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Comment by tarokun-io | Hacker News Reader

Interviewed with about 28 companies for almost 3 months, without a single offer! I was starting to get really worried about money and burned out from interviewing. In the past I've never interviewed with more than 2 or 3 before getting an offer

I now this is incredibly privileged. I'm not humble-bragging, just observing the change in the market.

As things usually turn out, during the last week of the 3-month search I received 3 different offers all at once.

For reference and if it matters: I've got 14 years of experience.

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I had the exact same experience about 5 months ago. > 40 applications, ~30 responses from recruiter, did at least 1 phone screen at 20 of them and around 10 full interviews (4-6 modules each). It was brutal and I don't recommend it.

Almost 20 years of experience at great large & small companies in the SF Bay Area. I like to think that I'm relatively intelligent and competent, but man, some of the interviews were torture. Even interviews for what are mostly CRUD web app development positions were doing l33tcode interviews (literally, I googled them afterwards) of moderate CS algorithms.

After 2 months of interviews I did get 3 offers at the same time. I've interviewed around here since ~2005 and I have to say it's still a crap shoot of if you'll get a good interview process. Some companies were great and had well rounded modules, focused on leadership, communication, design and just a little bit of programming. Others threw multiple l33tcode puzzles at you and had no idea what they really needed. Very frustrating.

I always ponder, after the years of experience - wouldn't you just leave the interview if it feels like torture?

I never ended up in a good place when it felt this way...

I'd say it's unprofessional to out & out leave the interview. Maybe for practical purposes it doesn't make a difference (though it can be a small world sometimes and you never know when something might come back to haunt you) but there's a certain amount of social norm & politeness involved, even if your own sentiment is "well they aren't respecting my time so why should I care?"

Also it can come down to just a bad recruiting/HR process and the place itself is perfectly fine to work for, and maybe that doesn't come through in the initial screening nonsense but you figure it out from the final round. Or you just end up not having a choice if the market is tight and you would end up wanting to take the job for the paycheck even if it's only 6-12 months while you find something better.

I guess depends on the context, I walked away from interviews where people were non-professional, rude or just plain wasting my time due to poor job description and completely different expectations. On the bright side, you save them time too.

Also I would say poor HR practices are correlated to the quality of the workplace but that's just a hunch that I follow. Not science backed.

I know this limits job opportunities, but a few years ago I started pre-screening the interview process. I ask specifically if the interview will be the whiteboard-type. If the answer is yes, I politely refuse the interview and tell them that I don't participate in whiteboard interviews. This is all done tactfully of course, but I refuse at this point in my career to be part of the tech hazing rituals. I have many other things I enjoy doing, rather than spending 6 months on Leetcode to ultimately make someone feel good about their previously worked out binary tree algorithm.

This has eliminated 90% of the stress involved in job searching, and I'm confident that I can get an offer at basically every interview I get into.

I'm not going to get a position at Amazon or a SF company, but after seeing what friends have gone through I have no interest anyway. I also make coastal money living in the Midwest, which was achieved by the exact method I outlined above.

Now if I was in a desperate situation I would probably be forced to go through with these whiteboard interviews, which would suck - you do what you have to do though. However, I wish more engineers would refuse whiteboard interviews. If more job seekers did this I feel like we could change the industry, but the whiteboard philosophy is so widespread that it's an uphill battle.

Thanks for sharing. If I may ask, when was the last time you looked for a job? I'm saying this because maybe you're having trouble due to ageism that you didn't encounter before.

I think age-ism isn’t that relevant when you’re under 40. There will be limited positions for someone who wants staff+ compensation though.

what's staff+ comp nowadays?

Very wide range depending on the company. Startups and the like $200K/yr+ and equity. The equivalent at Google is $500K - ?.

As an aside, Staff Engineers have to ride this strange line of being tech leads, managers, architects, and ICs. In my experience, one part or all parts will suffer. Will Larson's book[1] dances well around the ambiguity, but basically when you take a Staff Engineer job, it'll be unclear what you're signing up for.

