2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer
teamblind.com
teamblind.com
I recently went through a series of interviews with a company that were dragged out over two months. Each went very well. My last interview was with a "Senior Engineer" who graduated in 2020 and had a little over a year of experience at Google before joining the company in question.
He vetoed me because I used a debugger in a pair programming interview. Not because I didn't complete the task well.
So yeah, it's a bitch out there.
1. In your code should know what the edge cases, loop condition issues, etc.
I think this is fair. If you don't know the edge case failures when you write your code, you could end up with something like the Microsoft Xune that shutdown for an entire day over a leap year failure.
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/original-mic...
Keep in mind that code review will probably not catch all bugs, it's up to the original coder to write it. This is particularly true if you're the best person on your team, say. Or you're working at a startup where no one can really review your code other than you.
On the other hand well coded unit tests should help you here.
2. It's toxic brogrammer culture there -- where leetcode scores are all that matter. In which case it's probably best you were passed over.
Perhaps, but:
> It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
* https://quoteinvestigator.com/2018/11/18/know-trouble/
Sometimes you want to go to 'first principles' and reassess your assumptions. As a sysadmin I sometimes I resort to making sure the thing is actually physically plugged in (OSI Layer 1), the move up the stack with regards to how the bits flow.
Using a debugger implies that you expect the code you write to have bugs. Not a mindset I'd like my coworkers to have.
If I get around to it I'll eventually write a book about this technique.
A much worse mindset is to be arrogant enough to assume the code has no bugs.
As a matter of principle every code has bugs. Some bugs are found, some not.
Steer well clear of these people!
It’s not that much of a stretch to say that a debugger is a level of “help” that they want to see you do without during an interview. Using a debugger is a sign that you’re not sure what your code is doing and so you need “help”… maybe the interviewer was looking to see that they could fit the exercise in their head well enough to solve the problem without a debugger.
A debugger is as much "help" to an engineer as a hammer is to a carpenter. In my experience, engineers who don't use one are a detriment to the entire engineering organization wasting time and money.
Anyway, yeah I dodged a bullet on that but it's such a pain in the ass that I went though a two month interview process only to be vetoed at the end like that. During that time I spent about two weeks to learn an esoteric API that I'll never use again. Oh and it would have been highly unlikely that I would have even used that API in the job. It was just a requirement that I learned it for this particular interview. ...and no I'm not going to commit it to memory just so I can pass a coding interview and if that was the expectation then this whole situation is even more ridiculous.
Well that's a strong opinion and probably a closed minded one.
Maybe you exposed your mindset and this is part of the reason you didn't get the job.
After all you're being judged on everything, including your attitude. Not just your technical prowess.
In a leetcode style interview, I could see being thrown out for debugging. In a true pair programming exercise, I wouldn’t think this would be super common but guess it depends a lot on the exercise. Pair programming is extremely variable with the tasks.
lol, so true.
You were rejected not because of your lack of skills but to the contrary, you had more skills than that engineer. And that is a threat to that engineer professional future. You made that engineer look bad.
I have a very senior position in a very large company. I still like to be be in the hiring process of some members of my teams - mostly because I do not want to miss good candidates that may be a bit unusual.
When hiring for my first line, I always wonder if the candidate could replace me. It is surprisingly difficult to find such people, who would be hardcore geeks and want to lead others.
I asked the "would tout like to be in my position" a few times to successful team members. A few responded "sure". I had them present to the board, lead teams, and all but one came back to say that they are done and want to come back to what they were doing. The one that stayed did well, she is a good CTO today.
I can't stand people who are scared by others and would sabotage a team. I can understand that one is afraid of competition but in a sane and big enough organization this can be worked out.
Personally I am a good 1x developer but I have never had an interview and not gotten a job offer. Probably had 25+ interviews over my career.
The interview is the most important aspect of any job application process. It is largely responsible for the amount of the offer you get as well. It also manages peoples expectations of you once you start the role as well.
TL;DR: Connections don't mean shit. Companies require multi-hour takehomes and then ghost you. Every reply is automated unless you are moving forward. Recruiters take a week to reply to even the most basic updates.
For reference, I've job hunted twice in the last 2 years. The startup I joined in Feb of 2022 folded in Feb of 2023. My style is to treat it like a full time job, usually completely filling my schedule with interviews.
