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Comment by fasteddie31003 | Hacker News Reader

The job market for developers right now is tough. My last time interviewing I was 2 offers for 4 interviews. I started looking for a job a month ago and I've gotten 0 offers for probably 10 interviews. It's my first time interviewing over virtual meetings, maybe that's it, but I think it's the general job market. My last feedback was "TL;DR - The general agreement was that you can code, and likely code well. However, there were opportunities to lean into deeper context and alternatives to problem solving." Maybe recruiters trying to only hire the "perfect" candidate with the increased supply of developers in the job market right now.

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Then we must live in a different reality. All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

Same. Just yesterday, I had a company wanting to negotiate employment terms after saying they were passing on me last week.

I've had 8 recruiters reach out just this morning on LinkedIn. Granted, most of them are crap gigs but they were mostly crap gigs 6 months ago too. Plenty are interesting though. I'm really glad I specialized early on and found a niche.

>All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

All companies can be struggling to hire if their bar is too high and/or their pay is too low.

I'm being contacted for rates at 50%+ what the market was 3 years ago and they don't even care what my background is. And these are corporate recruiters, not phonebanks.

> All companies in my circle are struggling to find developers.

Struggling to find developers is often a self-inflicted problem by making the processs unattractive (nope, I'm not doing an 8 hour take-home project for free) or silly (nope, I'm not spending 6 months leetcoding).

Companies that adjust their hiring pipeline process to be an enabler of hiring tend to have an easier time hiring.

If the market was really tough you wouldn’t have found 10 interviews.

I’m sorry to hear your search is going so poorly. Do some retrospective and practice the bits you think you might be missing.

We have 5 open software engineering roles and we haven’t seen any changes in our pipeline.

i am in the market now and have the opposite experience.

I do agree that lots of ppl are very prepared for interviews now, it wasn't the case even few years ago. They expect you to do everything perfectly in interviews these days.

In your case you were probly expect to explore other ways to solve problems, eg: some alogorithm will have worst put complexity but most calls are to get so we can sacrifice some put complexity to improve get complexity. stuff like this.

pls see this : https://www.teamblind.com/post/7-onsites-7-offers-aAFTykAD

That's definitely frustrating feedback. Even so, I would consider asking for specifics about those opportunities were, potentially even reaching out to individual interviewer engineers who are more likely to share as opposed to only the recruiter or HR rep.

> The job market for developers right now is tough

The opposite of true.

Actually there seems to be a decreased supply of developers because everyone is trying to hire them. If you're getting feedback, I'd say take it seriously and see how you can proactively address it on your next interview. It's like Sales: anticipate the objection and be prepared to handle it.

are the 2/4 and 0/10 interviews the same level of work? Or are you applying to higher level positions now?

I'm was looking at senior levels both times.

But we still need H1B visas because the domestic population doesn't have enough coders.

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