Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

711 pointsimadkhan1,052 comments

I got laid off at the start of the year, and ever since then, I've been applying constantly but have only gotten one interview. Before being laid off, I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.

I've had my resume looked at by three different services (TopResume, Indeed, Levels.fyi) and am currently subscribed to Resume Worded, which scores my resume. Despite all these efforts, I keep receiving rejection emails.

So, I just wanted to reach out and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences with applying for jobs.

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It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.

It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them.

Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they'll have tools for this and if their tool can't extract your text they may not bother. Unless you're a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.

Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you're coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.

Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine's dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.

No, no one calls someone with 5.5 years of experience a junior engineer.

That depends entirely on their skill. I’ve seen people with 10 years of experience that were still junior.

One should definitely have outgrown a junior title after say 3 years of relevant experience, as that is more than sufficient time to be trained into a normal (non-senior) status.

It could last longer if your company does not have a normal title (i.e., they consider junior == !senior), but someone with 10 years of relevant experience should have earned a seniority title of some sort.

I think you have found the issue to be honest, I think most people are expecting to be "senior" in place of "not junior" as soon as they prove they are good programmers. The senior title has been quite diluted by that.

Seniority is about experience and not skill in my opinion, we see many talented developers who don't qualify as senior because they simply haven't experienced enough situations. I expect a senior to have some war stories and a breadth of notable situations that they can walk me through, to demonstrate their ability to predict common issues and pitfalls, and to show how their experience helps their troubleshooting and informs their choices.

If I had told 20 year old me this, 20 year old me would have balked. 20 year old me was an excellent programmer, but he didn't know shit about long term software development.

I think the missing piece is the intermediate / non-qualified title. Junior implies to me someone who requires frequent hand-holding and coaching even on small scale tasks. Senior on the other hand should require cross-functional communication skills as well as technical mentorship. There's a huge swath of developers who fit between those (solid individual contributors who aren't necessarily ready to lead a project or mentor).

"journeyman"? Might be too dated, or too gendered these days, but yeah... some 'not junior' term that just indicates they're "better" (experience or skill or both) than the juniors, but without all the expectations that 'senior' should bring.

I've just always used whatever comes after junior / senior without a qualifier.

I get it, and do too sometimes.

For me, this most often comes up when acting as a reference for someone. The hiring person will ask me stuff, and often a 'senior' label question will come up. Almost invariably the person I'm acting as a reference for is beyond 'junior' connotations, and I think have to ask what the hiring person mean by 'senior'. Getting their definition helps me answer most effectively.

"Yeah, AB is pretty close to what you class as 'senior'. He's going to work well in a larger group with defined roles and a set schedule, which it sounds like you have."

"Well.. SJ is not 'junior' any more, but does need to have someone more senior to help mentor/check in on more advanced topics. If you don't have that - if this is a 'lone wolf' role, they may struggle some".

We have all the titles we need. We have junior for "that guy who can't do a fuckin' thing unless you tell him exactly what to type." We have senior for "that guy who can take a ticket and implement it." We have lead for "that guy who can take a business idea and implement it."

That should just be the title without prefix really, a Senior Developer should be providing more value than just ticket implementation.

These are just my opinions though, it differs from company to company. One place the difference between a Developer and a Senior Developer was a senior could be expected to own a feature and all the moving parts to get it deployed, eg: taking it to the board, organising all the approvals and business requirements with other teams etc. Other places senior just means "not junior" and the roles are the same, you just expect more talent from the senior.

> I expect a senior to have some war stories and a breadth of notable situations that they can walk me through, to demonstrate their ability to predict common issues and pitfalls, and to show how their experience helps their troubleshooting and informs their choices.

Yep. I've been doing this for... almost 30 years now, and... interacting with 'seniors' with 2 years of experience is really weird. My recollections from the 90s having worked inside a few places was that 'senior' had a lot more weight/heft to it. It indicated, at the very least, long experience (8-10 years or more) and some ability to at least work with other tech people (non-tech was a bonus).

Can't quite figure out when this shift started, but have definitely noticed title inflation as a regular thing over the last 10-15 years.

Have you ever taken down a database by mistake? Dealt with bad backups, "on production only" issues, rounding errors in historical data, security breaches, multibyte character set conversion issues?

"Coding" is eventually only a small part. Better coding skills up front can help prevent or mitigate some of the potential issues listed above, but only to a point. You're not always even the author of all the code in use; learning how to deal with that, maybe under pressure of "prod is slow/down", has an impact on how you consider these issues going forward.

EDIT: tangential story

I was at a meetup years ago, and one of the "senior dev/architect" folks at the company hosting the meetup was talking informally about IDEs. I jumped in a bit as I'd recently started with IntelliJ (this was... 2010, I think) and was excited to share a few bits that were new to me.

As I listened more, the guy was lecturing the meetup folks that "IDEs were really for juniors and newbs". Specific language is somewhat lost to the mists of time, but the gist was "This is your code, you've written it, you should know it inside and out; fumbling with slow IDE just burns productivity, wastes time, and just shows you don't really know the codebase."

I eventually interjected that it might be reasonable for him, personally, to know all the code in a system that he'd built up from scratch over the last 7-8 years. However, for anyone new coming in to the codebase, an IDE is invaluable because it makes the entire thing far more discoverable. Jumping around between sections helps you learn and narrow down bugs/issues much faster. "Well, you should just be asking your senior if you have questions" was the main response, and IDEs were still beneath him.

I realized a bit later he was actually giving a small pitch; as host of the meetup, they had an intro period, and they were recruiting. I'd heard about this company before - growing, funded and in a space I had some experience in. Had 0 desire to work there after talking to him. But "the senior architect" always knows best in many places. :/

> Can't quite figure out when this shift started, but have definitely noticed title inflation as a regular thing over the last 10-15 years.

I'll bet it can be tracked down by looking at job-hopping. That's how it happened to me in the early 2010s: I was never told I was promoted to senior developer, one day I was just invited to a meeting for all our senior developers to get opinions on something. I hadn't noticed before, but during the meeting I realized I technically was in the older half of all the devs in the office (in terms of time at the company, not age), just due to all the hiring that had been done in the previous year or two.

Eh, maybe an "engineer", if they have junior, null, senior grades. A lot of places wouldn't consider that sort of experience level automatically senior; they'd have to be exceptional.

Not automatic but historically a good but not exceptional developer would expect to make senior after maybe 5-8 years of experience. Someone who was still needing close supervision - which is what "junior" traditionally meant - after 5 years would be exceptional and it wouldn't reflect well on either the developer or the places they worked at the start of their career.

Of course this is about the level the employee is capable of operating at in absolute terms but hiring is relative. In an employee's market someone might be able to land a "senior" role before they're really ready for it. In an employer's market the average candidate who gets hired as a "senior" might have 10+ YOE. We've gone from one to the other recently and everyone's expectations will need to adjust accordingly.

This is why software is not a serious profession: it has no consistency in progression and recognition.

I think I would drive myself mad if I tried to live up to the crazy expectations of senior from most internet commenters.

> I think I would drive myself mad if I tried to live up to the crazy expectations of senior from most internet commenters.

And maybe that's the point of it. Senior without the title inflations is meant to be an actual high level position - not 50-100% of the company.

A lot of places have just replaced senior with staff/principal engineers instead, but senior used to be a well respected and unique title back in the days.

I agree with half of what you say. Senior should be a high-level position. It's a recognition of someone with solid skills and the ability to get things done.

But suppose a senior is someone who can work mostly autonomously under general direction from their management and tech leadership, which I'd say is a reasonable basic definition of what "senior" level has historically meant in software development. We would expect to see a lot more people reaching that level and sticking around on a tech career path now because of the rapid growth in the industry and the greater awareness that people can be a high-level IC but not have much interest in formal leadership or management roles.

Moreover there is no rule that says an employer should hire mostly juniors, some mids and only a few seniors. Good seniors are almost always disproportionately cost-effective if you can manage to hire them. The trend for rapid job-hopping has left juniors as an almost worthless hire in many cases because they probably won't be around long enough to make a good contribution in return for all the early overheads they incur.

There is definitely a longer formal tech track in large organisations now. I'd say it used to be more that you reached senior and then any other responsibilities like leading a team or dealing with large-scale software architecture issues were kind of attached. So historically you'd associate those higher responsibilities with "senior" people where today those with the skills and experience to do them probably have higher job titles like lead/staff/principal instead.

So I'm not sure senior has been deflated or replaced by staff etc. It's just that senior used to be the top of three levels for many employers but now there's more recognition that your development doesn't just stop after a few years and "senior" today mostly means "first few years as a senior" in old terminology.

> But suppose a senior is someone who can work mostly autonomously under general direction from their management and tech leadership, which I'd say is a reasonable basic definition of what "senior" level has historically meant in software development.

That's where I disagree. A senior should do a lot more than that. Seniors would mentor and train juniors. Software or not - that's how it's traditionally been.

What you describe is more like an engineer (no senior). Juniors are the 1s that can't work autonomously. When you are recognized as fully fitting the role you're just that. A senior then excels the role.

> We would expect to see a lot more people reaching that level and sticking around on a tech career path now

What does this have to do with what roles are available in an organization?

I start a company. I have 1 CTO, 1 tech lead, 2 seniors and the rest are engineers. What level someone is at should not impact what I call the titles available, but to suit the current market, instead we have 1 CTO, 1 principal engineer, 2 staff engineer, 1 tech lead, some seniors and a few engineers. Same same. No 1 actually grew additional roles.

It's all a trick to make people think they've levelled up.

Seniors would mentor and train juniors.

I agree that was typically also something that came in at senior level.

Maybe it's a regional thing? I'm in the UK. I'd say it was fairly standard here for a junior to be someone in the first couple of years on the job who was still learning the ropes and probably couldn't do much beyond very basic grunt work without the assistance of someone more senior. Losing the "junior" label came when you got beyond the near-full-time hand-holding and started doing routine stuff independently. The "senior" label came when you could do the less routine or more difficult stuff mostly independently as well.

What does this have to do with what roles are available in an organization?

It means an organisation that wants to hire a senior-heavy team can now do so. That wasn't realistic for most organisations a decade ago because there weren't enough seniors to go around.

> It means an organisation that wants to hire a senior-heavy team can now do so. That wasn't realistic for most organisations a decade ago because there weren't enough seniors to go around.

There are 2 distinctions and that's what might be confusing. 1 is your experience/level and what you're referring to. The other is the roles an organization offers.

I might have 50 years of experience but if the other roles are taken by more qualified people in THAT organization I can take a normal engineer route. Doesn't have to be senior. It doesn't make myself not qualified to even be a CTO elsewhere.

The roles are fixed. It has to do with budget, balanced, etc. Having all seniors might mean fights and everyone wanting to contribute and pull the project in different directions. A good balance is needed. A senior heavy team might not be good just because you can.

I understand (and agree with) the distinction you're making. An employee's level isn't necessarily the same thing as the level an employer needs for a specific role. The latter sets a desired minimum for the former. And realistically the former usually implies some kind of desired minimum for the latter if only because working at a much lower level than you're capable of will reduce compensation and slow career progression.

Where we perhaps disagree is your final paragraph. The roles might be fixed but there is no rule that says they have to be. Usually things like budgets and the work that needs to be done that are fixed for the team as a whole. An employer might have multiple hiring options available that fit those constraints - for example hiring a smaller team of more senior developers or a larger team with a wider range. My argument above is that if you can hire a smaller team of good senior people then this is often cost-effective.

I don't really recognise the picture you're painting of a senior-heavy team being prone to conflict. A big part of that ability to operate autonomously that I suggested characterises senior developers is learning how to communicate and collaborate effectively without needing constant intervention from above or heavy formal development processes.

What you described seems like what happens if you want a senior-heavy team, hire people who aren't at that level yet, then still manage them as if they were seniors. The team doesn't reach consensus and get behind its choices collectively. However it also doesn't have the stronger leadership and safety rails that less experienced developers might need to be effective. I agree that situation is bad but it's not what I was advocating before.

> My argument above is that if you can hire a smaller team of good senior people then this is often cost-effective.

> I understand (and agree with) the distinction you're making.

Isn't this contradictory?

That's the trap we're stuck in. I remember Amazon HR saying their Senior titles are the equivalent of Staff Engineer titles elsewhere.

You can hire a highly experienced small team and pay each of them more. They don't all have to be "senior" in title and responsibility. They're just engineers. Fixed budget divide by the number of people (roughly) has nothing to do with titles. It only does according to some system where compensation is tied to titles.

You've said you understand the distinction but then some sentences later have just walked it all back.

> What you described seems like what happens if you want a senior-heavy team, hire people who aren't at that level yet, then still manage them as if they were seniors.

I repeat, you're after an experienced/skilled team - not senior-heavy. E.g. you may need someone highly experienced in React and Rust with 50 years experience. It doesn't make them senior. Working autonomously doesn't make you senior.

This is really startup / tech titles as a whole. If anything engineering has avoided the rampant title inflation that has been commonplace among other departments (try finding a sales rep who isn't at least a senior / director).

In (Brazilian) Portuguese software engineers are usually graded Júnior, Pleno, or Sênior, where "Pleno" means something like "full". It is used for these intermediary situations where neither Junior or Senior applies.

I do, and quite frequently.

After more than a 2 decades in software development (rails/web/...), for me to consider a developer to be a senior it needs to:

* Communicate: For example: can explain tech concepts to non tech people, or inform on Monday that the sprint will be unlikely to be done in time.

* Can estimate and adapt to changes. Be boring and predictable.

* Can work/collaborate/teach with other devs.

I got tired of interviewing tech people that though that to be senior is the same as to be specialist (or worse even, that it was related with the number of years).

You think it takes 5+ years to acquire those skills?! Man, I would be driven insane in an environment like that. Such a long time and a relatively low bar.

I think the point is that some people don't acquire it within 5 or even more years. Think of a typical checked-out worker, without any specific ambition in professional life. There's plenty of people like that.

Some, possibly even most, never do.

I know people with 20y that can’t do that.

Not who you’re asking, but it can take almost no time, or decades. It has nothing to do with years.

I have worked with people who have 8-10 years of experience and are still mid-level in both skill and professionalism, know that they are, and are fine with it. They get their joy from other things in life and are totally fine coming into the office and doing the bare minimum to get by and going years without raises or bonuses because of it. Again, this is a conscious choice these people are making, they're not being taken advantage of or anything.

I work with a guy now who's a mid-senior level (senior is SDE4, he's a 3) nearing retirement. Happiest guy I know tbh

> Such a long time and a relatively low bar.

I've promoted juniors in months. I've also had people start, stay a few years and leave as a junior. It's all about learning and what work you take on. Also, I see this often when interviewing. 5+ years of experience looking for a junior role. Usually, it's either someone who did not learn and was not promoted, or it is someone from an company that did not let people work on important things because they were junior. So they stayed that way.

Surely there's a step between a junior and a senior?

We typically use programmer, developer, or software engineer as synonyms as a whole, but I tend to view those titles as more junior/intermediate/senior.

A programmer can program code good enough, but that doesn't mean they are good at solving the goals business requires and communicating it.

A developer can program and develop a small enhancement with good communication. Sometimes can also break things down so other developers or programmers can work on it to.

An engineer an orchestrate an entire new project and can identify multiple areas where developers and programmers can be involved. A good engineer will do so while maintaining great communication with the users to ensure they get what they want.

An architect is someone who comes up with a plan to build something without any real care about budget, labor costs, or labor skills - both in software and in buildings.

"An architect is someone who comes up with a plan to build something without any real care about budget, labor costs, or labor skills - both in software and in buildings."

Disagree for both cases. The building architects I know surely have to work with a given budget and in software architecture likewise.

> but that doesn't mean they are good at solving the goals business requires

I wonder if any newcomer to an organization, regardless of how senior they are, won't be in this same position. In order to solve business goals, they need to understand them properly. In order to understand them properly, they need context. The context comes from working in the organization for some time (months to years, depending on the size and the transparency of the organization).

> An architect is someone who comes up with a plan to build something without any real care about budget, labor costs, or labor skills - both in software and in buildings.

This is definitely not true. I always have to balance on time/on budget/meets requirements and the skillset of the people who are using my designs.

I think in the trades, the intermediate level was called "journeyman".

Whatever about a software architect (that can mean practically anything; it's very fuzzily defined) that's rather unfair on actual architect architects, who are absolutely concerned with the practicalities.

"An architect is someone who comes up with a plan to build something without any real care about budget, labor costs, or labor skills - both in software and in buildings."

Whenever I hear developers say stuff like this, they just sound junior/inexperienced.

honestly, I'm a senior developer and I don't give a fuck about collaboration.

This does not compute.

I think you made the GPs point very effectively.

So does his profile:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=m00dy

    about: someone important...

Probably "senior" in the sense that you've been at the company the longest then. I've worked with a couple of these before, it's always awful.

See, again, this is what I'm talking about with the title inflation.

Couldn't agree more.

I had colleagues with 20+ years of industry experience who couldn't communicate efficiently, extending every short call to 1h+ meetings, require long and recurring discussions for the smallest details, or define tickets that always had to be reworked. The same people were often off by magnitudes with their estimates and reluctant to suggestions to improvements in their tooling (i.e. linter plugins for their IDE when necessary).

On the other hand, I had teammates with ~5 years of industry experience who outpaced the whole team, delivered optimal quality, were empathic, held workshops for other devs, and still had enough time/power to work on things like refactors.

What you're discussing has little to do with seniority - those are some personality traits that are great to have, but you either have it in you or not - people who are bad at explaining stuff will usually stay bad at it for the rest of life (but can still be fantastic in e.g. architecting things).

Being a senior dev is IMHO much simpler. It's all about being able to solve problems independently, without needing supervision, guidance or tutoring. If you can pass to a dev some business requirement, and know that they'll return with an optimal solution implementation, you've got yourself a true senior dev.

This is really off the mark.

I was horrible at communicating succinctly in both written and oral form and bad at PowerPoints and diagrams until 2016 - at the age of 42. I definitely wasn’t comfortable talking to “the business” and customers.

I got my first dev lead job and watch how my manager - the director of IT - at a mid size non tech company was able to translate my technical designs and challenges to the higher ups. I learned a little from him through osmosis.

I changed jobs in 2018 and I started proactively working with my CTO (my manager), sales and the documentation writers to become a better communicator.

By the time a chance to interview with BigTech in the cloud consulting department (yes full time job) fell into my lap in 2020, I had no problem passing a 5 round mostly behavioral interview where I had to describe technical accomplishments, business impact, scope, etc in STAR format - over video conferencing without the use of a white board.

I was still a little rough around the edges. But three years later, I consistently get great feedback from customers about my presentations and my ability to explain concepts and challenges to technical and non technical audiences at the same time. I’m not bragging just saying that it can be learned like anything else.

On another note, being able to work independently when spoonfed business requirements is considered mid level behavior according to the guidelines at every single major tech company that I’m aware of.

Can concur, the bar for senior at tech companies is usually that you are involving in scoping requirements and work, or even possibly owning the whole project.

Yes, like any skill, communication is something you can practice and get better. The key is that it’s very hard if you can’t get out of your own head. And when it comes to communication with executives and other very busy people you really need mentorship with situational context unless you really are a natural.

I got a lot of great mentorship here that very much took me to the next level when it comes to communicating with executives and CxOs.

But part of it was also me just watching people who were good at small talk and reading articles about how to be a good conversationalist since I am on client sites and go to lunch/dinner with them.

For instance, since I work remotely, I’m constantly taking notes when I’m on client calls and even with internal people when they mention something about their personal lives - families, vacations, hobbies - so I can ask then about it later.

Heck, I even have scheduled messages on Slack to ask them how was their vacation to $x when they are scheduled to return.

That's about how I think about it as well. You either need babysitting and mentoring or not.

Funny, this is how I (and I think most people I've worked with/for) describe a mid-level dev. "Doing the thing" is a pretty low bar but we don't really expect that from juniors, who typically need hand-holding. To be a mid-level you should be able to operate independently and provide optimal or near-optimal solutions most of the time, but your work is still going to be just focused around you. Most of what you're doing is individual tickets, refactoring, etc., nothing that influences or impacts the broader team. When your impact is beyond your individual work is when you start moving into the realm of senior, and it's part of why it takes time (not just skill) to get there.

> people who are bad at explaining stuff will usually stay bad at it for the rest of life (but can still be fantastic in e.g. architecting things).

How does that work? Explanation is fairly important there, I'd have thought.

> Being a senior dev is IMHO much simpler. It's all about being able to solve problems independently, without needing supervision, guidance or tutoring.

See, I think this may be the disconnect/product of title inflation.

In a system where you have junior engineer/engineer/senior engineer, what you're describing is probably engineer, not senior engineer. In a junior/senior system, it's, ah, a senior junior? :) A senior engineer should be a kind of force multiplier (though such is the level of title inflation that that maybe is now more staff in some places).

Hahah, It's the old story of the elephant and the blind men. There are so many ways to be a senior engineer, and it is, in my experience, very company dependent.

I wrote a blog post about it: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2812 which got some great HN discussion a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485006

tl;dr: being a senior engineer at a startup is different than at a consulting company is different than at a large retail firm is different than at a FAANG.

And my experience outside of the large tech companies is that titles are usually meaningless and don’t give you any signal when looking at applicants.

I'd add:

* able to take responsibility

* able to transfer skills and to guide juniors to productivity

> able to take responsibility

This is the big difference - seniors will track and resolve a roadblock or issue that they could justifiably ignore, in particular where other people in the organization are being difficult or obstructive, giving incorrect guidance, etc.

A junior will just go "We were told it cant be done/will take 5 weeks" whereas a senior will know that's bullshit and escalate it to the right people.

So I'm not alone!

I'm my environment, senior developer needs a deep understanding of technology but more importantly a deep understanding of business and business processes. I'm in the ERP space so a senior Dev can talk business language - they Co develop and guide functional specifications with business analysts. In other words they understand hr or pay or financial processes of the company.

I wish I could assume all those other qualities as well, but while some here think good communication is easy to acquire early, my experience is the opposite - there are many 20 year veterans that cannot / should not be put in front of a client. They are wizards at technology but not at communication - presenting things to non experts, understanding other points of view, etc. You have to WANT to learn things other than technical proficiency, and even here, that's frequently derided / seen as uncool. "Manager" is of course a swear word insult so anybody who wants to learn communication or empathy or estimates or hard conversation is "no true techie" :-/

Completely agree!

I call it do you have 10 years of experience? or do you have 1 year of experience 10 times?

There's a step between Fiat 126p and Ford F-150 when it comes to towing capacity.

No one says everyone with 5 years of experience is a senior, but most likely is mid.

That's exactly what the parent comment says: title inflation.

I sometimes get even funnier CVs, where a person with 2-3 years of experience (usually from the Army) is already in a tech lead / architect position.

Tech is very strongly bi-modal or even tri-modal in terms of both compensation and skill. Some people with 2-3 YOE will operate better than some people with 10 YOE.

> Some people with 2-3 YOE will operate better than some people with 10 YOE.

That's true of every field, and doesn't really relate to the claim of bimodality. If ability followed a perfect normal distribution, it would still be true that some people with 2-3 years of experience are better than some other people with 10-15 years of experience.

In most fields this is extremely rare. In tech it's relatively common.

The difference is the kind of environment you're working in (E.g. high growth tech company vs non-tech company) and the learning rate in that environment, which is where the modality comes into play.

> In most fields this is extremely rare.

For example?

In pretty much any field I can think of, it is definitely not rare. The norm is that some people pick things up quickly and other people don't.

It is normal for good musicians with 3 years of experience to be better than bad musicians with 10 years of experience.

It is even more normal for good secretaries with 3 years of experience to be better than bad secretaries with 10.

My mother once partnered with a local university to offer students internships clerking in her medical office. She remarked that the students, with their zero years of experience, were more effective in this generic, unskilled role than anyone she was able to hire into it. (Those people had many years of experience.)

The partnership with the university wound down and she went back to hiring no-hopers with plenty of experience. According to her, that was the best she could hope to do for the dead-end position she was offering.

In my personal experience, devs that "cross-pollinate" in other fields are usually more competent than someone with the same YOE from a purely tech background.

I think the issue is that people sometimes incorrectly assume job titles are standard and used the same across different companies. At some companies titles are more about pay bands. I’ve worked places with a bunch of “senior” engineers, but that was mainly because the company pay bands couldn’t compete with the market for junior engineers so they’d hire them as seniors. It’s bad too because sometimes once an employee gets that title they expect it at other companies even if the experience level isn’t there yet, which limits their mobility because they refuse to take a backward step in their career, even if the pay is better

I took three backward steps since 2016

- dev lead - non tech company responsible for one “team” of two developers and a bunch of contractors on another team

- “Senior Software Engineer” - no reports and I actively refused a promotion to be a team lead. I was already the de facto “cloud architect” over the “application modernization” efforts via no more than influence and reputation.

- mid level “cloud consultant” - full time job working remotely at BigTech.

As my Dad always said, it doesn't matter what they call you, it matters what they pay you.

I worked with a person for about 3 years (and he had previous experience as well) and I wouldn't even call him a fresh-grad level or trust him more than I trust an intern. Some people are immune to learning

We have a 14 year junior engineer. She refuses to learn new tech, is difficult to work with, and makes a mean bowl of spaghetti code. She does it so quickly though and has so much institutional knowledge that it’s pretty much mandatory she stays.

When did we arrive at a point where terms like "junior" became derogatory terms similar to "idiot" or "asshole"? No, you don't have a "14 year junior engineer". You have a senior engineer who is difficult to work with and is (according to you) bad at their job.

Her official title is literally Junior Engineer with the company. Did I say that it was a derogatory term or use the title idiot or asshole or say they were bad at their job? Bro you should get that chip on your shoulder examined.

Has she been with your company for 14 years? Because if so, this really calls some of your companies practices somewhere into question.

That being said, if she got hired as a junior in the last 5 years (despite tangentially having some programming experience) and never got promoted, I guess I can understand that, but really, why even keep someone on who refuses to learn new things, is difficult to work with, and consistently writes poor code

Why? Because there are also 14 year junior managers (except they get retitled to something like "team lead")...

>but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.

At this point in time, it's completely normal for people breaking into the industry.

But someone with 5.5 years of experience isn't a person breaking into the industry.

Unless they have 6 years of 11 months experience doing the same thing.

> _wild_ title inflation

I'm wondering if it's important to put a specific title on one's resume. I assume many companies don't have any titles at all and everybody is just a "software engineers", whether they are a fresh graduate or 10 years of experience tech lead. What is more relevant is the scope of the job done which should be listed in a job description.

I think yes. While many companies have unprefixed titles, others have just plain "Software Engineer" as one step above graduate and even some otherwise decent companies will discard resumes applying for senior/lead positions when a HR drone does a first pass and decides "no senior level experience", even if your descriptions are full of business impact and leadership experience.

I think it's also important to know what you're applying to too.

If you're applying to a Frontend Engineer Position, and you're a Software Engineer who's comfortable with both parts and the full stack, you just shut up, put frontend engineer in the CV, and let them choose you, you can always tell them you also know to do backend stuff on the interview....

First passes are pretty simple, they just match their job position with the stuff recieved.

ATS filter you based on keywords before a human does

Yeah, honestly if I was coming from a startup that called everyone the Vice-President of Whatever (or indeed a large multinational bank; some of those also have silly title inflation) I'd be inclined to just put engineer.

> whereas everyone else would call that person [with 5 years experience] a junior engineer

I’ve met people with 3 years experience who I’d consider more senior than myself (8 years). Some folks just learn really fast and/or don’t do much else other than work.

Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.

It's such an old-fashioned way to look at skills and experience.

Tbh there should be real ways to measure all this but there aren't.

If you can code by your own without handholding, are you a junior at that point anyways?

I've never really considered the ability to write the code without handholding to be the line between junior/senior. If anything that's more the line of being a competent developer with a particular toolset.

I may be a competent framer that can stud out the plans for a house, but I may not totally understand why the walls are positioned that way or how the roofline will work with the landscape to avoid water issues later. They're just different skill sets, I'd actually also expect the architect who can design the house wouldn't be particularly useful with a framing nailer.

Ive never actually liked drawing solid lines between skill levels because it is so contextual, but here's the closest I can get.

Any developer should be able to write code when it's already known what it needs to do. The next level for me is being able to write code with an eye towards testability, maintenance, and flexibility based on where you expect requirements to change later. I'd expect a senior to be able to go beyond that, starting from a set of product requirements and designing the code to work for those needs. Beyond that it starts to get really gray, and you likely lose more of the earlier coding skills, but that's where I'd be looking for someone who can help define what the product requirements even are, considering technical risks and limitations of how they might even build and host the product.

I see it like the most abstract up the ladder you get, the more senior you are.

Anyone can fix a button's css.

Not anyone can refactor big parts of a codebase into something better, or help them create from scratch in a cohesive, modular, future-proof way.

Every time I get into a new job I get a various degrees of this.

The more business-context you have, the better you can solve business requirements with tech, the better tech toolset you have available, the better choice you can make on what solution to use or not to use to such problems.

True seniority means understanding how all the system works, regardless of getting into the grunt work of each of the steps, but being able to do so and understand it at the lower level too if/when needed.

It's a hard act.

One caveat I have is that companies are generally terrible at recognizing senior+ level independent contributors (ICs). Many companies don't even have a career path defined for this.

I have worked with some of those individuals and they really are worth every bit as much as, if not more than, a systems-level thinker that enjoys mapping business needs to technical solutions.

Most large tech companies I've seen promote standout ICs to either architect or manager, assuming that the skillset and interest largely transfers. I've seen this blow up many times, it's painful to watch and I really hate it for everyone involved.

If I were hiring for my farm business, I would consider years of experience to have some relevance. Every year brings a new environment (e.g. drought, rainy, etc.) and, with the work being largely seasonal, it takes a whole year for a chance to try again. As each year brings new challenges, having another year of experience does strongly indicate that you faced a new challenge each time.

If I were hiring for my tech business, I agree that it doesn't mean a whole lot. One can experience a multitude of different environments before lunchtime. One can also do the exact same thing over and over. There is no seasonality to hold you back or push you forward.

