You’re Not Imagining It–Job Hunting Is Getting Worse | Hacker News Reader

You’re Not Imagining It–Job Hunting Is Getting Worse

time.com

53 pointssys4259024 comments

Dating, housing, and job markets. All have become a vicious maze. Arrange your life without these three, especially if you're in the position of an applicant. Let the curators and gatekeepers eat their own excrement. Major problem arises though. A partner, roof over one's head, and salary are three pillars of an adult responsible life, and no adult responsible humans will come out of this.

The only way to live the modern life is to go to the country side and detach completely.

Return to monke?

Return to 4chan!

And then burn out from being broke and lonely because finding remote jobs and the playing the dating pool are both sisyphean tasks and money and companionship are (typically) necessary to survive that live?

I found that the larger a company is (Megacorps like amazon and facebook), the worse the hiring process was. More drawn out, more stupid questions, less relevance to the job you're applying for, super duper slow and inefficient.

Smaller companies and startups tend to have much faster hiring processes

As someone who works for a large company, 100%, and not just that, the restrictions on allowed interview questions can be so limiting that even if we could do better, we aren’t allowed to. It’s frustrating on the hiring side just as it is for candidates. I’m sure this isn’t true everywhere, but just my experience.

I (unfortunately) worked for a Big4 and the hiring process took 4 months, 7 interviews in total (3 with 3 different partners) and completing a case study.

And in the end all I did was make slide decks. And then I progressed onto how to tell people how to make slide decks. Not a thing mentioned in the interviews was necessary in my day to day work. It was one of the worst working experiences in my life.

> another asked him to create a project that they then used on their website but didn’t pay him for his work

this is over the line if true. Without pay that work isnt theirs, and shouldnt be allowed to display it without his permission

> Many job seekers told me that they’d been targeted by scams in which supposed hirers offered them an appealing-sounding job, and even set up Zoom calls and interviews—but turned out to be people posing as recruiters looking for candidates’ personal information and job accounts.

> Even legitimate companies are posting “ghost jobs” that they don’t actually ever fill. Employers post ghost jobs to get a pool of candidates that they may use someday, to give the impression that their company is growing, and to keep current employees motivated

learn2code was the beginning of the end.

I noticed that there's a huge negative effect from COVID times too: interviews are all done over Zoom.

That doesn't sound like a huge deal, but when you have an active day job that is potentially not close to your house and doing RTO, it can be very hard to find a good place to take these interviews. Especially now that 5 interviews is considered normal, and since they're "online" people seem to expect that they can schedule them "whenever."

… and you’re comparing to what alternative? To take even more time out of the day to meet these people face to face? Zoom is more convenient by a mile.

I think the unstated part of the parent comment is that the zoom meetings aren't being scheduled in one block of time like in person meetings would be, but spread out over multiple days.

For some people, it's easier to take 1 day off work to go do a series of interviews than to fit 5 different one-hour interviews at different times over the course of a week.

If the company scheduled the zoom calls all in one block, then ya, zoom would still be more convenient than in person.

I started getting unsolicited invites to already-scheduled virtual interviews this Spring. Initially, it made me feel guilty to ignore them and not give a heads up I won’t attend. Now I just ignore them, which is highly recommended over engaging with pushy people.

Otherwise, people seem to like virtual interviews, esp whiteboards. Less stress.

Must be very sector dependent? My experience (finance) has been nothing like what is described.

No scams, few rejections/non-responses, no AI, no take home test, no real shenanigans. Just recruiters reaching out with job specs asking if interested.

Maybe it's because I'm in a fairly niche area that has "small world" vibes so everyone behaves to protect their rep

I know most industries want to hire people from the same industry, but based on my experience, finance seems to be the most closed minded (or least flexible in terms of at least entertaining initial phone screening)

I work as a software engineer. My last job was two interviews: initial "feeler" interview, and final hiring interview.

Of the jobs I interviewed for, all of them were similar. Three companies were seriously interested, and I got one reject, and two offers (plus 2-5 interviews that didn't go anywhere).

It seemed that only SV companies had these interviewing headaches, and I suspect it's currently better than ever. Keep in mind that companies have asked about the shape of manholes and the north pole, circa the 90s and early millennium.

As always, your mileage will vary.

This has largely been my experience, too. With a couple of exceptions, I've never had to go through the gauntlet described. It seems to be mostly an SV thing.

Because I consider the interview process to be me determining the suitability of the potential employer as much as the potential employer determining the suitability of me, the couple of exception I mentioned resulted in me bailing out of the process.

If that's how a company is for the hiring process, I can only surmise that working there would be full of the same sort of nonsense.

Yeah, it's SV and companies trying to be like SV. Unfortunately, this site doesn't know anywhere exists beyond SV.

In Berlin there's a famous club that doesn't let anyone in. Okay, so they aren't that exclusive, but they turn away a ton of people, even if they purchased tickets...

... now every club in Germany has door policy and is trying to channel their energy.

How many interviews are you actually getting though? I'm not talking about recruiter phone screens.

Recently my phone-screen -> actual interview percentage has gone WAY down. It feels shady, like the recruiters _are_ now just fishing for information and not actually looking to hire.

This is the experience I've had recently. And I was at LinkedIn, which I've always considered FAANG-lite, but it's Microsoft.

It's been such a pain just getting to talk to the first actual person.

I gave up, I just do bits and bobs for internet people now.

Core sectors and manufacturing seem to be intact, it's only IT and services such as banking which are facing the slack?

I don't really know about the current state of hiring in the different sectors. What I can say from my experience doing some IT projects for manufacturing, is that the one thing they surely would never do was over-hiring of IT people and other support functions.

Non-IT related field here. Been applying for jobs on and off for easily a decade. I have had a total of 2 interviews and one call back, nearly a year later after applying and had already moved to the other side of my country.

It's been a struggle. I have more luck securing work cold calling businesses within my field. Online applications are a joke from my experience.

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