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Comment by atomicnumber3 | Hacker News Reader

Especially when it's well-known that many engineers, especially senior, are essentially never "on the market". They work through their networks, leveraging referrals, and will frequently vanish from one job and appear in another without submitting a resume, contacting a recruiter, or touching anything on linkedin/gh/etc.

Seems like that alone would put a big skew on results. It's kind of like the "r/cscareerquestions" effect. There's literally only 3 people posting: hapless anxious innocent newbies/newgrads, low-marketability folks who are struggling to find a position, and people who get off on trolling/doomposting and otherwise feeding off the despair of the other two crowds. The result being a forum that perpetually makes it seem impossible to get hired as a software engineer (even during the covid hiring spree!).

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This isn’t my experience. I’ve interviewed many seniors in my time, and also gone on many interviews as a senior.

Networks fail people all the time. Mine failed me because I was at one company for a decade(switching teams), and my entire network still works there. I don’t want to go back, so I essentially have no network.

We hired an architect who’s entire network was still at IBM, similar to me. There’s other possible failure modes, it happens quite a bit IME.

Ah that's fair, I was being too hyperbolic. I suppose what I mean is "a nontrivial contingent [of seniors]."

Also it's worth noting that while your whole network might be at IBM still, I've found leveraging "I know X, who knows Y, who works at / worked at [target company i want to apply to]". They'll usually only be able to give you a "someone I know but haven't worked with" referral (some places call them just a "candidate lead"), but often it's still miles better than putting your resume in the website intake form. Going 2 degrees out in your network graph is almost always a shockingly large number of people / places.

Yeah - it's a super weird take.

Almost all the engineers I know get their jobs through random process. They use things like Hired, sending out resumes, responding to recruiters, rooftop slushie (no longer available), and then some actual referrals if they know someone. You use everything available cause you need to get multiple competing offers. You're not going to just interview at one or two friend's places and then get an offer and take it. You're gonna get 5-7 offers and then try to take the best one out of those by making them compete for one another.

This - turns out - requires a lot of companies and interviews and a lot of work.

> It's kind of like the "r/cscareerquestions" effect.

I canceled my ACM subscription in my late 20s because I got tired of ACM basically doomposting about careers. Last night I was going through my Gmail folders and found a bunch of old ACM doomposts I never deleted from their CSCAREERS mailing list.

So, it's not just reddit that doomposts- Industry veterans are just as paranoid and can also serve as Chicken Little.

anecdotally, i know more people that struggle with the hiring process then these extroverted super connected senior developers that just hop job from job that apparently exist. from the group of people i keep in contact with, i think only one is doing something like that. also the people we hired went through application pipelines and weren't just showing up after being recommended

I know quite a few developers who have a knack for following market trends and jumping on the rocket ship before it is about to launch.

It's actually not that hard if you think about what filter you would apply. The one hard part is finding recruiters who specialize in placing people at these companies, and, of course, passing the interview (or at least enough success that the interviewer doesn't tell the recruiter you are a poor quality candidate).

>They work through their networks, leveraging referrals, and will frequently vanish from one job and appear in another without submitting a resume, contacting a recruiter, or touching anything on linkedin/gh/etc.

I literally never heard of this, ever. Not even for staff+ positions.

I've read something on the lines of "even Tom Hanks sends his resume to the director when applying for a role". Hyperbolic or not, I've found this to be vastly true.

FWIW, I'm a senior engineer and I've been looking for a new position for a few weeks.

- I have had a satisfying number of leads from my network.

- I have also been approached by dozens of recruiters both through my network, through LinkedIn and through HN "Who wants to be hired?"

- I have a profile on Hired, through which I have had one lead, for a position in which I'm not interested. Zero on HiredSweet.

> Especially when it's well-known that many engineers, especially senior, are essentially never "on the market".

> Seems like that alone would put a big skew on results.

Yes it does. Same with internship pipelines at unicorns or FAANG. Some students intern at the same company multiple times during undergrad and transition full time after graduation. They appear to never be on the market.

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