Ultimately, what one is interested to know in questioning years of experience is how many scenarios someone has run through so that when something similar happens again you can believe, with reasonable confidence, that they will know how to react. This is quite measurable, but it can be hard for someone in tech to keep track of as there isn't a good frame of reference like in farming where you can simply remember each year.

All this tells me is you've never worked in agricw, and no other industry than tech at a professional level, because you think it's unique. It's not.

> All this tells me is you've never worked in agricw

Honestly, I don't even know what agricw is, so that is no doubt true. I've been working on farms for 30-some-odd years, though, and my farming operation has been going for 17 years now, so I speak from that background. We plant once a year, we harvest once a year, etc. so the lessons to learn only come around once a year. Thus years of experience starts to become a decent proxy for what you are really trying to measure. Indeed, that doesn't work in every industry.

I suspect it's a rather daft abbreviation of "agricultural work". Just guessing; I'd not heard of it either.

The idea that "experience" is an outdated concept would only make sense coming from an industry that really doesn't even really have "senior" people.

Having worked in multiple fields throughout my life, I deeply miss the presence of truly experienced coworkers.

For example one of the lessons of experience is that skill in the immediate task at hand is only a part of the overall engineering skillset. Experienced professionals (in any field) can often solve problems better with a tool they are unfamiliar with than less experienced professionals can in their area of expertise.

One trait of experienced devs I've seen, that I've not seen in even the sharpest but less experienced ones, is the ability to see problems that will arise down the road from miles away.

Likewise I also rarely see less experienced devs, no matter how smart and talented, see solutions outside of the main path massively reduce the complexity of the original problem. I fondly recall working in research orgs when I was much more junior, and asking a 30+ year industry vet how to solve a tricky problem only for them to, time and time again, that the best solution was to avoid the problem.

> One trait of experienced devs I've seen, that I've not seen in even the sharpest but less experienced ones, is the ability to see problems that will arise down the road from miles away.

This is called second (or third) order thinking btw.

I thought it was systems thinking?

> ...industry vet how to solve a tricky problem only for them to, time and time again, that the best solution was to avoid the problem...

This is a world-wide, ancient, phrase: If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Which derives from the universes oldest rule: Nothing is more permanent than a temporary fix.

Senior devs have internalized these two constants of the universe. I suggest you do as well, before the third rule of the universe takes hold of your life.

Third immutable rule of the universe: He who noticed it, broke it.

Junior is mostly related on the scale of responsibilities. Juniors take on tasks, middles on features, seniors are responsible for products, staff for a series of related products, and distinguished engineers are responsible for huge leaps in key core parts of the business.

Roughly speaking:

If you have a hard time contributing to starting on projects or resolving problems, AND you have a hard time contributing to finishing projects or resolving problems, you’re a junior X (where x is programmer, engineer, sysadmin, etc).

If you can contribute to starting on a project/problem but have a hard time finishing it, OR you have a hard time starting on a project/problem but can contribute to finishing it, you’re an X.

If you can contribute to starting on a project/problem, AND you can contribute to finishing a project/problem, you’re a Senior X.

Not sure the current term of art to being able to start and finish projects / solve problems and your work regularly being good and reliable, maybe Architect or something like that.

I like this heuristic! It captures several important aspects of "seniority" in a clever way.

A lot of the other comments are defining seniority in terms of years of experience or breadth of skills developed. Those are both important, but for me they don't capture how "well-rounded" you are. When I was a manager in consulting we used to distinguish between resources who had "5 years of experience" and resources who had "1 year of experience 5 times". Your years of experience need to be extending your capabilities, not just repetition of skills you have already mastered.

I think simple rules of thumb, like "5 years is a junior" or "5 years is a senior" aren't very helpful. When I'm hiring I may suggest a certain amount of experience as a requirement to indicate to candidates that I see the role as suitable for someone "entry-level" or someone further along in their career. But I'm not going to reject a candidate with good experience simply because they don't have the number of years experience I suggested. I'm going to look at what they've done.

One more thought on this topic. For me, years of experience can also be shorthand for variety of experience. Someone with 3 or even 5 years of experience is unlikely to have worked on a lot of big projects in different organizations. Someone with 15+ years of experience is more likely to have worked on a variety of big projects in different organizations. Some commenters here are probably going to tell me "5 years of experience at a start-up" is as good or better than 15 years of experience in a big corporate IT shop. Maybe. Depends on the role I'm trying to fill.

>Some folks just learn really fast and/or don’t do much else other than work.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't consider junior/senior to be defined by how "good" you are at programming. Obviously the hope is that senior > junior, but there are other, softer, skills involved with being a senior.

No matter how you define it, there's people that start working at a senior level much faster than others.

> Maybe it's just me, but I don't consider junior/senior to be defined by how "good" you are at programming.

What's your definition of senior?

Someone who's reached their last year of high school. Seriously though, senior just means you're older and have more years of experience. Make sure you help your kouhai when they're in trouble.

> What's your definition of senior?

I have already made the mistake you are about to make.

You've already invested a huge amount of time in learning something which became obsolete (like jQuery), then you got over it instead of giving up in frustration, and spent a huge amount of time learning something else (like Angular or React), and you've finally come to grips with the fact that it too will eventually become obsolete, and you'll be fine moving on to the next thing (like Svelte).

If you only know one system and think you're going to be able use it forever, then you're still a junior developer. If you're afraid to move on and learn something new, then you shouldn't be a developer at all.

(I'm not the parent commenter), but I believe a defining quality of a senior developer is someone who I can give any problem/project to in the business domain and they return with a solution in the technical domain.

Experience is absolutely relevant. You are vastly more likely to be competent at 10 years than 5 or 3 or 1. Sure, I have worked with incompetent people with more experience and I've been the "rock star" with 2 outperforming devs with 15, but there's still a strong correlation between experience and ability.

> Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.

I cannot disagree with this more. In my own experience, I've never met anyone with less than 5 years of experience that I'd call "good". And I've worked at several places in SV, FAANG included.

The good old "They don't have 10 years experience, they have 2 years of experience 5 times"

There is the saying that to get 5 years of experience in 1 year you should work in a startup.

This isn't only about title inflation. It is in some ways true in the real sense also. Because in a small team you get exposed to everything and if things don't work, it's very obvious why and there are no excuses to hide behind. Whereas in an enterprise you could sleep behind the wheel, roam around in pointless meetings, wait for the other department blocking you, ride on your teammates merits, close 1 story per month and nobody would question.

This isn't to say there aren't great minds in big organizations, I've been in both contexts and learned tons and met absolutely fantastic colleagues and experiences in both.

I think you hit the nail on the head there. I’ve only worked in startups and consistently I’ve worked with “senior”-titled engineers who were absolutely brilliant. Typically with less than a decade of experience.

But yeah there’s definitely no cruising at the wheel when you’re in a small, fast-moving organization. In my experience it’s helped me level up very quickly.

I don't think it's about learning very fast. You learn the technology as you use it.

It's about having the brain to reason around problems efficiently.

I worked with someone who become senior & team lead after 2 years (and a really good one at that), after having done business PowerPoints for their entire working life.

I link IQs test (in informal channels) and all the juniors who picked up development really quickly and become very effective, all have high IQ.

If it were allowed, I would definitely use IQ tests in an interview setting.

I think leetcoding started as a proxy for IQ tests (which could totally be, if people couldn't prepare on the subject) but nowadays it's just testing people's ability to memorise different cases and being comfortable enough with coding to be able to implement (and mix and match) them.

5 years for junior for better or worse is well out of step with the industry - while you're right that you can get some massively inflated titles that are out of step with the norm, the norm is that you're an intermediate developer at a minimum and most likely a senior after 5 years.

It's dumb, but it is the standard nowadays.

Intermediate/mid for sure, but if I get a resume from someone whose first programming job was 2018 and they're calling themselves senior, I'm throwing that in the trash unless like you said they're from VC-funded startups that are going to have massive title inflation and they're applying for a realistic (mid-level) role.

Sure, I guess my point is to consider the context of the person applying. If they are coming from a place with title inflation, it's not their fault that the company they worked for inflated titles. If you're exclusively hiring seniors and they are an inflated "senior", for sure you're under no obligation to hire them, but if you're open to intermediates, I think it's worth explaining how your titles might differ from their experiences and that intermediate is a better fit.

Anyone tossing resumes because of title/time spent not matching up with their expectations is out of touch

It wouldn't be unusual to be an E5 at Facebook (err, sorry, "Meta") after 5 years, which is considered "senior" level. The point I'm making is that this title inflation has happened more broadly than just at VC-funded startups.

I was hired at L5 at Meta in 2011, they’ve done a pretty good job at keeping the bar high but it’s mathematically impossible for it to stay at 2011 levels on multi order of magnitude growth.

Back when I was even bothering in Jan/Feb it was me and 20 other L8s interviewing for the same L6 opening. It’s a coin toss at that point.

Price discovery is not functioning at the moment, there are plenty of theories why.

But high-end tech hiring is a slot machine and will be until monetary policy lets the bond market stabilize a bit.

Your comment is almost completely incomprehensible to me, as someone that doesn't work in the Meta context...

I take it being an L5 is a good thing? but just six months ago you were an L8, and competition to become an L6 was a coin toss? No idea what 'price discovery' could mean in this situation, other than a fairly weird way to say 'salary range'? And any of this having to do with 'the bond market' is just baffling!

The reason I bring it up is that I'm genuinely curious what life is like in other corners of the tech world. Any way you could translate the above into non-Meta terms?

I worked at Facebook for 4 years and also don't understand that comment. I think it's just worded confusingly.

> I worked at Facebook for 4 years and also don't understand that comment.

I have never worked for FB and I thought it was fine. None of that is FB-specific.

> I take it being an L5 is a good thing?

It's implied lower numbers are better.

>> it was me and 20 other L8s interviewing for the same L6 opening

> but just six months ago you were an L8, and competition to become an L6 was a coin toss?

Yes, due to the number of people competing for the same position.

> No idea what 'price discovery' could mean in this situation, other than a fairly weird way to say 'salary range'?

Salary range implies stability. eg What a company is willing to pay for what positions. There has been a lack of standardization in talent across tech and instability in compensation. Another way to think of it is an increased risk tolerance in wages. This has been fueled by leniency in promotion/raises/hiring when profits were higher.

> And any of this having to do with 'the bond market' is just baffling!

Monetary policy (around interest rates) is directly related to profit margins and hiring. Suffice to say, this is common knowledge for anyone who owns property (beyond a car, maybe) or tracks the job market.

Can you further elaborate on why monetary policy is directly related to profit margins? My understanding is that monetary policy / interest rates is controlled by the FED. When they raise rates then money is more expensive, therefore profit margins shrink, and the hiring bar has to increase.

I addressed at least part of this question downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36914919.

I was 35 years old before I had the faintest idea how money works, like even a little.

And the only way I learned even a little is because I lived in NYC for a bit and ended up hanging with a bunch of Street cats after work, who laugh their asses off about how clueless we all are (in that moment personified by yours truly).

But you get a few G&Ts into them and they’re pretty happy to teach you Econ 101.

Incredible, thank you for taking the time to knowledge share!

https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Facebook,Amazon,Google&track... says higher numbers are better (more senior, more highly paid) at Facebook, so maybe the GGP post is talking about working at Meta, leaving, and then coming back to apply for a less senior role than they'd had previously? It confused me.

Much obliged, you answered that better than I could have.

Ah one minor critique, you didn’t tell them about the last time the same office that goes after terrorism and money laundering and stuff took time out of their day and busted all these same firms for wage fixing in the ancient days of just over ten years ago in federal court.

That’s at least tangentially germane. :)

You may have thought you understood it, but you don’t. Lower numbers in engineering levels are not better. That’s why the original post was confusing.

That is a minor nitpick that misses the point about a deeply insightful observation around bond markets and macro outcomes.

I thought it was too minor to even note.

Cool, I was in PA in 2011, MPK 2012-2017, and FBNY 2017-2018?

Did we cross paths at all?

I was on Ads for ages, Sigma for like a year, and IG ranking Ml for like 2-ish.

What did you work on? You should pop in the Ex-this/that groups from time to time if you havent, very cool crowd.

We overlapped in NY. But assuming your username is your real name, I don’t remember you. I worked mostly on iOS infra stuff (crash reporting, battery usage tracking, etc).

They were hired as a level 5 over a decade ago. They got promoted a bunch until they were level 8. At some point they left. Now they are trying to come back. The market is so bad that they have lowered their standards and are only applying for level 6 roles. Still a bunch of other level 8s are competing for that lower level job so the chance of them getting it is lower.

The bond market/interest rate comment is saying this is part of why the economy is bad.

Price discovery I am not that confident in the meaning. I think it means companies and candidates are having a hard time figuring out what each other are worth. So you have highly skilled people not getting the offer numbers they want because their skills are not being recognized.

L8 is a bit of a guess. I was an L7 five years ago and have been training hard since. Maybe I’m still a 7.

I think you and I are thinking similarly about price discovery. Markets get disrupted, it’s not unprecedented or anything, but in general there’s some price between zero and infinity that a person can make, and seeing that go from X to “no transaction” abruptly is less ideal than it going from X to X - Y because supply and/or demand changed.

Well behaved pricing curves are existential in a bunch of really key markets, to the point that institutions preserve those properties.

Whether one is a tech worker or a struc steel pro or a teacher, anything, it seems a weird exception to “we need differentiable pricing curves here”.

Can you further elaborate on "price discovery" and how monetary policy interfaces with the bond market? Also, curious to better understand how you interpret monetary policy and bond markets ultimately impacting high-end tech hiring in a more concrete example.

The second slash third questions are easier. In the US at least (and many other modern monetary systems) the money supply (it can be measured lots of ways, in the US a number called M2 is usually a good default) is (mostly) manipulated/guided by what are called “open market operations”. When lay people say “The Fed” they usually mean the “The Federal Open Market Committee”. Open market operations are give or take buying or selling US sovereign debt (a privileged kind of bond) to push the price up or down and therefore the yield (interest rates) down or up. Almost all interest rates are directly or indirectly indexed to US sovereign debt (Treasurys, etc.) and because of the way that money enters and leaves the system via lending activity (which is a whole topic), that “benchmark” interest rate “target” roughly increases the availability of money to say hire people or build a factory, or decreases it because too much money is chasing too little productivity (AKA inflation).

From roughly 2009-2022, the “benchmark” target was ~0, a policy position called ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy). This might have made a little sense to like, avoid a depression in the 2009 housing-originated (ha!) financial crisis, but it turned out that running the economy in this super whacky way drove asset bubbles in a bunch of stuff which is an effective wealth transfer from people without serious estates to people with them. This was very popular with the sort of people who decide stuff. There’s this other whole can of worms called “easing” (QE) that arguably made the target rate negative, also a whole other topic.

For reasons that I haven’t heard a persuasive explanation for, beginning in roughly March of 2022 the FOMC started cranking this target up (selling a ton of bonds) and is still doing it, the most recent increase in the target was 2 days ago.

This is going to slow economic activity and on paper inflation, but the effects will usually be felt first and most in what are called “growth” sectors, basically stuff where the value is perceived to be largely in the future rather than the present. With a healthy hand-wave, “software” is a “growth” sector, which is why 500k tech people can be fired in 6 months and the Wall St. Journal can still keep sort of a straight face that labor markets are strong. There is a roaring demand for gig workers who don’t get dental.

This is already too long, so if you want my personal opinion on price discovery in elite software talent markets, reply to indicate it and I’ll write a mother micro-blog :)

Is following this kind of info a hobby of yours? I find it fascinating, but I can’t imagine how learning enough to have a truly informed opinion about these topics could be actually useful to me.

Eh, I mean I guess ultimately I’m just kind of a nerd.

I will say that understanding a modicum of finance (I’m certainly no RenTech quant!) is basically a prerequisite for understanding politics, sociology, war, energy, technology, pretty much everything.

One doesn’t need a ton, but being able to give or take eyeball whether the market believes e.g. Powell is kinda table stakes.

And it’s just insane this isn’t taught broadly. I learned even just my modicum mostly by improbable random chance.

I absolutely do want the follow up to price discovery in elite software talent markets. That said, if this is something better discussed over a beer I've gone ahead and sent you an email :+1:

That doesn't seem fair, and it doesn't seem like an effective filter, either. Titles vary wildly for a lot of different reasons, and you can't expect candidates to present themselves to you in your terms. You can't expect them to take your job descriptions at face value, either. If mismatched title expectations bother you, blame the industry, blame other companies, blame hiring managers, but don't blame an engineer who has only been working for five years. It's on you to explain how titles and compensation work at your company and work out what their position would be.

I wouldn't pigeonhole someone into a level based on their years of experience or previous job titles, either. Interviews can reveal some surprising things. I've worked with people with less than five years of experience who were senior-quality developers at all aspects of the job, and I've worked with people with ten years of experience who just wanted to sit in their cube and write code without making any decisions or talking to anyone except their boss. And these people aren't going to straightforwardly tell you what their position should be. The one who wants to sit in his cube with no responsibilities might tell you he's senior (and his resume might back that up) and the one who is ready for a senior position might tell you they're mid-level, because at their last job they worked with extraordinary people.

Along similar lines to what you are saying, I think one of the more general problems that I see with titles is that people do tend to gravitate around specific industries/sizes of companies, even within IT, and then tend to associate their own experience as "normal" when it comes to seniority.

I've moved a bit between different sizes and government vs startup vs mid-sized etc, and the titles vary wildly.

Some government jobs had people with 4 years experience be "senior" or even "tech leads" because they weren't paying enough so they simply promoted any bright spark that was going to last to senior roles so they could at least get a few more years out of them before they left, as HR wouldn't pay more money without them getting the a specific title.

Other place I've worked, your title was essentially a lottery system, others you were hard pressed to be a Senior without anything less than 10 years experience.

But each of those places, I encountered people with very specific ideas of exactly what a senior was, and they were convinced their own standards were the "accepted" ones.

There are definitely general guidelines for senior, associate etc, but they aren't normalised, just like you are saying.

So point is, in support of your post, you can't dismiss someone just based on the title they give themselves, as it might have been perfectly normal thing to call themselves in previous positions.

That's a great point, that VC-funded startups aren't the only sources of title inflation. Salary bands at bigger companies also fuel inflation. I worked for a startup that got acquired by a large bureaucratic company, and I ended up as a principle engineer -- along with two other engineers on my team. It was the only way to keep paying us what we had been making as senior engineers at the startup. It was a director-level title, so my boss technically had a lower title than me. When I decided to leave that company, I was looking at senior-level positions at startups, because that was the equivalent to the job I was doing as a director-level IC at BigCorp.

You really squandered that opportunity to get a VP role at a startup?

I don't have VP-level handsomeness or social skills, nor the desire to put in those hours.

Large multinational banks are particular offenders here. IIRC, the rough equivalent grade for a Big Tech(TM) senior in JP Morgan (or maybe Goldman? one of those) is VP. Staff is MD or something!

This is based off of how leveling in finance. They just reused the same levels for their SWEs

There are tons of Senior engineers from Google and Facebook (and other large companies) with only 5ish yeahs of experience.

great example of why hiring in tech is broken.

decision makers making blanket generalizations because candidates don't fit the mold they've invented in their own minds using only their personal experience as a baseline.

tech experience is wildly diverse. looking at candidates with a one size fits all approach is passing up plenty of qualified people, but everybody wants to hire like Google.

Might be better to just ignore job titles altogether and only look at descriptions of what they actually did.

Employees generally don't decide on the job titles used in their company.

I don’t even have titles on my resume. Everything is “software developer” or occasionally something slightly different if I think it’s relevant to the particular work I did there.

Any senior developer using in resume term "senior"?

Since 2005ish.

We just rebranded senior as staff+

Staff Pro Max

Actually I think its pretty rare to even have a junior title nowadays. You can claim anyone with less than 2 YOE is a junior or whatever but when jobs require you to “hit the ground running” AKA run migrations in prod and resolve things when shit hits the fan then you’re not really doing junior level work.

Of course, there are also junior level jobs by responsibility but not title.

I have to read a lot of cv's and the job title part is just some empty noise for me. Developer, engineer, programmer they're just terms that go in and out of fashion. At first they will become more and more pompous, Senior 10x-Ninja, or whatever, until they become so ridiculous that the actual capable people will call themselves humbly just a programmer.

I haven't looked for jobs in nearly 9 years now. Is a LinkedIn profile essential nowadays? I have dropped all social media and LinkedIn is one of the most invasive. I really dislike how it notifies you for everything

You can turn off any notification settings

It just bothers me that people get notified whenever I'd do anything on it. As for myself, I simply make notifications go to my spam folder

I prefer to share my information when I want and with whom I want, but LinkedIn feels like a meat market. If FB was personal marketing 101 (only sharing what makes you attractive), linkedIn feels like an advanced course on being fake. It kind if disgusts me

If you're looking for work (at least in programming, in the US), respectfully you need to get over it. This mindset is well in the minority and will actively hurt you while job searching.

Not saying you won't find stuff without it, but why make it harder than it needs to be?

What do you mean by "It just bothers me that people get notified whenever I'd do anything on it"?

You don't have to notify anyone when you update anything, it's just a setting. Most people don't.

The "fake" ones are the people trying to become linkedin-fluencers, I agree I'd never want to do that. But setting up your profile is basically a copy paste of your resume, and leads to an in-flow of recruiters you can always go back to when it's the right time.

I can't really believe I'm preaching for linkedin because I barely spend any time on it, but it's a tool, and when I've decided to move companies, it's made life far easier than it would've been manually applying to companies. That's without making public posts or sharing public updates to my role

Maybe it's because I never go on it, but every time a contact posts or visits my empty profile, I get notified. I can only imagine the notifications they would get if I started actually putting my info online. I might want to share it with a recruiter on a one-off basis, but I dislike having my cv available to everyone. I like to live a private life and not be publicly tracked, is that too much to expect nowadays? Just asking because I haven't job searched in a long time

Yep makes sense, I hate all that too, and they probably should do a better job providing sensible defaults for people like us. But it definitely can all be turned off.

Go in there and disable all that before changing anything. I’m bothered in a similar way about that stuff.

That being said, I don’t post or participate in the social media aspect. It’s a virtual resume and an index of recruiters and companies who are interested in you, and it’s good to know where your colleagues you want to work with again are at.

Don’t install the app for minimal invasiveness. And also consider that anyone who actively uses LinkedIn has probably disabled or filtered out all the notification noise themselves as well, so don’t get too caught up thinking about it.

And proactively remove yourself from any of those people lookup databases that recruiters will use to find your direct email

It's a primary tool for a recruiter. If you are in a situation where you need recruiters to help you find work I think it would be worth the effort.

Having them centralized on one platform is an asset when you want to avoid the people who will sell off you contact info and resume to unscrupulous body shops. Cut out LI and apply directly whenever possible.

I have a very bare bones LinkedIn profile. It mostly serves as an address book.

it's bad when you're not looking for a job, but It's great when you are imo.

why is it bad when you're not looking for a job?

You get lot of spam and some of the recruiters can be pretty unethical

ah, fair point

It isn't if you have good contacts. It pays to build a lot of bridges at your jobs.

A lot more seems to be through it, though other job sites do exist.

I don't really bother with notifications or the app for any social media site.

> LinkedIn is one of the most invasive

surprised to read this, I don't find it invasive in the slightest. I've turned off notifications for most things but its the only "social" app I have on my device.

I will say it's gotten a lot more content focussed lately, with everyone and their mom sharing their thoughts on jobs and employment. Personally I just use it as a profile for recruiters to hit and a way for me to talk back to them

My observations are the same. It's good for some networking and industry news articles, but anyone in an HR or managerial role is posting a story meant to farm likes, so there is more noise than usual.

If you're at the point where you're sending out online applications to jobs where you don't have a connection, I would definitely get a linkedin.

I'd turn off notification entirely or for all but messages

Funny story about how linkedin's oversharing ruined a potential date for me:

Recently I have been online dating, and while talking to a match, she dropped that she works a relatively high position in state government. So naturally I googled her name (only had her first name) and the position and clicked the first link. "Oh wow, she is, that's cool!"

A minute later she messages me "Checking out my linkedin?"

I was super confused at first, being that I never use linked in, only set it up for a job change about 4 years ago. I checked the website on my browser and I was not even logged in.

Then I pieced it together.

The first search result was her linkedin, which I clicked. Without me even noticing, it opened in the app on my phone (which I wasn't even aware I still had), which was logged in. Of course then it sent her a notification that I had looked at her page.

She stopped responding pretty much right after that. I am guessing because my totally outdated linkedin didn't at all match what I had briefly mentioned I did for work, and was much more junior.

So thanks linkedin.

Proof you need to keep your resume current. lol

The reality is that she wasn't going to be a good match if she wasn't able to communicate if she had a concern like your linkedin not matching, or even just give you the benefit of the doubt. Imagine what else she wouldn't communicate.

> The reality is that she wasn't going to be a good match if she wasn't able to communicate if she had a concern like your linkedin not matching, or even just give you the benefit of the doubt. Imagine what else she wouldn't communicate.

It's reasonable to have a default posture of not trusting people you just met online and if you give them a further reason not to trust you (online profile doesn't match what you said), even if unintentionally, it's also reasonable to cease communications before more time is wasted on someone who is potentially untrustworthy. It's a red flag. And there are hundreds of other people you can communicate with instantly online who don't have glaring red flags. I find the behavior reasonable unless they had already met/had a lot of time invested.

The “there’s hundreds of other people” mentality will continue into a relationship and marriage. One of the large issues with dating today is how people treat it disposably. Just ask a question like a normal human. It takes 5 seconds to type it out and the response is probably reassuring

There's what you want people to do and what they will actually do. Nobody who sees a big red flag and has many other options is going to do that.

Which is fine and fair, but it doesn't really refute my point that this behavior would personally make me disinterested in pursuing them as a romantic interest, and in my opinion suggests they would have compatibility issues for a long-term monogamous relationship.

A linkedin profile isn’t essential, I last moved jobs less than a year ago and discovered I had an incredibly out of date profile when somebody mentioned they had searched for me and couldn’t find me on there.

I did however have talks and interviews on podcasts and other things they could find, and a history of things I’ve worked on which I can talk about, and a previous colleague had referred me so I already had an in.

I don't think it's essential, but it's probably helpful. I also haven't looked for jobs in a long time, but interview a lot; it's unusual, through not unheard of, for a candidate not to have one (I don't think it counts against them with us, but I'm sure it does in some places).

Also, if I did find myself in need of a job, and didn't have anything particular in mind, I'd probably start replying to the recruiting messages I get on LinkedIn.

I think you can turn off the notifications; it notifies me for messages but nothing else. I assume I configured that at some point.

Use your network, not LinkedIn, to find jobs.

But set up a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is the lubricant of "hey, my friend X is looking - here's his linkedin" in a way that "hey ..., here's his personal website" or "here's some word doc or PDF in some random format that is annoying."

I've hired a lot of people and there is little more irritating than highly polished, curated resumes with a lot of noise and fluff on them. There may have been a time when that mattered, but honestly I just want to see your location, education, degrees, and the jobs you've had.

Have you looked for a job recently?

I don't know about you personally, but people in my social circles and employed think the job market is the same as it was from 2015 to 2020. They have no data point and assume their 2+ year old experience of looking for work is relevant today.

The market is bad.

I was getting calls from recruiters in 2020. I looked and found work (contracts) twice in 2022, the first time was not easy, the second time was very difficult.

2023: I am available, contacts and links to resume, linkedin, etc... in my profile!

It's strange because economically, tech is roaring back and the job market is tight as ever.

Are employers hedging against this perpetually 6 month away recession? Is there a shift from growth mindset to value mindset?

For private VC tech, interest rate increases mean the next funding round will be much harder to get

There was also a concerted effort from major tech employers to depress wages to control costs. They don't need to directly talk to each other to plan it, they state it in their earnings calls.

The most economically efficient companies in my career always make it insanely hard to add head count to the team. They tease you with "might get a head count next quarter". Then frequently freeze the head count during your search. They are trying to squeeze as much as they can. I'm not saying this is a pleasant working environment, but it is very good for the bottom line. Also, it is sometimes more efficient for them to give modest pay rises to best performers off-cycle to motivate them to work even harder.

In the past, I would have also found it strange to see tech blowing up in a tight job market. After a decade on the team-building side, though, I feel different.

Interviewing and onboarding are a huge distraction. Interviewing and onboarding done well require hours of attention from the more senior folks on your team.

When a company is hiring, the senior folks involved might be spending 6 hours a week interviewing. For example, I might have 4 45-minute interviews, another 15 minutes prepping for each interview, 15 minutes writing up feedback for every interview, 30 minutes in hire/no-hire discussions for candidates who are close, and another 30 minutes in hiring or interview meta-discussions.

Onboarding takes even more time. If I'm a new hire's onboarding mentor, I'm likely spending their first couple of days close by to answer any and all questions. After that, my work is frequently interrupted for a few weeks as I help them through issues (totally legitimate issues, BTW). We'll be spending extra time pairing with the new hire during the feature development process. Code review for new hires' code takes a lot longer, too.

When you factor all that in, a hiring freeze can realistically free up 10 or more hours of experienced employees' time every week. These are some of the most productive employees on the team.

In that context, it's not especially surprising to me that giving the most productive engineers 33% more productive time would lead to rapid improvements for tech companies, in the short term anyway.

Of course, in the medium-to-long term, a company that's not hiring is building up a huge "personnel debt" that is going to come due eventually. The product improvements will lead to new business, more clients will require more support, the new business will lead to more feature requests, and some employees will move on. The company will find itself without enough personnel to make headway on their product. Then they will have a hiring blitz where they wreck everyone's productive time and the team culture. The new, bigger team will make some headway, but they will still look less productive than the team was during the hiring freeze. The business will stagnate. The company will enact a hiring freeze, or perhaps even lay off team members. And then we're back at step 1.

Perfect explanation of the problem - and if I may suggest the solution is to carve some of those experienced people off as military do into a "training role" - where experienced people rotate off projects onto R&R and then onto training - creating a mini bootcamp that also has knock on benefits of building standards, tech stacks and tooling that "we have always been meaning to build".

Someone recently pointed out that we should learn more from how militaries grow and survive over the years - this is probably the biggest lesson.

It is pretty funny. During Covid I heard all sorts of doom about inflation and the economy, while I was chugging along great.

Now, no one will shut up about how there are so many jobs and how the economy is doing great, but I’m fucked.