1 - https://staffeng.com/book

levels.fyi

Ageism is often conflated with higher compensation expectations.

While it's certainly very real, it's conflated with a lot of things: compensation expectations, specialization, potentially not up on current trends, maybe set in ways, etc.

I think a big one is there just being fewer old programmers so you don't see them as much so you think there's ageism. But the market has grown a ton over the past 10-20 years.

None of my friends in their 40s have trouble getting jobs. This includes software jobs that tend to skew young, such as game dev and startups.

I wouldn't doubt it exists, but anecdotally it doesn't seem to be such a huge problem that you can't continue coding until a standard retirement age.

Maybe naive but I don't really see 40s as ageism territory in general. That said, a lot of people adapt. Go into management. More externally facing roles. Different types of companies.

I guess what's old is new?

In my 20s I was told 30 is the end of the line. In my 30s I was told its the 40s. Now the bar is higher.

Maybe I'm part of a large enough cohort of programmers that we continually push ageism out, and due to that it will be 'solved' as we hit our 60s and 70s.

The key is probably that you can't be doing at 40 what you're doing at 20. Whether that means better technical skills, better management skills, better communication skills, just better able to navigate a company and the industry...

It probably does mean that, if someone just wants to code, they probably have a higher bar than people interested in doing a more diverse set of things.

I'm in my late 50s. When I hear about the salaries that much younger folks are pulling down in the FAANG companies I'm generally pretty shocked - I've never made anything close to that and don't have any expectations to. My expenses are way lower than most of the younger folks in tech because my house is paid off (will be in about a month), we drive 20 year old cars and we're quite frugal. For most of the past decade I've worked in startups where the pay hasn't been great but the work has been very interesting (in some cases, fun, even) so I'm willing to make that tradeoff. To summarize: I'd be willing to work for $90K/year if it was working on something I found interesting in an early stage startup (You get more control the earlier you get in). Are my compensation expectations high?

I wouldn't say so....90k is low for someone with a lot of experience. New grads expect more than that.

Yeah, that's exactly my point. The post above mine was implying that older workers demand higher pay. But I think it's the younger workers that demand higher pay.

The skew for pay in the dev industry is weird. When I graduated with my BS (2008) I was happy enough to find a junior position in game dev on the west coast at 40k. Mind you that was during a lovely market crash, but after 4 years in game dev my pay didn't increase very much (but my profit sharing did /eyeroll). Fast forward to the present, I work non-FAANG at a 210k salary and am only required to do dev work with no management silliness and no required overtime. My company hires juniors straight out of college at around 100k... this blows my mind.

Compensation in the SF Bay Area is another level but so is cost of housing in the SF Bay Area. So it's kind of a wash. Although if you're willing to rent and live frugally in the Bay Area you can save a lot.

One of the paths to financial success in the Bay Area is dual income households - the high pay for those families make it financially a no brainer to live in the area.

The compensation though makes take home pay far better than anywhere else even omitting that if you’re at a well compensating place (i.e. FAANG), even for just single individuals.

> Are my compensation expectations high

No... You really don't wanna work for less than $150k at a startup, at least on the west coast.

I have in the past 10 years worked at about 3 startups where I was making way less than $150K, and the most recent one where I was making right about $150K. In a couple of those cases I was willing to accept low pay because the work/field was a lot of fun and/or it seemed like a socially important project if it succeeded (alternate energy in one case) and I knew that their funding was very tight.

Thank you for sharing, and that makes sense.

That said, you yourself described this as "low pay".

My comment was in response to the GGP's desire to calibrate their salary expectation level.

So, I think we agree.

The one thing I never understood about in tech, people talk about so much about TC but never about take-home pay (after taxes, housing cost, lifestyle cost etc).

