Ask HN: Experienced devs (20+ yrs exp), are you getting interview calls?

I'm going to do a blog post on my job search in the next month or so, but for me it's been a _grind_ (that finally ended up with something, thankfully).

But sneak preview:

  * 100 applications
  * 54 first round interviews
  * 24 second round interviews
  * 10 third round interviews

Something like 94 total meetings (brief numbers here don't include 4th-6th rounds...), maybe 10 (?) "virtual onsites" of 3-6 hours, maybe only 4(?) takehomes, maybe 6 (?) Hackerrank projects.

I got a lot of at bats, and a lot of "swings and misses".

In general at least one place said that while they are hiring like nonsense (average desired growth at companies was 211% in the "forseeable": because I asked then aggregated them all in my spreadsheet) they apparently have a lot of candidates in the pipeline. So if you're kind of confusing because you're super senior and have done everything ??? maybe they get confused, and just say, "next!".

Out of the 4 external recruiter places I used, 2 were good at finding me excellent potentials that seemed to be enthusiastic about me and have short hiring funnels. By then I was wrapping up later stages with a place I found myself, and got a verbal offer, but I kind of suspect if I had leaned into external recruiters earlier I would have had a better experience / not feeling like I was spamming places with my resume.

This sounds absolutely exhausting... good to hear you found something at the end of that long, dark tunnel though! Hope it’s a great place.

What was the worst was the constant rejection, honestly. (I interviewed a _lot_ so it does track that I'd get 1-3 "thank you for your consideration but..." emails a day. But that didn't make it easier...)

i'm considering adding a gmail filter to auto-delete these rejections. just don't want to get too hasty.

Thats intersting. Thank you

I'm getting lots of emails. Most of them don't turn into calls because I cut off the process early. I want more than just coding in a corner in exchange for cash. It seems clear to me that the jobs are there if you want to be a coder, but it is tougher if you want some autonomy or authority.

So it all depends on what you want - if you want a coding job, fill out profiles on various sites and you'll get emails. If you want something else, you'll need to be more creative.

Thanks

"Can we say the job market is only good for junior developers?"

No, not at all. It's hardest on them.

The news we hear about lack of labor is not actually a lack of labor, its a lack of meaningful work.

Thanks

Hiring and recruiter outreach mostly happens on LinkedIn. Your unwillingness to use the platform is holding you back severely. I suggest you work on updating your profile and using it for job applications.

Yeah, about 80% of it happened on LinkedIn. Even had one who was from someone I knew personally. It's hard to ask someone if they want a new job, and the resume platform makes it a lot easier.

You are right. I am a little reluctant to do so because my current employer/colleagues will also notice it. Anyways, lets see

FYI there is a setting under Privacy that will prevent notifying your current connections when you make changes to your profile.

I’ve got ~16 years experience and I’m starting a new role tomorrow. I’ve been looking on and off for a while. I’ve had a lot of recruiters contact me, mostly for contract or roles I wasn’t very interested in (Fintech, healthcare tech, shopping).

I had a significant change in response (positively) when I started crafting my resume for roles I wanted. Between the recruiters and the candidate matching systems, a non-response seems more to be a we-never-saw-your-resume than intentional weed out.

To answer your first question though, I’d say the market is unequivocally better for Senior developers than for Junior devs.

Thanks for the info

I have 25 years as a professional developer, but I’ve been writing code in some form or another for almost 40 years.

I’ve been getting multiple emails from recruiters for MONTHS.

I absolutely love my current role, and have no intention of leaving, but I’m betting I could make at least $130 an hour in the current market, which would be more than twice what I make salary-wise.

It’s certainly tempting, but contracting has downsides too. No paid vacation, insurance, etc.

Good to hear that.

Does the tech stack matter? What do you work in?

It's not how many years, it a matter of how marketable the skills and experiences are. That said, it's also a matter of marketing (read presentation of you). Imagine someone else - all things being relatively - equal to you. But they are better presented. Who gets the call? Like it or not. For better or worse. Recruiters aren't going to buy something they can't sell.