2022 stats: In 1 month I interviewed with 31 companies, received 6 offers in under 5 weeks and had a job secured making ~30% more than my previous role. Of the 25 companies that I stopped interviewing with, 13 were me cutting off the process to save time and 12 were rejections. So ~50% success rate depending on how well you count the 13 that I cut off.
2023 stats: First month I interviewed with 14 companies, was ghosted by 6 of them. GHOSTED. 3 of these were from direct referrals from friends and previous coworkers! Not even my connections could get information on my process! I interviewed just as strongly as my previous year and they vanish, not even with a rejection. Of the remaining 8, 4 were not actually software jobs and 4 were rejections that refused to elaborate at all.
Second month I interviewed with 34 companies. 12 ghosted me, 4 of which required a multi-hour take home assignment. With a mortgage and kids, I was doing it all.
Of the 22, 11 didn't work out for non-performance reasons (found candidate before I was through the process, recruiter misunderstood the role, company moved so slow that I couldn't complete the process). Of these 11, 4 were from connections! They could not get their internal recruiters to reply to me in less than 2 weeks.
Of the 11, I was rejected by 6. Again, with no feedback or even a response when I asked for it.
Of the remaining 5, I got an offer and ended the madness before waiting to finish my remaining 4 interviews.
Also I don't understand why you said I must have connections and then a sentence later say connections mean nothing.
You are right though, it has been 16 months since I interviewed so things may be different.
RE Connections: I meant they only matter if they are high up enough to literally hand you a position. Anything lower than that (i.e. an IC referral) was completely useless in 7 different companies.
2. The market is incredibly rough for non-eng tech at the moment. Completely believable that they are getting passed over by stronger candidates (of which there are many)
3. They didn't specify the interview stages they failed at, or that they even failed at all. Ghosting is a thing, especially with tons of recruiters getting laid off
46 Interviews is also a huge amount. I've done less than that my entire career combined. I agree with others, something else may be off here.
IMO Blind is generally full of shit
And, unfortunately, that often comes across in a résumé and application.
Much better, I think, to spend time better conveying your strengths and interests as they relate to a specific job (or type of job). You’re much more likely to get the interest of relevant recruiters and hiring managers in this way.
I wonder that, too, but the last time I was on the market was 2017. This is the first time in my 30-year programmer career that I've heard anybody looking for programming jobs complaining about anything _other_ than recruiters bothering them too much. I haven't been in this market personally yet, but the tone is definitely a new one since the dawn of the internet.
All I can figure is I've been in a totally different part of the market from these folks. I've never once had a job search that looked like that. Typically, I do 1-3 interviews after 1-5 applications, and come out with 1-2 acceptable offers. I don't think my total application count in a given search has ever come very close to 10, let alone 100 or 1,000. Or, the last couple times, I've just gone, "yo, I'm looking" and had someone in my network hand me a job (I get that's a later-career thing—but my early-career searches never, ever looked like these application-gauntlets, either).
I doubt I've sent 50 total applications in a 20+ year career, which career includes most of the usual job-hopping-for-more-pay, so it's not because I'm doing very-long stints with single employers.
Still, the number is attention grabbing.
> maybe the market has shifted drastically
You're catching on. This is the worst job market in 20 years, far worse than the 2009 recession. In 2009, tons of college kids were still getting in Amazon but new grads today are struggling to find anything. This is a tectonic shift causing mountains to crumble, and we will be feeling the effects for decades.
Clearly, "tons" of kids getting into 1 company (out of several thousand just public ones), is a great indicator.
Just for reference, I actually lived through the 11% unemployment out of college. The market for fresh grads was absolutely brutal. A good 20-30% of my cohort never recovered and never broke into higher-paying white collar jobs and still works in jobs that don't require a college degree.
It was so bad, that the fresh grads of those years coined the term "lost generation". Millions of fresh grads just couldn't break into adulting for several years.
As a non-dev, I have between a 90-95% response rate when I do apply because I tailor my resume, and I apply to roles strategically and intentionally. I don't begrudge people who either have high success rates without doing that work, or who don't care about a lower success rate if it means spending less time on the process, but I don't get the people who hate the process so much that they intentionally torpedo themselves because of it.
The endless complaints about ATS and whatever else almost always come from people with objectively poorly written resumes or who are applying to jobs they’re not even slightly qualified for.
Just this year, in fact, I put it out that I was looking, on a Tuesday, and I had multiple phone screens set up by that Thursday and Friday. Interviews with 5 companies the following week, followed up by additional interviews that same week, and ultimately I had 3 offers and accepted a new position inside of 10 days.
