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Comment by psim1 | Hacker News Reader

Weirdly, a senior dev from my company was recruited by another company and will be changing jobs in a couple weeks. And to be clear, he is not a unicorn type. He's a good senior developer in a common language.

It's hard for me to understand recruiters "fishing in the neighbor's pond" while there are plenty of unemployed, qualified senior devs out there right now.

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I've heard from a few sources that there's a disgusting stigma of "if you were laid off, there must be a reason."

Yeah, I worried about this, which is why I didn't tell anyone I was interviewing with that I'd been laid-off.

Laid off in August, new job by end of September. That being said, it was much tougher than other times, and I have 10+ years experience in data science (which most candidates in this field won't have). I also interview well, which helped a lot.

I've always assumed this was the stigma, so I've always avoided mentioning it, but during the much more competitive market in 2020-2021, it seemed like big tech types were the only ones wise enough to look past that stigma and appreciate that often, cuts are to business units, not people. My wife was part of a big (31%) layoff at an AI Healthcare company during the earliest round of layoffs, and she had literally hundreds of requests to interview within the first two days of being laid off.

This round of layoffs seems different. If big tech isn't hiring, and they're the only ones wise enough to see through the stigma, that is a possible explanation for why.

It's like those people think there are layoff cooties or something, as if it's a virus that will transfer to their company. It's just a big shakeup of talent finding a new home.

This stigma exists because in past cycles (think 90s') layoffs were performance ranked. We can argue if such metrics are fairly calculated etc, but that often was the reason given.

I don't agree, but I imagine the mindset is "why would I hire someone who didn't make the cut and got laid off when I could poach somebody else that did make the cut at their company."

Sure there's plenty? Some reqs are ridiculously detailed and specific. Oh you have Python 3.10.7 installed, sorry we can't hire you we use 3.10.6 here. Next! Oh we want someone with 4 years experience, you only have 3 yrs 11 months call back later. Next!

My favorite was from some years ago when Java was about 8 years old and C# about 3. They wanted 10 years of Java and 5 years of C#.

One of my faves is the guy who created Homebrew getting turned down by Google even though something like 80% of the company uses it.

Or how about the time a clueless recruiter asked DHH how many years of Rails experience he had and he replied "all of them."

If the neighbor is your competitor, it makes a lot of sense to fish in their pond.

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