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It’s pretty rare in our field for someone to be able to land one job offer but not a second one.

Sure, there are a lot of applicants banging away hopelessly (because they’re not qualified and those people should not negotiate), but most everyone else in software who can land job offer N can land job offer N+1 without undue difficulty.

IMO, SWEs have never had more “walk away” power since I joined the field about 3 decades years ago.

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> because they’re not qualified

In an industry that is deadset on focusing on worthless leetcode puzzles as the major gating factor for a hire decision, I struggle to understand how someone "banging away hopelessly" is decidedly unqualified.

There are literally people applying for SWE jobs who couldn’t write FizzBuzz or a function to sum a non-overflowing array of ints in a language of their choosing. That’s tablestakecode, not leetcode, IMO.

That is fair. I have not encountered them myself, nor ever been an interviewee where "tablestakes" is the bar and not "hard leetcode haha I know the answer and you don't~~", but I absolutely acknowledge, recognize, and understand that this is a real occurrence as well. In those cases, I wholeheartedly agree with the label.

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