Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)
For those laid off, how is the job hunt going? I haven't been able to start yet, but likely this next week I'll start studying and getting ready.
EDIT: you cannot make this up, it's a saturday and we got an email 1/3 of our team got laid off (I didn't yet, but I have a feeling it might happen soon).
I'm fascinated by this. How does one do this? Two options I can think of are being independently wealthy and being dependent on another. Are there other ways to accomplish being so comfortable with, "eh, gonna be unemployed another 4-6 months and see what happens"?
Personally, if I get laid off, I would probably also not jump on the _very_ first offer I get desperately, but try to land something good. That's what the higher amount you get for up to 12 months is quite useful for.
Mostly comes to low cost of living in my country + being reasonably frugal + slowly building my savings over time.
(Though note that I don't have kids yet, if I had children my calculations would be totally different.)
I think there is a mentality difference here. I have savings that would easily last me 10 years of not working. But... that's kind of my plan. I will be retiring some day.
I don't want to use up even a dime of that money by not working in my prime earning years.
Different of course if you have a plan to retire at 45 or something.
Not saying you should run out and spend your nest egg. On the other hand, I'd be reluctant to suffer too much during my prime working years scrimping and saving for a retirement that might actually not happen. I'd rather have jobs I really enjoy, and frankly, if I enjoy the work well enough why would I retire? Just take longer and longer vacations and work part time. So I'm willing to use a bit of my saved up funds when necessary to get out of a work environment that is unpleasant.
My sister's landlord always told her how he planned to live in the house she's in once he was a bit older.
He ended up dying in a motorbike accident a few months ago, right after a house inspection...
I wonder what sorts of things influence the mentality. I've been reading Walden here and there recently, I remember being forced to read some of it in I think junior high, I suspect at least a little influence lies there but there's no better trick to make kids dismiss a book's messaging than to force them to read it in chunks via some textbook and then be quizzed. "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." "This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it, reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet." "Yet some, not wise, go to the other side of the globe, to barbarous and unhealthy regions, and devote themselves to trade for ten or twenty years, in order that they may live -- that is, keep comfortably warm -- and die in New England at last. The luxuriously rich are not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot; as I implied before, they are cooked, of course à la mode."
Of course by Thoreau's standards I'm positively roasting and happy about it, and I think 10 or even 20 years at a career is more than a fine tradeoff if that's all it takes to secure a retirement. As a teen I remember thinking I'd be happy enough to avoid having worked for 40-ish years straight like most of the adults around me had done/were doing (some of whom died right before or after their retirement age goal, too).
If you've got an iDevice with Apple Arcade, it's something interesting to play.
It uses books that are now in the public domain that are twisted into games of word order, spelling, and passages that make you read the abridged version and to an extent, force/encourage you to become familiar with the words to better play the game.
Meaning it would have been easier to with a demonstrable income stream? Or just incidentally, due to macro stuff and time raising interest rates over that same period
I figured I'd be ok liquidating ~$300k max for a cash purchase and skipping the mortgage, though if needed it's possible to get a delayed financing loan after, and at least a HELOC. But spiking prices everywhere made that more difficult or impossible in certain areas. And even if something is 'affordable' at say $265k, I find it hard to stomach the idea of paying that much when I think it is (and 2019/2020 records show was) worth only about half that. (In 2014 I actually had legal control of a house but opted to get rid of it, it had been refinanced and it took months to find a buyer at $170k to zero that out. Earlier this year zillow estimated it could fetch $420k, which is absurd to me knowing all about it, but seeing actual sales in the area I believe it.)
In one case I was doing reasonably well with my software dev tasks for a while, but then they assigned me to periodic customer support, and I said up front that's not something I'll be good at. At the same time, my manager tried to increase the oversight of my work, because I was getting slower at it. So I'd wake up every waiting for my manager to "check-in" on me like a child, eventually getting to the point where I couldn't bring myself to get anything done and just resented my existence.
I'm in an ok spot now, for now, but who's to say how it'll be by January. All I want is a place I can do good work for, for a reasonable salary, but it's been very difficult to find.
Software engineers still have a much harder time justifying having a low savings rate when you compare them to the rest of the population.
Generally, there's some degree of frivolous spending going on.
Actually, software engineers in 2nd and 3rd world countries can afford to save a lot.
Having low outgoings. While I would prefer to have income (I'm hoping to be able to buy a house at some point), I'm a single person with no dependents, and I probably spend around £1200/month in total (including rent). And that's in London - one of the most expensive cities in the world - and without putting any effort into living cheaply (I often buy groceries at the local store rather than the cheaper big supermarket for example). If I chose to live somewhere cheaper (even in the uk) that could probably be halved without completely destroying my quality of life.
