Ask HN: How do you find jobs to apply for? What's your main pain point? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How do you find jobs to apply for? What's your main pain point?

12 pointsjlamp13 comments

I'm working on a solution for connecting engineers with their best fit roles at startups (or other tech companies) but I want to know what your biggest challenges are when looking for a new job and interviewing. Is it: - Finding a job? - Finding a job you're passionate about? - Getting invited to the interview? - Passing the interview? - Not being satisfied with your role/job responsibilities after being hired?

Just to give some background on myself, I've conducted over 1000 interviews over the years for companies such as Amazon, Robinhood, OpenDoor, and many others. I've interviewed candidates for software engineering, data science, managerial roles, etc.

I want to better understand what your ideal "discovery -> hired" roadmap would look like, and how you feel we (recruiters, interviewers, hiring managers, etc.) are failing you.

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Most companies are not willing to pay. In most cases they look for Seniors but want pay average market compensation. There are multiple issues with this approach.

  - excellent senior developers already have golden handcuffs
  - there is high opportunity cost for switching jobs when senior 
  - for average price you get average talent, people with empty years

You get far in the pipeline to discover that they will not pay enough. I got an offer a few months ago but I wanted an extra 100$ on daily rate to justify switch, but they decided against. The Project in question is already at risk, and they are trying to hire for months but HR want to save...

The second big problem is proving my abilities. Coding test might be good for baseline ability but you will not discover person leadership skills, organization, drive and mental health/strength. I have very little time to prep for advanced algorithm questions and my CS background is weak. My open source contributions are mostly drive by.

Third is the level of dysfunction in organization. On interview company would pretend how modern and forward thinking they are but in reality everything have yearly roadmap and pets servers on RHEL 5. Glassdoor is helpful but you can have great teams one part organization and terrible in another. By accident, you might join a manager building empire without interest in actual product. On the other side are teams driven by Product with painful level of tech dept.

I (a generalist with experience all over the tech map, doing mostly devops/integration work) have seen only a single valid offer coming from a recruiter (and it was highly targeted). Not a big challenge for me specifically since I found jobs myself talking directly to companies and via personal network, but recruiters with no idea who are they talking to / looking for is somewhere there on the challenges list for the system as a whole. The job boards are better but not great either. I killed my linkedin account after getting a thousand of "you mentioned keyword Java, would you like a corp Java junior developer position in a different country?".

Also, we could really use some better definitions for "remote position" https://blog.viraptor.info/post/on-finding-remote-work ("remote for US citizens with a weekly meeting in SF", is not useful for 99.9% cases, but still comes up when looking for remote positions)

I agree, many of these job postings use misleading terms.

Regarding your use of your personal network and talking directly to companies, do you feel this approach has always worked well for you or do you feel like something is still missing whenever you search/apply for new roles?

I feel like I've been lucky and realise that one day my network may not have any good offers. It worked, but I wish it didn't have to.

Too much freakin noise on job boards and not enough filters. When I look at say LinkedIn’s job boards I see maybe 20-30% percent spam postings from many different faceless agencies all trying to recruit for the same garbage positions and maybe 70-80% jobs that the board determines as similar enough to my current and previous work which is not always why I want. It’s so bad to the point where I can search for a job completely separate position, completely unrelated to programming and a number of the hits will be generic software development jobs. Now there is one thing I will concede that LinkedIn does alright on the features. There are separate filters for job position and company industry. This is really nice if you’re interested in hunting out something specific. Most other job boards I’m familiar with have all the spam and filter problems without the annoying “smart” features.

Aside from that most of my issues are with job listings themselves and the lack of useful information in them.

I've only been doing internal postings for the last several years. Although I have looked at external postings.

The main issue with both of them is that everyone wants "senior" developers (the definition seems to vary). Nobody seems to be willing to provide any training. Sure, I have AWS certs, but they don't mean much when each company has their own policies and architectures.

I consider myself intermediate because the tech stacks I have used vary greatly and have switched every few years. I was a senior dev and even a tech lead in FileNet work (unofficially), but there's not much work for that.

I'm sorry you've had to deal with these misleading posts; many of them are not written well and over-inflate the word "senior" in their descriptions.

Do you feel your main issue then is onboarding onto companies not willing to provide training but you're eager to put the time in to learn somehow?

I think the issue is that you can't really be a senior developer in a tech stack unless you have experience in that stack. Every time I switch stacks, I screw myself out of a chance of that next level compensation. Starting over is basically throwing away the previous knowledge.