We're into the next election cycle and PACs on both sides are engaged in viral marketing. You can no longer trust that any news is sincere and hasn't been sourced from people with a political agenda.

From my experience in two small-medium businesses - they're both running leaner than possible. I figured both were trying to sell, maybe they are?, but neither has.

By leaner than possible, I mean, things are running unmaintained, and it's only a matter of time before some of it starts crashing down.

What does it mean? I don't know. They're either going to have to hire, get bought out, or close up shop. I'm -hoping- it leads to more hiring in q4 or q1/24.

Yeah its tough. But something like 3 interviews a month (and tough to pass) is more what I’ve seen. With less experience. 1 in 6 months could be bad luck but Id wager he just isn’t applying to enough places.

He and I both, apparently!

Yes, the market is pretty bad right now, and Indeed's data shows it quite well: https://www.hiringlab.org/data (go to Sectors and choose Software Development)

We are currently at -64% from the 2022 peak job market and even -20% compared to pre-covid number of job openings.

Love it when people share a point with data. Thanks!

I am likely not revealing anything new to you (nor I know much about hiring), but:

Taking a look at your CV, I notice that you have a lot of very short work stints, averaging at about a position per year.

This is probably just the nature of contracting, but I can see this putting off most companies that are looking for someone to dive deeply in the business domain and work on supporting a project long-term.

I also feel a lot of those "we need someone with experience on X technology to onboard us or fix some urgent problem" jobs are on a downtrend, given the rise of XaaS solutions, convergence of development stacks, more documentation, stuff like ChatGPT, etc.

Thank you for taking the time to look at it and commenting.

It is indeed the nature of contracting and project work. Note that there are 3 times where I have done contracts back to back for 4 or 5 years for the same company, which should show that I don't just jump ship all the time and am able to commit for a long time.

It made more sense to highlight each project individually in an economy with a lot of need for contractors for short stints, but point taken, I'll see if I can highlight the fact that 2, or 3, or 4 consequent contracts are for the same company. Maybe even just bold the company names.

Appreciated, I wish I could help more. There's for sure a way to highlight that you can work on long stints, as well as quickly jump into diverse projects across the full stack.

Unfortunately I can't help much on it, as on my short career I always chained jobs on the good times and never had to work much on my CV or marketing myself.

Best of luck.

I reviewed your CV as well. I am a former programmer/analyst/architect, now an IT director. I have reviewed a lot of CVs as a hiring manager. I agree with the feedback you have already received. Here are some additional thoughts.

You have listed a lot of experience, mainly focusing on technical skills. When I review a CV I focus more on the last 5 or 10 years than roles from 30 years ago (unless I'm looking for someone to do COBOL maintenance). I suggest providing more information about experience in the last 5 or 10 years. I wouldn't worry too much about listing specific projects/assignments before that.

Your CV emphasizes your technical skills, but doesn't provide much insight into other skills. Perhaps for some of your recent projects you could highlight other ways in which you contributed to a successful outcome. Were you the lead developer? Did you interact with users - maybe in an agile process? What aspects of the software development life cycle were you responsible for?

So, based on your current CV, I might suggest a some entries like these:

Subtlety Communications, April 2022 - December 2022

- Vulnerability Mitigation Project

  Lead developer responsible for analyzing vulnerability reports, identifying appropriate mitigation, implementing and testing mitigation. Reported to CISO.  Javascript, React.

- Live Chat Application

  Senior member of agile application development team responsible for front-end development. Automated generation of Docker config files to improve CI/CD processes. Docker, Typescript, React.

Thank you.

Formatting it with the company as the top-level item would make clear at a glance that you’ve been at places for a lot longer.

> I have done contracts back to back for 4 or 5 years for the same company, which should show that I don't just jump ship all the time and am able to commit for a long time.

The harsh reality is right now, there are a lot of applicants were for many recent years hiring meant active recruiting so resumes aren't getting the attention that they once did. People aren't going deep dive your history unless you seem like the perfect candidate.

So short stints even mixed with a few long stints aren't going to balance out as you are suggesting in many situations.

What I can recommend to try and soften this, is be more generic, don't list ever single job, but something along the lines of "Various contract based projects from yyyy to yyyy" and bullet point detail the more juicier bits of the contacts.

but admittedly I base this solely on my own experience, so take it with a grain of salt.

What stands out to me is short work stints. You don’t tell a good story and why do you have your work experience dating back to the 80s?

I personally have been working professionally since the mid 90s. But I realize that no one cares about the fact that I did C on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the 90s, VB6 in the early 2000s along with C, C++/MFC/DCOM or C# for ruggedized Windows mobile devices in the late 200x. I’ve cut out everything on my resume before 2012.

Your resume is full of responsibilities. But not accomplishments. If I were to ask you why should I hire you over the dozens of other generic developers who run across my desk, what about your career sets you apart? I’m being completely hypothetical. I’m not in a hiring position and I’ve only been in one for a brief stint in my career. But put yourself in hiring manager’s shoes. Why would you hire you?

I’m not sitting on high judging you by any means. I’ve had a fairly unremarkable career myself until 2018 and nothing that really stood out.

> why do you have your work experience dating back to the 80s?

I kind of disagree. It’s not like people are printing out or even reading back that far. May as well include it, but certainly don’t expect people to read it.

I’m currently hiring and reading a lot of resumes. I rarely read past the first 2-3 pages, but sometime when I’m curious go back to learn more about career path. Has someone been programming for 30 years? Or started as a dba or a support tech?

I think it depends on the risk of including it. If you worked for an embarrassing employer or maybe don’t want people to guess your age, remove old stuff. But otherwise, I suggest just spending more effort on making the first page relevant.

I'm not an expert but your implicit premise that it's OK for a cv or resume to have multiple pages surprises me.

One page! Put the most recent relevant stuff on one page and send that. I don't agree with the idea that it's OK to include more info because people don't have to read it. They do have to read it because it might contain a red flag.

Every word you type is making work for someone, and if it's not then why write it?

With digital files, I don’t think it makes more work. Different people want different things and it’s hard to know who will be reading.

For my resume, I add on new items after each position or paper or new thing or whatever. So I’m just adding on new sections every few years. If I was starting fresh I probably wouldn’t write pages and pages.

I agree that the first page should contain all essential information. But as for the extra pages, people only read if they have some reason.

The issue what that is I have no idea what his focus is and how does it help you determine whether I would be a good hire for your company to know I did C (and FORTRAN) in the 90s?

I would like to know if you did C or FORTRAN in the 90s because it’s different than if you were building houses.

Someone who has been programming for 25 years, starting in the trenches is different from someone who changes careers in the 00s and learns programming.

And I prefer some context to know what someone means as if it was just a line for “FooCorp 1995-2000, Programmer” does that mean FORTRAN or excel macros?

How I designed systems in the early 2000s when procuring hardware had large up front costs including building an on prem server room with raised floors and non water fire suppression systems is different from how I design systems now when I can create my entire server infrastructure by using a text editor and creating a yaml file.

The considerations I take about scalability, RTO vs RPO and my entire system design and process decisions change when I have unlimited capacity and the ability to scale to zero.

My experience programming in 65C02 assembly in the 80a doesn’t make me a better developer today.

For what it is worth. I disagree completely. Your programming in assembly in the 80s made you what you are today. I am actively in a hiring role, and interviewing seemingly constantly. I want the full job history. My team and I read the complete resume.

> whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.

Does anyone have advice on what I should call myself? I was a senior in public accounting (~3 years of experience) when I switched into software development after self-teaching for 5 years on the side. I settled for an entry-level role to get my foot in the door, but after 7 months I was made the lead of one of a few teams with the rest being led by principal engineers. I think it’s fair to say im clearly not a recent college graduate and am performing like I have already been a software engineer for a few years now.

I now have 2 engineers below me. My technical skills have grown much stronger than an entry level, and my non-technical skills are on par with the other principal engineers. My team has been thriving and has received quite a bit of recognition from the company.

I’m coming up on a year and ready to ask for a raise since I believe I’m vastly outperforming an entry-level role compared to my peers, but I don’t know what to push for since these job levels are less clear than they are in accounting. Level II? Level III? Senior? It’s tough to rank the experience gained from my CPA and accounting background (that would be very valuable if I were still an accountant of course). Naturally engineers want to devalue it (fair enough), but it’s clearly paying dividends in my ability to deliver the company value.

Possibly "Engineering Manager"

Not with 2 people, and it's not even clear if they are their line managers and manage them in terms of promotions, raises, hiring and so on.

That’s a good thought, but I do want to stay on the technical side for now. Perhaps that would be to my detriment, but I find the actual developing and problem solving so exciting! The company said they needed an in-house invoicing system, and I had a blast designing it, creating it, and finally delivering it this past week.

I guess perhaps you can express your technical and leadership/management skills separately? "mid-level developer, but with prior professional experience in another industry and strong leadership skills" or something. It'll take a bit of work to explain, but I reckon it should be doable. (I have a similar issue with several years of non-professional programming experience I have prior to my first job).

Tech lead.

I’ve seen Team Lead for a technical individual who drives/scopes projects and manages SWEs.

I hate to say this, stop applying.

Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.

> This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link.

It sounds like your recruiter is purposely ignoring any resume that is not explicitly sent to her personally. It sounds like a job security move at the expense of both the company and candidate's best interests.

A lot of resumes are not even for the job she posts. Bots and other 3rd party recruiters are also trying to game the system so they drown real candidates.

When a resumes is from her link, there are high chances it's a real person who took the time to read the job description.

The post-modern labor dichotomy between robots and human robots is mirrored on the hiring side in ATS and HR, respectively.

Sadly, this is not new:

https://medium.com/@jannaq/the-robot-takeover-is-already-her...

> A lot of resumes are not even for the job she posts.

I don't see how this can be a problem. People do look for jobs by contacting companies. Isn't the goal of a recruiter to check potential candidates?

> Bots and other 3rd party recruiters are also trying to game the system so they drown real candidates.

I fail to see how this problem is avoided by ignoring the company's inbox.

> When a resumes is from her link, there are high chances it's a real person who took the time to read the job description.

I don't but it. This does not pass the smell test, as screening does not depend on which input you use.

It sounds like someone is failing to meet their job requirements.

Really? You don’t see how a recruiter would miss things if there’s 100+ spam/totally unqualified resumes for every legitimate one?

> Really? You don’t see how a recruiter would miss things if there’s 100+ spam/totally unqualified resumes for every legitimate one?

Your comment makes no sense. You're arguing that a recruiter should miss 100% of all contacts because otherwise they would miss things.

It's like arguing to throw the baby out with the bath water because otherwise your recruiter would miss things like the soap.

Where did I say everything? I didn't say that.

> It sounds like your recruiter is purposely ignoring any resume that is not explicitly sent to her personally.

Curious, how does one ignore something that is never actually sent to them, explicitly or not?

By my reading: ignore careers@acme.com, read ojford@acme.com (mail from the recruiter I hired, who has my email address, while direct applicants don't).

Why stop applying? If you have time to apply - apply. Meanwhile, if you're not happy with results, engage a recruiter too.

Recruiters will get you in the door. Better yet, recommendations from the company you are applying to will work even better.

I've had the best luck with recruiters that have contacted me directly on LinkedIn. Conversely, I've had zero luck with the recruiters that contact me via phone call.

My assumption is that this is because many of the latter are operating under the "if we get you hired we get XX% percent of your salary" model, and are thus inclined to submit as many applications as they can.

I think this is only really an option for some sub-spaces of tech.

As someone in a middling HFT shop my linkedin inbox is flooded with recruiter spam. But most of my friends in frontend work don't get any of this.

There is definitely truth in this. I see lots of ads for senior full stack devs (and devops). Not so much for front end. I wonder why that is.

I think it's easier to get away with not having someone who specializes in front end and so a lot of companies just don't prioritize it. I think a lot of them also don't realize how much they're missing either, but I'm maybe a little biased because I specialize in front end, haha. I do think that this is a contributing factor to why so many websites and web apps work and run so poorly.

> As someone in a middling HFT shop

Hey, since we're on the topic of HFT developers...

How do people break into that area?

I've done a lot of performance-optimization work, so I thought I might be a good candidate for some of those roles.

But for all the job postings I've seen in the past ~4 months, they want significant prior experience developing low-latency systems.

Is this just a temporary thing, where the pool of already-experienced candidates is sufficient?

It's like a middle school dance. If you ask enough people, someone will dance.

Well that helps explain my time in middle school.

I also had good results with recruiters. They will actually get you at the door, so you better be prepared. Seems to be a decent strategy for people who are bad at networking like I am.

Recruiters get a lot of flak here and elsewhere, but having recently interacted with a few for a recent job change, their incentives are aligned to have some skin in the game, and they can do the emotionally draining part of pushing the company to speed up the process for you without having to send multiple emails or waiting for months for your rejection.

When you say "recruiters," do you mean in-house recruiters or third party recruiters? Getting an in-house person on your side certainly is a great way to speed along the hiring process, but I've literally never had a third party recruiter send anything my way that ever came close to working out. It's gotten to the point where if I get an email from a 3rd party recruiter, I just don't look at it -- although I'm not sure if taking a chance on one of them at this point is a higher percentage play than 100 cold applications, TBH.

I suspect a lot of it has to do with the type of companies that tend to hire 3rd party recruiters. Namely, startups, and typically early stage startups who don't have any in-house recruiting staff. There's nothing at all wrong with early stage startup companies, except that my experience seems to indicate they don't actually know what they're even looking for. That's in addition to the likelihood that they just haven't been around long enough to develop a structured hiring process.

I don't know. What I will say is that your incentives and a 3rd party recruiter's are not the same. They want to place you quickly and get the commission, regardless if it's the best company or the most competitive offer. You're right that they do want to keep you at least somewhat happy, because if they get a reputation for treating candidates badly, that can be fatal in their profession. But, the people they really want to keep happy are the ones writing the checks. And, in this situation, that ain't you. You are quite literally the product here.

I have had some good experiences with 3rd party recruiters. You obviously need to keep the fact that they will say whatever to get you to take the job they find. But equally they will push the company to hire you.

3rd party recs aren't entirely aligned with either the employee or the employer, but that fat cheque is a massive incentive that makes things happen. I've heard of recruiters who placed portfolio managers and ended up getting seven figures due to the compensation arrangement.

The thing about 3rd parties is they are really useful if you're already on the inside. If you have all the relevant CV points, they will get you interviews. This is the flip side of why people get ghosted by them: if they don't think you'll be easy to place, they won't bother with you, and in fact they think the employers will stop taking their calls if they push the wrong CVs.

Another thing about recruitment is that not everyone is good at it. There's a lot of young ones just out of uni who give it a shot, and suck at it. Badly organised, don't know the business, waste a lot time for a lot of people. I've got a bunch of LinkedIn contacts who are in various unrelated businesses because they started off in recruitment and couldn't bill enough to stay there. If you don't field a lot of calls the ones you do talk to might be these noobs who are looking for leads.

How do you find these third party recruiters and convince them to work with you?

Putting your resume on job boards for 3rd party recruiters (at least in India). Not sure how it is in EU/US.

For recruiters within a company, try looking for them on LinkedIn, check out a recent post of theirs to verify if they still work for the company, and reach out with an application if they have an email address, or via LinkedIn messages.

When I search for companies in India, all I get are 3rd party recruitment firms. The recruiters themselves are hopeless and ask questions like "How many years of Git experience do you have?".

How do you find promising companies in the first place?

I can only speak for my little corner of the market. For systematic trading, there's LinkedIn and there's efinancialcareers. Those are places where you find ads for the type of jobs I'm interested in.

But don't apply for the jobs on those portals, that is just a black hole. Just look at the ads, note down the names of the recruiters and firms they work for, and either phone them or message them on LinkedIn.

They'll have a chat with you to find out your situation, and then they will tell you what jobs they've got. Note that every recruiter in the whole world thinks they have a great relationship with Citadel, Millennium, and every other well known employer in the space, so those intros have no value at all to you, since anyone could be your gateway. They'll also have a bunch of less well known firms, so you need more than one recruiter since they don't all know everyone.

Of course LinkedIn is also a way for the recruiters to get in contact with you. Just set yourself to open and wait around, a fish comes every week or so.

> I suspect a lot of it has to do with the type of companies that tend to hire 3rd party recruiters. Namely, startups, and typically early stage startups who don't have any in-house recruiting staff.

That hasn't been my experience. In a startup people often wear multiple hats, so it's not uncommon for CTOs or CEOs to be directly involved in the hiring process. Startups usually list their open positions on their site and screen applications via email, or post on the HN Hiring and other niche job boards. Startups certainly don't want the cost and communication overhead of dealing with recruiters, especially because it costs them much more to make a wrong hire at an early stage.

In contrast, large and mostly technically out-of-touch companies love 3rd party recruiters. They give them a bunch of vague role requirements, and let recruiters do the dirty work for them. If there are problems with filling a role, they can always blame the recruiting agency.

I used local recruiters to find me jobs most of my career (1999, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018). I met them in person either at their office or for lunch. I met one in 2012 who found the perfect job for me in 2018. We stayed in touch all of those years.

My first job in 1996 was based on a return offer from an internship.

In 2008, I did the random submit my resume everywhere thing and in 2020 an internal recruiter from $BigTech reached out to me.

With remote work being more of a thing combined with my much stronger network and resume, I will probably lean much more on my network and resume the next time I’m looking.

Lots of recruiters are scum, but some are great, and it's not always easy to tell the difference. I get all my work through recruiters who find me on LinkedIn, and they've found me some great projects. I may hate LinkedIn, but it really works for me. (Mind you, I'm a freelance contractor, not an employee.)

Exactly, this is my experience as well. It has happened more than once to me that my application didn't get any response, but then when I contacted a recruiter he could get me in for an interview at the same company. One time I even got the job.

I have three recruiters that I contact every job hunt, makes the process better and I actively like the recruiters as people.

It's like reconnecting with a work collegue every few years.

Are these third party requiters?

One is, two are at established companies.

So true, if you are applying through a webform or an email address, chances are, your application is never even going to reach human eyeballs.

Fwiw: I’m an employer, and sometimes people ignore the “how to apply” instructions on our site (which say to email to jobs@) and reach out straight via eg LinkedIn and I always file those in my “can’t follow a simple instruction” pile.

Not to say that what you say will never work, but I think it’s worth pointing out that at some companies, application processes might exist for a reason. For me, having all applications in a single place is key to actually being able to deal with them effectively.

Finding a recruiter to apply through jobs which the recruiter is contracted or employed to hire for is very different than sending unsolicited spams to employees at a target company, even if both can happen on LinkedIn. It was the former suggestion that was being given.

Ah I thought they meant a recruiter at the company and not an intermediary. Thanks.

Either way, really - many in-house recruiters do actively source via LinkedIn and encourage inbound messages there from interested candidates. But it seemed like this was a suggestion to use LinkedIn as a front door rather than as a back door.

The bigger the employer, the more likely it is, that after a first recruiter phone screen, you still havebto go through the normal recruotment / application process, for compliance reasons mostly. No big deal, as the recruiter is working on your behalf on the other end, if he decided to invite you to an interview with the hiring manager, to fast track you application through whatever arcane or byzantine process there is.

Yeah. The recruiter doesn’t bypass the process, except maybe the first stage. They just get you into it with enough attention to get at least a first conversation, and usually a polite way to nudge the company for a response if they get slow for whatever reason. Still sometimes helpful.

Honestly, an internal employee referral helps in similar ways, especially from an employee who knows you well in a professional context. But that isn’t always available.

Sure it works for you but if you need tools to manage then I can't imagine the average applicant in your process has very good odds.

Even if only a few companies hire through direct contact, many of the ones that do will hire more than 1 in 10 of the relatively infrequent direct contacts, while their HR process may be sitting on the thousands of regular applications.

By tools, you mean a gmail label, yes?

Sure, anything that acts as an external structure to not even know the very basics is not a good sign for their odds..

People should write you a cover letter on the off chance that you open a spam folder of such volume that you can't bother to manually label a mail as belonging in it?

If they're doing both, I'd reconsider that policy. A lot of people will submit a normal application and additionally reach out through LinkedIn, since for many companies their direct application process might as well be a garbage bin even for qualified candidates.

If it's solely through LinkedIn fair enough I guess.

As someone on the other side of this - applications sink to the bottom and often never receive a response when sent to places like jobs@, so LinkedIn is a way to at least get the attention of a real person.

I’d suggest calling out on your job posting that LinkedIn messages may be missed and the email is the correct place to reach out.

For what it is worth, I see a slight recovery in the software engineering job market. In the first half of 2023, voluntary staff turnover was historically low in my company after redundancies at the beginning of the year. Now the economy isn't doing as badly as predicted, industry-wide layoffs are reducing frequently, and staff are regaining the confidence to move jobs again.

Depending on sector, you may find you only get traction through recruiters. I work in finance, almost everything is through third party recruiters and there are two reasons for this.

1. We are only allowed to hire through either an approved recruiter or the company job portal. The company job portal gets so many applications for each job it's absurd, and we have to sift these ourselves to some degree (HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots) so rather than sifting the portal applications we mostly use 2-5 known recruiters who only give us candidates who can do the job. They do the first screenings, if they give us shit candidates we never use them again, so we rarely get a bad candidate through them.

2. Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).

> Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).

How badly are you paid?

Can't speak for that guy but there are definitely people who are well paid but who will go out of their way for free stuff.

Don't really get it myself, I think typically such people are drastically undervaluing their time.

> Can't speak for that guy but there are definitely people who are well paid but who will go out of their way for free stuff.

Me: I'm not doing DIY, I'd rather pay someone competent than waste my time and energy.

Also Me: I'm getting 100% of the value from this perk goddammit it's free stuff who turns down free stuff.

goddammit it's free stuff who turns down free stuff.

Your opinion is wide spread, but it erks me. "There's no such thing as a free lunch" is an adage millennia old, and true.

The rule is, nothing is free. Nothing. There are exceptions the rule, but that is exceedingly rare, and if you think you're onto one, it's probably a scam.

"strings attached" is another adage, and often you get "free", by having the strings attached to you.

There isn't a free lunch, but there certainly is a lunch you've already paid for.

E.g. I was at an 'all-inclusive' resort for work and some of my colleages seemed to think it was their duty to get as much value out of the meals as possible, even trying to calculate the actual cost of different dishes.

In my case I am thinking about work perks. So, say, free biscuits in the kitchen.

Of course it isn't "free" in the sense it is a result of work, but it is free in the sense it has no additional cost.

It's an emotional thing. When you spend formative years in a financial condition where food expenses were significant, and free food significantly eased financial pressure on you, that reaction to free food can stick with you long after you have the financial freedom to make your own choices.

Source: finally realized that half the reason I went to technical talks that bored me was for free pizza and beer that were bad for me anyway

I'm paid very well but when a recruiter invited me this year to watch the FA Cup Final in their box at Wembley I obviously went.

This is a pretty expensive present not a free lunch. Please note if you work for a regulated industry you may be liable to report this as well and may even price-wise be well above your allowance

I was briefly a dev lead responsible for hiring contractors. The company I worked for already had a contract with a certain recruiting agency - the same one I came in through.

The brief stint I was at the company, the recruiter gave me tickets to the local professional baseball team that included access to premium suites and tickets to the local professional football team.

But yeah I get it, having a free meal wouldn’t mean much to me.

I work in finance and we have lots of mandatory training about to do about "gifts". Game tickets are a specific example used to illustrate corporate corruption...

The company I worked for already had an exclusive contract with the recruiting agency.

We weren’t going to hire contractors outside of that agency.

Heck, my manager asked me did I know someone with the same skillset I had, I had a friend who was looking for work and asked for a rate of $80/hour. They wouldn’t hire them directly. I had to negotiate with the recruiter and my manager until we also settled on paying the agency $120/hour to hire my friend so he could get $80.

No my manager also wasn’t responsible for choosing the agency. That was chosen on higher levels.

I think you are completely missing the point where this can be interpreted as they giving you a kickback in order to keep the exclusive contract going

I have seen people who make $250K a year be swayed by free muffins. It has nothing to do with money.

I'm always amazed by how cheap it is buy someones vote. Bribery works and it's surprisingly affordable.

It's the thought that counts. I'd rather have a 20 minute chat with a cute recruiter than sort through 50 identical looking pdfs.

After a layoff I went through a recruiting/contracting firm that converted to full-time at my job. After that I kept an eye out on recruiters, and male or female it was the best looking set of people I'd ever seen in person.

You don't need to be badly paid to enjoy free lunch.

If you have no qualms to participate in the lowest kind of corruption, then it's not hard to understand why the labor market is dysfunctional.

Calm down V for Vendetta

No, they're right. The only saving grace is that it's not limited to the private sector; our political processes basically run on bribes, too, so they're just following our leaders' example. Just need to get bureaucracy in on the act, and we'll have the "Eastern Europe on the Eve of Collapse" trifecta.

I don’t think the problem is just easy corruptibility. Organisation leadership may have let this fester by not paying any thought towards aligning the incentives of their workers at every level and their own incentives correctly. Corruption is an easy explanation. But it’s probably just human nature to subvert and rebel.

> yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates

Maybe 99%. This doesn't work on me. Any swag I am sent from a recruiter gets handed to someone else. I turn down dinner and drinks because I feel like I'm being manipulated. The harder a vendor or recruiter pushes here, the more uneasy I feel about using them. I don't want to hang out with people who only want to be around me so I can give them something.

Edit: Sadly, I think this doesn't help me from the perspective of being recruited, but I can't help not being comfortable playing this game.

> (HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots)

My last job tried to address this by having a small technical test of skill that could be thrown at anyone as a first pass before getting any technical people involved. We got virtually no senior role "spam", so we didn't have to worry about making a challenging technical test, we just needed to weed out junior applicants who basically didn't know how to do anything other than apply for the job.

It worked pretty well for us but we were a relatively small company. I don't remember the exact stats, but I'm pretty sure we hired less than 50 people a year (across a couple offices in the US) for the technical roles we used that test for.

I'm glad it seems to be working for you, but it's kind of unnerving to be asked a technical question by someone who doesn't understand the question and cannot actually evaluate your answer.

How do I find these recruiters?

This and…

Use your new free time by not applying to…

Work on a project that interests you and share it online

Exercise both physically and fiscally

Spend time with people you care about and also care about you

And keep working on projects and sharing them, maybe even with hn

The comments on here are legion of individuals who post some project and have to then fight away recruiters…

What do fiscal exercises look like?

You invest in Apple or Tesla, get hit with 30% tax, and receive communication from IRS while living in Europe and having nothing to do with USA. Then try to clarify the whole mess.

TradeRepublic

Not available in some EU countries I need it, but thanks!

I think they mean “learn to buy cheaper groceries” but I hope they mean “deadlift 20 years of income tax filings”

My self confidence and well-being from cardio was crushed by a 4-page letter from tax office in a language I don't understand, even though I speak 3 languages already.

Repeatedly raising one of those burlap sacks of money found in old cartoons above your head.

>Work on a project that interests you and share it online

This is good advice, but remember it's not the only way. Not everyone is comfortable giving their work away for free.

(maybe its a new product/business idea etc). If the new business idea fails or you decide not to proceed with it you can still put it in your CV as long as you can describe it in detail and/or show potential employers your work. Assuming the project is related to your work of course.

Different way to look at freely shared online work: It's not giving your work away for free. It's an ad for your services. And because it has wide utility, you get seen by lots of eyeballs, possibly including exactly the people who can make a hiring decision about you.

If you don't mind, could you tell me how I should go about finding a recruiter directly on LinkedIn? I've been out of the market for three years now (had to take care of sick family) and it's extra brutal; I've been contacted by a few recruiters but I'd really like to speed up the process of networking with them if possible. Thank you. (I'm in the Inland Empire in Southern California).

Connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelsonic I will help you fast-track this.

I have a parallel-universe version of the question--from a universe where I've ~idealistically refused to create a LinkedIn account.

How would you go about finding a recruiter sans LinkedIn? :)

Swallow your pride.

No. I will never have a Linkedin profile. I will live in the woods and eat nuts and berries first. And I'm serious about this.

You could go out, network, go to hiring fairs and various places.

At which point you're pretty much always going to be asked for a LinkedIn, and pretty much noone will want to put work in for someone not doing something has simple as creating an account. So, unfortunately, as the other comment said, swallow your pride.

These networks have made it so that the cost of idealism is being cut off socially, whether that's friends or employers.

Last time I checked, I can’t exchange pride or whatever is keeping you from creating a LinkedIn profile for goods and services.

Um, personal data, and yes you absolutely can sell it, just not (paradoxically) if it belongs to you.

_Using_ LI, costs attention too, increasingly so, as with all social networks, but you also receive some in exchange, so if you don't value your own attention all that much higher than every other human's on the planet ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

...yeah, it's pride.

I mean you can just have a LinkedIn and only ever use it for a job search. That's what I do. I write on top of my profile "email me, I check this once every 3 months."

Well, seeing that I got a job that will pay me 1 million+ over the course of four years from a BigTech recruiter reaching out to me in 2020 all at the “expense” of creating a profile and reading an email when they sent me a message, I think the tradeoff was well worth it.

How much money have you made by creating a profile on HN and reading and posting to it and giving it your attention since 2015?

Contact recruiting agencies, they have websites. Local ones might hold events (e.g. talks) you can physically go to to meet them.

Thank you for answering sincerely and without condescension. <3

I'm not on LinkedIn either :) There are plenty of other helpful comments on this comments page, e.g.: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36904735

This is weird. I've stopped going on LinkedIn because there is a constant barrage of recruiters.

If you list the right skills they will find you.

Back in the doctom crash recruiters wouldn't pick your calls. Downmarket takes a bit of mental adjustment if it's your first time.

This definitely used to be the case for me, but the large employment gap absolutely killed that. Not a surprise.

I had one gap I thought could be a problem(a couple years). I definitely lost ~50%-75% of the offers because of it, but I found what I was looking for in the end. However in my case during the gap I was working on my own projects that are at least tangentially related to my work.

If you haven't and your gap is for other reasons I'd write a "skills based cv" and definitely spend at least 2 weeks reminding yourself everything you need to know before you go for technical interview. There is no worse feeling than getting a technical question you knew an answer for, but you can't quite remember what is was.