Maybe you ought to make a masterclass on this topic.
It's pretty easy to save money on a software developer salary in the United States.
It's not that hard to accomplish for those who can be(come) location independent. For instance[1]:
> You would need around 2,582.16$ in Budapest to maintain the same standard of life that you can have with 8,700.00$ in San Francisco, CA (assuming you rent in both cities).
[1] https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?cou...
Just about anywhere in the United States will be a lot cheaper than SF, too, without the huge inconvenience of moving internationally.
I picked Budapest as an example because it's a well known international destination with very high level of walkability, great public transportation, and affordable prices.
Prague and Krakow are two other similar options in Central Europe, only much less "weird" (and, as a result, a little more "boring").
There are also plenty of pleasant and affordable cities in Southern Europe, such as Valencia and Porto.
Actually, that makes Budapest a fair comparison to how SV and surroundings also deal with their homeless..
I used levels.fyi to find comparable salaries and my friends in tech said it’s pretty accurate
Having worked for 10ish years beforehand, it was financially easy. When I was ready to work again, I responded some recruiter emails and was hired again fairly quickly, at a position better than the one I left.
Living in a low cost-of-living area helps a great deal, as do the excellent salaries US devs make.
If yes, then...yes this is easily done.
- encouraged people and myself to hold on to about 6 months of runway because the future is unknown.
- encouraged myself and others to never have a single source of income.
- always be sharpening your skills. They get dull, redundant, and obsolete within ~5 years.
Live by these mantras, if one has the luxury to do so, and being laid off is nothing more than a disappointment.
In my case that'd be:
- living in a relatively affordable country (Latvia), where rent and other expenses aren't too high
- having an okay income by local standards, e.g. I make around 2000 Euros after taxes, which is in the upper 10% of salaries locally https://www.algas.lv/en/salaries-in-country (many earn more)
- saving and/or investing for many years now, I have about 37k Euros saved up, which isn't much for someone in US, but with monthly expenses between 500 to 1000 Euros, they might last me from 3 to 6 years (though less in practice, due to inflation)
- having additional factors that make things easier, such as sharing a residence or living with parents, having solar panels or one of those energy efficient homes if in the countryside, having reasonably affordable ways of heating if in the countryside (e.g. firewood with central heating), not having too many subscription services and so on
For people with higher living standards than mine: probably earning more than I do, even relative to their expenses.
And that's assuming you even live long enough to get to retirement...
Even as I approach elderliness, I still feel that every year of my life has become much more joyful, exciting and enriching than the previous year. I would absolutely not trade away multiple retirement years for a single year of fucking around in my twenties.
I had WARN and severance that would last me all summer, fall, and a bit into the winter before I ran out of that.
So, I spent all summer and fall and a bit into the winter (the thing that finally had me head to my parents' house was a snow storm from the Dakotas heading east in October) driving, hiking, and taking photographs.
There were some hikes that I did then (petroglyphs at Ozette, Ramona Falls on Mt. Hood) that would be much more challenging now that a decade and a half have passed. My endurance for driving has also gone down - I noticed this coming back from Dickinson, ND after the eclipse of 2017 (I really should have gotten a hotel room in Minneapolis) compared to the last leg of a trip from Twin Falls, ID to SF in '08. I can't do 10h drives anymore like I could when I was in my thirties.
And so while there's the "a year off when you're 25 vs retire earlier in your 60s" debate, I would tend to argue for the "when it's a question of experiences to be had, regrets are often the more costly side of the equation when looking back on it later in life."
Also note that not everyone has the same life trajectory of a family and kids and grand kids to look forward to in their later years. For me (single, no kids, on the far side of the half way point between 18 and 81), I am very glad that I had my great road trip when I was in my 30s rather than trying to do it when I was retired.
We of course can't trade our older years with our younger years.
For me personally, I'd much rather have spent the time with family, travelled to the places I wanted, slept around and worked on things I found fun than to slave away, just to save for a greater comfort in a future that is uncertain.
Of course I still hope to be comfortable in retirement, but without a doubt I would regret having chosen a certain path that would lead to comfort than a slightly less predictable path where comfort is not guaranteed.
Like - have a unique skillset, have multiple certifications, recommendations, proven B2B experience as a consultant.
Then getting contracts is easy. Probably less easy now tho.
> How does one do this?
In my case my wife has a job that provides the health insurance (so your "dependent on another" is partly right). In addition, our mortgage will be paid off in January, so that'll make it easier to live on one (smaller) income. We'll still be running a bit of a deficit each month (between $200 and $300/mo) but we've got a good 12 to 18 months of living expenses saved up in our emergency fund (that would be 12 to 18 months of living expenses if we both were to lose our jobs). After that there's a Roth IRA we could draw upon. So not too worried at this point.