More random-y thoughts:

- Two weeks isn't that long. If you were on a dating app looking for an LTR - and jobs are relationships - would you expect a match in two weeks?

- Not much of LinkedIn profile? I would imagine many recruiters can't be bothered. What about LI activity? What would a fly on the wall say?

- GitLab / GitHub profile and activity?

- Similar to GL / GH, what about side projects? Anything to show?

Is the market hot or do people with 20 years of experience have to still work on additional signals like a portfolio / github profile / side projects?

Those things seem necessary as a way to signal competence when you're lacking other signals like experience or education.

20 yrs experience? Nobody cares. That not a benefit. It's a feature. No one cares about features.

Skills X, Y and/or Z?

Ability to A, B and/or C?

These are more important. Whether it 20 yrs, or more, or less. No one cares.

I didn't mean to say 20+ yrs of experience is an advantage. Its the other way around. My worry is that the application may not even be considered because of 20+ yrs of experience. Skill can be proved only after getting an interview.

I've got 20 years of experience and have never bothered with side projects, portfolios or the like. You have to have the confidence to pitch your real experience and let it shine on your CV and at interview, both from a technical and people point of view. That's what hiring managers are looking for from someone who has been in the business for a while.

If you get rejected because you don't have a recent GitHub project, that's their loss, and they don't know what they're missing.

Thanks. Yah. 2 weeks is not enough. But I could sense the overall trend. Yes. I need to make my resume marketable. My linkedin activity also is empty. Although, I have done a lot of POC's, none of them are in public places like github etc. Agree with you that skills, quality of work etc matter the most. But that can be proved only after getting an interview call.

> Recruiters aren’t going to buy something they can’t sell.

Unfortunately most recruiters don’t have the faintest idea of what they’re trying to sell, let alone what they need to buy.

Fair enough. But they do know what they have sold. They do know what clients have bought. If you're not semi close to that it's gonna be a tough go.

Well you're not really on LinkedIn it sounds like. I thought the job market wasn't super hot because I was only getting a trickle of recruiters pinging me on LinkedIn for the longest time, but back in April I flicked the switch to say I was open to new work on LinkedIn and got 19 recruiters contacting me that first day, and another 12 the next day, and ~8 a day for the next week or so after that.

And now that I have a new job the recruiters are contacting me more often than before I flipped that switch even though I flipped it back off again.

But while I wouldn't say I'm active on LinkedIn, really, I do have basically the equivalent of my resume on there. Maybe if you're really wanting something you might want to consider at least putting some bullet points of what you've done for each job then flip that switch and say you're open to new work.

I honestly couldn't keep up with all of the recruiters contacting me and let a few of those slip. I did get to final stages with five companies though and got two offers.

That being said, I didn't get any offers from recruiters I met from LinkedIn (I'm sure I would eventually, three got close). The two I got offers from was a company where someone I knew referred me, and a company that contacted me on Hired.com when I went through the process there. That one was kind of nice because you can post salary expectations before anyone contacts you and I put something about 20% higher than the top of the ranges I was getting told by recruiters reaching out on LinkedIn, and I ended up getting offered that much as well.

I'm a senior engineer who had a .net job at a large but not super well-known corporation for 6 years before my current role, and about 8 years of other experience predating that.

Thanks for the useful info. I am not sure open to job is a good thing to do. People might assume the person is desperate for a job

I don't mean the one that changes your profile picture to make it obvious to everyone that you're looking. I mean the setting that lets recruiters know (and only recruiters) that you're looking.

Yes constantly.

I think it helps to specialize more as your career progresses FWIW. I specialize in search, etc, so constantly get emails about new positions to do some smart thing with Elasticsearch or some such.

Thanks. That gives some confidence to me. In fact, I too have done a lot of POC around new tech like elasticsearch etc and I am enjoying it. But my actual job doesn't involve any of these. Unfortunately the recruiters insist on using it in the actual project.