I also found it's easier to apply directly rather than through recruiters if you have a big gap in your work.

It flops from side to side, six months/a year ago I got about one-three per week, now zero for several months and only bot adds.

How do you identify a bot ad?

No profile picture, working in some big company that is entirely unrelated to me, lots of common connections but no posts, no engagement or anything. For example I have had five that works as "engagement manager at walmart" add me in the last few weeks, and also people common to me, I can see the number of common contacts go up by just updating the page because a lot of people will just accept any connection request.

Yeah but it’s all random phone calls from people with an accent so thick i can’t understand them, who obviously haven’t read my resume, and who won’t pick up the phone if I try to call them back anyways.

Add them as a friend on LinkedIn and start a conversation.

This is how they do it, they don't mind if candidates do it back.

I’ve done this about 50 times at this point with various strategies and have gotten ghosted on about 40, been told they aren’t hiring on 5, and told they had been fired on the other 5. I’m not sure this one works very well, at least at lower YoE.

This sort of mirrors what my experience has been during my search. In the past, reaching out via LinkedIn or otherwise would merit a response (at least); however, in the current market, I never get a reply and in some cases I see the application is rejected. I feel like sending messages is hurting more than helping.

Likewise with follow-ups. Anytime I follow-up on an interview, I never hear back or it is rejected, so I've stopped following up after interviews completely.

Interesting, I had better luck. You might be right that experience could be the difference, I'm 15 YoE.

Tbh once I listed my AWS architect qualifications, I went from 1 contact/week (since March, it was a bit better before) to 5/day.

Did you add a skill or a certification?

Certification

Ask around, google "inland empire recruiter", look on social media for recruiters (I know a few active on Twitter/X).

But asking around is best; shoot a few messages to ex-colleagues on linkedin.

Not necesarly the only way as someone who often interviews candidates, if I'm getting bombarded by spam applications, the least you can do for me to take your CV seriously is a cover letter related to the job posting / company.

I don't understand any candidate who sends out a letter without researching the company for 30 minutes and taking another 10 to write a thoughtful cover letter. if you're not willing to put that effort into your potential future position, it's not even worth opening the CV from my side.

That goes a long way, tailoring the CV and, if absolutely needed, cover letter for each application. The CV also when recruiters reached out to you, as they still have to present it to HR and hiring managers (also having a recruiter presenting the CV and candidate helps a lot, and means the CV can be a bit less polished). And if recruiters, or the companies behind them, require a cover letter, being contacted first by the recruiter makes writing those a lot easier since you don't have to cold sell yourself as much. And the first discusion / phone screening, ehich propably didn't require a cover letter, gives you hints and hooks to use in the letter (I say that as person who hates selling myself and especially writing cover letters, also I found my last job that way).

Now the trickey part is, so, to have solid recruiters hiring for real positions reaching out to you. For some reason, they did in my case more or less every time I kind of needed it. I have not the slightest clue so why, my LinkedIn profile was up to date but far from polished...

Well, I content myself with being lucky for some reason, and I am aware how lucky I am when it comes to that and quite grateful to universe, and hope to never have to go through that whole process again, because applying, getting new jobs, tinse and repeat, gets stressful at a certain point. And now I reached a point in my career where I like the stability of a job, collectively (and relatively high) bargained salary, good, bordering very good to almost stellar, retirement benefits, I job that is truely challenging (new stuff that allows me use my experience almost completely, while being borderline scary at times) working on a product for which projected end-of-service-life is over a decade after my legal retirement age.

That being said, I had a period in which I had to write a ton of applications whipe seeing the clock running down on my unemployment benefits. That alone can be soul crushing, so I try to cut people somenslack when it comes to CV and cover letter polishing. It still means one shouod put some thought behind both tasks so.

I've been on the interviewer side too and I must say that I had the complete opposite experience. I've never seen a cover letter help a candidate (they mostly don't get read at all), only hurt a candidate chances. I wouldn't even read them unless they had glaring issues (like it's way too long) in which case I'd bin the applicant.

I will never do cover letters-- "Hey, spend 30-60 minutes on this so we can slip it into the pile of 500 applicants where it will never see the light of day! Yay!"

>I don't understand any candidate who sends out a letter without researching the company for 30 minutes and taking another 10 to write a thoughtful cover letter.

I sent a cover letter to my first 3 jobs. They never checked it. Never directly asked but it comes up in conversation at some point when talking about other new recruits.

I don't see the point in a CV if you're reaching out to the recruiter. That fried request message on LinkedIn or first email is your "cover letter". Letting them know who you are and what you want.

I've given up on applying through company portals for a few years. Last job I applied myself was in 2016. The rest was people reaching me via LinkedIn.

I'm not a recruiter and have no vested interest in this, but the experience with recruiters from the candidate side is just completely different to justify their existence. From the company side, we also get better candidates from recruiters.

Applying through portals make you feel like a second-class citizen. Companies often ignore you, ghost you, have terrible screening, take ages to respond, give no feedback. Recruiters that reached directly to you have your back and will push for timely responses, will help you negotiate a salary and will prepare you for the interview.

With that said: I had good experience with internal recruiting too. My best salary offer I got was from a company that had internal recruiting (I accepted and work at this company).

But I hope I never have to fill a form in a website ever again.

I think the right time to apply through a company portal is when you already have had conversations with folks at the company (hiring managers, recruiters, other team members) and are just "checking the box".

Definitely agree, hope I never have to apply via a portal again.

I would still probably refuse at this point, on grounds of having done this in the past and being "ghosted", even though there was prior conversations.

If a company is interested in me, they won't make me jump through hoops. On the other hand, I'm quite experienced and popular in the job market, so things might be different for other folks.

Just anecdotally, I got 2 of my last 4 jobs by direct applying with no networking, and 2 from recruiters. One internal and one external. The internal recruiter oversold the job and it was not great. The other jobs were all good and about what I expected.

Not completely disagreeing with the OP but before going the recruiter route make sure you have exhausted the social network route.

Your resume has way more chances to be considered seriously if instead of just sending it to the company inbox someone already working for that company recommends you. If you have any friends, family or ex-colleagues working on a nice place, tell them that you are looking for a position and ask them if they would mind referring you. Although it's becoming rare, some companies still have a "referral bonus" for employees that bring up other employees. You might even do them a favor.

I would say an order of magnitude more likely, even. People always underestimate just how much even a tangential social connection improves your chances.

(FWIW, this is also why I think recruiters work.)

I would add to this that you should find a handful of recruiters and check in with all of them regularly. As long as you make sure that you don’t get submitted to the same job twice, the more recruiters you have working for you the faster you’ll find something. To find recruiters, do a Google search for recruiting firms that have physical offices in your town, find an experienced recruiter who works for them on LinkedIn, and call into the front desk asking to speak with them.

I suggest an even more devious tactic.

Run enumeration on their company and see if you can figure out their boss's PERSONAL direct email address. Send resumes there instead of info@whatevercompany.com - Often if you can figure out some scheme like first initial last name @ whatevercompany.com you can get that contact.

I tend to do this by simply waltzing into the office and asking for a business card if I can. Apparently nobody does that anymore but it gets results.

> Find a recruiter on LinkedIn.

They keep fucking me over. Had one a few weeks back that messaged me with 2 roles that looked like a perfect 1:1 fit for my resume. Never heard from him again.

I’ve literally never gotten a job that didn’t come through a recruiter (except my most recent job). 10 years experience, every time I want a new job I just reach out to recruiters who have contacted me recently and recruiters I’ve had good experiences with in the past, they’ll bring me a handful of random jobs and I interview for the ones that sound like a good fit.

The most recent job the hiring manager saw my post on HN: who’s looking to be hired, and they just reached out directly.

I hate to say this, but many recruiters who contact me seem to reside and work from India. I get all kinds of recruiter attention, including unsolicited emails, calls, and texts, but most of them seem to be looking for a relationship where I do the work, and they subcontract with a subcontractor who's subcontracting for another contract for a major firm.

It's basically spam at this point. How can we "stand out" without getting bombarded with low-quality "proposals"?

As someone on the other side, with open positions we're hiring for:

There are probably fewer job openings than there were, but I don't think my company or anyone in my network have changed HOW they're hiring, but we have definitely noticed a huge uptick in volume of applications. Earlier in the year, we were getting almost nothing. Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD.

There's just a lot more to wade through from an HR and hiring perspective now, orders of magnitude more. It takes way more time/resources and is way more draining for the people involved.

I think my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out. Don't go overboard or anything, but if you're submitting your resume to an HR software or something, maybe try and find someone in the hiring chain on LinkedIn and email them directly either with your resume or just asking how its like to work there before you submit. Something like this.

I remember a report from facebook hiring, when they broke down how each person applied. It was something weird like %0.01 were hired by "walk in". Some person literally walked into FB headquarters and left with a job. I will say, if you walk into an office, you will NOT get ignored.

Of course you won't get ignored, you'll get escorted out by security. The likelihood of a hiring manager being in the office nowadays is also very low.

I actually got my first job out of college this way. I was trying to get a job in something completely unrelated to what I studied, so I was doing whatever I could think of to get noticed. I still can't believe it worked, but it set me on a good path, at least.

I wonder what would happen if you somehow managed to find what coffee shop the hiring manager was working from that day and sat down next to them striking up a conversation. Obviously most of the ways you could do that are super creepy if not illegal, but then so is most of what FB and crew make.

Your comment reminds me of an awkward story: I worked at a company once where we were having trouble with Apple's AppStore review. The app was delisted and we were losing money daily. It was so bad the CEO came in and led a meeting to brainstorm what to do--all wild suggestions welcome, and worker-bee me got to be a fly on the wall. One of the VP-level execs mentioned in this meeting that he happened to know some breakfast or coffee shop where Tim Cook can sometimes be found before work. Well, the CEO loved this, and for a brief moment, "Physically accost Tim Cook in Palo Alto" was one of the leading candidates to solve our AppStore problem.

What did you do instead? Apparently you came up with something even better

Amazingly, what worked was: Actually read and follow the AppStore guidelines, rather than complain about how unfair the review was.

Ok, interesting :-)

We have an employee on my team that got a job this way a few years back. She is still with us and does good work.

How long ago was this now?

16 years now. Not sure if it would be as effective today. I doubt it was truly effective even back then.

A past employer had a memorial page for its founder where one employee related a story of how he did this and ran into a man at the reception desk who accepted his resume and promised to pass it along but wouldn't give his name. He got the job and discovered that he managed to run into the founder at just the right time.

This type of hiring is most likely reserved for Yann LeCun caliber talent. If you walk in to FB HQ without an appointment, 1) they wouldn’t let you in, and 2) you’d probably just make it awkward for the security guard

Yeah, I agree. That "walk-in" was probably Yann having lunch with another intellectually famous friend. Someone recognized them and took the chance to interview them.

I know this sounds 'old fashioned' but you really want to work for a particular company, walking in has had a surprising success rate for me over the years. Some are absolute sticks in the mud about requiring the candidate to apply online, but in many, you can at least chat with someone in hr or a hiring manager about the sorts of positions they have available and what skills they need. This all but guarantees your resume will be looked at by an actual human.

I got my first job by walking in. It was at a medical center, and I just asked the receptionist for the IT department. Got routed all over the med center. When I got to IT I found the telecom manager was way over worked and needed help, but had no time to search. So he interviewed and hired me on the spot. This was in 2007.

I wouldn’t do that today, you won’t get past security at most places. It does happen, though.

That’s awesome! Nice initiative!

I got my first real tech job in a similar way. I was moving into a dorm at a state university (1999 or so) and the network was not working. No one around, so I went into the unlocked networking closet, found the IP for my floors switch, realized the ports were all disabled, got them enabled and passed out static IP information by the time the dorm networking manager got there. Was also hired on the spot!

As others mentioned this will not work at FB. Their lobby is 100% security and always busy as it is a massive campus. The only way a FB employee is even there is if they are waiting to escort someone in for a scheduled meeting. Getting into the campus would not be useful either. Its like a little college town. Offices require badging in. This might work at smaller companies however.

> Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD.

What percentage of these resumes do you think are generated by GPT?

Honestly, I don't know. I don't see enough of the "not close, easy rejection" type resumes, I see things after they've been filtered. But I'll see if I can get an answer to that question.

The last time I had resumes to look at it was a few years ago, pre-gpt. We had pretty a specific hard requirement (elixir experience), and easily 95% of the resumes had no mention of it. So I don't know if I'd blame artificial intelligence, more like natural stupidity.

[edit] And by stupidity I mean people who just spam every job they see trying to get a hit. Like what were you planning to do if you got the job?

Learn Elixir? It's just a programming language...

I don't pay people for that. Job description called for at least 3 years' experience, which I should've added to my post.

I think this tech downturn is all a collusion amongst tech leaders to bring down software developer salaries. How are so many places hiring yet so many are laying off thousands, and most of them in tech/development? Even the places laying people off are still hiring those positions.

More like everyone realized that they can trim down to improve margins without taking a lot of flack.

Both

Yep, fire the devs after they've built the software. Fire them because the software is already built. Slowly your software grinds to a halt and dies because you release features too slow or your software starts to become very bad.

By the time that happens the person who gets to tout the savings on their resume has already leveraged that for a salary bump somewhere else.

It's an unfortunate reality that if you're employed (not a founder) and you think more than a year or so out, you are going to be outcompeted by people who optimize for short term gain and leave before the bill comes due.

And some of the fired devs go to work for the competitor or start their own business. This is a natural lifecycle of software. Slowly rot and let others grow.

sounds good, that's Future CEO's problem to solve. Who may or may not be current CEO. Current CEO gets a nice small bump in stocks and a good resume to jump off with.

Well, to give you my POV - my company is still hiring because the business fundamentals are still strong. We're making money and using that money to pay people. But I have friends in network who had to lay off because they were hiring against VC cash instead of revenue, with the expectation of raising another round later. But they now don't expect to be able to raise that next round so easily so they have to slow their burn rates.

Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate.

> Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate.

Why it changed? What happened?

A combination of fiscal policy (money is literally expensive at the moment, as central banks raise interest rates to combat inflation) and fear (a lot of people have been expecting a recession any day now for the last year, though it keeps getting postponed, and may yet be the recession that never was; while a good few countries dipped briefly into technical recession this year, fear of another proper global recession does seem to be abating a bit).

The over-simplified answer is "The fed started upping interest rates, after having held them ridiculously low for about a decade."

There's arguably more to it than that, but when people talk about "cheap money" they mostly mean "low interest rates". If you just Google terms like "end of cheap money" you'll find lots of discussion on all of this.

Some examples:

https://www.ft.com/content/6d312b6c-9f74-4816-ad7e-7e797c5e0...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2022-11-30/what-s...

https://fortune.com/2022/12/28/investing-outlook-2023-fed-in...

https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/end-cheap-money-reveal...

and so on.

basically the mechanism that the Fed uses to keep interest rates low involves creating a lot of new money and using that to buy bonds from other people, manipulating the market for bonds (high priced bonds = low interest rates).

Most of those bonds were government treasuries, but other bonds were corporate bonds - sheets of paper that say I'll pay you back in 10 years - and sold directly to the fed for newly created money. so the corporation printed money and got newly created money in exchange. they just have to pay it back in 10 years at like 2% interest a year. Many of those corporate issuers parked that money in private equity firms, or were private equity firms themselves, if they weren't directly hiring employees for pet projects - the private equity firm would be investing in newly formed pet projects.

All of that has stopped now, as the fed stopped buying bonds and doing the most to get interest rates high. Doing everything except selling the bonds they bought.

Tech leaders colluding with the government by abusing the H1B program and ultra-lax enforcement of anti-trust laws to absolutely crater tech salaries has been the name of the game for 15+ years.

The number of H1B visas in relationship to the entire market is just a drop in the bucket.

600k H1B workers is quite a lot.

How would such a joint-coordinated effort work? Is such collusion possible at this scale?

I don't think its collusion but its possible when one major tech company does it the others think its safe to do it too. But I also think many of these companies over-hired during the pandemic and even with the layoffs have more employees that pre pandemic.

Well, one arm of it is the H1-b program.

People are spending less time on social media so web marketing spend is down. Businesses are focusing on event based marketing. Web marketing is a very large part of the demand for front end. That's not collusion, it's basic economics.

What you call "collusion" is what economists call "the market". Collusion doesn't even make sense here when it's so broad based. I could entertain collusion if it were a relatively small number of companies, e.g. in the Apple/Google etc. anti-poaching case. But here tons of companies had layoffs, and it's not hard to see why:

1. There was a ton of over hiring done during the pandemic. I don't think anyone really denies this. We were getting close to the "anyone that can fog a mirror" bar that I last saw during the .com boom.

2. Most people don't understand how the raise in interest rates makes it much more difficult to defend additional headcount even for companies that are hugely profitable. I won't go into the full economic theory, but the short of it is that when cash now earns ~5%, the bar for what new projects need to earn also shoots up. Obviously when cash was earning nothing people were much more willing to make highly speculative investments.

There is no collusion, and I think a lot of folks who didn't start in the job market until after the Great Recession never saw a downturn.

In a note of optimism, I'd argue that I heard all the exact same things during the .com crash, e.g. "they're going to ship all our jobs to India." Yet software dev salaries absolutely exploded in the past 2 decades since. I've talked to some folks who have already seen a marked improvement in the job market over the past month or so - not stellar by any means, but not as awful as it was earlier in the year. In other words, I'm really confident "this too shall pass."

The overall quality of an individual employee has declined considerably. Mass hiring and layoffs are to an extent part of a more elaborate hiring process. Right now market dynamics are making this possible but as things tighten up there will be salary depression and more intern type roles coming back as the "hiring" process gets extended where previously it was compressed.

not really

it turns out you need half the people to do the same job

> bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD

I've wondered about that. Sometimes I see jobs that sounds super interesting, but I only match maybe 50% of the unique bits of experience they want. Then I see 200 applicants and think ... how many people are just applying for the hell of it, because the job sounds cool, even though they have none of the right experience?

recommend tailoring your resume to each job and highlighting the experiences/projects that are most relevant for that role :)

also applying to newly posted positions and using referrals when you can

> I've wondered about that. Sometimes I see jobs that sounds super interesting, but I only match maybe 50% of the unique bits of experience they want.

Really depends on what the company needs. We're willing to talk to a pretty wide range of people about some of our roles, while for others we need someone specific. Honestly I think 50% is not that bad. We get a lot of 0% resumes.

Unfortunately, it depends on the company. Some job descriptions are sincere “we actually need this”; some are a wish list.

I'm always applying for the hell of it, because job descriptions are a mess anyways. These companies actively say they're entry level-junior level and then requires 6+ years experience. If they're gonna waste my time by just trying to get more eyes on their position to game the filter system, then I'm going to waste their time by sending my resume.

Let's not even talk about the companies that actively promote themselves as a remote position, and the chances of it actually being remote are about 10%.

> and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD.

Been seeing a lot of this too. Backend specific job, .NET, and we get a bunch of folks who are front-end devs with maybe python or node.

Do you make it clear that you will only accept candidates with strictly .NET experience? I've had plenty of reasonably positive experiences applying to places where I have the overall skill set (front-end or back-end) but do not have the exact tech stack the company uses as my strongest set of hard skills.

Both companies and applicants dance way out-of-step with each other on this.

Companies list 10 things as "requirements" but are willing to hire candidates without all of them. To me, requirement means must-have, but what do I know? Candidates know that companies are not serious about the requirements, so they ignore them and apply. But, some of the requirements are "must have" from the point of view of the company, but they never say it. And sometimes even if they say "Experience in obscure XyZ framework is a must!" they still may bend the rules if John Carmack-like talent applies. It's such a mess.

>Both companies and applicants dance way out-of-step with each other on this.

100% agree with this. The previous commenter's company probably does want exactly those things, but as you said, some other companies have HR write the job postings and it is just a game of telephone with what the hiring team actually needs.

So they only way to find out is to apply, especially if you are currently unemployed you don't want to risk something just because you don't 100% line up to the position.

I'm curious why you wouldn't consider those people just because their existing experience doesn't 100% overlap your tech stack? Could they not be trained on how to write backend .net? Wouldn't the diversity of experience be helpful for your team?

Yep they could but companies usually don't do it.

I've done it. OOP is OOP, there are only different flavors.

I wonder to what extent an OOP person would be able to do a Haskell job (or a similar functional language).

Anyone can learn a language. The .Net framework and the related ecosystem is huge. I’ve done front end work maybe a decade ago, I still do backend JavaScript and I know the basics of web technologies. But anyone would be a fool to hire me if they wanted a front end developer.

Even if I knew Java that doesn’t mean I could just jump in and start doing Android development.

I remember jumping in and doing Spring Boot. I knew Java. It went well, it helped that I knew about NodeJS and Django.

Man, I have backend-specific experience with .NET and all I can find are job postings for frontend, Python, and node. Where are your job postings?

> I think my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out

Really, once you are unemployed and looking for a job, it’s too late to do anything to stand out. The time to do something to standout is while you are working.

How will emailing someone directly help if he doesn’t have a unique set of skills that helps him stand out? If he is just another generic developer (no offense intended I don’t know anything about him and that’s how I would have described myself until 5 years ago) why would emdilokb

> The time to do something to standout is while you are working.

This is an issue I ran into recently during my post-undergrad job hunt. Having exited college without an internship, it was difficult to distinguish myself in any meaningful way. In my opinion, major, career-defining work needs to be at least six months' worth of dedication to be of any importance on a resume. Most people don't have the savings to go that long between jobs.

I was fortunate enough to secure a well-paying internship over the next six months, but in all honesty I think I got lucky. It's tough out there if you don't have the existing background to set yourself apart.

While I agree it is better to look for work while working, I don't see how that impacts how you stand out in a hiring process. How can you leverage an existing job to stand out to a new potential employer (while looking, ie. short time scales)?

I meant while you are working taking on tasks and responsibilities that will help you stand out in the market when it is time to look for another job.

In other words, always keep an eye on the market and be prepared. That also means keeping a strong network, always answering emails and LinkedIn messages from recruiters and judging which ones are reputable and which ones aren’t and honestly, doing resume driven development.

How do you respond to LinkedIn recruiters when you're not in the market for a job?

Previously I had a colleague recommend taking interviews from recruiters to keep your interview skills high and market knowledge current. I gave it a shot but kept getting offers so stopped.

“I’m not really looking right now. But things can always change. Let’s talk. I’m always passively looking and the right opportunity may persuade me.”

Thanks!

Strongly disagree with this. Its very easy to stand out, in many different ways.

> How will emailing someone directly help if he doesn’t have a unique set of skills that helps him stand out?

Because they will indicate their very direct interest in the company in a way that people who are spray-and-praying 100s of resumes a day won't. Because they get to briefly demonstrate their soft skills to a potential teammate in a way that might not be conveyed in just a resume.

I'd hire a generic skillset developer who is a great communicator and teammate over a technical genius asshole who shreds teams apart 99.9% of the time. I've made this choice personally many, many times across my career as an engineering leader.

So what are these many ways to stand out that aren’t based on what you did when you were working?

> I'd hire a generic skillset developer who is a great communicator and teammate over a technical genius asshole who shreds teams apart 99.9% of the time.

How would you determine that if they can’t demonstrate their communication skills and their ability to work well with others based on their past experience - you know the standard “tell me about a time when…” questions?

Ha. I think back to all the times I had a "direct interest" in a company and it never amounted to anything. That and twenty nickels would buy a dollar.

I am seeing the same thing. I have 5 open positions. This past week I have seen a huge uptick in applications. We have streamlined our process to 3 interviews. We do not do Leetcode.

Still with even a streamlined process, we were not seeing any senior Python developers for several months.

I've gotten plenty, though I am a decent bit more senior than you. It's very hard to get an offer right now, but for sure you can get interviews. I think I've interviewed with ~10 companies for positions since June, and all passed on me, but it's mostly because I didn't take the time required to prepare. In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, or give the wrong response to a question right now.

I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you.

Tech is a really weird place in general these days, maybe we need a hard reboot in the sector, or maybe we should all go do something else with our lives.

> I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview.

I have been diagnosed with ADHD (and started medication, to be clear) this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process?

I've been at it on and off for 17 months and have had the worst experience with technical assessments, despite being a 10 year career veteran with plenty of Web development experience.

> I have been diagnosed with ADHD this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process?

You don't. In my experience, any mention of anything resembling mental illness will result in rejection (but obviously they'll cite some other reason to avoid a lawsuit).

As a general life advice (this may sound harsh (but thats life)) ... never admit weakness or flaw to anyone that you're selling yourself to. They will immediately ignore your 99 other good qualities and only focus on the flaw you mention.

Selling yourself is a game, and the ones "buying" you dont have the cognitive head space to make difficult decisions across many candidates. They will always choose the mentally easier option.

The "game" is that you have to as quickly as possible figure out exactly the mental model of what it is they want, and frame yourself as that. All the parts of whether you or they actually fit each others needs must be done within that dynamic. You cannot explicitly mention negative qualities, you have to infer whether they will be accommodating.

As somebody who has been diagnosed with ADHD (and struggled mightily at times) ...yes. This.

Once you get the job, most workplaces simply just want you to get the job done and are fairly flexible.

Need to wear noise canceling headphones or hole up in a conference room to write some code in a distraction-free environment, etc.? Been in the industry for 25 years and that's never been an issue.

Mentioning a label like ADHD to an employer is IMO useless at best and career suicide at worst. Most commonly it sounds like you're making excuses. Best case scenario is that they're sympathetic, but, the label "ADHD" still does not tell them what you actually need. Even if your manager has diagnosed ADHD as well that doesn't mean her needs are the same as yours. So why even mention the label? Tell them what you need -- or better yet, when it's feasible, just do it the way you need to do it.

For example, working on a teeny tiny laptop monitor exacerbates my ADHD. Shuffling windows around really breaks my flow. So I like big and/or multiple monitors. If I have a workplace tech budget I use it on big-ass monitors or I simply bring my own. There are cheap, lightweight, portable 1080p USB-C monitors now and I can fit two of them in my laptop bag alongside my laptop. So by buying $200 worth of USB-C monitors on Amazon I have solved this particular hurdle for myself.

There are physical and mental health diagnoses for which I wouldn't give this sort of advice. And yeah, the world should be different.

Are professionals posting about theirs and others’ experiences with ADHD (on LinkedIn, for example) committing career suicide? That sounds harsh.

Well, I have seen folks have a wide range of reactions. Everything from "I have ADHD too!" to "ADHD is a fake disease and just a way for lazy people to make excuses."

ADHD needs to be understood and destigmatized and I do talk openly about ADHD (like now) but it's just something I don't volunteer about myself in my professional life.

n.b. when I say "career suicide" I could have used a better choice of words. I wouldn't ever say that mentioning would torpedo your entire career. But it might be bad for your career at a given company IMO/IME. Depending on who reads it and how neanderthal their views are.

This is good advice if you want to work at a place with this sort of culture

I've been told by recruiters that the reason they never give you a reason for rejecting you is so you have less ammunition for any potential lawsuit.

Never reveal ADHD to employers or fellow employees. It will always be used against you.

I've been very disclosive about my diagnosis, and many people I work with have in turn revealed their own diagnoses to me. I'd like to hear more about your experience with this ⸻ how is this info getting used against people?

All weaknesses or differences can be used against you. When you’re interviewing for a job you are presenting an idealised version of yourself that makes the decision to hire you easy from the interviewer’s perspective. That’s not the time to bring up flaws.

In general though this idea that people should talk openly about their mental health problems is good for society and terrible for the individuals concerned. People will absolutely change their opinion of you and treat you differently, and they will never disclose why.

Exactly. This is why the "tell me your weakness" question is a trap. It's deliberately selecting for people able to read the subtext and the situation and respond accordingly.

The interview, and to a lesser extent the workplace, is a hostile environment where you are in direct competition with peers and management who try to get the most out of you for the least compensation. Anything you say or do will be used against you the second it is useful to undercut you in favor of someone else's payday.

Nothing to add to your well-stated comment. This sucks.

Moral ambiguity is a competitive advantage for the business too. Holding back "progress" turns you into a cost center in a real quick way and that's something the business wants to avoid.

Who do you think did better for Uber, the person who pointed out that it was technically illegal, or the person who pointed out that they could make a lot of money before the legal trouble materialized?

I've been at a company where that happened and the people who focused on data accuracy and brought that up in debates around prioritization got cut for not moving the business forward. As I got told, "if the customer is shown what they want to see (and they have no other source of information to compare), does it matter if it's accurate?"

Amen. Unfortunately, but ... Amen.

-If you mention anything about medication, boomers will immediately assume you're taking "meth" because they know the medications have some sort of amphetamine component.

-People who think neurodivergence == lazy/undisciplined/shithead/whatever.

-People who don't understand ADHD will assume you're like that kid in elementary school who was always setting things on fire and interrupting class (and there's a good chance you are, but you've developed management skills by now as to not do that at work).

-People who sort of understand ADHD and know you won't be as mindlessly heads-down as other employees so you're likely to not take well to corporate bullshit/want to work on things you find stimulating rather than <insert banal maintenance task>.

-People who understand ADHD too well and can keep the dopamine flowing just enough to wring you dry until you burn out.

they will act confused, pause, say they will ask someone, and never get back to you

on the other hand its hard to blame one aspect for "being bad" at leetcode. Plenty of non-diagnosed people with tons of real world experience have a hard time finding the gotcha in a 38 minute interview. It doesn't represent the real world in any way IMO

They're not testing software skills, they're testing anxiety: https://news.ncsu.edu/2020/07/tech-job-interviews-anxiety/

I hate to say it, but you're gonna have to learn coping mechanisms. I think a lot of us in tech have similar issues to be honest, so you're not alone here. Personally I HATE having to sit there and grind, but you've got to find a way to squeeze out the motivation. I also perform really poorly under interview pressure, but I think that wildly over-preparing can help you calm your nerves. Personal network is also SUPER important right now for securing that crucial foot in the door.

The time to develop a network is when you don't need it. So for those of you with a job, work on it now. Add your coworkers on LinkedIn, message that old friend from another company for lunch.

    wildly over-preparing can help you calm your nerves

This is exactly what (ballet) dancers and (classical/jazz) muscians do. It is hard enough to do what they do without pressure of hundreds of people paying money to watch you.