A lot of your money is going to be for housing, and there are a lot of "conventions" that I think you should be careful with. Housing companies will tell you to spend 30% or more of your gross income on housing. You can do that if you want, but you'll have more savings if you aim for 10-15%. It's quite possible; I've lived in a nice neighborhood in NYC for 10 years and pay about 16% of my gross income on rent. (Rent stabilization is a powerful force, though, and you kind of had to be here 10 years ago to be paying 10 years ago's rents.)
Similar stabilizing forces apply if you have a mortgage as well. If you get a 30 year fixed, your monthly payment isn't going to go up over 30 years, but the value of that money is going to decrease, so it will be less of a burden over time because your income is likely to be adjusted to inflation over time. My advice to myself from 10 years ago would have been to buy and not rent; the dollar becomes worth less and less over time, but the roof over your head remains as useful as ever. If you have savings, the dollar decreasing in purchasing power just wipes out your savings. If you have debt, then the amount of time it takes to work off your debt decreases instead. Rent stabilization does give a lot of this advantage to renters, but it's rare throughout the US, NYC is kind of an anomaly.
Regardless, always be working on building that buffer. You want to be able to pay for housing for 1-2 years without working; once you have that buffer, then you can decide to use it to take time off, or you can keep it stashed away for "quirky billionaire buys my company and fires everyone". (Such things do apparently happen.) The lower your monthly expenses are, the easier that is, so keep your expenses low. The expense that I think is easiest to dig into is food; it can easily be $25-$30 to order a cheeseburger and fries for delivery (at least in NYC), but you will be hard-pressed to spend $30 on ingredients to make a single meal. If you have any free time whatsoever, there is a lot of savings at hand. If you have no free time, then hopefully you're being compensated for that.
I suppose the elephant in the room is the disparity in pay between non-FAANG and FAANG (or whatever people call it these days; Facebook, Amazon, and Netflix seem to be facing hard times, Google definitely seems interested in reducing compensation across the board, Apple's still doing pretty well), and things like that. There are no doubt great software engineers making $70k a year doing the same work that Google is paying people $400k a year to do. Try and get that job, and everything will be a lot easier for you. HN hates this, but if leetcode is what's standing between you and 4x the pay, you should probably just practice the leetcode. Your safety net and quality of life will increase dramatically, even if you move to a high-cost-of-living area. I definitely did that when I was applying to Google 10 years ago, and it was probably the best investment I ever made. $50 worth of books and a few evenings trying the exercises, and I got a 3x pay increase and a free move to NYC. Would recommend considering it.
(BTW, it seems like every company in existence has min/maxed the cost of living thing; so you are unlikely to get ahead by moving to a low cost-of-living area. Your employer will just pay you less and keep the savings for themselves. But if you start cooking food instead of ordering it, they'll never know, so that's free money for your savings and investments ;)
All companies pay you to put its interest before your own interest, but some companies are much worse and much more effective at working against the greater good than others. I'm not selling out to those just to add another few years to my already very achievable retirement.
I'm nearing the end of it now, and I've spent about $6000 over three months on things I'd categorize as normal living expenses (I took a couple of trips that added a few thousand to that). I'm not so well off that I can call this a trivial amount of money, but it wasn't the hardest decision ever, and I could make it work for much longer if I had to.
If you move to SEA your cost of living might be as low as $500/m depending on the frugality and living standards. Its not for everyone obviously due to various life circumstances (caring for relatives, wife with kids, illness). But for the young, single and free there is a world out there that doesn't require you to have a 300k/y job to survive in upper Manhattan and service the car / house loans :)
I wish people explored the world a bit more. It really does give perspective in terms of how the rest of 99% live outside of our tech bubble.
I set aside extra the rest of the year to smooth over the drop off in responses late-Oct/Jan period. By February I usually get swarmed with asks to tackle projects and can pick ones that are actually interesting.
Then it happens again in summer as people with enough money to not work take another 2-3 months off.
Lately I’ve been “specialized” in cloud ops mentorship. Lots of businesses still run monoliths, have no CICD or secops. I don’t automatically nudge them to break the monolith up; some are well organized and documented and work for the biz. Mostly I help them establish a smoother “idea to deployment” pipeline.
Though after 4 years it’s become pretty repetitive. I’ve been tinkering with the Linux kernel internals again, thinking about looking for lower level gigs.
I’ve done an about 1 year stint contracting, all with a single client pretty much staff aug web dev, then went back to fulltime.