I can put in time to learn. Most of the time the biggest issue is that internal policies, procedures, and systems are not adequately documented.

> how you feel we (recruiters, interviewers, hiring managers, etc.) are failing you.

Here's my big thing - interviews, recruiters, hiring managers are all trying to do one thing, and one thing alone - fill that spot. Many times, I don't think they care if it's a great fit for the candidate, and will paper over workplace issues or culture. In the end, sadly the problem is that the people doing the hiring and the person getting hired many times have completely different goals. Same for compensation.

Whereas for the candidate, it's really about picking the right company to work for and interview at.

People are really on their own to find the right fit, and it's certainly not easy. Finding your own fit can be tricky especially if you are changing roles and your resume doesn't look like what the hiring manager was expecting.

I think there are plenty of job sites for people who are really looking for a job. What is missing is something where people who are generally not looking but would be open for the right opportunity. These people are usually doing well in their current roles but something is missing. Just not enough for them to look actively but would be open for the right opportunity.

honestly, at this point it's not hard. when I was younger the hardest part was developing a reasonable list of places to apply. my strategy for developing a reasonable list was to watch conference talks over technologies that I enjoy and document any company being represented. the biggest pain point to the strategy is you don't have very much control over region. when your first out of school, it might make sense, but if you've got a family and are intending to be regionally bound it may not. I really loved the strategy because I definitely had something to talk about during the interviews, and every company I interviewed with was interesting

As someone who's not from a traditional background and currently in an odd area of 3 years split between regular software dev and SDET, I genuinely feel like everyone at every stage of this is a failure point (including the engineers) but this is a people problem that you can't solve with software.

Trying to find a job that looks like it'll pay me a living wage and put me on a good career path is a struggle. There are things on LinkedIn and Indeed that look good but are just re-routes to knock-off job boards with names like Nevoo and IFindJobForYou, and these are links from what are supposed to be the big names in job searching. Those redirects never take me to the job position, and when I go to look up the company and see if the posting is on their careers page, it usually isn't. Other people on LinkedIn have noticed this but the moderator response at LinkedIn says that these redirects are legitimate. The fix is "easy" but the politics to get it to happen is hard, good luck with this one.

One thing that's caused me a lot of trouble is that people (HR, engineering) don't actually read my resume because they have to deal with so many, even after I've gone through the process of making it as easy to read as possible, including constant revisions and peer reviews. They'll look at my resume when I submit for a junior position despite having balanced and sufficient experience and just throw my resume in the trash because I don't know one piece of tech on their laundry list or I'm somehow overqualified despite fitting the position's experience range, aka I get an email saying that while my credentials were impressive, they've selected another candidate. However, some companies will deny me that junior position and somehow think I'm qualified for a senior developer role. These are definitely people problems: what assumptions are being made here that I'm somehow not qualified for a more junior role but somehow qualified for a FAR more senior role? Who's making these assumptions? Another people problem.

Interviews are a mixed bag. For SDET positions, I've had good interviews since they're more on the behavioral side where the interviewers want you to talk about your experiences with software development, and their technical questions are mainly shibboleth tests to ensure you didn't lie your way through HR. I've only had one bad SDET/QA interview, and it was for a fintech company trying to test me as a senior software engineer when the job would be manual testing and DevOps-like work because the guy giving the interview was a Caltech graduate ubermensch who probably hasn't been aware of other people's emotions and backgrounds for many years because he's been in "startup mode" or whatever. Again, a people problem, but I don't think that this one is even solvable.

Software dev interviews are honestly far worse: I've had automated code screens where the platform didn't support modern language constructs and made simple tasks needlessly complex and I'm tired of having to play Russian Roulette with interview questions as to whether they're Leetcode Mediums or obtuse math-derivative questions. I rarely get to talk to engineers, and when I do, they mostly just say "here's your question good luck" and vanish.

I had one positive software dev interview with Bloomberg, where it was more traditional and the dev was actually trying to follow my thought process as I solved a problem. This might not seem like it's a people problem, but it is: your Leetcode Mediums and your Bachelor's in CS are useless if you're not going to engage with me and gauge my competency in some meaningful way. If software developers are so overloaded by work, going through resumes, and coming up with non-asinine questions, this looks like a great people problem to solve: introduce a sales engineer-like team that can have its members divided between various engineering teams that can handle non-managerial but people-focused tasks.

I could write about the oddities and various people-based quirks of this process further, but I'm probably getting near the character limit. Really hope that you're not trying to make yet another website, OP.

Would love to see more company HRDs providing rss feeds to their open positions.

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