I wish everyone could have this sort of experience because I have the sense that (from my own personal experience, to some degree, but especially anecdotes like the OP) that it's a really, really rough out there for most people.
Great product managers are very valuable. Having someone who knows the customers and the market inside and out helps a company focus their roadmap on the highest value features and products. If you're paying 50 engineers and their managers to work on products, having one highly-paid person dedicated to scrutinizing every last detail of the roadmap to make sure you're not wasting time on the wrong features will produce an efficiency gain.
I think the issue is that there are a lot of bad product managers out there, so chances are good that most people have never actually worked with a good product manager. Product management is a vague position where quality is hard to measure, so a lot of people end up in Product Management because they know how to speak charismatically and present themselves well in meetings.
Anecdotally, the recent downturn has forced a lot of companies to take a closer look at these highly-paid soft positions. Among my personal network the number of engineers who got laid off is much smaller than the number of product managers who got laid off, despite the fact that I know far more engineers than product managers.
The commonality in the best PM's I know is having more than a passing knowledge of the domain they work in.
The signal-to-noise ratio on applications that come in through that channel is so poor that unless you're a tiny company that gets only a handful of resumes, recruiters usually ignore them.
Do you count that as a waste of time? In my experience, those have a much higher rate of response.
I meant going to a company's LinkedIn profile and applying unsolicited.
I've been on the hiring side as well and you can definitely see that by far most applications (direct from the ATS) are from someone who might as well not have bothered: their experience is only qualifying in a stretch, or they are so completely out there you have to wonder how they thought it was worth 30 seconds to apply.
46 first rounds sounds like a lot too. I get the feeling that applying to too many jobs simply meant that the low probability dusted up a bunch of HMs who thought they'd take a chance.
I don't think hiring is a straight up numbers game, there's probably certain pots that are OOM more likely to get you a job than others. Eg personal network and similar businesses.
You're better served by finding 20 companies you want to work for and finding a way to speak live to someone who works at those companies and then applying through them.
Send in a resume, of which there are only a few categories of customization. Certainly no need to customize for each specific company for SWE.
I can't think of a position I applied for that I didn't spend at least an hour working on the initial application. And an hour would be fast-tracking it.
12 years experience as a dev, was previously making pretty darned good money for Canada. Laid off on early May. Starting a job on Wednesday that pays 60% of my old TC.
It's tough times out there.
That said, I had about 25 applications, and did interviews with only 7 companies.
One question - do you think your comp level was due to lack of experience with current "hot" skills/languages or do you think it was market factors of number of unemployed devs and the number of jobs in your region?
The other aspect is the interviewing. People here are unfamiliar with other markets. If you’re interviewing with FAANG and crew - you probably send out hundreds of resumes. If you’re picking really desperate startups - you might get 25% reply rate if you’re in a good economy. In other scenarios, getting a 2-5% reply rate is common. Thus why people have to apply to so many places and so liberally. You’re just sending the same resume as you do everywhere else.
The other thing is the interview process for a lot of these companies is harder and more selective. You’re competing with people from all over the world and many whom are on visas and want to stay in the USA. Your small shop in a city of 250k that pays one fifth what this person is used to isn’t going to be competing for the same talent.
My point is - wow, yes, people get paid differently in different markets. They also have different interview processes because when you get paid a lot, it tends to bring a much stricter interviewing environment because there are often way more qualified people than they can hire. (Whether you get into FAANG is a mix of luck and preparation - most everyone is qualified enough to do the jobs even if they don’t get hired but the interview process is extremely noisy and highly selective by nature)
I’ve gone through these gauntlets. I had to interview with 100 companies to get one offer. (Including 15 onsites) In other stages of my life, I interviewed with about 60 and got 6 offers. It’s hugely variable and often has little to do with you and more to do with the hiring environment. I was overqualified for most every job I’ve ever had or been interviewed for. As every job I’ve ever had has been a joke in terms of the challenge, the skills needed, or the intellect required. I’m including jobs I’ve had paying $15/hr all the way to $1m/yr. Don’t misinterpret the interview process as really being a strong signal to your ability to do the job. Especially with all the leetcode stuff.
Being jobless takes a huge toll on the mental (and physical) health and instead of being supportive and empathic, we deride the struggle that is finding a job in this market.
In 2023 only, more than 200.000 people have lost their job (source http://layoffs.fyi).
Companies use ATS to discard CVs that don't perfectly align, ghost candidates, make bellow market-rate offers, post fake job ads ...and fire people to show strong quarters and make VCs happy.