I’d love to find engagements where you’re not tied to their 9-5 hours, have to attend their daily stand ups etc. I think the only opportunities like that on a standard full stack engineer skill set is building MVPs for new startups, or companies with no in house dev team
How do you expect the HR folks to validate (or even to have read what you wrote) these claims? A lot of people put the things you’re putting on their resumes.
They’re also getting resumes when from Meta, Amazon, Stripe, … engineers. Is it really surprising you’re not getting a call back?
This seems self-fulfilling? People who have applied to your company are saying they are interested in working there. The lack of response is the reason they lose interest.
You are much more expensive, so companies are extra cautious hiring you. And it's just common sense that there is an order of magnitude fewer managers than there are individual contributors. And many (most?) companies have a bias to promoting internally.
I recall interviewing someone who had just a terrible technical interview, but honestly seemed like a good fit. In the interview it came out he had worked for and with two people who I knew fairly well (and respected and trusted.) Two phone calls later, and based on their experiences with him, he was on to the next round.
Okay, maybe that's not a fair argument on my part because you're actually using the positive feedback that you got from the mutual acquiantances and they could have given negative feedback, but it's still the case that some candidates don't get that opportunity at all.
In this case it was a benefit both to me and to the candidate.
Does knowing people in a field give someone an advantage
Considering that, minus the short period of COVID lockdowns, an entire generation has really only known a healthy economy (since ~2008): I think it's going to be a tough transition.
We usually have boom and bust cycles at least every decade. COVID lockdown era gave people the false sense that we had already weathered the storm.
So this is actually a warning to me as a hiring manager. Good staff developers absolutely are technical leaders but if they have day-to-day people management skills I'm at best confused, at worst skeptical. Managing 12 engineers is a full time job before you even get to staff developer responsibilities.
Found a new job (non-startup) by responding to one of those. Signed the offer and was going to quit FB on a certain date, then got the FB layoff severance package a week before that date as a nice bonus.
I also interviewed at Google and got the thumbs up to proceed to team matching, but no team matches after a month. This makes me believe that they have at least a partial hiring freeze, although their recruiters are pretending that this is not the case - they're just saying that team matching takes a bit longer. Google interviews were useful as practice for the other jobs, but not for actually getting an offer.
I didn’t get an offer from NFLX but they came across extremely well, i’m very bullish on the company solely based on the culture and talent I met.
The MSFT experience was the exact opposite!
Not making a judgement call on the use of the stock markers, just doubting it's done for the efficiency.
Maybe the complacency combined with the large organization side?
It feels like MSFT would be 'safer' if less exciting.
Even in down markets, hiring tends to pick up in January as managers get their hiring budgets for the new year and are back in the office.
Hang in there!
I've had a handful of tech screen interviews, but only one* has progressed all the way to a full interview loop so far, and I got a generic rejection a few days later. I have been waiting 2.5 weeks and counting for a phone screen result from another (larger, public) tech company. Nothing close to an offer yet.
I'm considering just taking more time off until things speed up again - I can afford it, but I worry about how hard it will be to get hired again with a "long" gap of 2+ years.
* for "Senior Software Engineer" at a medium-sized pre-IPO tech company
So far, I have one other interview from an internal referral, but haven’t heard anything back from the ~10-15 other applications I’ve sent out. I’m getting a bit discouraged and feel similarly as you - it would be nice to take more time off (maybe I don’t actually love working in tech?), but I have the same worried as you. Feels good to vent in this thread, though :)
I felt a bit bad about posting here, because the thread is ostensibly about layoffs, while I quit voluntarily, so any feelings I'm feeling about the situation now are my own fault :)
But it's somehow comforting to see I'm not the only one marveling at the sudden slowdown. It eases the inevitable fear that it's just something unattractive about me or something I'm personally doing wrong.
Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required.
I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicidal and throw you into existential crisis.
In this modality you are test driving each other.
I got frustrated by interviews where I told them I've been doing this for over 25 years and they're like "ok how do you show the list of files in this directory at the bash prompt"
I've had the "what the hell job are you hiring for?" response in my head many times
I've got no interest groveling my way up some kind of hierarchy to eventually get to a position I thought I was coming in to do in the first place.
This has turned out to be a perfectly acceptable shortcut.
You could say it's more like petitioning for a job as opposed to applying for one
You are making sure your passions align with your work.
If you can find motivation beyond a paycheck and do it then you're more confident you'll enjoy it for the long haul.
Jobs are easy. Satisfaction is the hard thing.
Strictly speaking yes this is uncompensated labor but if that's all you see, let me help a bit.
What if the target is NASA, Wikimedia foundation, maybe some software for Doctors without borders? They all have salaried positions and volunteering is probably a solid way to know if it's a good fit
Some people have passions that are not monetizable.
