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Comment by debacle | Hacker News Reader

Hiring has slowed to a crawl, and the hardest hit appear to be junior/low level devs not going into the startup space.

I'm seeing a lot of hiring for senior positions. I'm getting more, not fewer emails for interviews as a CTO. Meanwhile, it seems like unless a new grad is headed to a FAANG they are not finding jobs the way they were a year ago.

This is how things started in 2007, anecdotally. The ladder got pulled up earlier in the year, and then right around the holiday season everything fell apart. It took a good 2-3 years for everything to recover, but in that time salaries were down roughly 20-30%.

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I made well over 100 applications last April - May; as a grad student close to their master's at a top EU University. I had more success from FAANG companies than startups. I eventually landed a very low paying job at a fintech startup but they had financial issues. Come mid july I found myself interviewing for a FAANG company, and today I passed probation period.

The fact that I was good enough for a FAANG company, but unhirable to almost everyone else is a bit beyond me.

I've seen it said on HN say FAANG hiring is as much to keep other people from hiring you/to stop you from creating startups, as it is to have you do a work for them

FAANG have the resources to train juniors, startups like juniors a lot but usually don't have the resources to absorb employees who need hand holding.

I understand that, but even here I am not given any handholding, we discuss what needs to be done, if needed I write technical document, get feedback, and then implement.

It's possible that your work environment is set up to provide the necessary guidance even though it doesn't feel like handholding to you. At smaller companies you might just get a vague description of a task and be left on your own for weeks to figure it out.

That's very likely, ask and ye shall receive is very common here, and the company gives the resources to anyone and everyone to learn.

From my POV, this is like university, but easier, and I get paid.

Where did you look for jobs in the EU - as in which message boards/websites etc...?

LinkedIn and company websites mostly.

I see. And how did you find the company websites? The reason I ask is could the type of companies in your filter be the ones just not doing quality work? And interestingly my acquaintance is having the opposite problem where they are willing to train but are having to work very hard to find good CS grads in the EU.

I was looking mostly for companies in Scandinavia, NL and Germany through LinkedIn, or just big names. Some companies had easy apply, others sent you to their website.

I have been told by people in r/cscareerquestionsEU that I may be too expensive due to master's but the "absence" of experience to make me unemployable.

FAANG care about education credentials, startups care about pragmatism and getting things done.

How do you evaluate that the person can't get things done without even interviewing them? I had 3 internships, and built all sorts of systems.

Only a single startup gave me the chance to prove that I can get things done.

FAANG on the other hand seems to care about getting things done, or as we say, having a bias for action.

Maybe some of them do, but Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Amazon didn't care about my education, which is good because I don't have a degree.

The scale of hiring at FAANG companies is on another level. Google's summer intern class is probably much larger than the number of FTEs at my current job. They need to contact tens or hundreds of thousands of prospective candidates. I'm not shocked some people have an easier time getting interviews from FAANG companies.

This must vary by industry. I just left one big bank to go work for another one. Both are hiring like mad, both junior and senior roles. Both actually have pretty amazing internship programs and at least one has an incredible program for veterans.

Just to add on to this, pretty huge demand for SWE/SRE roles in platform development (internal and public cloud) and security (compliance, automation, etc)

Theoretically it shouldn't vary much by either industry or technical role, since qualified tech people are basically fungible in the sense that they can train themselves to basic competence in any area, so the fast hiring side should be seeking out workers from the slow hiring pools to where it all evens out.

I would definitely agree if we’re talking leaves on the org tree. Once you start building new layers you really need people that have been there and done that (more aligned to use case/industry than specific tech) or you end up with thee we blind leading the blind.

Enterprise hiring is a mystery to me. Big companies, especially banks are so flush with money that they should be able to hire any number of decent developers in any general area just like turning on a faucet: allow remote work and offer too much money to refuse. I agree you want relevant experts to get things started, but for that you just hire a few the same way and use them to train other leaders.

If what you really mean is that banks are trying to poach the same handful of employees from each other, then I can see why that would be a challenge.

From a big company's careers page, enterprise hiring starts with application systems requiring accounts and asking questions like they're running a federal background check. It's a big signal of disinterest. When you say banks are hiring like mad I trust you don't mean they're relying on experts going through the front door.

Ppl really seem to forget that its highly dependent on country you live in.

Developing or fresh developed countries have insane growth opportunities for devs.

Companies are running away from US and similar expensive/costly places.

A year ago when the pandemic was still front of mind for everyone? Finding a job when you are early career is almost always tough. Sure some times are tougher than others but its almost always very difficult unless you have a top degree or spent a lot of time doing interview prep.

Yep, the pandemic caused tech companies to hire like crazy because so much money shifted from physical goods to services to digital. Many companies saw it as a once in a lifetime opportunity to catch a long living change at the start. Didn’t really work out, hence many of the layoffs, but the job market a year ago was so hot it could melt steel.

> This is how things started in 2007, anecdotally. The ladder got pulled up earlier in the year, and then right around the holiday season everything fell apart. It took a good 2-3 years for everything to recover, but in that time salaries were down roughly 20-30%.

Yes. It really sucks for new graduates and entry-level because all of a sudden you are competing with people with years of experience for the same salary and position.

Also importantly, the consequences of graduating into a recession can be quite lasting. Based on research going into the last recession ('08), it takes up to 10 for the effects to disappear[1]. And if your base case is the last couple of years in software - well it seems likely that was a huge bubble that won't be replicated any time soon.

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[1] https://www.nber.org/digest/nov06/career-effects-graduating-...

I wasn't entry-level at the time but I was somewhat shifting roles when dot-com deflated. I was fortunately able to land a new and, in many ways better, position quickly but compensation definitely took a hit over the next number of years. Everything worked out in the end as it ended up being the on-ramp for a good position (and another role change). But it wouldn't have been an ideal situation for at least some.

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