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Comment by asadlionpk | Hacker News Reader

Sounds about expected even in current conditions.

If you are fairly skilled programmer, somewhat senior. These layoffs don’t matter.

I assure you that you won’t die of hunger if you quit/are laid off. Plenty of demand for non-coasters.

Anecdotally, a large number of experienced engineers I know at big tech companies have been secretly hoping to be included in an upcoming layoff round.

So many people have mentally checked out of their current jobs but are too lazy to grind leetcode and go through interview loops. Unless you are in a financial crunch or have other issues like visa sponsorship, getting paid for 6+ months to fully focus on the next step of your career sounds like a dream.

Microsoft/Google/Meta/Amazon/Salesforce and the like are spending many billions of dollars and unknowingly setting up the largest startup incubators in the world right now (and getting nothing out of it in return).

>unknowingly setting up

Wondering why they are giving such big serverences. Surely its not out of goodness of their hearts. 7 month severance at google seems a bit over the top to me.

“Lazy” is the wrong word. People work for 8 hours a day and then are expected to cook, clean, exercise, and maintain some sort of social life. Adding in Leetcode on top of that is going to cause something to give. There’s only so many hours in the day.

As evident by my current habits - I'm far more willing to walk in the cold wind and workout at the gym for two hours than I am willing to do even one leetcode problem.

I've been going to the gym 4-6x/week for the last couple months. I cannot get myself to do almost any leetcode even though I should be doing it. I've just accepted I'll not work for a while longer and keep going to the gym anyway.

Sorry, but in my opinion your logic is very weird.

It's a fucking investment dude.

You invest those hours to have higher salary / cooler job / be better, etc.

You don't want to put X hours of effort into something that may make your 8h/day work better?

Your social life probably ain't gonna disappear if you'll spend a few hours a week for a month or two on learning

I've been working + getting degree on weekends for 6 years, so I kinda know something about lack of time.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying everyone should be doing LC. Just don't act as if there was some tremendous trade off required to learn it

Regardless of the exact word choice, if you have a life goal that requires some extra effort and sacrifices, and you cannot get yourself to do it, you can't really blame your busy life or anything else. There are others who do all of the above and still make the time, and they are going to be more successful than you while you continue to complain about the industry/interview process/leetcode/whatever else.

Nah man, I can complain about anything I want.

That grind set mindset, “you can do anything you set your mind to, so you can only blame yourself for not having {life goal}” is a recipe for depression and burnout

> they are going to be more successful than you

They may make more money anyway. Whether or not that means they’re more successful is a different question.

Now if only 6mo (or even 3mo) severances were the norm outside of FAANG on this wave, it wouldn't have been quite as painful of a lurch for some of us.

Yeah if you're good and have the resume/experience to back it up, you won't have any issues getting great offers even in this market. Great candidates are not easy to find in any market.

This must be extremely subjective. Many times over I see very well qualified candidates spending months in this market looking for a position - when it took them weeks before.

Well qualified != useful for the role.

Meaning well versed and with 5 years experience in some fresh 2 years old technology stack?

Anecdotally, this. I'd never spent more than 3 weeks looking for a job prior to my October/November job hunt post-layoff. This one took about 6-7 weeks, all told (and likely would have come out closer to 8 had one branch path played out). I was intentionally looking for remote-first companies that seemed halfway stable, and was prioritizing those open to sub-40h workweeks (30h, 4DWW, 9-80, etc.), which admittedly, all three shrunk the pool tremendously (each), but particularly on workweek length, I was negotiable. I still had an overall horrible experience with the dozen or two companies I chatted with, and notably got some absolutely wild rejections (however, quite thankfully, also landed somewhere great after sifting through all of these):

- absolute crickets, which made up about 33% of the "rejections" after a phone screen. This was unheard of pre-layoff rounds, but I understand that recruiters themselves suffered a lot of losses in this wave so I somewhat get it.

- "We only hire SREs, and any role leveled Senior+, in San Francisco, there's too much context to offload remotely for leader roles" (this is, itself, such a glaring red flag that I was considering walking from this process anyway)

- "You mentioned your preference to not do Coderpad-style interviews, and sadly, we only hire based on timed+video call Coderpad interviews, good luck!" (I basically never ran into this pre-2022 despite my stance on this issue almost never changing in my career, this was the cause of several rejections this time)

- A subtype of the above, bombing a surprise (or once, "forgot to ask ahead of time and got scheduled for one that I decided to go to anyway") Coderpad/l33tcode/etc. style interview. Rejections on all but one of these, where I advanced and backed out for other reasons.

- Being an SRE not married to Kubernetes I've learned is now often akin to no longer being an SRE. In fact I now question whether I truly consider myself "an SRE" in the current startup climate's sense of the word anymore. As an egregious example, one interview asked me to rate my skills and opinions on Kubernetes specifically. I answered honestly that I thought it was the right tool for many jobs, but not all jobs, and that I wouldn't claim to be a guru at it as I often use other tools that fit the tasks at hand better. Rejected.

Yikes on that bit about Kubernetes. That's kind of appalling given the constraints most young companies are (or at least should) be operating under.

Cargo culting the wrong tool is a pretty good sign of a company that will eventually not make it from a tech point of view so better to let such go. If you're Calimero and you want to pretend to be Godzilla that's fine by me but not need to tie yourself to that particular mast.

You're not getting roles at FAANG or most any place in SV without doing leetcode.

That’s unfortunate. They’re missing out on a lot of talented individuals.

They would much rather miss out on potentially talented individuals than hire one sub-par person. They care much more about avoiding false positives than false negatives.

I also had someone candidly tell me that they deliberately select for candidates who have put extensive time into preparation because that correlates with effort and the willingness to work under crunch conditions in the job. Gross, but effective.

By this logic, maybe leetcode is a sign of somewhere that indulges in death marches and should be best avoided working for?... except when everyone does it, and/or applicant is out of work

Exactly. I was fired from a tech job a decade ago and I found plenty of food to eat in the dumpsters and it wasn't hard to get enough day labor cleaning up puke that I was able to buy a tarp to sleep under.

Joking, but this also a true story.

I now want to hear the very detailed version if this story.

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