I can see both sides of the argument, some people want to just do their stuff and leave, whereas others might wholly devote themselves to the problem.
> … you are test driving each other.
Unless you think the way they run their open source projects is the way their entire company works, you’re really not.
The strategy strikes me as a little weird but not crazy. If you like open source already, it might make a lot of sense.
This might be true, but at least the skills are easy to show off on a resume and will help you with other interviews. Open-source contributions might vary drastically in nature and might be harder to leverage as experience/proof of skill
There's no guarantees anywhere in this strategy. But there's nice correlations
Another strategy for getting intro to users of OSS software is to join discord and start offering help and then possibly leveraging that to mention the help could be more permanent.
Do be careful though not to be explicitly soliciting since that is usually against the community policies so a little bit of a needle to thread.
"Doing work for free", as some others have pointed out in a negative light, is fundamental to how modern software works. If you're not contributing then you're profiting off of the minority that does...
Real world example: my company has our react UI library open sourced. I don’t think outside the org uses it, but it’s an open source project “owned” by a company. Another example would be something like React.
If you want to contribute to open source, do so with the mind that you are helping a shared community (or maybe just for fun). Don’t do it because you think it will help you get a job (I’m not even sure parent is correct that it will).
As a hiring manager, the open source projects and blogs people sell on their CVs is impressive if it looks like self-motivated interest, and annoying if it looks thinly self-promotive. The two inherently intersect but when it skews to the extreme of self-selling it isn't taken as seriously from what I observe.
Mostly joking but I don't think such a bonus is a crazy idea
I totally love this suggestion btw, but I think it serves when you are doing this continuously rather than when you are pressed for the job asap.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/19fr_36WOzKlq_zyGP2RdxMEs...
Good luck!
I was still getting a fair amount of interviews though. Fortunately I landed an offer in August, because without it I may still be jobless. But the layoffs, freezes, and continued whiteboarding style interviews and things are definitely a trifecta.
It was my first job search in the post-COVID era, aka the era of remote work, and wow was it different. Traditionally, I'd see a handful of jobs that looked interesting each week, and would be one of a handful of applicants. Now that geography isn't really a barrier, there were far more options, but far more applicants. I'd see 20+ roles per week that were a good fit, but each would have 40-200+ applicants, even for the senior (Director/VP) level roles I was looking for.
I've got over 20 years experience from startup to massive tech companies, and applied to 58 jobs. 12 of those led to an initial discussiopn with a recruiter, and 3 of those led to a full interview loop and 1 job offer.
Since accepting the job offer, I've heard from 4 more of the companies I applied to and they were interested in going forward with the process. For each, it was at least 5 weeks since my initial application.
Happy to hear you got back on your feat so quickly
Sifting through the noise was tough. I resorted to a daily alert for each job title, since that kept the number to process each day down to a manageable level, and I made strong use of the "hide this job" function of LinkedIn to keep ones that didn't feel like a good fit from popping up again.
Again, software engineering is such a great career, when you can create valuable things for others in case of crisis.
One example, they have no idea on how to build fast, secure and cheap websites!
Trying to fit in ideation between leetcode prep and applying for jobs
Firstly, build your connection based on quality software. Find the first customer is the most difficult task!
One way, is through friend connection. If a friend's friend is a boss at a company, then it's first good step.
The most important thing, is you need to deliver usable software!
A good friend have mine who has been focusing on career coaching has started to put together a few articles [1, 2] targeted more at folks impacted by recent layoffs. Like so many of these articles, the intent isn't to have deep, novel ideas -- instead, it's to pull together things that you probably already know, think about them clearly, and get some comfort in the next steps of job search. If a small number of readers have just one thing "click", it has some value, in my mind.
This is one of the rougher markets we've seen for engineers in a while, but in my opinion it's still a worker's market -- in almost every niche I interact with, hiring has slowed but we are still having a hard time filling the open positions we do have, and we're always looking!
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7001201... [2] https://alignedclarity.substack.com/p/streamline-your-resume...
Senior Data Engineer with 15+ years of Python experience and a background in Physics and Math. Can't wait for the new "Who's Hiring"
I’m much more curious in 4-5 months. I assume VC funding is harder to get now, for example, but I don’t think that’ll make a massive impact for a little while.
I talked with them for an hour that next Monday AM about the opportunities my teams have open, one of which was highly relevant to their skills, and by the time we chatted, they had 3-4 interviews with other companies scheduled. Joined the dots to the hiring manager and recruiters. They introduced us to lots of other Twitter engineers too which was amazing and very helpful to me.