And when someone has the courage to speak out, we attack them.
[somewhat "self-promotion": if anyone has a hard time getting past ATS, I built a small website to help align their resume to a specific job ad: https://rolematch.me . The service is free, no data is gathered or stored and the invite code is konami]
I wonder if previous experience at FAANG is becoming a negative factor in the hiring process. Run-of-the-mill Fortune 500s aren't going to pay Meta money ($475k+) for a product manager. More like $120-150k. And maybe they're looking to avoid the expectations (read: entitlement) from those who are used to those kinds of outsized salaries.
That’s what I did the majority of my career so it’s not meant to be an insult.
Junior/associate devs, hired out of the internship program usually, can make less than $100k TC (some even make less than $80k). Most of them say it is hard to live on that salary with an apartment, car, student loans and wanting to have a life.
Most of the standard SWEs make more than $100k TC. I've been told the TC for standard SWEs maxes out at under $170k at our company.
Seniors TC starts around $140k, and goes up above $180k.
Leads/Principals I'm not as sure of. Maybe for every 20 associate/SWE/senior we have one lead. I believe their TC is north of $200k.
As the standard dev is either an SWE or senior SWE, that band is probably $100k-190k. With some associates/juniors making less, and some leads/principals making more.
The H1Bs make about 10-15% less than the non H1Bs.
In India, if our programmers make the equivalent of $30k that is a lot. The company wants to hire more Indian programmers but there are timezone problems, language problems, skill level problems and other problems.
Or maybe it has more to do with accounting practices or with liability. We're talking F500 HR logic here.
It can be. If you're not able to pay FAANG level compensation, hiring someone who is taking a pay cut to work for you is often just them getting a paycheck until they get another job back at FAANG level.
If this is done before they're contributing positively (onboarding and domain knowledge acquisition takes some time), its a loss (and they've likely commanded higher compensation based on their previous experience).
Unless you are specifically after the knowledge that they bring in, for a company hiring it can be better to hire someone with less prestigious names in their experience who can do the job and is more likely to stay for a few years before jumping to another job.
If they came from making $400k total compensation per year, and you can only offer them $150k salary (and no stocks), its more than likely that they'll be looking for the next position on the day after they start.
Yes. There's also a pretty significant difference between FAANG and ordinary companies in terms of development process, business customs, etc. that I've seen present an insurmountable culture shock to people who only know FAANG.
It absolutely can be. It can also be a positive. It all depends on the company you're applying to.
Someone else mentioned FAANG levels of comp. My base comp is anywhere between 240 and 270k with these jobs + stock / options.
I assume this is everyone. Can only carefully answer so many questions in crappy lighting before the brain dissipates.
To apply for as many positions as the article claims means that you are basically shotgunning applications. There's going to be a large amount of wasted effort doing that as opposed to being "pickier" and applying for positions that actually look like a good fit for you.
I think it's counterproductive, personally. When I've been involved with hiring decisions, it was pretty easy to tell which applicants were actually applying for the specific position and which were basically mass-applying for every position they could find. The ones mass-applying would be among the first to be weeded out and much less likely to be called in for an interview.
I tried to pick roles I am a decent fit at and I am seeing like a 1 in 20-30 response rate. LinkedIn jobs are showing 100+ applications for any job.
But there has to be at least two things wrong here, since he had a very low success rate on applications and on interviews.
The market dynamics are totally different from software engineering. PM positions come up infrequently and they're often looking for someone quite specific. Prestige also seems to factor into it a lot: I think every PM I've worked with has had a Stanford or Harvard MBA.
My recent experience as a senior engineer was less gloomy than this. I applied to ~10 open positions whose needs matched my experience well, was offered an interview at 5, and did 2 full interviews which both resulted in decent offers. My comp decreased slightly (from FAANG-level) but was still reasonable. I also applied to ~5 companies that I knew were a long shot (i.e. no well-matched positions, or significantly more competitive than Google/Meta) and heard back from none of them.
But I haven’t been in the job seeking market in 6 years, being gainfully employed in my current role.
The idea of having a 1-2% success rate is terrifying. I don’t think I’d have it in me to press on. I’m used to employers rolling out the red carpet, and I really really don’t want to go back into the job market. Godspeed to anyone who’s going through this right now, you have a lot more guts than I got.
From what I've heard 6:1 isn't a bad ratio - things are definitely not as good as 2021 but also not as bad as last year.