Also, other HN posts about pressure in interviews have given two amazing ideas:

1) Take a mild beta-blocker before the interview. Any liberal doctor will prescribe without issue. "Practice" a few times before the real thing so that you can find a level that works for you. This kind of drug is used to cheat in concetration sports like archery and darts.

2) If remote interview, drink a (half) glass of white wine (don't stain your teeth!) before or during your interview. You can hide it in a mug. More than a few people have vouched for this idea.

Can confirm I know people who use beta blockers for interviewing. Abuse of ADHD drugs is also getting fairly common.

If you play "fair", you're a sucker.

>I have been diagnosed with ADHD this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process?

As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD a decade-and-a-half ago in my 20s: You don't. You don't even think about using your diagnosis as an excuse or a shield for behavior that is unacceptable. You never consider thinking that you deserve special treatment because you were diagnosed with ADHD. You accept that there are tradeoffs that come with it, some positive, some negative, and that you will have advantages in some areas and disadvantages in other areas and you don't let it define you or your behavior.

Would you give the same advice to someone who was blind or in a wheelchair and asking for reasonable accommodations at work? ADHD is a legally recognized disability in the US, just like other, more visible disabilities. There are a number of accommodations that OP could ask for that an employer would be obligated to provide.

In pragmatic terms, disclosure is probably best kept until after you've been hired somewhere, since discrimination during hiring is commonplace.

Parent is giving a report from experience and that perspective is worth noting even if it may not be considered kosher by some standards. As such, it should not be dismissed as a bad advice as it deals with the reality of workplaces and not 'world as it should be'.

No, because those visible disabilities win the favor of juries and get punitive damages. ADHD doesn’t so no lawyer worth anything is even going to take a hard look at the case.

    Would you give the same advice to someone who was blind or in a wheelchair

No, I wouldn't. But as fellow ADHD sufferer (who has struggled greatly at times) I would vouch for the parent poster's advice.

ADHD ultimately comes down to coping strategies. At the end of the day you are going to have to develop strategies to focus and accomplish your work.

In this sense it is different than e.g. blindness. A blind person (I'm partially blind, too! fun!) can't cope their way to sight. But an ADHD sufferer is going to have to figure out a way to focus and accomplish work.

I guess if I was already hired I might consider bringing up the disability thing if my employer was doing some weirdo, directly-hostile thing w.r.t. ADHD like banning headphones in an open office. That would be a plan of last resort.

I see ADHD as a trait. It's only a disability if it holds you back. It's akin to multi-threading; there's more complexity, and risk of thrashing, BUT when managed properly the parallel-processing can be a significant advantage compared to neurotypical minds.

Hmm, which advantages does ADHD give you in the workplace?

> BUT when managed properly the parallel-processing can be a significant advantage compared to neurotypical minds

Adderall lets you get into insanely deep "flow". It's like cheating for concentration. You can even use it if you don't ADHD. Just after I left university, it started to be a thing to take it, then do massive amounts of studying before mid-year and final exams.

That’s not an advantage of ADHD, it’s an advantage of off-label use of ADHD medication. For people who do have ADHD, Adderall brings them closer to the neurotypical baseline; in fact one of the common helpful effects is less concentration in certain circumstances, so they can direct their attention where needed more effectively.

I don't understand the downvotes. I'm speaking honestly from direct experience, and paraphrasing ideas I've encountered in various contexts over the years.

> 10 year career veteran

A 10 year career does not make you a veteran..

You don't know their situation or work history, why reply with something so negative?

A veteran is someone who has served in the armed forces. It's like saying "I have 10 years tenure" when they're not a tenured professor, but just mean "have worked in the industry/position for 10 years".

The term is used colloquially so often that I didn't even associate it with military service in this context in the least.

Both the use of “veteran” and “tenure” that you provide as incorrect are recognized as correct by OED and are common colloquial uses.

> A veteran (from Latin vetus 'old') is a person who has significant experience (and is usually adept and esteemed) and expertise in a particular occupation or field.[1] A military veteran is a person who is no longer in a military.[2]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veteran

That's one definition. A word can have more than one definition.

Cambridge: "a person who has had a lot of experience of a particular activity"[1]

Merriam-Webster: "a person of long experience usually in some occupation or skill (such as politics or the arts)[2]

Oxford: "A person with long experience in a particular (non-military) position, field, or activity; any experienced or ageing person."[3]

Vocabulary.com: "Veteran commonly refers to someone who has fought in a war––think Veterans' Day, the Vietnam Veterans' Memorial––but, in fact, the word can mean anyone with experience in a particular field."[4]

I could go on. They used it correctly. 10 years is plenty of experience for this field to use the term veteran.

[1]: https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/veter...

[2]: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/veteran

[3]: https://www.oed.com/search/dictionary/?scope=Entries&q=veter...

[4]: https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/veteran

Veteran has a broader meaning than just ex-military. Saying you're "a veteran" implies military service, while "a veteran of $foo" does not.

You just aren't familiar with the more generic definitions of "veteran" and "tenure". "Tenure", especially, is not reserved for the well-defined academic track.

Fair point that it reads negatively. I was smiling while I wrote it. A 10 year period of time does not invoke the word veteran to me. But it’s not a big deal and I’d rather not bring the negative vibes.

Lol, ok. I don't even bother to list anything on my resume over 10 years old.

I skimmed this earlier and this comment got stuck in my mind. I came back to others saying similar things but I'm still commenting anyway.

The thing you're asking for? There is no such thing. I've been in your shoes and I've been on both sides of the interview table many times. You probably need to drop the idea that there will be accomodations for anything during this sort of process.

Let me tell you what works for me. Focus on cardiovascular exercise three days a week. Find one habit you can manage to do daily and make that your keystone habit you hang other things around. Sleep well, eat right, see if you still think you need accomodations once these three pillars have been addressed.

If they've already been addressed you're squarely in the realm of practice every day. Flashcards for jargon you missed in interviews, etc. The onus is on you, my friend, and I hope this new diagnosis of yours isn't something that feels insurmountable. You've got this, just not with the mindset that others need to treat you any differently. Especially in the context of finding or even into starting a new job.

As someone with ADHD and cerebral palsy, I will say at least physical accommodations are sometimes respected. I only ask to be allowed to remain seated while whiteboarding. Sometimes it's flat out ignored. Once I was asked to whiteboard in front of a panel of judges for an hour. After that experience, I'm now much more assertive about it, which can lead me to be viewed as abrasive. Thankfully it's a non issue since most interviews moved online. My current boss didn't even know I had a disability until we met for lunch 3mo later.

I don't ask for accommodation for ADHD. I believe that would be judged far more harshly. Frankly, the ability to focus is part of the job requirement. If I were having issues with this I would get medicated before asking for accommodation.

Thanks for your thoughts. I am medicated.

Hello no, don't tell them anything of that sort. This isn't university; this is real life full of unfairness and hidden discrimination. I wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901303&p=2#36903751

What the other guy said about drugs is probably a good idea.

Do NOT tell them until you're in the door, if at all. Maybe mention it casually when you need to assert taking an extra long walk or something.

I'd just take the walks. I've never had an employer in the software engineering industry who batted an eye at such things.

Middle aged, diagnosed with ADHD about 15 years ago, been in the industry for 25 years.

Not saying my way is best, but this is how I do it.

ADHD is nothing to be ashamed of, and IMO you have as much right to accommodations as somebody with no legs who uses a wheelchair. However, you couldn't pay me to mention ADHD to an employer or prospective employer. It's too stigmatized, and also it's just plain nebulous -- even if an employer is supportive, your manager can't intuit and extrapolate the behavioral health needs of individual employees based on their diagnoses.

    How do I best tell prospective employers I might need 
    some accommodation in this process?

During the interview process I don't mention ADHD or accommodations at all. Best advice I can give here is to either (a) just grind Leetcode until you feel comfortable with it? (b) send your resume to a kazillion places and just bail if the interview process involves some kind of live coding exercise you feel that you'll struggle with. Or, alternately, just do it anyway with zero pressure and maybe you'll surprise yourself. You will get better at live coding and interviews with time.

Once you have the job, I still never mention ADHD ever. What I do is just ask for accommodations that I need. I never worked at a company that really gave a flying fuck if I took my laptop to a spare conference room so I could code in a quieter and less distracting environment. Helps to tell your team where you'll be so it's not like you disappeared.

But from a tactical standpoint I would at all times urge people to think in terms of solutions (specific coping strategies and accommodations) instead of labels and craft your employee/employer relationship accordingly.

I've been diagnosed myself, but ADHD varies greatly from person to person. So I definitely don't assume my experience is the same as yours. However...

    I've been at it on and off for 17 months and have 
    had the worst experience with technical assessments, 
    despite being a 10 year career veteran with plenty of 
    Web development experience.

In addition to my other reply: is ADHD truly the issue for you w.r.t. technical assessments? Are you sure it's not anxiety or unfamiliarity with the source material?

My experience with ADHD is that it causes me to struggle during the long grind of holding a job. 40 hours of focus per week, doing things that might not be very exciting? Yeah. ADHD struggle. But maintaining my focus for 30-60 minutes for some tech assessment? This is not a problem. That's adrenaline time, baby.

If you are ever able to maintain 30-60 minutes of focus for anything at all (movies, gaming, reading, sex, sports, hobbies, whatever) but not for a job interview then I would take a very hard look in the mirror and see if there's something else affecting your performance.

Again, just a prompt for thought. I do not make the mistake of assuming anybody else's experiences and struggles are the same as my own.

Thanks for your multiple comments and thoughts.

My biggest frustration is the mismatch between what a technical interview ostensibly is supposed to elicit for the interviewer, and how that interview experience is supposed to help the candidate prove they can do the job by successfully completing the technical assessment.

Solving a two-dimensional array data analysis problem is not an effective way to determine how good I am at Web development; this has been an example of one of the worst live coding assessments I’ve had in my search so far.

The best ones I’ve had have been asynchronous and allow me to spend hours if necessary to produce an artifact that would actually reflect my regular work product if hired. Those examples are proudly shown off on my GitHub, even, for whatever it’s worth.

100% agree on every point.

Ability to crush Leetcode problems has little correlation with ability to make web apps and CRUD apps. I've been working in this industry for 25 years and it is extremely rare to have to bust out some compsci/Leetcode algorithm stuff in real life.

I'm okay with maybe a very quick coding screener like Fizzbuzz. The reality is a lot of people applying for these jobs can't code, at all, period.

https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/

Anything more than that is silly IMO.

This is exaggerated, we just hired someone and don't give these kinds of tests or expect this level of correctness.

I feel like this is fed by anxiety. I really doubt a large amount of ordinary companies have switched to FAANG leetcode + system design interview formats because of a downtown.

I think its fed by people trying to get good jobs. On average, better companies have harder technical assessments.

The comment two up was talking about regurgitating memorized solutions. If you can memorize a solution and then just copy it down, the problem must be not very involved I guess.

How much were you involved in the hiring process ?

Everyone uses the FAANG loop + system design + leetcode design now

I don't know when that change happened but it is practically universal

Everyone? Nah that's Hyperbole.

In my experience about 40% do.

I've never had an issue simply showing an open source past project I created, going through my portfolio of other project examples, and my resume.

I stopped interviewing about 4 months ago because this, in my experience, is NOT hyperbole. Also, 80% of job descriptions, threw kubernetes into the requirements on top of 10 other competencies seemingly just because they can.

Good to know.

Ya know... I posted that without experience in the current market. It was more of a "this is what it was like a year ago" sentiment.

Thinking more about it... I can see how 40% is too low an esimtate.

Thanks, good to hear what it is currently like out there on the job hunt. I am about to begin one myself.

40% of the general population? sure

for desirable employers with competitive pay, I'd guess closer to 80%.

I've had about 6 different interviews these last couple of months, and none of them gave me leetcode type questions. The closest I got was code snippets where I had to explain what was going on, or very easy fizzbuzz type coding questions.

What companies? Every company I've interviewed with in my loops recently have me coding in the first technical screen. I've had five of these interviews so far, various sizes. On-site is multiple levels of tech screens. And this isn't even for FAANG-exclusive companies. FWIW, I'm interviewing in a HCOL area for companies that pay well, so it may be more competitive.

People often speak of the mystical company that doesn't make you code in the interview, but I haven't come across it once in the current market.

I also don't know how comfortable I'd be joining a team that doesn't make me write code in some capacity during the loop... but I also recognize the ridiculousness of expecting correctness, optimal solutions, or the types of questions being asked. Discussing those things, sure, but expecting regurgitation is nonsense.

I agree that smaller companies are a lot less likely to spend the effort to emulate a FAANG hiring process. For one, job candidates are less willing to undergo the punishment if they're not going to get to put Google on their resume.

I think HN is over-represented by people who work at a FAANG or would like to. They're probably not applying to many jobs at mid-tier companies.

> It's never been harder to get a job

Were you around for the aftermath of 9/11? What about the crash of 2008? Both times were considerably more difficult for job hunters.

Interpret it as a figure of speech, otherwise there's going to be someone from the great depression who shows up and clicks his tongue at all of us.

True. I'm also trying to provide some perspective to younger job hunters that while now it is more difficult to get a job than anytime since the Obama era, it was much, much harder during the George Bush Jr. era which wasn't all that long ago and I suspect there are a lot of folks here on HN who were working back then.

Personally, I can go further. Things weren't too great during George Bush Sr. era where we had a recession so bad the media started calling it a depression. It resulted in the infamous "jobless recovery." Duly noted that Junior was able to beat his dad in the economy wrecking, job destroying department.

Before that we had the big market crash of 1987, which was really the planting of the recession George Bush Sr. inherited. He just unintentionally nurtured it along until it became a full-on, economy-wrecking recession.

Younger HNers take note of the pattern going on here.

I don't know about that. During all previous major downturns, the base-level credential was a high school diploma or lower (yes, even during the GFC). That's no longer the case. Whatever our older siblings, parents, grandparents, etc. had to do, tack on another 4 years just to get your foot in the door.

A lot of the people being hit today got their first wallops during 2008 (and were affected by their older relatives' struggles during 2001), so you're dealing with compounding misfortune. Oh, also, more people. There are almost 3 times as many people in the US today than during the Great Depression; almost 100 million (~30%) more people than in 1990. It's fundamentally more competitive just on a body count basis.

The only change I see is that the media is more savvy about pretending things are better than they actually are, at the behest of their financiers. You'll finally admit that we had it the worst sometime after your recognition would have made any difference, I suspect.

EDIT: Did I mention the relative cost of housing (most people's largest expensive), transportation, and food in 2023 vs 1987? Because it's bad. Borrowing the lingo of my juniors: "You gripe because you had to pump gas or bag groceries for a few months to pay rent. I, forcing myself to DoorDash knowing that I won't be able to pay rent, am smothering the icebolt of panic in my breast with the bare hope that if I survive another month, there's a chance the markets will crash and the affluent Boomers in charge will FINALLY have to admit how bad things are and be forced to do something. We are not the same."

I was talking IT. Millions of IT folks, most having a 4 year degree, and even quite a few having advanced degrees, were tossed out onto the street en masse.IT has been requiring a 4 year degree (or equivalent experience) plus two years worth of work experience since the 1980's when I started my career.

In 1987 I bought a condo for $55K at 7.5% interest and thought I got a steal because I was buying for cheaper than rent. I just looked up on Zillow and that property today is $163,200. That represents an average annual percentage increase of 5.46%. According to Google, IT salaries have increased an average of 3.8% per year every year since 1987. That indicates properties values are increasing at a rate of 1.6% per year faster than IT salaries are growing. But that needs to be tempered against interest rates being so much lower now than they were during the 80's and 90's.

The biggest difference between today and back then is the cost of higher education. College tuition has increased at an annualized percentage rate of 5.5% per year since 1987. That doesn't sound too bad until you realize the minimum wage has only increased by 2.3% per year over the same period - which now means students are no longer able to work a part-time job and go to school, which was very common when I went to college. Now they get loans. Then when they graduate, even though the housing market values hasn't increased too bad compared to IT wages, it's a lot when you also have a lot of student debt that we never had.

>IT has been requiring a 4 year degree (or equivalent experience) plus two years worth of work experience since the 1980's when I started my career.

This is not true. Associates degrees in IT that lead directly into jobs were common when I was in high school in the 2000s. Even as late as 2019, I knew people working entry-level positions that were working towards their associates degrees. Around 2015, I knew someone who was hired and essentially paid to study for their A+ and Network+ certificates. These people may have been somewhat lucky, then, but it's impossible today.

>In 1987 I bought a condo for $55K at 7.5% interest and thought I got a steal because I was buying for cheaper than rent. I just looked up on Zillow and that property today is $163,200. That represents an average annual percentage increase of 5.46%. According to Google, IT salaries have increased an average of 3.8% per year every year since 1987.

n=1. Median home prices were $100k in 1987 and peaked at 5x that in 2022.[1] Currently sitting at 4x. So, on balance, the situation is substantially worse.

>But that needs to be tempered against interest rates being so much lower now than they were during the 80's and 90's.

You might want to check interest rates YTD.[2]

I agree on colleges.

I would also look at food. The cost of eggs has about tripled since 1987.[3] Income has not.

I am being critical about this because it seems that you're one of my many seniors who don't understand the magnitude of the hardship young people face today, compared to what older Americans contended with. I hope that this helps you to understand.

[1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MSPUS

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/30-year-mortgage-...

[3] https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/inflation/egg-prices-a...

Ah sorry this was hyperbole, let me adjust the phrasing. It's hard but probably not as hard as 2001 or 2008.

> but for sure you can get interviews right now

Apparently this is false for OP. Your problem is different.

>In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, or give the wrong response to a question right now. >I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you.

Did they tell you that they passed on you because of your minor imperfection in the answer? Or is this an assumption on your part?

I might have passed on you based on what you've written, but it wouldn't have been because you gave a B+ answer and I required at least an A- solution or something.

Honestly this entire concept of gamifying your interview is not great. Maybe this is what gets you in at the big shops like Microsoft or Amazon these days? Totally understand that, I'm more of in the start-up world.

In my world, we're looking at personality, attitude, problem solving. I'm not looking for a robot to regurgitate a technically perfect answer. I'm looking for a human who responds like someone would in a job. Depends on the interview (up, peer, or down in seniority), but the interview is a space to basically pair something out and work together and see if you fit with how we operate. We wouldn't want someone to come in and just regurgitate what they think is perfect. We'd prefer to pair it out, talk it through, look stuff up live, and see if there is charisma/chemistry in the working relationship and the culture. Depending on seniority of course but we can teach a Jr or Mid coding and technical material but we cannot change their personality or make them better to work with.

I got explicitly failed from a first round interview because I took too long to solve a graph traversal problem. I reasoned my way through and got to the optimal solution, the interviewer confirmed that it was the optimal solution, then said I "should have recognized a variant of Dijkstra's algorithm" and that I had failed for not knowing it in advance.

Personally, I think developing it from scratch shows more promise than memory, but a lot of employers are looking for the inverse right now, IME.

edit: and this was not a FAANG, this was a startup with a single digit number of employees!

Did that experience actually reflect what you'd be doing on the job, or was it just another bullshit interview experience?

Absolutely no relevance. And even if there was, I'd like to see a business where having to take an extra fifteen minutes to reference an algorithm textbook is the difference between success and going under.

What kind of time pressure do you put on candidates? Do you expect them to sit there live for 45 minutes and complete something that reflects what it would be like to work there day to day?

Depends on the interview or the level but I prefer open-ended situations like "imagine a local small business that sells widgets. They want a backend that keeps track of inventory and a frontend that displays widgets and prices to customers." Or whatever the idea is. Some candidates only need that much and begin asking questions, designing systems, writing code, whatever they want. Others need more guidance and I'm happy to continue defining how this app should work or how big the audience will be or any other details. To me it's about exploring their experience with the whole process holistically and letting them dive into their subject matter expertise naturally. From this idea, there is no "completion" of the exercise as no one is actually going to write a backend and frontend in 45 minutes.

But I think you learn an enormous amount about an engineer here. How will they use this time? What will they focus on? The details they choose to spend time on, how did they turn out?

I've seen Principals take the whole 45 minutes on system design asking extremely detailed questions and building a system far superior to anything I would have engineered myself (interviewing up level). I've seen Jrs hash out a simple database structure in 5 minutes in a comment block and spend 40 minutes writing a simple react app that shows this hypothetical data. Obviously this principal wasn't hired for their front-end knowledge and this Jr wasn't hired for their system design, but still, very valuable to see how they do it.

Do you provide feedback to rejected folks so they understand what they should try to improve if they re-apply? The lack of feedback from most places completely puts me off from considering them again, even if that’s what they do to everyone.

I am willing to provide a short communication some times providing information but the reality is usually a lot less interesting than people think.

Reality: I want to hire 1 person, we get say 5 past all the stuff before me, we interview all 5, and then we choose the one that we think fits the best culturally, personality wise, skill wise, etc. So our reply is usually "hey you were great, we wouldn't interview you if you weren't, we just found someone we liked a little bit more". Which isn't very satisfying but you have to think about it from my perspective too. How do you choose between 5 great candidates?

Ultimately, luck is playing a massive role here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LopI4YeC4I

I definitely failed at one or two places on the behavioral / experience questions, but a few told me explicitly I need to improve my technical chops (I was grateful for the feedback). I felt like nobody was unfair at all, and that I just need to refresh my knowledge in the fundamentals. Basic DS & algos, concurrency, programming language trivia, etc.

Startups are kind of hard to get an interview at these days, you ideally should know someone already working in one, who can vouch for you. I don't feel like they have a low bar either, just less rounds.

My Facebook phone screen many years ago consisted of an HR-sounding woman asking me three questions, the first two I answered correct (according to her), and the third one I answered correctly (I checked afterwards) but didn't use the term that was apparently written down in front of them, was told 'wrong, it's <term>', was thanked, hung up, and got a rejection email a few days later.

In that case I think it's pretty clear I was rejected based on getting one answer incorrect. The phone call wasn't even that long at all.

And while other interviews have been longer, I suspect I've been rejected a few times based on me struggling with one particular Leetcode problem.

One guy didn't even let me finish it beyond five minutes of trying to figure out the recursive function, just rejected me on the call. That guy had a huge ego and I already wasn't certain I even wanted to work for him anyway (but I didn't have any other offers yet so I gave it a shot anyway), so not a huge loss there.

It is funny because the industry wants devs who can amplify their productivity with AI. ChatGPT can crack leetcode problems easily, yet the interview process is selecting for people who are good at competing directly with AI.

Only the software industry can create gatling footguns like this :)

> I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you.

I'm not discounting that it is hard to find tech jobs right now, but have you considered that this attitude of "grinding leetcode" is possibly contributing to companies not biting? I would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

No, the first round is usually a timed coding interview where the goal is to get an optimal solution as fast as possible. You should not be talking much with the interviewer. The intro (if there is one) is a quick exchange of names and last job worked at, then immediately diving into coding problem. You cannot start with a naive solution, interviewer will ask you to skip and go straight to optimal (this happened to me more than once). If you solve that, they ask followup questions to probe your knowledge, and if you beat that, you get a second problem.

After that might be more rounds of coding, system design, and hiring manager interview.

The part where you can be charismatic is once you pass the initial technical bar(s). The talking/behavior is a later point in time and is relatively easy IMO.

Examples of questions I've been asked:

1) https://leetcode.com/problems/non-overlapping-intervals/

2) https://leetcode.com/problems/design-add-and-search-words-da...

3) https://leetcode.com/problems/detect-cycles-in-2d-grid/

4) https://leetcode.com/problems/evaluate-reverse-polish-notati...

5) https://leetcode.com/problems/word-search/

So nothing too hard but you have to instantly solve it, and optimally. The hardest one I got was some type of AI search problem, where you have to find a way to navigate obstacles in a 2d grid, and another geometry problem I've not seen before.

Along with this questions like: what pitfalls arise in concurrency? Explain how you would design a pointer type that can be shared between threads, what is epoll? How do you debug a distributed system? etc.

Jesus Christ: Where are you interviewing? This sounds more like Stephen King's The Long Walk, than a job interview! Do they hold a gun to your head while you regurtitate the optimal solution?

Have you interviewed recently? The vast majority of companies won't even have a conversation with you until after you've jumped through this.

fwiw in my experience it's entirely possible to avoid this if you don't submit an application "cold" (i.e. through the careers page), but through a recruiter or referral _IF_ you have a strong portfolio of open source work and/or exposure in technical spaces.

i'm more than happy to do take-home assignments or complete reasonable timed assessments, but i have (politely) refused to complete leetcode-style gotcha screens when they have been presented to me as "just another part of the application process".

idk, though. maybe that's a privileged statement based on my position, but from what i can tell grinding leetcode seems to be much less reliable these days & the toll it takes on a lot of folks is pretty significant.

I have but haven't had anyone ask me leetcode questions yet. Everyone's just been asking about my precious jobs. I also have an ok amount of public projects, maybe that's why?

If someone asked my to do a leetcode style problem I'd politely refuse, and likely end the interview. I went through that kind of job hunt at the expense of my mental health and confidence in myself as an engineer once. It was one of the most degrading experiences of my life (so in all not a bad life to be fair). I'll never do it again.

Previous jobs*

This would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

When people started asking these questions, the whole point was to see how people reason about a new problem they haven't solved before. There are almost no work problems that require you to regurgitate something verbatim you saw on leetcode before.

It's seriously making me question the intelligence of these interviewers. Although at the same time I realize it's mainly just to arbitrarily whittle down the applicant pool to a smaller number you can interview in person.

it is very sad. i personally would much rather someone walks through their problem solving approach and identifies shortcomings/edge cases than to regurgitate a memorized algorithm.

it's really easy to identify code that is not optimal at code review time. it is far more challenging to have a conversation with a algorithm-regurgitating robot that their entire approach was wrong because they misunderstood the abstraction or that their code wasn't needed because Larry is refactoring that part of the system to a separate service already.

Yup. It's absolutely crazy to me to see the amount of people who are apparently doing hiring telling others here in the comments (and elsewhere on HN, etc) that they should "grind leetcode" while also NOT admitting that this is absolutely stupid. Like I'll give you a pass as an interviewer / hiring manager if your hands are unfortunately tied and you can't change your companies hiring processes.

But if you're an interviewer or hiring manager who is telling people to "grind leetcode" because you legitimately believe this is a good way to find good talent ... you need your head examined. All you're doing is filtering for people who've grinded leetcode long enough to memorize solutions. This has ZERO correlation to software development ability.

Appreciate you putting these words together. More employers need to hear it.

There are so many leetcode problems most people can't fully memorize them all and many people just don't.

I actually think interview questions that are more qualitative are worse. I have to freaking guess the "design philosophy" of the interviewer and cater to his viewpoint which is often pointless or just flat out wrong.

Especially today with Copilot and GPT-4, if I need to merge two sorted lists with optimal time complexity, I'll just ask GPT-4 and it'll give me the leetcode-optimal solution adapted to my language and variable names. Leetcode is less relevant than it has ever been.

That is fascinating. I wouldn't even show up for an interview if they told me to prepare for that kind of exam. What kinds of companies are these and where are they located? Sounds like an interview designed by an omega nerd nightmare boss.

Have you been interviewing recently? The qualitative interviews that test design are actually the ones that are unreasonably challenging now. You have to cater to the interviewers design philosophy.

For example I tend not to prefer putting data into a class if it's not needed, but we had one interviewer who wanted all my logic as methods on a class even though it's fine to have functions operating on a data structure. Not a big deal either way right? But there it is... With the influx of candidates they measure this bs.

If you view the list here: https://leetcode.com/problemset/all/ you will see the questions tagged by company (there is a paid option as well). If they have a name you know, they probably do this style of interview.

I don't understand what I'm looking at. Who is tagging companies? Why would leetcode know the specific questions people are being asked to whiteboard?

People who interview at these companies report on their interview experience. It's true, these leetcode style questions do get asked and not just by the FAANG companies but lots of much smaller, no-name companies as well.

Yes, you can certainly find companies out there that don't interview in this way, but leetcode interviews are extremely common.

Strange. Not something I've seen, but I'm also very picky about the companies that I have applied to in the past–to the point of picking specific people I want to work with–and never ever go after mega orgs (I've contracted with some of them, and that's enough to know to stay away). Seems like a practice that would actually bias in favor of more junior developers, because of the emphasis on speed and familiarity to CS classwork. Obviously some programming jobs are heavy on algorithms, but that's neither the case for most roles nor what typically sets apart senior developers from juniors.

> I would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

My guess, as someone who has occasionally been the hiring manager, is that this is true, but so is the leetcode crap. It's leetcode that gets you far enough to meet someone who matters. It's charisma and reasoning ability that will get you an offer.

I've met plenty of applicants who could give me superficially correct answers, but with any kind of detailed conversation it became clear that this was basically all they could do. When I hire someone for my team, I don't want leetcode answers, I want someone who can solve problems. I want someone that seems like they'll work well on the team. I want someone low maintenance and at least adequately productive.

But this is just a medium sized software company and not a FAANG.

> I would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

As someone who has interviewed many software developers, I can assure you that charisma is not something that experienced hiring managers in tech are expecting in the candidate pool. For sales positions, sure. For coding, though, competence is often inversely correlated with charisma.

Reasoning through technical problems is a different story.

I think your first observation about grinding leetcode is interesting. I suspect that this is the approach people take when they're trying to get picked up by big companies (FAANG or whatever). Programming problems become a quick way of winnowing the field for companies that have a highly process-oriented approach to hiring. My own experience has been in small companies, where being able to get in the door and make progress through the interview process is often dependent on one's personal connections/network, creativity and so on.

So my advice to the OP would be to leverage your network and try to get inside companies connected to people you know. Maybe look at smaller companies that aren't necessarily tech companies, but have a strong need for tech?

> competence is often inversely correlated with charisma

Source needed. I've been working in tech for 15+ years, alongside highly charismatic and competent people, terrible engineers with less charisma than my coffee pot, and everything in between.

You do not need to be charismatic to be a good engineer, but also it certainly doesn't hurt, and friendly teammates make for a better team atmosphere. If I'm considering two candidates otherwise similar, I'm going to go with the one that's more pleasant to work with.

If we assume they are two normal distributed characteristics that aren't related, then it is a natural consequence once you select for those who are at the top of either distribution.