Our interviews happened with them 10 days later and we moved forward to make an offer; we are still working through offer details with them (and they have multiple companies making offers). We’ve also got several strong applicants for this role.
I’m glad to see many of the impacted folks are quickly finding places to land because the cruelty of Twitter’s next chapter under Elon is a stain on the industry and the world.
What’s salary, what’s a performance-based annual bonus in cash, what’s equity-based compensation and within that what’s granted upfront and what’s performance-based and granted annually, what’s the signing bonus, etc. Vesting schedules also can differ somewhat dramatically (the Amazon offers as one example are very backloaded), some companies have a history of pricing in assumed growth in equities, there are lots of moving parts (some of which are employee-favorable, like pricing on-hire awards on a Trailing 50d Average; some of which are more employer-favorable like assuming 15% annual appreciation in equity price).
Recently lots of companies have moved to quarterly vesting which is very employee friendly
I’m guessing you’re a startup meaning illiquid options - high risk with a tiny chance of a high reward after its all said and done, and the standard 90 day exercise window upon leaving is very employee unfriendly
But thanks for sharing!
Layoff is a layoff regardless of whether you get fired over email, text or a personal call from the CEO saying how great you are. It was the latter for me several years ago and didn't sting any less.
However, I've noticed that the LinkedIn spam is getting increasingly outrageous in their offers (I'm in quant finance in London). This surprised me given the market is supposedly cooling off with lots of free agent talent, but I'm getting multiple offers a day promising 300-500k (GBP) compensation, sometimes even fixed base comp! It sounds a bit too good to be true but the frequency of messages and the numbers in those messages have both been blowing up over the last 3-4 months.
Not sure what's driving this but it's definitely unusual given the market and location. I'd say it's about double the top range I've seen in previous years.
Company 1: Terrible over-engineered music firm (no users). Full 7 rounds, exams (which were easy shit), but "VP" ghosted me, he was a former twitter guy, seems like he wants to hire a twitter guy.
Company 2: Credit card company. Full 5 rounds. Four hours of exams. The recruiter feedback from team was "too much of a people manager", then ghosted. Someone lied and said I was non technical - yet i passed the technical exams. I used the term "we" too much explaining projects.
Company 3 (automatic): Finished the exam in LUA for a openresty opensource project (didn't even know lua). Everything worked nicely. I was told he didn't like how i laid out the lua.
Company 4: "Not enough of a people manager."
Company 5,6,7,...: Recuriters make me do calls and exams then ghosted. I don't think they have jobs - just recruiting cause that is what they do.
Exams:
1) using openrusty to create a application load balancer in lua
2) using python to create a url shortener
3) using php, complex input file, then output file (sorting, hasing, parsing)
4) using ruby, connect to an oracle db then do complex queries (outer joins etc). Just for hazing sake, they named the tables keywords eg: "join".
I will say the take home tests at these companies are fun. I have a family and I am very nervous.
I like take-home tests too, but am reluctant to do them in languages I don't have a lot of recent experience in. Not that I can't ramp up enough to get them working, but when someone who writes that language every day looks at the code of a guy who just read a few tutorials, he's going to be irked by lots of little things. Not the impression you want to give going forward. Only exception is if I can solve the problem in a more academic language, e.g. Scheme, or something else they don't use there.
That's probably a deal-breaker at places that want to hire a developer with X years of experience in some specific language. So if I found that was the case, I'd probably just pass on it, as it's obviously not me they're looking for. Whether they realize/intend it or not, they're filtering for someone who has said language and tooling pre-loaded into their brain.
How clearly was the marking criteria or rubric communicated to you?
If you’re getting frustrated and have the financial capacity for it, maybe consider a break during December?
I'm paying $100/hr (negotiable) for skills in { Rust/Actix webdev, Unreal Engine plugin development, computer vision, audio processing, signal processing, ML }. These roles will convert to salary/equity later on, once the project outgrows my ability to self-fund.
We're building a cloud-based AI film and music production suite.
In any case, I'm sorry to anyone impacted by this down tech cycle. The world will get back to its senses, and tech will continue to eat everything else not-tech.
Edit: I broke the contact form. Email me directly. echelon@gmail.com
Actix/sqlx isn't Rails, but it's 90% of the way there. The rich type system is liberating, and form validation is far easier with Actix/serde than rspec.
I've only had one interview this year. It was with a FAANG. I easily passed and got an offer, but then layoffs were announced and they had to revoke.
I've only had two software interviews in my life, so I don't have much to compare it to.
At least FAANG don't really care about those things. On the other hand if you know your way around assembly on esoteric hardware, the stereotypical FAANG whiteboarding questions like "reverse a linked list" shouldn't be a problem.