Yes. I've tried to remove all contact info from LinkedIn as well as job details (other than company, tenure and title) and I still get 5+ recruiters contacting me per week.

Thanks

Yeah (18 years of exp here, so not quite 20+), I'm getting lots of messages on LinkedIn. I turn the more promising ones into interview calls.

The interest is mostly based on a combination of fairly strong CV overall and familiarity with a couple of technologies which are currently in vogue in my niche (Scala development). I'd say you need at least one of those, and preferably two. Without it, you don't seem to bring in more (perceived) value than the guys in the 5-10 years of exp bracket, and you'll probably be more expensive and/or possibly harder to manage.

Thanks. By familiarity, do you mean using it in the day job?.

That is ideal, yes.

So, the unfortunate truth is that the #1 recruiting tool in the industry is LinkedIn and recruiters aren't going to look farther than LinkedIn 95% of the time. They are also going to take an application and then look up the person on LinkedIn and, if they don't see any information, they are going to pass more often than not.

I know you don't want to do it, but if you are serious about finding new work then I'd strongly urge you to make your LinkedIn shine. You can always remove it after you find a new job.

What are recruiters going to look for?

First and foremost it's going to be about technology affinity. If they work for a Java shop, they are going to be looking for people with Java or C# backgrounds. If it's a ruby shop then for ruby, python, node.js, etc.

Second, they are going to look to see if what you've actually done matches what they are looking for. Are they looking for someone to do machine learning pipelines? Are they looking to decompose a monolith into microservices? Those should show up in your descriptions.

Third, and probably way less important for many places, but they are also going to look for your company history affinity. Do they think of themselves as "IBM-lite"? Then they'll look for people who have lots of big company experience. Are they a rapidly growing Rails shop? They are going to look for places like Shopify, Stripe, etc.

If they can't find you on LinkedIn, you are putting yourself in a bit of a hole. Not one you can't get out of and be successful without, but it's a handicap.

As an example, and not to try to be self promoting, I received a notification this morning that 445 people had viewed my LinkedIn last week (I'm being generous and assuming LinkedIn is telling the truth here...i know i know). I've been in the industry for 20 years. I'm mgmt now, which makes it slightly different, but out of the 445 views I received 10 or so solicitations for jobs, 5 or 6 people reaching out looking for a job, and 100 or so sales pitches.

Anyway, I wish you luck. I'm hiring (rails, monolith -> SOA, postgres, APIs, etc). Happy to chat if you want to learn more.

May have more to do with your experience or how you are selling it

Thanks

It’ll be hot when FAANG starts doubling senior comp + non-FAANG start competing. Anything else is noise.

Posted this comment on a previous thread. Recently switched jobs. About to start week 9. 40+ years of experience. Strong LinkedIn profile. Tired Github profile that needs an update.

I applied for only one job at the insistence of my wife because it was with a renowned company. I had to actually write out a C.V. to apply, and as of today, nine weeks into my new job, 13+ weeks later, my application is "still under review" according to the internal recruiter/manager. All other companies I spoke with were inbound leads.

I had, and still have, a lot of technical recruiters reaching out to me. Almost all of them failed to garner my interest based on a few simple questions I asked right up front. Before agreeing to interview, or even "sending over a resume" I prequalified all of the positions to ensure that it involved remote work and that the pay was within a range I was willing to accept. "Is this position remote? Or on-site? What is the pay range for this position?" A large proportion of the people who reached out did not respond to the questions, and of those that did, several gave responses that were immediate red flags or immediate rejections from me.

I interviewed with a FANGMAN company, on the recommendation of a friend, and I ultimately turned down the offer, but had it not been for my friend's insistence who works at the FANG, to "keep going" through the interview, I would have simply stopped the interview, and in fact thought about doing so several times. Whiteboarding and take-homes for people with decades of proven and verifiable experience and a couple of master's in computer subjects is still apparently a thing "to verify you know how to write code."