Someone in the top 10% of competency or charisma will have average distribution of the other. If you consider the full population, you'll find no relationship, but because you are only look at the top 10% of each, those in the top 10% of one will be average in the other and vice versa. While some (~10% of each top 10% group) will be represented in the other group, you'll still find that they are more likely to be at the bottom of the group in the second group.

The end result is that if you only plot the data for the top 10% of each group, there will be an inverse correlation.

This can hold true even if there is a positive relationship between the two characteristics depending upon the strength of the relationship and how selective you are in selecting the top of each group.

This leads to some interesting results, such as when fruits are grown for look and shelf life risk losing taste and flavor despite these factors being unrelated.

Of course you want to work with people who are "pleasant" and "friendly" but these are not synonyms for "charismatic", defined as having "special magnetic charm or appeal". [1]

Would you disagree that software development, as a profession, tends to have fewer charismatic people in it than other fields in which charisma is more valuable and/or essential? For instance, if I were to suggest that the average successful politician is more charismatic than the average successful software engineer, would you disagree with that statement?

If we think about it in purely economic terms, I'd suggest that people who are very good at getting other people to do things (i.e. they have charisma) have a powerful incentive to enter careers where they can leverage that special ability.

1: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/charisma

Maybe charisma is the wrong term. I've found pleasantness and willingness to communicate to be strongly correlated with engineering ability amongst those in the profession. Likewise, the worst engineers I've worked with all had major anti-social personality issues. The profession has always involved soft skills in my experience. When I've hired people I designed small tasks similar to the actual day-to-day work they would be doing, and that filtered out candidates who lacked coding ability quite easily.

>> competence is often inversely correlated with charisma

>Source needed

Experience and observation. When one is deeply involved in solving hard problems, one has less time for pleasantries, superfluous stuff ( but important to people in general) and subtle manipulations of relationships, that make up 'charisma'. Over time that becomes your personality. Not saying that this is the best thing to happen to an engineer, but it's the way things are IMO.

Honestly as a senior if I only focused on my ability to ”grind leetcode” I would probably be laughed out of interviews instead of having more work than I can handle. Your milage may vary but don’t underestimate team play and personality/charisma. Few team managers want the team to be more disfunctional after hiring you.

Charisma is one of those factors that bypass conscious mechanisms.

Experienced managers think they aren't screening for charisma but I would say 99 percent of managers who say this actually are, but they just don't know it. It's subconscious.

I can somewhat prove this to you because there's science on this. Charisma isn't very measurable or quantifiable but a physical attribute similar to charisma is, and that is physical beauty and height.

The more attractive you are and the more taller you are the more likely you are to be hired. It's absolutely true. There's so much studies around this it hurts. Just Google it.

There's even been a news segment in 60 minutes where they literally sent in a ugly dude with a shitload of Ivy league credentials and a handsome tall dude with nothing. And it was incredible. Ugly dude was grilled like a mofo and not hired. Handsome dude was a shoe in, didn't even get asked any hard questions.

The interesting thing is, the hiring manager wasn't even aware he was being biased. When asked in a subsequent interview on how he chose each candidate he stated credentials, but was completely unaware he wasn't even looking at credentials.

Now you yourself may be the exception just like how everyone thinks they're the exception and I'm sure you have examples to prove it too. But humans are inconsistent, I'm positive that at some point during your experience you mis-judged a person with rizz as being more technical.

Its human nature. We are wired to be biased this way. Nothing consciously immoral here. Just note that the first human bias being triggered by any reader reading this post is that they think they themselves are clearly above this bias. That should be the first thing the reader is thinking, and if I guessed correctly on that... Likely I guessed correctly on everything else.

Hiring managers and interviewers are definitely looking for charisma in the sense that they want people who are competent and that _they wouldn't mind working with_. Call it charisma, or culture fit, or whatever, but when interviewing you definitely want to come across as friendly and easy to work with.

Sorry to revive an old thread, but I just wanted to add that I did not interview with any FAANGs. All were either startups or at most mid-tier companies. I think the well-funded startups do copy FAANG style interviewing.

> would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

No, they want the code to match their expectations. I interviewed last year, and breezed through the early and behavioral stuff, occasionally being up leveled or oddly positive feedback in the process. They'd often quickly move from interviewing to selling me, talking openly about (relatively good) salary, etc. Then I'd do the leet code* part and lol, bye bye. And after about 10+ rejections, as I got better (and similar) coding questions, suddenly that all changed. Rejections became offers, "not good enough" became "one of the best ever" -- same person, same(ish) questions. They all just care a LOT about the quality and speed of the coding part (along with the level of style and communication they expect). Its not unreasonable, I guess. Its odd, its frustrating. Maybe its accurate. But its best to accept what it is, get REALLY good at the coding part, and you'll get a lot more wiggle room if you're bad at the other parts. And if like me, you are great at the other parts, expect to do a lot of interviews to get the offers, and / or a lot of practice (but I strongly recommend interviewing first, as demoralizing as it is, because the companies you like tend to all ask same style of questions, I practiced tons of stuff I didnt end up using).

*They were rarely leet code, usually more realistic coding questions. But same vibe.

Thank you for this anecdote. This is where I am currently at, but I don't feel discouraged at all, I feel up to the challenge! I am finding the process of learning fun and I am in fact improving a ton at the fundamentals. My speed is improving quickly and pattern recognition is developing. I can glance at a problem at now have an intuition for what shape of solution it has.

At my job I created a slack bot that posts a daily random leetcode challenge every morning (easy and medium difficulty only, for now). It's there for fun because we're a team of devs who love coding. But I also created it so I can practice every day just in case I get laid off (we had 2 rounds of layoffs within a year).

But honestly, I'd still enjoy the daily challenge either way

And your company doesn't mind you doing that during work hours?

Not OP, but...

Framed as team events, challenges, building exercises, etc. most companies will allow short frames for them. It's all in presenting superiors with a cost analyses that speaks to them in their native language: Profit/Loss/Excel.

Are work hours a thing anymore, anywhere? My jobs have all just been working as needed 24/7 with no ability to set boundaries

Oh, yah. Ours are aggressively tracked, logged, re-logged in a totally separate system for fun, and we're not allowed to exceed 40 per week.

Please god tell me where you work

I can relate to this situation. I've been interviewing since June, and the only times I've advanced to the next round were those where I made no mistakes at all. In the past, you could complete 90% of the task and explain the rest, which would hint to them that you know what you're doing. However, today's scenario is quite different. Now, you are expected not only to provide a complete solution but also to present it in the most currently accepted way.

Reach out to people you've worked with in the past. After having five years of experience, you should have worked with at least a handful of people who need someone to fix another broken website.

These could be managers, people on your team, people on OTHER teams, vendors, salespeople you've spoken to, anyone.

Ideally, you should ALWAYS keep in contact with people you've worked with, even if it's just emailing them "Happy Birthday!" every year for the rest of your life, but the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, the second best time to do it is now.

A warm referral is the best way to get a job. It's tough doing cold outreach. Good luck!!!

So much this - nearly every job I’ve gotten in tech has been due to knowing someone working there, or knowing someone who knows someone.

I have around 13 years in the business but I suck at socializing and I'm thankful this hasn't been the case for me, I would be broke if I depended on acquaintances to find work, instead I just have landed positions by applying to offers found at LinkedIn and elsewhere.

You don’t need to socialize - a recruiter reached out to me and I let him know that I wasn’t in the market, but the guy who had sat next to me for 3 years (open plan offices FTW!) at my last job would be perfect. We weren’t terribly friendly but certainly got on professionally.

Interesting. Literally every job I’ve gotten was either through a recruiter or cold outreach.

How far along are you in you’re career? The first 15 years I was recruiter or responding to ad, but after 20 mostly network.

> after 20 mostly network.

I suspect the importance of networking and the likelihood of ageism are often related.

It might also be related to industry size. I've done games and robotics - both relatively small industries compared to "web".

13 years so maybe

And I'm 2 cold outreach, 1 recruiter, 1 from network.

Everyone's experience is different?

The problem being that when you muck up the interview, you get outed as a quack to someone you know.

flopping interview != quack

Everyone knows that interviews have high false negative rates (depending on your hiring criteria). You have to mentally guard yourself that interviews are not a complete judgement of you; they are at best a small pinhole view into your capabilities.

Early in my career I was an ace at learning just enough to talk the talk in an interview (I was playing the risky game that I'd have the chops to learn the skills when I needed them, which thankfully I always did)

I had a boss who was incredibly good at this strategy. She would take the time between the interview and job start to learn what she needed to know.

> The problem being that when you muck up the interview, you get outed as a quack to someone you know.

The downvotes you got were undeserved. For most job markets: If an ideal candidate is interview-disabled, their odds of being hired are dismal.

For me personally - if I refer someone and they mess up the interview, I wouldn't take it as them being a "quack". If I referred someone it's likely I thought they could do the job fine, it's just that they didn't do a great job convincing my coworkers - and that's okay.

I would it very strange to get happy birthday messages from former colleagues. Do people really do this?

Yes, but in my limited experience it's been former managers who are looking to see if they can re-hire you (at either your previous job or wherever they moved onto themselves).

I think that’s just selection bias. Managers became mangers because they’re the type of person that keeps in contact with their prior coworkers and associates.

I'm not really a birthday person in general, so no, not that specific thing, but I definitely have a set of like five to ten past coworkers who I really respected and enjoyed working with, some as peers and some as managers and mentors, and maybe about once a year I'll think "I wonder how XYZ is doing" and reach to them.

I would be totally weird out if some of my past co-workers suddenly reaches out to me with bullshit smalltalk to ask for a job.

Or random people from my past sending me happy birthday ever year.

I am probably not social enough to understand that, but that sounds like a lot of work just to stand out as kinda weird.

Yes you are not social enough to understand this, I regularly get mails or messages from past colleagues who I've never talked to in years suddenly ask me that they are looking for a job and if I know an open position. I absolutely understand their quandary and go out of my way to help them out, cuz we're humans.

Well ok that's one thing. But op was suggesting to cold reach sales people, vendors and anything you had contact with plus basically creating a list of 'humans you might have use for in future' and their birthdays for your personal benefit.

> But op was suggesting to cold reach sales people, vendors and anything you had contact with

No, it's not "cold", the point is that you had contact with them, they know you. It is totally normal to say, "hey not sure you remember me but we worked together on XYZ project in 2017, and I noticed you're at a company now that is interesting to me, can we grab a coffee to catch up?"

> plus basically creating a list of 'humans you might have use for in future' and their birthdays for your personal benefit.

No, keeping track of people you enjoyed working with and reaching out to them periodically is not "keeping a list of humans you might have use for in the future", it is having a network of professional connections that you haven't lost touch with.

I think something you might be missing here is that this is not a unidirectional selfish benefit. You know what I love? When people I enjoyed working with reach out to me. I'm glad they kept track of me and I'm glad they thought to reach out, and I'm glad to both catch up personally and see if I can be helpful to them professionally.

This is what makes the world go 'round, and it's not weird distasteful or nefarious, it's a very good system.

I have to concur with this opinion with a comment because upvotes are not visible on HN: yes it’s absolutely alright to keep in touch with people (even at the cost of it looking like pretence at times) and then ask for help ‘out of the blue’. I have absolutely helped out when I’ve gotten such reach-outs and will do so again. We live in a society…

This is literally how I got every job I’ve had over the last 30 years. You ought to give it a try. People who know you and you know them are the best way to get good jobs. You can ask frank questions, they can give frank advice, and they will talk you up with the hiring manager. I’m about as antisocial as humans get, but it sure beats beating pavement and cold calling.

Haha, I once had to reach out to two guys I worked with 5 years ago for references, because the role I was applying for required two references from two previous jobs and these two guys were the only ones that were still working in that place. No doubt it was a bit weird for them, but one's gotta do what one's gotta do. They both agreed BTW.

Yeah this is weird. Work is not just a place where you transact time/utility for money. You can also get to know people and form friendships. I still regularly chat with past work colleagues and meet up with them when I travel.

In the last 20 years I’ve interviewed for exactly one job, and that was my first one out of university. Since then it’s always been people I know offering me new positions. People don’t just hire a random person off the street unless it’s some MegaCorp sausage machine or they’ve exhausted all other options.

Look you can follow this disengaged, unsocial approach, but it’s suboptimal.

>I’ve interviewed for exactly one job

I hear this every so often, but do you mean that literally? It's so far outside my reality I can't believe it still happens.

I've never seen anyone get a job at an established company without SOME kind of interview. Even Guido van Rossum (creator of Python) has needed to do some interviews when changing companies.

Even if they are the hiring manager at a new company I've never seen them be able to completely bypass the HR process in that way.

The interviews were meeting the people, having a chat about what kind of work they’re doing, what I’d be responsible for, etc. Nothing technical. More like an informal chat where it was like them trying to convince me to come over, not me trying to convince them why they should hire me.

As for the HR process, yes there’s always HR. It’s usually a few days after the chat and just a formality to tick the boxes and explain leave policies, the medical cover, run background checks, but HR really has never had any influence over the decision.

I personally get these and want to connect and help people if I’ve had any kind of working relationship with them. But maybe I’m weird.

It helps you also because most people aren’t sociopaths and will pay it forward. It’s a way for you to build your own network.

Your career is often only as strong as your network.

You aren't weird.

I agree the small talk is weird, I prefer when people are direct and message me asking if I know of an opening. I usually check on our internal job bank and give them a referral (if they are good!)

IMO it is absolutely not weird to ask connections if they can refer you for a job? The company even pays me bonuses for successful referrals! (Well maybe that's over now, I haven't checked recently)

> I would be totally weird out if some of my past co-workers suddenly reaches out to me with bullshit smalltalk to ask for a job.

What, why? This is what professional connections are all about! Sure it is weird when like a social friend from childhood reaches out with an ulterior motive, but it's not weird when professional connections reach out for professional reasons. You're the weird one on this one :) And you're probably limiting your own career with this hang up.

I love it when past colleagues reach out. Even if I'm not personally hiring or don't think they'd be a good fit for my current company, I probably know of other people and companies to introduce them to.

The job market as a whole and the industry as a whole doesn't give a crap about you. Your ability to extract a decent life out of working in software in the long run depends on the relationships you make. It's rare to actually work on a team that executes well and where you enjoy those people's company. In my 20+ year career it's only happened less than a handful of times for me.

So if any of those people reach out to me looking for connections, I'll absolutely do so because I also expect they'll return the favour when I need it. It's worked out for me before.

You don't have to invite them to your wedding. But having a brief if awkward friendly interaction and then passing on a referral for a posting or letting them know about some opportunity you may have heard of isn't "socializing", it's just a career skill.

We're all in this together. Being able to have a career that doesn't suck depends in large part on networking, not on your coding skills.

> Being able to have a career that doesn't suck depends in large part on networking, not on your coding skills.

Yes. I'm not sure this is the thread in which to do it, but I think this is an important thing for the "Rah Rah WFH" type folks to consider. Networking over Zoom/email/chat definitely isn't rare or impossible, but is a lot more limiting & difficult than in person.

I haven't found it too bad, I've actually formed some reasonable relationships WFH in the last couple years job hopping after being stuck at Google.

Also some of the most long-standing software industry relationships I have are people I met back in the early-days of the Internet (early 90s) on MUDs/MOOs/IRC/Usenet etc.. and have never met in person.

But personally I am sick of WFH for other reasons and would love to go back to in person if the local options were better. (But also just sick of working, generally :-) so...)

But I can definitely see it could be tricky for introverted types, or people just starting their career.

What I want more than anything is a stronger separation between domestic and professional workspace.

That's a really interesting POV and I totally get where you are coming from.

It just never happened to me, I picked my jobs myself, bootstrapped my companies without promoting it in a inner circle.

In fact most people I know got their job by just applying for it or recruiting companies.

I wonder where I would be at if I had networking skills, when my coding skills already brought me everywhere I wanted to be.

Maybe it's cultural, maybe it's just my social circle.

It's about showing that you care about the person, not JUST what they can do for you, your job search, or your career.

People don't like feeling like a tool other people use to get what they want.

Or do you mean reaching out at all for a referral? This is simply because HR and managers love knowing that someone, ANYONE, likes you enough to be willing to work with you again.

I believe the market really is just bad right now. When I was job searching it probably took me 3 times as long. I noticed that there were hundreds of applicants per role when normally I'd have noticed less than 20 maybe? Even at my current company they told us that hundreds of people were applying. That's how many you have to beat just to get in the door.

I think it's caused by a number of factors:

(1) Investors are spooked about the health of the economy and are giving out less funding. Less funding = slower startup growth = less hiring for new roles.

(2) Since funding is slowing down startups can't count on future raises as much and are being told to preserving capital. Runway becomes more of a priority = also less hiring.

(3) ''"Covid revenue spikes lead to surges in hiring and lay offs when revenues reversed.'" I've been told it was only non-technical roles but I don't buy it.

I think what happened was companies needed to trim fat to satisfy scared investors and Covid was used as the perfect excuse to make layoffs seem like they were outside of companies control. But everything was about the mentality of scared investors. Investors were literally angry that more people weren't fired... So yeah, this is quite a toxic time to be in tech. But I do think it will stabilize eventually.

It's the interest rate. Investment money is no longer (near) free.

Meanwhile companies are having record profits. What gives?

Only a small fraction of start-up scene is ever profitable. That gives.

Most people aren't applying to startups.

That's the whole point of the changes - we've switched from "spend current money to grow company size and earn more money tomorrow" mode to "that tomorrow has arrived, extract profits now by reducing expenses and keeping headcount low" mode.

Companies are having record profits because they're reducing hiring and having layoffs.

>Meanwhile companies are having record profits.

Profits are measured in nominal terms, we've had the highest inflation in 40 years, and employees wages lag. Bigger revenue numbers, smaller costs means more profits.

At least in regards to competing against hundreds of applicants, I think that's driven by how easy it is to submit a job application now, and by the fact that so many roles are remote. I'm job searching as well at the moment, and a friend I talked to said he had genuinely applied to at least 1000 jobs, in basically any city in the country, before landing the role he has now. Said he submitted 20 applications/day, 5 days a week for 6 months. That kind of math can explain why so many roles have 1000+ other applicants.

I'm curious though - how many of those applications were for recently posted positions? I ask because I assume that the older a job posting, the more likely its position has been filled but the posting hasn't been taken down.

If you apply to 1000 positions, but 700 are from those "zombie" job postings, then you've really only applied to 300 positions.

I'm not sure but I'm guessing they were to mostly recent postings. He did say he would apply to companies multiple times because they often re-post job listings.

His approach was extremely different from how I would approach job applications though. The job he ended up getting was as a Ruby on Rails developer, as the 3rd person in a 3-person startup. And I don't think he knew Ruby when he applied, just html/css/js. And the job had him relocate to Ohio.

I think he's an extreme case, but I see "I applied to X-hundred jobs" posts so often that I do think it explains the massive applicant pools for most job listings.

I've never gotten a response from a job application where I put in very little effort though, so I can't vouch to whether it's a good strategy or not.

I will say as someone who's been involved in the hiring side, the 100s of applicants number is true but also misleading. Especially if you take public applications on linked in or someone. You'll get a lot of people who are unqualified, and I don't mean stuff like "3 years of experience and the req said 5" or "Only worked in scala but we're hiring for python devs", but rather "This person is a cashier and has not indicated anywhere they would have gotten development experience", or "This person is a fresh graduate applying for a team lead role".

Then if there are still too many to interview after that first filter there's the easy ways to cut down numbers further like "This person has no visa and has not started any visa process to work in our jurisdiction" or "this person's entire career is in a single tech stack that is not our tech stack while there's other candidates with our tech stack or a track record of adopting new ones". Could these people work out? Possibly. But it's an overhead that when there's extra candidates, they need something to stick out to make it onto the shortlist. If there's others that have all the same pros and an already valid visa/citizenship or the right tech stack, they'll get on the shortlist first.

After those two processes, the number of applicants per role are not that crazy.

This would be such a fantastic use of LLMs. Each step you listed to curtail your list could be done fairly easily using a specific model (prob classification oriented). I wonder if there's a market for something like this.

There's already automated systems that do this. We do it manually just because we don't want to risk a system automatically discarding a candidate we might actually like.

That's kind of my point, I wonder if LLMs (especially something new like GPT4) could surpass those 'old school' automation methods for this given their 'understanding of context'.

Then applicants will start jailbreaking the LLMs in their cover letters to get to the front of the line. Which will be great if you're trying to hire prompt engineers.

Inhumane Resources

I am always curious what kind of candidates the competition are. You have a unique insight as someone who does hiring.

that is why you have to first verify whether they have a master's in CS, if your requirement asks for that. you call the university and find out. if they don't, you can discard the candidate. then, you can filter on the visa requirement etc, and only after doing all these obvious things you go on to your requirements.

this also means you don't need to do leetcode interviews. anyone from a decent university with an actual degree will be able to code, or quickly learn how to. you said it yourself - too many candidates, so no time to do leetcode BS.

We should replace the term ‘trim fat’ with ‘cut flesh’ because it’s ridiculous and demonstrably wrong IME to assume management knows which resources are fat and which resources are actually crucial muscle that they would be (funnily) forced to re-hire for the sake of the health of the business.

Very anecdotally it seems to have picked up in July/August. No major layoffs and at least I’m getting the usual recruiters spam again.

Same, I've had a bunch of flying car startups start bugging me with weird stuff plus a couple of the primes. It was all rather sudden too so I'm not sure what happened to flip that switch.

Flying car startups?

Not going to name names but there are a bunch of flying car and "autonomous air taxi" startups trying to get to market right now. They're all going to get their PP slapped by the FAA the second they actually try to operate (a whole regulatory framework still needs to be created to make any of this remotely legal) but apparently it's enticing to the type of individuals comprising the investor class right now because they have at least some money.

Shrug...

That's hilarious, I thought it was just being used as a catch-all term to describe startups with head-in-the-clouds products, not startups literally trying to make flying cars.

Profit numbers caused wall street to ease off a bit and so the natural empire building and workload reducing motivations to hire more staff moved the equilibrium back a bit more to hiring.

I was laid off in August 2022, and it took me 6 months to find a new job. I was able to land a decent number of interviews but I interviewed poorly and didn't get any offers. Doing interview prep actually helped a lot -- now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself.

I found my current job through the January HN Who's Hiring post. This company doesn't post anywhere except HN. Would definitely recommend that since the August post is coming out soon! This experience inspired me to build a tool that uses AI to match your resume to the best matching jobs: https://hnresumetojobs.com/

Give it a try, maybe it'll help you! Best of luck, it truly is a grind and is emotionally taxing -- but you WILL find something soon.

> now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself.

And now that you can recognize that skill in isolation, do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?

Do you think the people interviewing you could recognize that you were specifically bad at interviewing, and not at everything?

You'll have to forgive me here, I was only drawing on one experience when talking about being on the other side of things. So I am generalizing based only on one experience, however, with that said, I think the unfortunate reality is just that we as humans do bias toward wanting to hire people who are in fact able to communicate well and demonstrate their abilities to you.

Even if someone is really smart, you have no way of knowing if they are if they can't communicate that with you. Not to mention working on a team is all about communication.

> I think the unfortunate reality is just that we as humans do bias toward wanting to hire people who are in fact able to communicate well and demonstrate their abilities to you

I mostly agree with your assessment, except I don't think that it's unfortunate at all. If applicants are so dense that no one can get along with them, those people, imo, should be removed from the team.

It doesn't matter that you can 10x everyone around you, when you are bumming a team consisting of hundreds of people out.

You've got the topic of the conversation somewhat wrong.

The problem discussed above was that some people are simply bad at handling the kind of stressful situations that interviews present them with. (Note, it's not necessarily about any stressful situation, just one where you're under intense scrutiny.) Hence, you can end up not hiring someone because they're struggling to show their skills in an interview, even though they'd be an excellent hire otherwise (including being a great team member). This is, indeed, unfortunate.

> do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?

I do, yes. IME, candidates that take the time to learn the skill will take the time to learn other skills required for the job. If a candidate can't be bothered to learn a skill to get a job, why should I hire them for a senior position? If it's entry-level, that's a different story.

Why is the skill required for the job? Or is it required mostly to stroke your ego about them having to crawl over some arbitrary glass to please you?

I'm not sure what that is about the second question. But there are always skills specific to any job. We have a profession that spans across infinite industries so there is always something new even though we're 'just writing software.'

For example, I went from web-hosting software to fitness industry software. There is very little overlap in skills beyond 'writing software'. At hosting job, scale was the biggest issue (dealing with hundreds of millions of events per second) where now, legal/insurance type issues are the biggest hurdles. It requires a totally different way of thinking and knowledge set to be effective at a senior level. If you're just focused on 'writing software' then you're not senior material, you're just a programmer ... not an engineer.

But is the skill of interviewing a skill needed at the job? I'd wager not. So why are you selecting for it, and deeming those not good at it lazy? Sounds like a good way to bias your pool and throw away lots of good candidates.

It's one of the skills that indicates someone is more than a software-engineering, misanrthopic robot. This world has enough of those.

Signalling is an important thing, it's why you iron your shirt before the interview - it may even be why you have a degree. The cost of false positives is high, so if this filters out skilled engineers who think are appeasing the interviewer's ego, the system is working.

If you can’t show me you’re a senior+ engineer, then I’m not going to hire you for a senior+ job. It’s as simple as that. You can ace the technical interview, but if you can’t tell me why I should choose YOU over every other candidate that aces the technical interview… why shouldn’t I pick one of those other ones? It has nothing to do with ego or anything else.

This is a skill, learning to sell yourself. It translates into being able to get sell innovative projects to stakeholders, to learning new things, to understanding business requirements.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I’d love to hear why or how.

Yes, I am completely with you. I always hated these arbitrary algorithm tasks that have nothing to do with the actual job. With the experience of hosting multiple job interviews I prefer to do a task that is close to the job, but keep it open enough for the applicant to do it their way. And making sure to the applicant that asking questions is desired. If they go in a wrong direction without asking questions, it's a good sign. If they ask good questions it's a strong plus point. Also I can see if they can apply learned knowledge quickly.

Why should I do algorithm or math related tasks as a frontend developer for example. Soft skills are way more important than preparing for potential interview questions.

> throw away lots of good candidates.

You say this as if it's a bad thing.

The reality is, companies have multiple qualified applicants for each open role. Hiring teams are actively raising the bar and trying to find more ways to narrow the pool down. If there are 10-20 qualified applicants in the pipeline, and half of them interviewed terribly, it's very easy to cut the applicant pool in half by rejecting the people who couldn't communicate their experience clearly during the interview.

Remember, "interviewing skill" is just another way of saying "how good are you at communicating with prospective employers".

Communication is usually an important hiring criteria. Ability to communicate well in an interview ("good interviewing skills") is a good proxy for ability to communicate in general.

To play devils advocate interviewing isn’t far from presenting your ideas to a skeptical audience. This is a good skill to have for any engineer. I don’t think it’s necessary or sufficient but it is useful.

> Why is the skill required for the job?

The same reason that your skills are required for the job you are paid for, I suspect. To ensure that you can actually perform your job properly.

How does this logic cope with someone who puts intense levels of effort into developing interview skills, but not the depth of development or design skills to be a continued success post hire?

Nothing is easy.

Everything in a balance.

Downturns always reveal the important of relationships — the true gold and what is always worth investing in and collecting.

This is my fourth downturn. Nothing — nothing — has fundamentally changed.

> How does this logic cope with someone who puts intense levels of effort into developing interview skills, but not the depth of development or design skills to be a continued success post hire?

I expect it resolves just fine. The intense effort that you acknowledge is precisely what it takes to move forward in this field.

> do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?

Definitely. Motivation is of major importance in whether a new employee will be successful or not. And if a candidate obviously has put a lot of effort in preparing for the interview, then this indicates that he/she is motivated to get the job.

Ofc it is not the only factor to take into consideration, but surely an important one.

I don't know, why should we have to be "motivated" to get a job, when the company can just get rid of us at any time? What's the point?

Seems like a double standard.

You could also leave the company at any point, so why should they hire you?

There's got to be some give and take in a relationship with an employer. If you're feeling exploited, you're not in the right role. And that will show in the quality of your work. Work can be fun and interesting, and someone who enjoys what they do will relish the opportunity to learn. I know that for me interviewing, though tough, has always been an opportunity to solidify my basic understanding of the field I'm in. Maybe figure out what you enjoy, and find an employer who respects you equally?

That’s a luxury only affordable when there’s a wealth of choices available. If my choice is between a boring job from an employer I don’t respect, or no job at all, I’m taking that job.

> If you're feeling exploited, you're not in the right role.

I mean that's a good attitude, but really some industrues and some fompanies are exploitative.

And I am not talking Cobalt mines or McDonalds. Look at the game industry- really good developers, much more skilled than average web dev, and they get shit pay and long hours. Why does anyone work there? People exploit their passion.

So they are orthogobal concepts - maybe you are passionate, and someone takes advantage of that

> Why does anyone work there?

Ask them. They are choosing to work there. They have options.

Also why is McDonalds an example of an exploitative company?

> Also why is McDonalds an example of an exploitative company?

Because we (in UK) are paying in-work benefits to help people who work there survive. So the taxpayer is subsidising the labour costs of this business. If we didn't, there wouldn't be enough people willing to work at McDonalds.

We should only pay benefits to people who are unemployed, a job has to cover costs of sustaining employees. The same pronpem is faced by british farmers - they can't exploit romanian students with schemes where they pay them below minimum wage by charging £50/day for libing on the farm in a tent. And there arent enough british folks who want to break their back for minimum wage.

You aren’t subsidizing McDonalds labor cost. If McDonalds paid them more, they would be paying more than the revenue that’s attributable to them, and creating a net loss by hiring them and they simply wouldn’t do it.

As a society we have decided that people deserve a livable wage. That is a good thing. Minimum wage laws are a distorting way to accomplish this because they put a cost that should be borne by society (no-skill workers should have a livable wage) and force it on industries that employ workers with no skills. Subsidizing the income through government transfers is frankly a more equitable means of achieving that goal.

That being said, in such a regime however minimum wage laws are necessary, not because McDonalds is exploring the workers, but because they are likely to exploit the government.

> If McDonalds paid them more, they would be paying more than the revenue that’s attributable to them, and creating a net loss by hiring them and they simply wouldn’t do it.

