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Comment by pranit10 | Hacker News Reader

Good to see I am not the only one interviewing a ton. I have a different experience than yours for FE interviews. No leetcode questions. Mostly take home or live coding React/Vanilla JS stuff. No system design rounds either mostly talking about the tech stack in breadth and sometimes in-depth.

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You guys are not alone. My last job search was probably on the order of 100 applications, 10 interviews, 1 offer. It's been this way my whole 20+ year career. I don't know who these Captains Of Industry geniuses are who are getting multiple offers from 20 job applications, but I'm sure it's not the norm.

> My last job search was probably on the order of 100 applications, 10 interviews, 1 offer.

This is bizarre to me. How many years of experience do you have? I am in the US.

I get almost a 1/1 interview to application ratio and numerous offers, and I'm nothing special. I've just "been around the block" and I can convey that I've dealt with the big, difficult problems in the real world and have tackled them head on. Maybe it's the honest "been there, done that" I can convey after 20 years in the industry.

We may also be applying to different types of companies. I don't go for the "5 rounds of social fit" type companies, I go for straight engineering.

That's been my experience as well. Last job search, I put in 3 or 4 applications and after all the calls and interviews were done I ended up with 3 offers.

I'm nothing special. But I do learn a little about each company I'm applying to and tailor my resume to each position. If possible I develop an internal contact so I can get some informal information on the position from the inside in advance. I only had inside contacts for two of the companies last time though.

I can't imagine doing that for 100+ companies like some people apply to. I have to imagine most people applying to that many are just doing a spray-and-pray method.

Or maybe advertising themselves but not selling themselves. In some cases a 2% conversion rate is a decent goal for a marketer advertising to the general public, but would be pretty bad for a salesman getting commission from personalized sales.

I'm no salesman, but approach the job hunt like an enterprise salesman who needs to land a good account with a good commission to live on.

Not who you're replying to, but I have 10 years FE experience, and have managed small teams (3-5). My hit rate for interviews to applications was around 1:6. My only requirements around applications were: no early startups, a modern tech stack, and a minimum engineering team size.

The overwhelming majority of companies simply ghosted my application – Spotify, Atlassian, ADP, Lyft, Stripe, and Squarespace were all applications I made in one week, none of whom ever responded.

Hopefully I'll be closer to 1:1 once I've got 20 years under my belt ;)

OP here, I didn't keep an accurate log, but yea it's all ghosting. I'd estimate it's about 85% "never contacted" ghosting, about 5% ghosting after an initial call w/ company recruiter, and 10% ghosting after doing at least one phone screen. I don't know whether these companies are just incredibly disorganized and forget people, whether the jobs don't really exist in the first place, or if it's just their cowardly way to say "no" to a candidate without actually saying "no".

It is my belief that, like most tech companies, they have pretty much a huge raging river of good candidates to choose from, so they have to use a very coarse filter (ignoring almost everyone), in order to deal with a manageable number of them.

is this some US thing?

here in Eastern EU if you have >= 3 years of xp then probably almost all of companies that are hiring will try to talk to you if you apply

ofc if your skills/tech matches their requirements somewhat reasonably

>is this some US thing?

Western EU thing as well. There's an oversupply of candidates (everyone wants move/live here) and a low supply of jobs (in some countries), so companies can afford to be very picky.

Eastern EU has the opposite phenomenon, oversupply of jobs due to outsourcing/nearshoring coming in, and lack of skilled candidates since may skilled ones moved west.

Over Supply in the West?

Yes. My no-name company paying average or below average wages, in my no-name western EU town in Austria, has received over 30 applications for one position within a week, most from outside the EU (I think the Russo-Ukrainian conflict added a lot of gas on the fire).

So most companies here have raised the hiring bar accordingly due to this oversupply of applicants, therefore getting a job now is pretty rough if you're not at the top of your game in terms of experience and skillset.

This was my first time going after “senior” titles, and was also the first time I’d seen system design interviews. They only cropped up in final rounds. I had them at Amazon, Uber, and three other companies.

I was supremely nervous about them before but I actually wound up doing really well (save aforementioned DB crap). It was a chance to talk about my personal niches, like accessibility and load times.

Frustratingly, every single one was wildly different. I found that approx. 0 of the “cracking the system design” stuff I read beforehand helped in anyway.

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