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Comment by dadkins | Hacker News Reader

How can it simultaneously be the hottest job market in anyone's memory, and yet the process still looks like this? These don't look like companies struggling to hire; these look like companies being exceedingly picky and not suffering one bit for it.

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It's where they're applying, I think: "Apple, Babylon, Cloudflare, Deliveroo, Monzo, Spotify, TrueLayer." Don't know anything about Babylon or TrueLayer but most of these are largish, established companies. I've found early-stage startups less picky recently - I got a job at a startup in November that only required 4 video interviews each between 30 minutes to an hour. No whiteboarding, mostly just discussing previous projects. Finally the last (4th) interview was with the CTO where he started by saying: "It's really hard to find people good people to hire right now" and basically said he wanted to hire me and asked if I had any questions.

Have Startup salaries gone up recently to match the market? I had thought it's pretty understood that you are taking a significant paycut relative to established players to basically play the lottery with startup equity?

Maybe the other way to look at it is, the "established players" can only employ so many people. Many of them are paying some pretty insane salaries now (I consider over $200K pretty insane) - but as I said, they can only employ so many people. In my case the salary is plenty good without even having to take equity into account. And the work is likely much more interesting than I'd get to do in an established company. Also, if the startup makes it I could be in a pretty good position being able to call a lot of my own shots as to what I'm going to work on and how I'm going to work on it - autonomy.

All that to say, it seems a lot more like a lottery trying to get a job with the established players (after jumping through all their interview hoops), and while the money might be better, the type of work, what you work on, the level of autonomy you're given (or not) is also very important.

Startup salaries have gone up a lot in the last few years from the boom in funding. Experienced engineers with several years of experience are clearing $200K+ in base, and getting a solid equity cut too: https://topstartups.io/startup-salary-equity-database/

Appreciate the link. Don't know if you're affiliated with the site but the ability to sort the data would be incredibly useful and the name of the Startup would be of interest as well like levels.fyi

I am applying to ~10 companies, mostly start-ups, and they all have the same process. They are mostly not pure algorithms but have varying degrees of difficulty and all use multiple rounds of on the spot coding. Perhaps ironically I found the one purely algorithmic question (standard graph traversal) to be the least stressful.

Because regardless of the hotness of the market 90% of candidates are still completely unqualified for the position they are applying to. Companies would rather keep the role unfilled than hire someone who can't code "hello, world!" (and no, that's not an exaggeration).

That may be a challenge, but if a candidate has years of experience in the software industry then their resume might vouch for some skills. If a developer has delivered features to common tools that many appreciate then how is it possible that they cannot accomplish basic coding tasks? The main problem here is that teams that are hiring often don't even bother to read resumes and so they end up with a process that is expensive, broken, and actually insulting to the most qualified candidates.

Resumes do not work. People will straight up lie on every bullet point

That's the point of the interview, to validate the resume by having in-depth conversation about the projects in it.

Note this doesn't mean trying to test for the skills that they must've applied to do those jobs. That's hopeless to achieve in an interview for all the reasons endlessly documented in these threads. Instead, assume that if they did the jobs listed in the resume, obviously they must have the skills to have done them. So now the interview is about validating they did those jobs, not the technical detail itself.

Based on more than two decades of hiring, this works very well.

> can't code "hello, world!"

Is hello world now code for hard level leetcode problems?

Looking at the list of companies they are maybe applying in the U.K. where the market is different.

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