That only happens when McDonalds is paying exactly as much as the value they get back. Which is doubtful. If forced to pay more or shut down, your average McDonalds would prefer to pay more. They wouldn't be losing money.

>And if a candidate obviously has put a lot of effort in preparing for the interview, then this indicates that he/she is motivated to get the job.

In case someone doesn't see the absurdity of this situation, let me make it clearer:

We all have 24 hours in a day. Given that fact, whenever I'm at the crossroads between "practicing my interview skills" and "diving deeper into <insert language/framework/specialization>" then it makes sense that I should be prioritizing the former because prioritizing the former implies that I will be motivated enough to learn and work with the latter, and nothing more.

Why not just learn the latter in the first place?

This is not absurd. You're not a <insert language/framework/specialization> drone. Being good at your job requires many more skills than that.

I'd argue that interviewing well is strongly correlated with skills that are valuable for a SWE role. It's not perfect, but overall I do feel like there is signal there.

I beg to differ by a mile and more. If all you have to choose from are mediocre candidates then choosing the ones who hustle by preparing for inane interviews is maybe a barely acceptable option. But you instantly discount any great candidate who doesn’t interview well. A great candidate who also interviews well will have the pick of the lot and unless your org is OpenAI I doubt they’ll come to you. So it’s probably in your interest to try and find the hidden talent in the bad interviewees.

> But you instantly discount any great candidate who doesn’t interview well.

I never said that. I said it's a very important factor, but there are other factors as well. Also, not interviewing well doesn't necessarily mean that you didn't prepare anything. Preparing also means reading up about the company, putting some effort in your CV etc. What I'm looking for, again just as one of the indicators, is that the candidate has put some effort.

Most great candidates don't live in SF, so OpenAI isn't an option for them.

Fwiw I’m an employer too and I strongly disagree with this. In fact we try very hard to see if we can separate “interviewing skill” from “real work skill” because we only care about the latter, and with programming roles there is little overlap between the two skills.

The idea that someone investing time and effort into being a smooth interviewer somehow shows that they’re “motivated” seems like a weird tribal dance to me. Who does it benefit?

What I'm looking for, and that's also what I wrote, is that candidate has put some effort. This can also be in getting to know about the company or in updating his/her CV. There are candidates that are so fond of themselves and their perceived technical skills, that they act like diva's and don't find it necessary to put any effort. I'd rather not have those as my colleagues. I'm not saying that not preparing automatically means the candidate is such a diva, there can ofc be many other reasons, but it's an indicator to be alert for.

And again, this is not the only indicator I'm looking for. A candidate who didn't prepare much but can tell very enthusiastically about some project or technology is obviously motivated as well.

Needing to pay the mortgage is a HUGE motivation, but it doesn’t necessarily correlate with job performance.

What I would say I look for in software developers is people who are genuinely interested in software development. You don’t need to be a committer on 4 open source projects, but show me that you actually like the work (the fun parts at least.) If you’re also interested in the business domain that’s not necessarily required, but a huge plus.

>And if a candidate obviously has put a lot of effort in preparing for the interview, then this indicates that he/she is motivated to get the job.

Well, yes, desperate people are going to be "motivated" and work really hard to get the job.

But remember this cuts both ways: people who aren't desperate with have no problem leaving you you for the next big thing. Being an employer doesn't put you in some default superior position. You need workers and workers need work.

Could you describe the process of learning the skill of being interviewed?

For me, I was actually just really bad at selling myself (job interviews are not where you should have false humility I learned).

I was very fortunate in that my girlfriend helped me a lot here. But quite frankly what she did was very straightforward. She would do a 30 minute mock interview with me, and ask me pretty standard behavioral questions. Questions like:

- Can you tell us about a time when you had to work on a project with a tight deadline? How did you handle it? - Can you give an example of a project or initiative that you spearheaded and the impact it had on the company or team? - How do you prioritize and manage your tasks and responsibilities when faced with competing demands or tight deadlines?

I answered these questions on my own in a notes app, and then when she would ask me I would then draw on my previous experiences and figure out how to answer question that tells a story as best as possible.

This really helped me a lot.

One tip I would give is to generate these questions, try copy/pasting the job description into ChatGPT and ask it to generate a list of interview questions for that role! I found that much better than sifting through the SEO spam for interview questions.

"job interviews are not where you should have false humility I learned" This is so true, definitely screwed over some of my earlier interviews due to doing this

definitely use chatgpt to get the typical behaviour questions, works like a charm.

I had 7 jobs in the last 9 years. I've quit all of them. I interviewed at probably 50-60 places during this time and I'm currently moving to my next role, so I'll begin the 8th job in 9 years.

To practice interviewing you need to firat get details about the job and company and develop a list of questions. If I really wanted a job I'd get 30-40 questions prepared, from job specific to behavioral ("tell me of a time you had to deal with a difficult stakeholder"). Then add variations of the question so you get used to being asked the same thing different ways.

Then always use STAR (situation/task/action/result) to answer the question. This will help the interviewer remember you a lot better and it will also highlight what YOU did.

Practice going through your CV/resume back to front and front to back. Be prepared to highlight what you learned at each role and why you left from it/got made redundant.

With sufficient grind you will become proficient at this and it will make a world of a difference. I can now confidently say "I wont get this role because I messed up X, so if they were paying attention they will reduce my score for this". You will still get rejected (sometimes there is just someone better than you) but the goal is to improve your odds at being the one that gets the job.

Hope this helps!

I'm curious what the experience/incentive has been to change jobs so quickly. Was it a cluster of redundancies that is inflating the number or do you plan to stay at a job for no more than 1 year + a little? Do your interviewers find this suspicious or negative? I've always been told that if you switch jobs too fast then no one will hire you cause they know you'll leave as soon as you get up to speed.

I wanted to get into a more technical role and a lot of these roles were in customer service, sales, support, fraud prevention, etc until my most recent 2 jobs, which have been in software development.

The other aspect is that I will view a company the same way they view me - a resource and a means to an end. I've been asked in several of those interviews "You don't seem to hang around a lot, how do we know you won't leave in a year" and I tend to answer that "You don't. The same way I don't know that some economic downturn isn't on the horizon and that you would instead scrap me a year down the road.". Some don't like it and engage in that discussion more and some accept it.

At the end of the day, I'm here to do a task you hired me to do, I'll do it well (they can check a ton of references in this respect) and when I'll find something better I'll leave. If I don't get hired because of this, it's not a job I would want anyway. I'm pretty tired of how capitalism and "the market" applies only to workers but it never seems to apply to companies and when it does then you're "not a team player" or "not in it for the long run" or, as we've seen recently on HN, "not part of the family".

So to do my part I always advise / suggest to friends and family to quit. Start looking for something else, get some practice, see what's out there, see if you could get paid more for your skills and see if you could do more interesting work. Those are all possibilities. Unfortunately, most people like to stick with the devil they know and then end up scared and shocked when they get made redundant. Hope that this explains it. PS - the job I most recently accepted seems great, the team and the product seem interesting and I'm looking forward to getting stuck in. However, that doesn't mean that if I start getting bored, if change isn't being effected at the rate I push for and if the product/team turn out to be not great, I might decide to move on.

It's a great attitude to have. Just be aware that if you ever want to become a manager or higher it will work against you. If you just stick to technical positions you'll be fine (until ageism rears its ugly head).

Hey, I tried your website, it selected 314 jobs. Doesn't look like is matching correctly. Or I am a jack of all trades.

No the website doesn't work at all. It shows me the same 314 jobs. Not a single one relevant.

Hey, sorry to hear it's not working for you -- would be happy to look more into the problem! Could you shoot me an email with your resume attached? My email is in my HN profile.

Hey would be happy to look more into it -- my email is in my HN profile, would appreciate if you sent me your resume there.

> now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing

I noticed this when interviewing candidates and although it's nice to have someone with their interview skills together, you run the risk of hiring "the master of interviews".

I would say that you run the certainty of this.

Well, there's degrees. Last week I did 5 interviews where the candidate gets a full PDF explaining what we are going to do during the interview (along with a sample problem to practice on), and half didn't have an IDE or testing libraries set up for a TDD coding interview...

lol, what a guantlet. (sorry, I haven't interview since covid)

I second this, I was hired through a who’s hiring post late last year myself. A director of engineering who is an active HN user was a green flag for me that the company was the right fit for me, and it turned out to be the case.

I tried advertising as a consultancy, after an exceptional career in tech.

* Client emails me asking if I can help with his site. I respond. He asks for more details. I respond. He provides a website with an MLM video on how to "be your own boss and sell a product that sells itself". I was talking to a bot.

* Try upwork. Spend all day to send 15 proposals, get 3 views, no replies. Upwork wants me to pay money monthly for more "connect" points. Looks like you need to do work for nearly free to get ratings, and you're heavily competing with offshore. close tab ... Try fiverr. Get no messages.

* Startup with revenue contacts me, shows me their business, discusses their problems, seems very interested in hiring. Offers $20 - $30 an hour for Cloud security work; software engineering, seems price sensitive to the extreme, doesn't seem to want want to pay for any time spent reviewing docs/analysis, only wants to pay for the execution time. Say no. Guy keeps calling. Guy agrees to higher rate for a tiny amount of hours to be done next-day. Guy doesn't give access, asks to review more stuff. Wasted many hours for no money.

Lesson learned, try to find a fast growing company and stay away from people that sound like they would negotiate on the price of corn kernels in the back alley of aldi

Thing is with the freelancer sites, they are almost all looking for cheap talent. You can be anyone, with a perfect score on the site, with huge track record, but the moment you raise your hourly above $30, no one is interested.

Consulting is absolute shit. The only way to make it work is if you already have the contacts with companies that have the money to spend or if you have a channel that can get you those contacts (eg. a huge following on twitter, or a popular blog)

I have a couple companies I do consulting work that are great for but they came to me through my network, I have tried to get more work but either I get stuck in an endless sales cycle (think over 1yr of sales meetings and no money exchanges hands) or their budget is extremely low.

What channels did you use to advertise? Can upwork be a good starting spot?

I advertised from linkedin and my websites. Upwork is bad. You would need to do some nearly free work for awhile to get some ratings and a 'rising talent' rating, to start to be considered for work.

Once you work for free for a few weeks you might start to get some traction but you'll quickly run out of "connects", that allow you to bid for proposals. Basically you have to pay upwork to apply to gigs, and then upwork takes a cut if you get the gig, and most the gigs posted want to pay offshore rates, eg 10 - $30/hr for AI work, or skilled software engineering.

I've had similar issues - so much so that I've created Resgen[0] just because it was tough getting call backs. It turns out I really needed to tailor my resume to each job and it resulted in a lot more call backs.

[0] https://resgen.app

i've bookmarked ResGen in case i ever become desperate / crazy enough to rejoin the working class. But may I just say sir, I LOVE your lightweight pixel inspired web page -- so clean! We need more sites like this, well organized and thoughtful without the clutter

Hey thanks!

Pixel inspired? I think it looks like a Lichtenstein painting. Neat.

Wow, that design is modern but brings me back to the days of application skin sites and early digital art communities back in the early 00s. Great job. I'm going to sign up.

It's like gumroad.com (the design I mean)

I definitely had a lot of inspiration from gumroad - love their design too.

Thanks! Let me know what you think when you try it out.

To be fair this Mondrian style is a web design trend right now.

I like the idea of ResGen. But I think you should consider changing your pricing.

10 free resumes per month seems too generous. Also, $7 is very low for a paid plan, when your users are likely to churn as soon as they find a job. If this tool is really as valuable for job hunters as it aims to be, they should gladly pay three times that amount.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll experiment with it - currently still early stages and feeling out what people are comfortable with.

This site is amazing. Finally something with a clean design, no fluff and it's fast.

Gotta love Sveltekit SSR for snappy response

Similar to what we're building at rezi. https://www.rezi.ai/

Nice! I've used Rezi a couple of times.

Great project but I don't have LinkedIn. I've previously used ChatGPT to do something similar. Wrote a text about myself, copy-pasted the job description and then asked it to generate resume bullet points. It worked well. Maybe your site can do something similar? Instead of requiring a LinkedIn job posting, users can copy/paste a job description.

I plan to have support for other job boards (greenhouse, ashby, indeed, etc.) soon.

We are getting literally thousands of more or less qualified applicants for most of the roles we're hiring for at Dropbox right now. Can't speak for other places but I imagine it's similar for some. I don't know anything about your resume or qualifications but it very well may not be _you_ that's the problem, per se. As others have suggested I would see who you know places who can pull you out of the pile.

Thousands, eh?

I'd assume you're not actually hiring "thousands" of people, which means that a very large percentage of those "more or less qualified" applicants are not passing the interview rounds.

Since it's logical to assume that you'd actually want to hire someone for those open roles, it's not too hard to see where the disconnect is.

Of course, I don't mean "you" in the sense of you, personally, and I don't intend this to be a personal attack of any sort, but it really does say something about how utterly insane people on the hiring side have gotten in the past few months.

I couldn't understand this comment and wondered whether you had misread the parent. The point is that they are posting job openings and getting thousands of applicants per role i.e. They are oversubscribed.

That literally cannot be true unless the supposed "more or less qualified" applicants actually aren't qualified. Now, I suppose it's possible that thousands of people are lying on their resumes just to get a chance to work at Dropbox, but given this year's layoffs, I find it far, far more likely that people on the hiring side have gone off the deep end.

You can disagree with me on that, and that's fine, but stay with me for a second here... if there's an open role, presumably they'd be better off with someone filling it than having it stay open for months on end, right? And, given that the candidate pool has been recently enriched with people who were recently employed and would not normally be out on the job market (remember, these are "more or less qualified" candidates, at least according to their resumes), I have a hard time believing the disconnect isn't that companies either think it's a good time to go unicorn hunting, or they don't actually want to hire at all for some reason.

But, again, unicorn hunting only works out in a tiny percentage of cases, because the supply of unicorns is low, and the real unicorns probably are not the ones out there pounding the pavement. I can't even begin to explain why any sane company would post a job listing in good faith and then never hire anyone for it, given that they're supposedly inundated with reasonable-looking candidates.

So, what's the deal here? If you have the explanation, I'd love to hear it, because I've been on the hiring side, and you can damn well bet I wouldn't devote my time to resume screening and interviewing if I didn't think we were actually going to hire anyone.

The person posting did not say they had trouble filling the position, only that for positions that do open up they get thousands of applicants.

The person posting didn't have to. Everyone else is saying they aren't getting hired. Who do you think is on the other side of these transactions?

Hiring a single candidate for a single position is what’s on the other side of these transactions, typically.

> having it stay open for months on end, right

I stayed with you. Here's the non-sequitur. New positions appear on an ongoing basis and the latency from opening to accepted offer is non-zero.

You know this isn't about 1 person at 1 company hiring for 1 role, right? This is about the job market as a whole. Who do you think is on the other end of these transactions?

Context. Seriously.

The context was you responding to somebody specifically at Dropbox. You glommed onto their comment as the opening wedge for a point you wanted to make that is about the job market as a whole, not Dropbox. Then you seem puzzled (at least) if not positively affronted that people responded by saying you seemed to be missing the point Dropbox-dude was making.

Context. Seriously.

This seem pretty simple to me. Dropbox opens a role. They get 1000 applications. They hire one person. 999 people post on forums that they're getting rejected everywhere they apply.

Going more macro, there are 1000 people out of work applying to every job. There are only 100 jobs open across all companies. The same 1000 people apply to all of them, only 100 get hired. 900 people post on forums they can't get a job.

This doesn't need to be a conspiracy theory. If there are fewer jobs than there were last year (particularly in sectors like junior dev and FE eng) there are going to be people who don't get hired.

Man, that's some serious black belt level overthinking.

One open position, 1000 resumes received, pick a handful to interview, hire 1 after a few weeks, 999 come to HN to ask if the job market is tough and say they can't get hired anywhere.

No need for some weird conspiracy theory.

How much have you raised the hiring bar due to the flood of qualified applicants?

The internal standards are basically the same but who gets an interview has dramatically changed due to the enormous resume pools. Where we would have interviewed a decent chunk of generically plausible candidates before the lay-off waves we now tend to be interviewing plausible candidates with some kind of special expertise related to the role.

My linkedin views are basically rock bottom and the twice-daily recruiter spam has stopped entirely. From my assessment of my network anyone who lost their job is looking, or has been looking for a long time.

The market is effectively dead. Even if you set your sights extremely low. Even corporate suit-and-tie programmer jobs are drying up. I don't know what I'll do if I lose my job. Construction, maybe. I can't be without health insurance so I am always terrified of markets where it might take months to get a new position.

Feels like the market is good in Sydney but alas you get lower wages and the high and rising cost of living. Stagflation is rampant!

I think the market is shit only in certain HCoL places like US or west europe, everywhere else seem to be normal maybe slightly wordless than last year (but last year was crazy good)

Feels like the US is on AC and everywhere else is on DC

It might be dependent on what's in your area. I still get a fair bit of recruiter spam, but the character of it has changed a lot. Amazon seem to have put their ambitions to briefly employ everyone in the world on hold, and I haven't heard from them in a year, say. On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of mail/LinkedIn messages from (a) medium-sized post-startups (~1k employees, probably not a unicorn) and (b) financial firms (HFT and all that). I suspect that these types of companies were starved of applicants over the last few years; they simply couldn't afford to compete with stock-heavy offers from Big Tech(TM).

I have also had LinkedIn recruiter messages dry up in the past 6 months, and as for the geolocation component I'm in NYC, and yes my profile is up to date, I'm listed as 'open to offers', etc. I used to get a dozen messages weekly, now maybe one per month.

I find it to actually be a bit quicker paced than late last year, I am at least finding enough listings to conceivably apply to currently, couldn't say as much back then.

Rejection email?

You were lucky to get a rejection!

Or an email.

We used have to lick the bosses boots clean, applying for a job paying penny a year, an' if we were lucky we might get a thrashing to within an inch of our lives, and a rejection screamed in our ear.

Luxury....

Yes sure, I'm in the same boat, but probably with worse prospects (took a 'career break' to work on side projects, etc), and it feels like I'm boxing in a cloud - 90%+ of applications are just ignored, not even a rejection.

> - 90%+ of applications are just ignored, not even a rejection.

I recall being at that position. I firmly believe those 90% of applications are actually fake job ads to trawl for personal data. The most suspicious cases come from recruiters who post the most generic job ad over and over and over again.

Yep, I also noticed those fake positions usually promise a very high wage, higher than similar positions.

A rejection screamed in your ear? Luxury! When I was a junior developer we used to stand in job line 25 hours a day for tuppence and if they didn't hire us we'd be shot.

You were lucky to get a rejection!

You could say that again. In the early 2010s, I always got rejection emails. 10 years later with milliennials now in hiring manager spots, ghosting is now the norm.

33 applications since 1st of June:

- 2 rejected after interview.

- 2 ghosted after interview.

- 3 declined on my part after interview for various reasons (1 paid essentially below minimum wage, and 2 required relocating to a different country which is fine by me for the right job, but I didn't really have a good feeling about either).

- 8 rejected by email.

- 18 no reply (but some might still reply, since it can take a few weeks).

So that's about a 50% reply rate, give or take (assuming I'll get a reply from a few of the application from the last few days).

I would kill for even a 10% reply rate.

Same here. 22 years experience full stack; leadership roles. Can't get an interview. Taking an ML class. I think telling some recruiters I had a baby on the way was a mistake.

You’re struggling with 22 YOE? That’s unfathomable to me

this industry seems to be more and more senseless. or maybe it was a bubble and we're falling back to the norm where enterprises are your enemies..

Possibly the ageism in our profession is not only a myth?

I've heard about that many many times yet I don't believe I've ever experienced it (I'm in the UK and in my late 40s).

I am a contractor and for the most part it's still, thankfully, a meritocracy. So experience is, in my opinion, the biggest factor.

I have no doubt that sometimes, perhaps for the entry-level roles, they will discriminate against age but for senior roles, due to the cost of the candidate and the potential damage they can do, a younger candidate without the experience, could affect them badly.

I definitely hide everything about my private life when speaking with recruiters or potential employers. On the first day that you walk in the door of your new employer, dump all your personal problems (that you choose) on your new boss. It is the only chance you have to do it. All other times are "inconvenient" or an excuse to say no-to-hire or give you a lousy rating or layoff. Women have been facing this ... forever in the office. The smartest ones learn to play these games.

Out of curiosity, what's your definition of "full stack", if you started working in the early '00s?

I’m confused by the question. Are you under the impression that the term “full stack” didn’t exist in the early ‘00s? I recall the term already being an overused joke by then. It basically just means that whatever stack you got, the person can work on all parts of it.

Never heard the full stack term in early '00s, but I was very very junior so it might be me, anyway I'm pretty sure that nowadays "full stack" has a specific meaning (basically only related to web development) and that it was different back in the day

Is the definition today something beyond “can work client, web front end, web back end, infrastructure, and database”? Because that’s how I thought of it then and that’s my understanding of it still.

kinda agree, AFAIK full stack term became mainstream when front and back got closer due to ajax, maybe it was already used in the days of LAMP which was a `whole stack` too

I didn't start working that early but still find it hard to define because these days "full stack" is someone who can write frontend and backend web apps – but on my first few jobs "full stack" was anything from writing javascript for the web to setting up or troubleshooting a server, or debugging a SQL query plan

I think the best description is "give me a piece of tech and I can probably figure it out"

Full stack back in '00 was typically LAMP. Linux, Apache (httpd), MySQL, and Perl, Python, or Php.

As a full stack developer, you were expected to be able to do system administration for Linux, setup and configure Apache httpd server, work with MySQL (create tables, know SQL), and work in a language that typically started with 'P'. The way that CGIs (and Php) worked implied that you did front end and backend work as necessary... though front end didn't have the same degree of complexity that it does now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)

What you are describing is not full stack, it's backend development.

Full-stack adds the front-end, and that's why you won't find js devs that can configure nginx, because they've been surfing on that "full" part of "full-stack" for years but it really just means you can do node and JS.

Back in lamp stack days, also involved front end development - though that was before even jQuery.

Writing the page to do front end navigation was part of the expectations of the fulls tack developer. They may not be a web designer, but the "ok, this is what the designer wants the page to look like - here's the HTML that I need to write to realize this" was part of writing the perl (in my case) CGI to make it spit out the proper html in the proper spot... and you really can't do most php without doing front end development as an integral part of it.

The definition of full stack has changed over the years as the stacks have changed and more emphasis is on the front end as front end libraries and frameworks have evolved to take more of the heavy lifting for presentation.

Going to echo Shagie. Even early 2010's full stack was WAMP, MAMP, LAMP stacks + HTML/CSS/JQuery. Or .net/webforms, java, etc.

he is probably wondering if maybe his tech is some out of fashion one so that could be the reason for difficulties in getting interviews

I have had the same experience job hunting with 15 years experience as full stack and leadership. The market is awful right now, I either get rejected outright with some automated email or I get through to interviews where they clearly haven't read my cv and they'll ask if I have experience managing teams of 100+ (I don't)

I don't even know what the overlap between people that are looking for jobs at my level and people who have managed huge teams is... everyone I know who have managed teams that large is on massive comp packages at FAANG type companies.

It's all very confusing, it made me feel like I've picked the wrong field. I have been lucky enough in my career that I have a long runway, but I'm also not rich enough to retire and do something crazy like buy a farm like I've seen other people in my situation do.

Very frustrating situation, I have been trying to work on my own projects but I'm not a natural salesperson so it takes a lot of effort to motivate myself to do things like cold calls or even cold emails.

I have my system configured to auto-delete all applications containing the phrase "full stack".

Best decision I ever made.

Why?

This advice won't help you right now, but when you do find your next role, try take an active role in tech interviewing. It's something I pushed hard to take part in two jobs ago, and it's shown me what good candidates and bad candidates look like, how to interview and how not to bomb the interview in the first few minutes. It's also helped me massively as a candidate.

I was about to write the same. I volunteered in the company to help with hiring and after 20-30 interviews you get a lot of insight, what is looked at when evaluating and just in general being more natural when talking to people you see for the first time.

Can’t recommend it enough!

I am registered as an interviewer at my workplace ($big tech company) and in the past 2 years I've been assigned just one interview. In the past year I've been assigned zero. Interviews are randomly assigned. Front-end web developer. Internally I can see they are hiring countless full-time PMs, PgMs, directors... but developers being hired are here on 6 month vendor contracts, and not full time employees, which is a change. Something is happening.

This is odd to me. At LinkedIn they always needed more interviewers. And I did more than 100 in my 5 years there.

I posted something similar just a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36876485

I worked as a cybersecurity engineer for 2 years and I've applied for over 300 _entry level_ developer jobs over the last few months and still haven't heard back from most places. It's definitely not just you!

I've heard from family and friends that are still in the tech field that most companies still have a hiring freeze in place and that this will probably stay in place for the remainder of the year, maybe even into Q1 or Q2 of next year.

The best idea right now might be to get _any_ job (even entry level positions) and just hunker down while we wait for the market to recover before we can apply for jobs that are more commiserate with our experience levels.

I decided to go back to school and get my Masters in CS while I wait and I'm also planning on doing some web or app development on the side just to pad my resume a little.

I'm sorry I can't help any more, other than to say that you're not alone in this :)

The market is indeed not the same it was during the past 2 or 3 years. But these last years were abnormally good for IT professionals. Too much cheap money distorted the job market and, if you don't have much experience on how things used to be before that, you may find it difficult to adapt.

Suggestions:

- Try to expand to back-end and advertise yourself as a full-stack. I'd say that many companies are currently in "maintenance mode", putting their new projects in a wait list and focusing on maintaining their existing systems. A generalist developer, able to work on the entire stack, would be more valuable in such cases -- and that would also explain why UI designers are having such a hard time to find new jobs.

- Submit resumes to the "Who is hiring" lists here in HN

- I don't know if that's your case, but anyway. If you live outside US and EU, worked for companies from these regions in the past few years, and are trying to find a similar job now: it's gonna be harder than before. Those are precisely the countries where the cheap money caused the most severe distortions. Too many small companies with very little potential were full of cash and hired tons of developers from abroad. These days are over. Such jobs still exist, as they existed before the pandemics, but are harder to get and the competition is tougher. If that applies to you, I suggest you to start focusing on "traditional", on-site jobs in your country, and keep looking for better, remote jobs while you are employed and less preoccupied.

Could you elaborate on how you're applying to these companies?

The highest probability approach to getting an interview is via an internal referral: i.e. someone at the company you want to work at refers you.

After you've exhausted your network, cold emails with a strong pitch to engineers & engineering managers at companies that are aggressively hiring is the best approach to gain referrals.

A couple of friends and I wrote a playbook to help folks land interviews: https://koopuluri.com/get-interviews. We go into detail about what a strong pitch is, how to craft one, and how to effectively cold email.

Happy to help in any way, feel free to reply here / email me (in bio).

I thought I'd add a data point to this discussion.

I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback.

I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue.

The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to "interview" me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn't have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO's and such).

My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff.

The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they're looking for and that's it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins.

I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap.

One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients.

I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV's sent to the clients and they're now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out).

Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I'd chime in.

as a rule of thumb I ignore all UK agents, they have the attention span of a coked up butterfly. from my experience they try extract as much information out of you (your salary, last company, are they hiring, give me phone number to their manager or hr) and never call even if they scheduled a call. they never update you if the role you applied for have been filled in meantime, you simply get ghosted and your email gets spammed with offers.

I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.

My experience echos yours too... lost count of the number of times I've been ghosted.

I've learned not to trust agents. At all.

If I get a call I assume that I'll be ghosted or that they're lying about the role.

If I manage to get an interview, I usually get the role (I'd say about 70%+) but getting to the interview stage is always a pain with the agencies.

That being said, the market is most definitely different at the moment: I'd hate to be applying for entry-level (or even mid-level) roles at the moment!

I have a friend who is looking and he's struggling to get anywhere at the moment and he has more experience than me (I'm more senior than him but his CV has extensive experience on it).

To the contrary, it took about six years until the most persistent UK recruiter stopped calling me back. There is certainly a function of how well does your CV match their clients in there.

Recruiters usually just pay lip service and pretend to send your CV through. They data mine and will have already put people forward at jobs you think you're applying to. About 30-50% of the time your CV won't be sent immediately, if at all, until their other candidate is rejected and I have (personal) evidence of this.

The reason for this is 2 fold:

1. They directly stop you competing with their current candidate, who is probably the highest % cut.

2. They indirectly stop you being put forward by other recruiters when you say "oh another recruiter has put me forward" (which they haven't, but you have a verbal contract with).

So the number of jobs you think you're applying to is actually less .

If you suspect this is happening (and make sure genuinely it's not just a delay in the HR dept first by asking probing questions) call the company and ask them directly, state that the recruiter is being a little slow corresponding and you'd like to confirm the status of your application. If they haven't heard of you, terminate your verbal contract with the recruiter and send your CV directly to the company. This happened for my current job, and now I'm earning a substantial amount of money (think tech arch, top end salary).

My boss said during hiring "I don't know why they wouldn't pass on your CV, you were clearly the better candidate".

I forgot to add, I rarely use recruiters now unless they seem genuine and want to talk at length including giving you contact names at the company "the manager Fred Bloggs is usually...". I wait for companies' in-house HR on LinkedIn to contact me or contact them directly if they advertise.

> 2. They indirectly stop you being put forward by other recruiters when you say "oh another recruiter has put me forward" (which they haven't, but you have a verbal contract with).

They usually send you a confirmation email to say that you're their bitch now but I reply to the confirmation email saying that if I hear nothing for 7 days, then I can go with another recruitment firm.

In my experience from both sides of the table, agents have always been the route to market in the UK whereas applications through HR have been a black hole.

Not saying you are wrong, but my (London, mainly BigCo) experience and read is that 90%+ of tech jobs are filled through agents.

Same. Sooo many Norwegian companies for some reason use UK recruiters. I'm boycotting each and every company doing that.

They're nothing but noise. Shotgunning messages to everyone. Calling me out of the blue while I'm at work. Just straight up spam and annoyances. We don't get much robo-calls here, so UK recruiters is the sole reason why I no longer pick up the phone from unknown numbers. It can sometimes be multiple a day. And blocking UK numbers doesn't work. If you don't answer, they call you a minute later routed through a Norwegian number.