I have friends who work very boring jobs in the gov't or non-profits (who make 90K but have a 10% 403b matching or pension; a 750K house; and a 1 million liquid investment account of CAGR of 20%), drive beater cars but through shrewd investments and frugality are multi-millionaires. I also have friends who flex in fancy cars, fancy luxury downtown condos and fancy jobs (who make 200K+ but never contribute to 401K, no house b/c lives in HCoL and only a ~150K in savings b/c travels, eat out etc.) but spend it all and when I talk to them in confidence, am shocked they have a fraction of what I think they are worth net-worth in the bank.

I used to think these stories were some kind of Suzy Orman/Dave Ramsey made-up morality tales or exceptional one-off stories - but older I get, I realize they are not. It's just most people start off the same - and it's only after years, people's money habits dramatically compound over the years that these differences become exponentially large and comical.

You're talking about monthly savings, not take-home pay, which is usually defined as cash compensation after taxes, retirement, and deductions (i.e. how much you "take home" from each paycheck). Take home - expenses = savings.

And yes, savings and savings rate is the biggest determinant in eventual net worth. I know bond traders and FAANG engineers that make $200K+/year and live paycheck to paycheck because their expenses eat up all of that and then some. One guy literally blew it all on hookers & blow and then died of a fentanyl OD. I also know people that saved about 1/3 of their take-home on a grad student or Whole Foods salary and are now living a reasonable life as a homeowning family despite never breaking $100K/year in income.

If you're interested in connecting with a fellow 50-something, check my profile. Not sure if you're an engineer or other -- I'm a PM if it matters.

I just did a job search with ~15 years experience for a Staff+ position in Feb of this year, got interviews at most places I applied, multiple offers. From speaking to friends, the situation today is completely different. Multiple places I applied or had offers have locked down hiring and/or done layoff rounds. Those who are still hiring can be a lot more picky - either lower comp, higher skill bar, targeting underrepresented groups, etc.

> In the past I've never interviewed with more than 2 or 3 before getting an offer. I know this is incredibly privileged.

I'm not sure why you are saying this. You're in a rough spot and you're human. You don't have to qualify your struggle, even a universal one or one you do slightly better than others. The truth is that it shouldn't take interviewing with 28 companies to find a single offer. Interviewing at a handful before an offer sounds like it should be the (historical) norm, not a privilege. I know plenty of boomers who brag about how easy it is to get a job, with many talking about how they got hired as a walk-in to a technical engineering jobs. So don't put yourself down, we don't need a race to the bottom. We empathize with you because you're human.

More of this

We got to stick up for one another and lift each other up. We're in the same tribe, even if we don't know it.

I've been in this situation enough times that I don't ever really feel ok until I have a year's worth of savings to cover the time it takes to find a new job. Of the 10 or so years I've been a developer, I've only maybe spent 5-7 working as one

Yikes, 28 companies is something else. I had a somewhat similar experience in the last downturn in 2010 - first of all I couldn't even get an interview for like 3 months, then in the last 3 months of my garden leave I interviewed at about 8 places before getting a visa/offer. This was despite having a solid CV. It was something else, and incredibly distressing. You have my sympathies - I'm pretty sure tech interviewing over the years has traumatized me.

not to diminish your success, but I've found similar results in the past. I think there's something about scarcity. As soon as one company knows another company wants you, all the sudden the 1st wants you now too. and if two other companies want you well, then you absolutely have to have that candidate. it's kinda messed up.

but, congratulations!

Well I don't know what exactly is wrong with me but I typically have to interview for months with several companies before I even land one offer. I have more years of experience than you (for perspective).

I'm glad things are finally coming through. Best of luck. I had a similar experience looking for a job a few months ago. I got lucky with timing and joining a company that's optimizing for longer-term cash flow.

What are your skills and what kind of roles have you been applying to?

Your experience has been quite different from mine. Laid off 3 weeks ago, 4 offers at slightly below what I was previously making. I'm a fullstack engineer.

Thanks for sharing, last year or early this year, job hunting is very easy, one month I got about 2 or 3 offers, but not it seems hard, and my current company planned to lay off people as well.

Probably need to repeat your journey

What was the ballpark of the offers, if you don't mind sharing?

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