All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field.
Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through.
Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but I'm working fewer hours per day and working on more interesting things. A lot of that has to do with transitioning out of management, I think. I don't miss it :)
For the first job, I bill hourly for the time I spend working. Here, I develop web applications to validate machine learning models for a company; I help organize results in a way that allows ML engineers to easily "spot check" the results of ML runs on data through a web interface.
The second job I have is in the "web3" space developing applications that run on a specific blockchain in which I've specialized. Compensation here is based on milestones and paid out in cryptocurrency.
In both cases, I am transparent about the progress I'm making and compensated accordingly. The hourly rate I charge as a contractor brings in an equivalent salary to what I had as a full-time employee in about 900 hours per year, which works out to be about 18/hours per week if you assume 2 weeks off.
In principle, I'm likely someone that hiring managers are looking for, and really a pretty good deal. In practice, I'll probably just retire rather than throw my hat into the ring again. Or--since I have a vindictive sense of humor--maybe I'll spend my retirement doing "fake" interviews with prospective employers.
I think it's this one of the parts that really ticks someone like me off. Most interviewers know almost upfront 10 minutes into into the interview if they are going to reject you, yet they can often drag on for an hour, under the guise of knowing, your 'approach' a problem.
Making the wrong call would entail the interviewee potentially feeling offended, which could be an issue if the ultimate decision was to make an offer to them -- they might reject the offer due to this experience alone. Not to mention it would be pretty awkward to work with a new colleague where you walked out on him as an interviewer. (In general you really don't want colleagues to know that you voted to pass on them)
In general if a candidate thinks they're getting nowhere they can suggest to stop the interview. Nobody can stop you from cutting it short and leave if those 50 minutes are important to you.
(Also, FWIW I don't think saving a hypothetical 50 minutes of interview time is what the GP was specifically referring to...)
More disturbing are the cases where the hiring organization knows in advance that they _will not_ hire a candidate. IMO, it's unethical to waste someone's time on that.
In my personal experience, I had a FAANG drag me along for six months, passing screen after screen, only to be put off at the end for a "flaw" that was obvious from day one on my resume. I'll accept your judgement, but don't waste 50 hours of my time discovering something you could have learned in 60s by reading my resume.
Hirers complain about not being able to find candidates. This is one huge reason why.
I've been thinking about charging $1000, up front, for a day's interview. Sounds like an arrogant, asshole move. But still, what would be better?
Strangely, I had one place basically self-flagellate at how bad they were at their response time (again, in an automated response), and never followed up again.
I feel like part of my problem is that I worked in an industry previously that inflated my titles. I'm applying to entry-level/associated positions with "Director" on my resume, mostly because I'm trying to upskill things I didn't get to learn, in an environment where I'm not managing the whole department.
It's disheartening to see LinkedIn say "Yeah, want to see how you stack up against the 100+ other applicants?"
I have 2 YOE as a SWE, got laid off in August from a startup that was Series A and generating no revenue. I was able to get interviews in September/October, and got far at 2 companies but got rejected by one and ghosted by another. I have found it's much harder to get an interview this month as layoffs increase. I'm pretty much hoping that once the holidays are over, things will pick up again, but I am pretty worried that I may be forced to just join the military or something because I can't get a job in tech.
And if you don't believe in karma, I saw a linkedin post by the guy who ghosted me about how he got screwed over by the company and let go. It's not super healthy, but it still feels good sometimes...
Keep fighting the good fight and don’t let yourself be under-valued.
Put another way, if you're just looking for junior with keywords that's one thing but means you're just a number. But you may be looking for specific individuals with a track record which, given the right match, may be good but you need the right match.
That assumes you're in the northern hemisphere!
To anyone who is job hunting now and finding a slow market: things will change, we will get through this.
Just curious, as a flyover midwesterner, it seems like no one here is affected, nor are we getting any interviewees from FAANG into the pipeline suddenly.
I interviewed at smaller companies but the main problem was they were out of touch with TC and unwilling to offer equity, and at least one place was kind of rude about it when I asked. Unless you’re desperate, no one from FAANG is going to work below market for a place that doesn’t give employees a stake in the business. Unless you’re Netflix and you offer dump-trucks worth of cash, equity is where the upside is.
He did ask if he could come back within a week, stating that the work env was horrible, and we told him he is welcome to if he wants, but at the end he decided to stay at Amazon. It's also not like we have a chill team - I just try to make sure people don't work OT unless it's strictly necessary (about once or twice a year). Other than that though, we do expect people to put in their 8 hours on a semi-flexible schedule.
