program and ended up working there for three years. Have recommended others go through it as well when they began pursuing careers in tech. Can't speak of it highly enough.

[1]: https://www.utexas.edu/its/analyst-training/

I have a few friends, who can't seem to find any developers on the east coast too.

In late 2015 there was a lot of fear about a dot com like bubble burst. I read and hear little about it these days. Might be a good sign.

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