As someone working hiring engineers (4+ positions open), it's been about 10% easier than mid-2022.
Like the article states, way more open jobs than people looking for them still.
Like the article states, way more open jobs than people looking for them still.
If they raise their salaries to become competitive again they will fill their positions. If they keep going with normal compensation from 3+ years ago they will keep looking to hire and losing their best employees.
In the end, I've learned nothing about the state of the job market.
There were, and still are a ton of recruiters hitting me up. Most of them are garbage, probably 95%. I still feel like a broke the salt circle by telling people I was actively looking for a new opportunity.
I have a family and need insurance for one of my daughters with special needs, so I went hard at interviewing. It took a solid 6 months, but I had half a dozen offers for Sysadmin work that met the pay I needed. The hardest part about comparing offers is the benefits... Different copays, deductibles, OOP max, and premiums. Also different pay schedules can make it difficult to compare premiums. Then you have waiting periods...
I ended up with an excellent opportunity and I've been super impressed, but it was a rough 6 weeks.
The majority of offers I received were from companies I applied to directly. I had some I cut short in early interview phases because I started my new job. Stability trumps the chase for afew more dollars. The market is still good, but remote hiring is slow, although in person wasn't really much faster at most companies.
More then I made last year, about the same as the DevOps position I left at the beginning of the year, but bonus opportunities and way better benefits.
I am the sole income, so I definitely needed a certain level.
You need competing offers to get a good offer - so you need to interview at places you have little interest in actually working for.
I would expect a lot of these people either got a good enough offer, or good enough competing offers, or just didn't get an offer from where they actually want to work - so don't need competing offers.
Additionally, there's a lot of people that interview for practice just to keep fresh for when they do need a job, and a lot of people that interview at a few places as practice before they interview at the places they're really targeting.
I'd expect a lot of no-shows from this cohort.
A lot of the process seems to be performative and not really being done for the purpose of matching a real job seeker with a real job.
They pretty much fell into two categories.
The first was person companies who wanted you to commit 1-2 days of in person interviewing after completing the phone screen and a at home test. If you are interviewing at multiple companies and are already employed, this is pretty much a no go unless you are already really enticed or want to work there. Even interviewing at just 3 of those places means taking off so much time from work that you'll either tip off your boss that you're on your way out, or use up all your PTO that you ideally use to have a life and not burn out.
The other category was remote interviewing companies. I observed that they did the same number of interview steps as the in person companies but instead of a day or two gauntlet they schedule an hour here, an hour there, an hour another day. This worked well for interleaving interviews in the regular work day without disrupting your current job, but it meant the full interview cycle would take 3-4 weeks on average as both your schedule and the schedule of their mandatory interview members(hiring manager, heads of various departments, whatever their companies "important" person was, etc) had to align. And that is all before there's interruptions like illness, or getting paged to an on call event.
Every company was doing a minimum of 4 hours and an average of 6 hours of interviews with the common gates being 30 minute phone screen, 45-60 minute take home code interview, 60 minute technical interview with 1-2 engineers, 60 minute system design with 1-2 senior engineers/architects, 60 minute interview with equivalent people in product to make sure you have similar philosophies, and then another 45-60 minutes with the hiring manager. Occasionally companies would also add in an hour with prospective teammates to see if you click, and/or an hour with some specific department they felt it was important to have engineering work directly with.
Its frankly a lot of work when you also have to prep for the typical interview questions that exercise a different skill set than the common job, and are likely doing this gauntlet with multiple companies simultaneously. Its also a high amount of spend on the company side when you add up all the man hours they are using per perspective candidate. My take is that the ghosting seen on both sides is because no one wants to deal with all of this once a match has been found.
It's really on companies to fix this. Candidates aren't clamoring for more and more interview time. When I speak to friends in professions outside of tech they are flabbergasted at the the length and depth of the interview process the tech industry has developed. Bad hires can be a problem but I think our industry has overcorrected for that. I won't believe that companies are truly "desperate" until I start seeing this interview process scale back. Desperate companies would be trying to hire a quickly as possible, not tick off all the checkboxes on a list of tests.
I've been looking on Indeed, HN: Who is Hiring, and angel.co but have had zero luck this past year. I get that companies don't want to take on the risk of a potential bad hire but c'mon. I can't even get an interview.
To be frank, "too inexperienced to get a job? time to contribute to open source!" is almost always a glib and unhelpful retort. If someone can't get recruiters to reach out, they probably don't have the expertise to build open source, and vice versa. Open source is not a dumping ground for inexperienced newcomers.
That is certainly one way to treat someone willing to do free labor in service of something the maintainers love, but I don’t think it’s a positive way. If open source is to continue and grow, it will always need a fresh set of people to work on it, and bringing those people along is part of the work of shepherding an open source project, in my opinion.
What is your advice to the person saying they can’t get an interview?
You still haven’t given your advice. If you’re going to be critical of mine you could add something positive in counter.
In general, getting something done counts for a lot. And many floss projects will welcome contributions. There will generally be feedback, need adjustments for testing etc. But there's room to do productive things.
After you do some contracts and get some good experience under your belt, register as an LLC and give yourself a title - software engineer at your company.
It should be enough to get your foot in the door for an interview and from there as long as you are a good talker you will get the job.
There's a lot of jobs where coding is part of it but it's not called coding.
How is that possible when every 1 job has 100 applicants?
Most of the applicants already have a job. Even if one position is filled a new position is likely to open up to backfill the other.