The search so far has been pretty bad. Probably in part because of the timing (a week before thanksgiving, but it’s the same story every time. Any job I want I won’t get and any job I don’t want I can get.
I expect things to maybe pick up a little in early December, but I’m honestly kinda defeated. My last job was far from perfect, but I was planning on using to save up the industry afterwards which ofc won’t happen now, at least not in the timeframe I envisioned. Worst case I have to accept a pay cut that will nip those plans very quickly.
I didn't get laid off, but. Quit Google at the height of the frenzy last December. Coasted for a while doing my own thing and entertaining a job offer that fell through. After that through the spring and summer it was actually slow and difficult finding work. I signed a contract that was initially very exciting and promising but then found there was a crypto/eth association I was not comfortable with, so started looking immediately and was very worried because of the layoffs that were starting to blow up.
But in the end I actually found it not bad and I had the choice of basically two excellent and exciting jobs. I'm still not 100% certain I picked the right one, but here goes! And holy crap am I tired of interviews.
Similarly I have a friend who got laid off from Meta in the latest round, and she's already interviewing in boatloads of places.
I think the key thing is that compensation that's out there won't match what is made at a FAANG, esp with the latest round of layoffs. But I'm personally fine with that. In exchange for getting my soul back.
Otherwise I will look into non-tech related work to meet expenses.
Here in the EU, either her career gap (due to covid + country change + taking time to upskill herself) gets in the way, or C-level German language does, and if nothing else, they're hiring Seniors.
If anyone is willing to hire a bright and hard-working beginner with an MBA in Finance, drop me an email at me [at] manishgill [dot] com
Any chance of upskilling her quickly through some intensive German lessons over the Christmas break?
From memory the German market can be surprisingly insular in its use of German. Not as tough as the French, but close. Also, maybe she can work remotely for a Dutch company? If she speaks good English the Dutch don’t care at all.
And yeah, great idea re: jobs for Dutch companies. Will definitely check that out!
It's a bit scary. So, I am spending some time on the side sharpening my technical skills. For e.g., Crafting Interpreters and Designing Data Intensive Applications.
The responses have been: not a cultural fit, wasn’t the perfect match (German speaking responses), overqualified (mostly from western countries), under qualified (from countries like Czechia, Poland, Romania,etc.) for junior positions.
Getting interviews has been difficult and sparse. Contributed to FOSS, and keep learning programming/higher maths. Hope is low.
Long story short while he was working on tasks in this weird ass way to interview about half way into the week he gets a message saying the role had been closed. Suddenly. There was no inkling or hint that the role was tenantive.
Shortly before he he process to interview and maybe hire my friend there was some message or rumor that they were trying to scoop up laid off Twitter employees.
I dunno. It seems shady. Avoid Auromatic not for the politics but because it’s not well run at all.
Studying?? For a job interview? Do you seriously need to do whiteboard algorithm reverse a linked list kinda coding as a senior in the US? Or what is it that you need to study before an interview?
Would love to know any good job boards if people know
October: Peloton 500, Intel "thousands", Oracle 200, Microsoft 1k, Zillow 300
November: Opendoor 550, Twitter 3700+ (probably 5000+ after the 'sign the hardcore decree or be terminated'), Zendesk 350, Salesforce '100s', Meta 11000, Amazon 10000, Cisco 4000, HP 4000-6000, Stripe 1000+, Lyft 683
Hasn't happened yet but reported to do so soon: Google 10000[1]
Notice it's accelerating, both in size of layoffs and and how many tech companies are laying people off. Granted part of it may be trying to squeeze it in before the end of the year for financial purposes.
Source: https://tech.co/news/tech-companies-layoffs
EDIT: Crunchbase is saying 73,000 workers in the tech sector have been laid off in 2022, so far. Also has more companies on their list.
https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs-2022/
[1] https://www.kron4.com/news/bay-area/another-massive-tech-com...
I see you mostly mentioned big tech corporations. What is the situation for it roles at non tech corporations and at middle and small tech companies?
Although those numbers you mentioned might sound bad, it is possible that those are the final numbers for lay offs for those companies and once they met the numbers they target and stabilize their financial situations, there won't be any more rounds of lay offs. They might even rehire some people if their economical status will improve.
A couple of these stories I've seen suggested for some of these companies it's not all, or maybe even the majority, technical people (like it says 'layoffs were focused on X, Y, and Z departments', where it might have marketing or HR in there), but there's none I've found that has made it clear exactly how many people in technical roles.
Applied for a small pre-ipo biz lately, I’m over qualified for the position and respectfully let them know that I’d expect a very clear and direct path to a more senior position in max 12 months.
Interview process is slow but ongoing. I was told that it prob won’t happen before Jan.