I had an interview lined up with another FANGMAN, which was to be a full day of "first round interviews" and then two full days with different teams to figure out where I would go. I withdrew my application once I accepted the offer for my current (new) position. The second was not a company I was interestd in, but they were doing interesting things in augmented reality.

I put in my two weeks notice, and the company I was working for made a counter-offer. Absurdly almost two hours after my last day on the job.

In all I had five offers on the table, at base compensation of $100K (absolutely absurd interview with a low-ball offer even after pre-qualifying the company to make sure the compensation was in the ballpark), $120K (reasonable interview, low-ball offer even after pre-qualifying), $150K (45 minute interview, knew the size of the offer going in, interesting work), $230K (a quick chat, then four hours of shooting the shit, exceptionally interesting work) and $260K (two full days, whiteboarding and take home (which I refused to do), career advancement).

My current position I didn't even apply for, and I don't think anyone even looked at the C.V. I got the job because of an old colleague who said "are you looking?" Having a strong network is important. My last two jobs, not including this one, both came the same way.

Total search time was from late June to mid-August. Maybe eight weeks total. I was being extremely picky with regard which companies I talked too.

pimp

Thanks. Interesting

Not a dev, but dev bg -- looking for all these dev-adjacent roles -- i'm old as rocks, but there are a lot of us out there, especially in big boring non-tech companies:

  * Solutions Architect
  * Technical Product Owner
  * Sales Engineer
  * etc.

i'm now getting blown up, but i'm keeping up my 250+ applications/day, and mixing in studying (aws, etc.), company/market research, NBA (a little too capitalist and exploitative and dehumanizing, but we all have our vices), etc.

Probably 10 to 20 applications I send get some type of "Social control tech is really appealing to me!"-type love letter -- the rest are spray and pray.

I also started going thru the HN Sep/Oct "Who's Hiring?" posts -- there are literally hundreds of companies looking, and I have a feeling if I was a dev, I'd be hired by now. I do hold out hope that one of them is doing something cool.

As shitty as applying and interviewing is, it's also somewhat exciting to me, especially as I've had some real shit jobs, and I've rarely had a position where I was like, "Oh, so _this_ is what a contented professional life feels like."

In terms of _getting_ jobs, I feel like an expert (keeping them, not so much -- i.e. I've rarely been happy, whether I thought it was going to be great or not), I would generally suggest staying with your core stack/tech -- if you're primarily concerned about _getting_ a job, as opposed to anything else, like wanting to keep it, etc. If you've done 'Tech X' and some company really wants 'Tech X', they're be all over you. OTOH, if you have _not_ done Ballerina programming, but you have a PhD in Computer Science, they/recruiter will likely shit all over you -- it just doesn't matter, so don't waste your time and emotional energy with the 'But but but' stuff -- save it, keep it movin', don't look back in anger.

Outside of that, if you're semi-competent+, I would always lean towards HN-type/tech companies -- because they're _generally_ -- _generally_ -- less incompetent and less petty than other companies/personnel. If you're semi-competent+, you can talk to a semi-competent+ person as some HN/tech company and actually relate, because you will both have a visceral negative reaction to having to work with/for f**ing idiots.

:-D

Good luck!

p.s. hope you follow up with a post later after you've got something and been there for a month. i've started keeping a 'the_job_hunt.txt' running notes file -- i thought of blogging it but too much drama, etc. i've been thru the job hunt, i would argue, more than 99.9% of people on HN, and have some experience on the other side of the tab, so i thought it might be interesting for someone to read about my experience. tho, i don't know where people would post things. i don't have a personal blog, etc.

Thanks. Thats very useful.

I think you already know it and mentioned it, but definitely try to get in somewhere via friends or acquaintances, if possible.

I'm kind of in the same boat. I think it's just a matter of finding some organization where you will be recognized and appreciated for having a lot of experience. Some places simply don't understand that, and will only be looking for whether you have the specific skills required. They may not understand that you've seen tech fads arise, become skilled in them, and then watched them become unfashionable.

Thanks. You are right. Not working on a particular tech should not be the reason. Fundamentals are more important.