You now need to do 15% better in technical interviews than at the start of 2022 | Hacker News Reader

You now need to do 15% better in technical interviews than at the start of 2022

blog.interviewing.io

52 pointsleeny24 comments

The charts presented in this article seem designed to be misleading - different scales, and large offsets from zero designed to make small absolute differences look large. Of course, I wouldn't expect anything less from a blatant ad for interviewing prep from interviewing.io

We used 2 different axes because the values for each of the lines were different. For instance, in the graph comparing open tech jobs to the bar, the bar is the average technical in interviews from 1 to 4. It wouldn't have made sense to put that on the same axis as the number of open tech jobs (hundreds of thousands).

I also just fixed the first graph. It still has 2 axes, but the order of magnitude is more realistic.

Why not just use the same axis? It's still incredibly misleading.

It's on its own axis because the blue line represents the number of open tech jobs across all disciplines, whereas the red line is engineers only.

The red axis is quite confusing, as "total engineers looking for jobs" is a much more useful point of comparison rather than "new engineers" starting from 0 at an arbitrary date.

That is, it's more important to know whether we went from 100K to 110K (and how 110K job-seekers compares to the number of job openings) than from "0" to "10".

Side note: how can the "Q4 so far" graph only go up to ~1-2000? More people than that were laid off from Twitter alone.

I'd go further and consolidate the chart into one line: engineers per open tech jobs. It's really hard to get much out of the red line being so close to the bottom.

Doing this would be easier to understand as a job seeker. For a given job post, I want to know if I'm competing against 10 or 50 other people on the job market.

This article sucks. Those graphs are horribly misleading, it's just a blatant ad.

Author here. Publishing this post brings us no pleasure. I originally had that in a footnote and then moved it up after seeing these comments.

One might say that because we’re a mock interview platform, publishing this post is self-serving. The reality is that we take no joy in this content. Ever since hiring freezes and layoffs have started dominating the news cycle, we’ve lost about half of our interview volume, many of the prominent employers who were hiring through us as recently as Q2 of this year have paused. So, trust us, we’d much rather be writing about something else while living in a hiring boom. And look, whether we want to see it or not or whether we have vested interest in publishing it or not, the data is the data, and the data doesn’t care. Realistically, neither will the employers who are still interviewing and hiring.

I'm a customer and fan of interviewing.io but I'm also disappointed in this post. It's not actionable information for candidates.

A lot of the interview prep industry deliberately stokes interview anxiety to drive sales. I appreciate that you folks have a product (and marketing tone, usually) that emphasizes results over hype, but I think this post falls short.

One of the things I don't understand about hn is that advertisements with only sensational content like this can easily get on the front page. Is it because people just looked at the content title and voted?

it portrays what is happening in the supply/demand of software engineers. this is highly relevant to every SE, especially one's that are hiring.

i don't understand why people are so mad at this site, I say, don't shoot the messenger.

Because this is not measurable.

Also because soft skills matter a lot when getting a job.

Why do these graphs all start in 2022? It's impossible to put this into perspective with so little data. Is the market more difficult than 2020? How about 2016? How about 2014?

TrueUp doesn't have historical data from before 2022. We couldn't find another index of open tech jobs, sadly. If you know of one, please lmk, and we'll rerun the numbers.

Here's the raw TrueUp data: https://www.trueup.io/job-trend

I've used https://www.itjobswatch.co.uk/ in the past.

Because it’s just a an ad and should be ignored. Leave this trash for LinkedIn.

The companies they picked for this analysis makes me seriously doubt this is representative of most of the market for tech jobs.

We commented on this in the post. While we are targeting a specific slice of the market, FAANG and FAANG adjacent, so are our users. It's true that these companies run a process that's not indicative of the whole industry. However, because they’re relative rather than absolute, we feel reasonably confident that these numbers can be generalized to the overall hiring market.

We also felt that even if this data WEREN'T entirely generalizable, it would be interesting to a big enough subset of the HN population to merit sharing.

The layoff data from the analysis you used to create the red line includes less than 40 companies and at a glance seems to only include one of FAANG (Netflix)?

Not sure what "FAANG-adjacent" means but if it just means "top-tier companies" I'm not sure the others are that either. Many of the listed companies I've never heard of, a lot look like overvalued startups which of course would get hit hard by lack of easy money, Coinbase is in crypto.

I find it very hard to believe you can make a generalization to many/most companies with this data, I know for a fact several large Fortune 500 companies (banks for example) are still hiring in huge numbers. JPMorgan for example is hiring >2000 engineers this year, that number exceeds the entirety of your "additional engineers on market because of layoffs." The only companies listed on TrueUp in the Fortune 10 are the tech-first ones so huge employers are missing from the dataset.

Personally I think the title of the blog post is misleading at best and pretty close to clickbait.

Seems like you have a larger pool of potential customers so i'll take this as a well time ad. Nothing about free prep sessions or guidance to actually help folks, might lead to a better ad consider the response here.

Just a thought, it's gonna be a bumpy ride. Roci out.

blogspam is now allowed in HN?

flagged

This domain actually gets posted here a lot, always by the same poster (the owner of the company).

I Doubt this is measurable

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