F*ck every Norwegian company outsourcing their recruiting to these agencies. I don't think they understand how poorly it reflects on them..

its not just Norway, a lot of recruitment companies based in the UK are focused on european mainland market, germany, switzerland, denmark, etc.. a lot of cowboys over there who figured out putting people into chairs is very profitable and scalable. some of them act as middle men and take a cut out of your salary. its really the new wild west over here.

BTW what is it with recruiters being overwhelmingly British also outside of Britain (say, German speaking tech space)?

> I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.

How do you find out which companies are hiring, please? It's like a catch-22 situation: in order to know that a company is hiring, you need to know that the company is hiring. If I search for open positions for my role on Google, all I am seeing is the endless stream of recruiting agencies with no visibility into what companies they are actually recruiting for... Are there any places left where companies advertise directly?

Have you tried Indeed, Monster, etc.? Or failing that, contact the companies you're interested in directly?

I am sure I must have checked out Indeed; but when I look at it now, it is not as full of posts from recruiting companies as I remember. Still a lot though: "Senior X Developer required for one of the leading FinTech companies...", "We’re working alongside a leading scale-up... in order to to find a Full Stack X Engineer..." and so on. I wish there were a simple way to filter all those middlemen out.

I dont really go for big tech, usually I target small to medium sized companies.

So for me when I want to work for a company with embedded / audio etc I just google who is providing such services in the location I wanna work at.

Once I found the target company and their website, a lot of them have "career" or "job" postings on there. If they don't I just send an email with an inquiry about currently open positions with my cv attached, sort of an electronic cold call :)

I don't like to deal with the middlemen I go straight to the source, Frank Lucas style of the software era if you will...

I won't resort to naming and shaming here but if you ever get contacted by a UK agency that 'resources vividly', immediately request a removal of your contact info per GDPR or you will get phoned daily for months on end.

If you're referring to Vivid Resourcing, they're truly horrible, I got interrogated by them for 30+ mins and they disappear, happened twice so it can't be a one off!

when I finish one of these calls with these UK recruitment agencies I feel so sick to my stomach. they really are hustlers and grifters in the worst sense of the word. never again...

>not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff

These still exist for large companies (especially US companies) and those with internal recruiters. It's a shame that the latter get tarred with the general term - they have very different motivations and methods.

I've had similar experiences with UK recruiters, and heard the same from colleagues and friends in the industry. Recruiters there seem to gather a lot of applicants for a role, promise the world, then drop most of them.

I have had good recruiters in the UK but they're few and far between.

Best to treat them like company contacts. Let them apply for a role or two for you, and contact somebody else for another role. I used a dozen recruiters at any one time when I was last applying in the UK.

The UK job market, particularly London is pretty good for this. I had a bunch of recruiters doing this end of last year when I started looking for a new role. They are incentivised to put the work in.

France here (not Paris). I’m a small startup, I spent 1 year going beyond 2 employees, and I needed to be 9. I had the income for 9, so I’m not a flimsy startup, wages are cool, tech stack is state-of-the-art.

- Indeed easily costs 500$ per month without result,

- Employees know it so they slack around. Not only they performed bad work during this period, but I also had to deal with firing one to show the other that bad work in unacceptable.

- Took recruiters at 7-10k€ per recruitee, for 1 year, didn’t work out, their candidates kept failing the basic Java tests (like they can’t align 2-for 1-if),

- Took an inhouse recruiter, 3000€ per month for 8 months, he overhauled the communication, wording style, videos, blogging, LinkedIn news, and did those 30-minutes calls before our 2 rounds of interviews.

Now we’re 8 and employees are actually pumped up motivated at work. And thanks to this, work is also more interesting than when we were few, because we have time to innovate, we’re not struggling under support workload or having to run around keeping the servers hot.

—-

I attribute the new fashion of 30-minutes calls to 1. scarcity due to Covid disorganization, 2. radios and media, even business shows, blasting out that the newnormal is 32hrs a week, 100% remote, and that if you haven’t been promoted to management in the last year you are wasting your life with your employer, 3. Students have been incredibly badly taught during Covid, so they suck at programming during interviews, 4. Therefore, employees are not worth spending the money on, and we’re better off spending the money on recruiters. So those 30-minutes call are a redistribution between who provides the value; the employee provides less value, the recruiter does.

I got laid off at the end of the last year and had some savings which allowed me to live comfortably for another 6 months jobless. I enjoyed this time, worked on some personal projects, and learned a lot. Eventually ran out of savings and started applying in the spring – the recruiter will set up an interview for you very quickly, so there was no problem on that side, although the quality is low, usually, it is a mechanical interview for X/Y/Z 10000-employee conglomerate looking for 10001st with cosmic high expectations (from a 2007 methodical book), so you have to rely on the quantity a lot to find what you want (it's a good practice anyway). In the end, I was lucky to find my gem by leaving a short resume in an HN "Who wants to be hired" thread :) You never know when and where you will find your destiny – but you can always pull more out of the chance – if you advertise vigorously!

Just so hopefully this doesn’t come across as insulting and for context, I spent my entire long career as a journeyman enterprise CRUD developer until 2020 working for mostly unknown companies.

What do you think you have that sets you apart from all of the other developers who are looking for a job?

If you can’t answer that question and you are randomly applying for jobs through job portals, it’s no better than playing the lottery.

While I have been working for a long time, I stayed at my second job for nine years and by 2008, I was very much an expert beginner at 34 years old. The only thing I had going for me were soft skills and I was a good “developer”. But I was a horrible “software engineer”.

2008 was the first and last time I randomly submitted my resume to portals. After getting another job and while muddling my way through the recession, I answered every recruiters call, accepted lunch invitations, went to local tech events and built a network.

Remember the FAANG layoffs were huge. You are competing against those folks (you may also be one of those).

https://fi.money/blog/posts/faang-company-layoffs-what-cause...

Being in a major corporation sometimes can play against you:

- I see a couple of corporations on your resume, do you have experience working in a startup environment?

- ...

If you have Blind app access, try to search for "I really thought after Google, I should be employable" post

blind is the most obnoxiously insufferable community. i'm glad they're not employable!

TC 0. how's that.

I don’t wish TC 0 on anyone but Blind has to be one of the most toxic communities. I spent a few months on it when working at a FANG adjacent company and after seeing people personally calling out managers and just generally any visible person I stopped using it.

What does "TC 0" mean? I only found (three types of) complexity classification, which clearly doesn't match the context…

My guess is "total comp 0". Blind has a culture that somewhat turned into a meme that any post should be accompanied by you disclosing your total comp at the bottom of the post. To the original poster: if you're in the EU I can see if I have anything in my network to help you get some interviews. Feel free to reach out.

The idea that TC is a meaningful measure of anything is kind of silly given how incredibly volatile it can be. If you’re working at a company whose stock is on a constant rise, your TC also skyrockets for as long as your RSUs take to vest, and then you often get a cliff-fill, so your TC basically just keeps ratcheting up as a function of the stock price. I’m not complaining, but quoting my TC at you as if it gives me some kind of clout is kinda delusional if 2/3 of that TC is due to the stock doubling since my RSU grant.

In this context "TC" probably means "Total Compensation", and "TC 0" meaning "currently not earning anything at all".

It really is an astonishingly nasty community, probably at this point, self-reinforcing; no-one normal is going to stick around.

> "I really thought after Google, I should be employable"

Well, I can see the employer side as well

"After Google" you'll complain about the lack of chef on site, about how the automation tools are not quite like how it was in Google, how "oh in G we used to do that differently" etc

Yep. Had multiple ex-Faang folks who couldn't ship the most basic tickets in a startup because there weren't 10 invisible teams making their lives easier.

I recall reading something how some companies frowned upon FANG candidates because they were concerned the candidates were more trouble than what they were worth. Stuff like the toxic corporate mentality inherited from a FANG, and overestimation of their own ability even if they were actually good. We're talking about things like SDE1s acting like the principal engineer in their new role right out of the gate and nitpicking everything to try to portray themselves as problem solvers at the expense of their whole team. Something similar to a messiah complex coupled with entitlement. This rubs people the wrong way.

"Former Twitter Employee Can't Seem To Find Meditation Room At New Taco Bell Job"

https://babylonbee.com/news/former-twitter-employee-cant-see...

FAANG is nice, but it doesn't guarantee anything.

The market is pretty horrible right now, in my experience. Speak to a recruiter and it should be a little easier to find something. I used to have roughly 1/2 of applications leading to interviews and around 3/4 of those leading to offers but this year had a 20 application dry streak. I think the market is pretty flooded with good talent from the large tech companies layoffs and the number of people going through bootcamps for junior positions too.

Hoping to get an offer in my final interview for a role in 10 minutes!

good luck!

Thanks, got it! :)

Congratulations!

> I think the market is pretty flooded with good talent from the large tech companies layoffs and the number of people going through bootcamps for junior positions too.

I believe this is the key part. I see many people coming from coding bootcamps with a lot of experience with frontend dev in React, since that is (was?) probably one of the few fastest things you can learn to go to the market get a job fast.

Now the market is flooded with people in this situation, since their qualifications are so generic that they become more easily replaceable.

Things that disqualify CVs straight away for us:

* Unclear if have right to work in country. This needs to be stated up front! Our company can't sponsor visas, so if based in another country unless it says something about the visa status, we basically have to throw it away.

* Poor grammar, spelling, attention to detail on CV. I get some CVs through that are almost unreadable. I'm not saying if there's a single typo then we'd disqualify, but if it's littered with them it shows poor attention to detail and that's quite important professionally!

Things that would make me think twice about interviewing:

* Too much emphasis on stuff that's not relevant.

* Big gaps in employment

* Working for weird companies that show poor judgement in itself. For e.g. - Crypto exchanges, predatory companies, etc.

> Big gaps in employment

Really curious what you suggest as a remedy for this one. It seems to boil down to "sorry, you're screwed now" or "lie but don't get caught"

If you've got 300 CVs to review, much of them with similar experience, do you interview the people who've had 2 years off, or the people that haven't?

I'd probably take a mix. Those people were probably doing some interesting stuff in those 2 years. Generally among our hires, those applicants have been much more eager to get down to business than the ones that are burned out from working the same job as the one they're applying for at a place they hate that isn't paying them enough.

And before you think you dodged it, I'm still wondering what you're suggestions are.

At least in my field, it would be an absolute complete irrelevance.

You’ve said 2 years here. What sort of gap wouldn’t be a factor to you? 3mo? 9mo?

Why does this make any difference to you? Are you afraid that they secretly joined a terrorist organisation and were in a training camp in a Middle-Eastern country?

That suspicion will surely be a problem for people of certain nationalities. (here in the EU there have been a few cases in the news which tends to make people more suspicious)

What if you been running a freelance consultancy for 15 years or so, but have very few references from clients available due to seldom interacting with anyone on the client side with meaningful technical experience.

Let's say for example your consultancy works with primarily physicians directly, or wealth managers, or attorneys - people who are not incapable of understanding technology, but have hired you precisely because they don't have the spare bandwidth to get into the weeds of another complex technical domain in addition to their own, and would have absolutely no idea how to comment on your understanding of algorithms or ability to function a small develepemt team as an IC, etc.

I've never seriously considered trying to parlay my experience into a mainstream developer role because I assume that in a sea of 100 applications all having a similarly recognizable list of roles and references, anything that doesn't fit this model is ignored because it's too much trouble to to make a side by side comparison with the rest of the candidates.

On one hand you're saying you want evidence of the candidate's work in recent years, but on the other hand you're also saying fuck people who take breaks to recharge, they should be on the rat race like the rest of us.

I'd interview both of them so long as they pass the requirements. The second guy I'd want to see recent projects, not employment.

I once took 3 years off to play an MMO game (not joking). After that had to restart from the bottom of the salary ladder, but climbed back pretty quickly. This is a universal secret weapon - drop your salary requirements, like, a lot, to get hired. You can usually climb back.

EVE Online? :P

No, a Korean one, which, in complexity, makes EO seem like kindergarten. Enough to say, you can code your own bot companions in LUA.

> climbed back pretty quickly

How quick is 'quickly'? Going through the similar motions here, nearing towards the end of the MMO's current cycle of content.

Why working in crypto exchanges would show poor judgment? There are still technical problems to solve.

I knew a principal engineer who heavily disliked blockchain because it uses a lot of energy for proof of work, but with proof of stake this should be better now.

> still technical problems

Namely:

- what schemes are still left for us to pull a lot of money into before they get recognized as scams

- how do we get out in time to leave someone else holding the bag

I spent about three months consulting for some crypto company as a distributed systems engineer.

They paid me to design an eventually consistent, self-healing data store with a cache layer / write ahead log, with peers determined by paxos consensus, transfers metered by finops and govered with kademlia, and a storage layer capable of byzantine fault tolerance, which we implemented via signature chains.

See, they had this crazy idea that they'd make a cryptocurrency that they could sell to western digital, who could offer hard drives that "filled themselves up" with other people's data when idle. WD would obv make a buck and maybe sell these drives for much cheaper than the component cost. I'm not exactly sure of the economics. I think the idea was to have half the drives be "receivers" and half be "senders" and actually sell the "senders" for way more than component cost, but provide trivial effort file backup.

I think they're still building it. I dunno if it'll be a scam or not. I had fun though.

I mean... morally speaking, how is it worse than working for Meta or Google?

Asking the important rhetorical questions o7

No, just not understanding why someone saying they work for Meta or Google is seen as A-OK on this forum, but if someone even mentions crypto, they raise such antagonism.

The difference is subtle: the FAANGs inflict ills whereas crypto itself is an ill. I guess some people split hairs over a distinction like that, but I hold them in similar regard.

I have to disagree: crypto let me send money to my acquaintances in less lucky in their birth place then me while enabling scams, Facebook lets my company advertise while manipulating people brains; I don't see why one is more intrinsically ill than the other.

I mean, why don't you want to hire Bernie Madoff's accountant? He was still solving accounting problems, and he'll be out of jail any day now.

It’s an industry full of grifters and scams?

As someone who has been on both ends of hiring, why do you care about gaps in employment? People can either do the job or they can't, I don't see why their personal life (or whatever they took off for, willing or not) is relevant.

It's really tough for remote jobs. In-person jobs, on the other hand: people are literally reaching out to me (a first in my career) about on-site jobs but it's just not tenable for my lifestyle atm. So yeah I've been unemployed for nearly a year now.

How are you making ends meet then? Or are you freelancing or something?

Occasionally but mostly I'm burning savings. I got pretty used to a low standard of living in the couple of years before I entered software development, so when I started making money, I saved a lot of it. If being confined to one place for work doesn't currently suit me, then neither do many of the material trappings of rooting: accumulation of consumer goods, a nice home, etc.

For what it's worth, I'm in a 'hot' area and my application response rate is something like 3%. I've also had this bad luck where a lot of the larger companies I've been interviewing with have rejected me without giving a reason, and then a month or two later (or one time, the day after the onsite!), I'd see that they were having layoffs.

edit: and just as an aside, I'm a minority in tech, and I feel a bit like I'm more likely to get an interview (some recruiters have told me as much... wanting to increase diversity on their teams) while also more likely to get a "technical rounds were great, but not a culture fit" final decision.

I'm a minority in tech too and I never respond to the race, ethnicity and gender questions. There are many red flags to find out which companies are likely to be racist. If the company's diversity statement is larger than the job description, I do not apply. So far this has worked pretty well for me. I applied to 25 jobs in the last month and I got 3 interviews so far. I think ethical companies that do not partake in racist statistics appreciate you not answering those questions.

Be careful when batch applying. My company, for example, requires applicants to repeat a code word in the email subject line. Last time we had an opening, it was clearly stated in the job description, yet 90+% of applicants didn't do it. We then sorted them onto the same pile as those guys from India that booked a CV spamming service, meaning no human ever looked at the CVs of people who didn't follow this simple request.

Assuming we are talking about software engineer positions, at least in the US I have not seen any company that requires applicants to actually send an email to apply for a long time. Just about every company uses an online applicant tracking system, either a third party, common system or an in-house one.

Good tip, but to offer a counter-point: I skip a lot of text when reading job descriptions because 99% of the time they are packed with marketing nonsense. It's so dull, meaningless and repetitive that it's sometimes comic.

Ie toilet paper company: "Here at XYZ corp we believe we will change the world forever through market-leading technology that inspires generations. We hire innovators, explorers and change-makers. We're non conformists on a mission. blah blah blah"

The real job role: "be some sysadmin for an ancient legacy platform".

I was laid off in December, a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe.

I was surprised at how difficult it was to get an interview as I have a somewhat unique skillset. But understandable if 50-150 are applying.

It took seven months before I found something, by which point I had to bullshit about the gap in employment (left to spin up my consultancy!).

Agree with some of the comments here. Find a good recruiter who is a straight shooter, they will be able to get you an interview or tell you what you're missing.

> a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe

I strongly wish such things were recorded (eg, in a 1-party jurisdiction) and would be used to file grievances in court against CEO and leadership.

> I was laid off in December, a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe.

Name and shame please.

I can't speak for everyone, but in the 6 years and 4 companies I've worked for, we have hired only 2 front-end engineers. Full stack is simply what we want a vast majority of the time. So I'm not saying it's impossible to find something but just from a numbers perspective it's just not in demand (I worked at 2 startups and 2 mid-size companies, big tech probably does hire front end devs, but I can't say for sure).

As a frontend developer, with the usual caveats of anecdotal experience etc, I'm somewhat inclined to agree when talking about regular employment. Over the last decade or so I've worked in companies that range from a few employees in total to thousands of people, and most of the time I'm either the frontend guy or one of a very small handful. Most of the time the value you bring to the table from the technical side is unblocking other people, that is, making sure the design system is consistent, everything builds, nasty frontend-specific bugs are fixed, etc. Everything else can be delegated to generalists which gives the company a lot more flexibility around how to hire and arrange work.

The one place where this trend does not hold in my experience is contracting. I've done a fair bit of it throughout my career and being a frontend development contractor or similar is like selling hot cakes if you bring a lot of experience to the table. The main customers are generally companies who don't have that one guy who figures out frontend stuff and in the end they have a critical mass of mess that they hire someone from the outside to come in and fix pronto.

At my last job, I had a little bit of experience on the other side of the hiring table – our founder walked me through our hiring process, and it was really eye opening.

Any posting we had immediately got a lot of responses. We heavily tailored our postings to appeal only to people we actually wanted (e.g. were super clear about requirements, or talked extensively about company culture), and we still got dozens of applicants almost right away. And IIRC that was just through Linkedin, I hadn't even seen how many applied through other channels.

Granted, most of them were mass-sent resumes, but that still crowded any good-fit applicants and made it a pain to look through.

For positions at bigger companies, you could easily be competing with hundreds or thousands of mass-sent applications. Even if a human being ever looks at your resume, she'll most likely make a decision on whether to throw it away in a few seconds before moving to the next one.

At this point I think applying to postings is pretty much dead. Instead, I'd focus on contacting your past colleagues asking if they know of any openings at their companies.

Instead, I'd suggest: - Contact your past colleagues if you hadn't done so yet. - If there are relevant conferences or meetups in your area, consider attending. - Also, look into meetups for groups that might look for someone like you. E.g. if you go to a front-end meetups, you're just another guy in the crowd, but at a marketing or local chamber of commerce meetup there might be only a few people with the same skillset. Granted, this one often works better for freelancing, but still. - A friend of mine found his previous job by contacting people in the field and asking for advice. He moved to a different city right after university, so had no local contacts – I told him to look up people in the companies he wanted to work for, and just message them asking for a short advice call. I think the third person he spoke to recommended him to someone that was hiring. Though the key here was that my friend was only asking for advice on how to get into the industry – but once he spoke with people, it was easy to make a good impression and they kept him in mind next time they heard of an opening.

What do mass-sent resumes look like?

The market is definitely bad! Headcount is tight at companies, so they are trying to make each hire count hard, plus the market is saturated with talent (compared to how it used to be) because of layoffs.

Something that worked for me is that I have a profile where I am a domain expert who is reasonnably good at data science and software development. I am no rock star in any of the three fields, but this particular combination is pretty rare. I got my last 2 jobs this way: most applications just got lost, or ended in a meh screening interview, but there was this one job posting in the year that required this mix of skills, and I was just the obvious choice and got hired pretty much without competition.

I am not suggesting that you start a PhD in some obscure domain, but any additional skill can help stand appart from all other generalist front end developers. For instance in my last company we did quite a lot with geographical data, and if a front end dev showed even just the slightest knowledge of geodata (like knowing what a map projection is, or a knowledge of the technologies used to display maps efficiently on the web), he would quickly go on top of the pile. So if the is any domain where you know just a bit more than the average guy, even just as a hobby, I would say that it makes sense to display it on your CV and search for postings that might be related.

>reasonnably good at data science and software development.

Could you please specify how good? What exactly are your strengths in those fields? Do you have PhD?

I’ve been out of work for about a year. I was never a top player in the field, most of my experience has been enterprise work and non tech companies, with some tech companies (including the one that laid me off. I have a bit more YoE than you.

For the first several months, I screwed myself by operating in a 2010s mindset “I’ll have a job in <= 3mo and I can be at least a little picky”. I was not targeting specific companies and looked at both tech and non tech companies.

I was exclusively interested in remote jobs, mostly because I still had a lease and breaking it would be very expensive, as would keeping it and having to pay two rents. Remote roles were also scarce, adding that single filter could significantly cut the amount of jobs I saw.

I did interview for a handful of on-site roles, mostly for practice, and those tended to progress better, but again, they all wanted me to move to even more expensive areas when moving at all was going to be expensive.

After a while though it got worse and worse, my professional confidence flatlined. There were hardly any recruiters reaching out anymore, cold apps went to the void, and the few interviews I did get never made it past the first round. Never got any feedback. The few recruiters I could get were equally useless, usually showing off some roles that I looked like a good fit for before completely ghosting me.

I wondered if my resume was the issue, and had several people, as well as ChatGPT look at it, and got nothing but good feedback with minor nitpicks.

A lot of the jobs I saw within my area of experience either wanted high senior people, or people with very niche skill sets, and apparently they can afford to be picky right now.

Most recently, I’ve had interviews that seem promising and people (family friends) now claiming they can get me a job, but unfortunately this year has battered me, with large expenses left and right My lease is up now, so I’m looking at on site roles, but the rental market is so bad here I’m afraid it’s too late.

One one hand, I was never happy with my career, and now the golden handcuffs are off, on the other hand, I have nowhere else to go, and the shit that matters just keeps getting more and more expensive

When you say "applying constantly", what do you mean? A few years ago, when tried cold-applying to jobs, I had to send several hundred applications to get a few good interviews, and I have a very strong resume (15 years of experience and worked at NASA). During the pandemic, I was hiring for an engineering role at a fairly unknown startup and we had to filter through over 500 applicants and interviewed only 15-20. Now, with LLMs, I imagine those numbers are an order of magnitude worse and applications are looking more and more personalized. A few bits of advice:

- Don't focus your efforts on cold applications, the numbers are against you

- If you must do cold applications, use LLMs to customize applications and aim to send out >50 per day

- Focus on your personal and extended network, reach out personally to people you know and ask them if they have any opportunities they can connect you with. Personal connections are always going to trump sitting in a stack of 1000 cold applications

In addition to your network I would say contact recruiters who may have “spammed” you in the past. At least they are almost certain get you interviews as opposed to just sending your resume places. Speak with a few recruiters and you’re almost certainly going to get doing one or two interviews a week for jobs you’re actually interested in.

I think regardless of the job market situation, the time-to-hire has become unreasonably long and I'm not optimistic that this will change for the better anytime soon.

The trouble with job-hunting these days via web is that the signal-to-noise ratio has decreased dramatically over the years. Being able to apply to hundreds of jobs is a double-edged sword where hiring managers also have to filter through thousands of profiles so now everyone pretty much have to play resume-seo of some sort.

> Being able to apply to hundreds of jobs is a double-edged sword where hiring managers also have to filter through thousands of profiles

This has been true outside of tech as well and has given cover for harmful hiring bias to thrive.

Hiring for common jobs is largely done thru portals and most will diminish/disqualify entire classes of people (first-time, age, inconsequential criminal rec, other hidden criteria) with no regard of the candidates' likely capability.

During the worst of employee shortages, there was no sign that portals loosened their ingrained discrimination; qualified and available hires went unconsidered as before.

If you admit that you have a slight bent towards entrepreneurship or similar you are out of the door instantly. If it’s somewhere like a YC startup and they realize you’re not young and willing to sacrifice your life, same thing.

Edit: to make that less bitter sounding.

To be more helpful: A resume gap that you’ll casually admit to or honesty in monetary requirements also are instant disqualified status these days. No more low interest rate free for all.

Can't help but feel this is often the case. A bit of "oh they are not desperate enough yet to join us"

How do avoid mentioning that, what is the ICP for an interviewer?

Bots and scams. Housing, dating, job search - these three have become hopeless "marketplaces", hopefully we are at the tipping point and they will collapse. I compile Latex CV for every job application and make an extra effort to apply directly to the company. Every time they have direct one to one communication with an experienced professional with relevant education, and they... insist on digging into inconsistencies and gaps in the CV, search for fraud on my side, ask for salary upfront (ie. "we want cheap" or they simply probe the market for salaries). The market is bad, you have bad luck, the shit's fucked.

the ideal candidate has 3-4 years of experience in exactly everything you need so you dont need to train. has no idea what they are worth so you can underpay. and doesn't have a family so they can sit in the office 24/7.

this is what the job world has become and it's not going in the right direction.

Bingo

The market is bad. I've been unemployed for 9 months, almost no interview invites and the ones I did have led to nothing (also to no alternative hire of someone else for the allegedly position). And I've got almost 20 years of Product Leadership experience, Stanford, Google, myspace, Booking and Trip.com Groups, that stuff. The market (in my case APAC: HK/SG/AU) is shit and frankly not really worth engaging in right now.

I'd love to be employed, but a low IC position (haven't done that in 13-14 years) for 60-70% less pay (the last one who contacted me) is a bit of a tough pill to swallow in a market with (last year) 10% inflation.

My humble advice would be to take any job that gets offered (as long as it isn't sweatshop conditions or unrealistically low wages) and then simply continue the job search.

Once in a job, you are more employable. And employers are for sure not entitled to their worker's unquestioning loyalty. So I see nothing wrong with moving positions if a better one presents itself.

exactly, stealing someone who is already employed feels much better because from the company's point of view you have already been pre-selected. it also gives you a leverage when asking for more $$.

don't hate the player, hate the game...

Have you considered your own venture with that experience? Would love to connect

I am still considering, but assembling the right team and the right locale (to get talent and funding) is a bit difficult as I am based out of Hong Kong and Australia right now. But I am open to ideas.

Yes, it's awful. I applied to 60 companies and got 3 responses. I have a background in big tech and applied to mostly large and medium sized tech companies.

That ratio isn’t bad tho

That's half the response rate I was getting years ago when I was trying for my first job with no internships and a non-CS STEM degree from BFE Midwest Liberal Arts College.

I truly graduated just 6 months too late, apparently.

I'm used to >80% callbacks. Before the pandemic that was standard.

One resource you can look into is specific channels for your skills. For example, if I'm looking for Elixir work, I'll look at the jobs in the weekly Elixir Radar newsletter => https://elixir-radar.com/. And there is also an #jobs channel on the Elixir Slack account => https://elixir-lang.slack.com/

Good luck OP!

I’m sorry this is happening to you. The job market is very bad right now by tech standards, but people are definitely still hiring. A few things I notice from my very-myopic view as a backend engineer at a large-ish tech company:

- Hiring has ground to a halt for generic FE developers. The general strategy seems to be that we should have enough FE people to move around to get new features done. No more big UI rewrites that would require an expanding FE dev force.

- Hiring for specific roles is still good, but I guess the applicant spam has gotten crazy bad, and now most hiring moves through direct recruiter interaction and other side channels. We’re still hiring a good number of backend distributed-systems devs, specialized mobile devs, and tons of the ever-popular “ML Engineer”.

- The finance industry is apparently having a great time right now because their recruiters won’t leave me alone. Multiple people we laid off on my team landed at cushy or high paid jobs in banking or finance. All backend engineers tho.

My probably worthless advice would be to start spinning your resume differently and target a new position. I suspect FE rolls are really taking a hit as companies seem saturated. Start reaching out directly to recruiters. If all else fails, consider a career move or even the classic “go back to school to weather out the downturn”. Good luck!

It seems to be bad. I have applied to 600 software dev jobs in 2/3 months and have had around 8 interviews but still no dice.

I'm outside of FAANGs and the valley and in biotech and formerly DoD.

For us, it's always been 'this bad'. Applying for thousands of jobs isn't too terrible, depending on the economy of course. Covid was a rare bright spot for biotech applications, unfortunately.

My advice is to ditch the applications entirely and go straight to networking. Yes, not exactly the most revolutionary advice here. But, if you;re in that kind of competition/environment, you've no choice but to work your network.

If you've already done that and found no luck, find people at the companies/departments you want to work for and figure out what hobbies/side-projects they do. Then try to make friends and try to get a job through that connection. Yes, it's a lot longer and more fraught process, but it can lead to results. Church or other community based methods are also possible, though it takes longer to build up the network that way.

Outside of that, recruiters/headhunters have been something approaching a way to get a position. Try looking for them online too.

Really though, work your network and don't be shy about it. Let your friends know you are looking for work, don't be embarrassed.

>My advice is to ditch the applications entirely and go straight to networking. Yes, not exactly the most revolutionary advice here. But, if you;re in that kind of competition/environment, you've no choice but to work your network.

Could you elaborate on this please?

Is there more to networking than just sending personalized connect messages based on a person profile on Linkedin?

I have been doing that without much success

Yes, meeting someone in person, like at a meetup, even for 5 minutes, will get you 100% better responses than trying to force a connection without even having met the person before.

Alternatively asking someone you know in person to introduce you to the person. You're trying to connect with.

Doing “networking” cold without any personal connections rarely leads anywhere valuable.

FED is finished . i would suggest moving into something with higher barrier to entry.

last 4 FED my company hired are ex-sales/ex-whatever bootcampers (yes my company is cheap).

remote working is the final nail.

still few good FED jobs but you have 10,000s expert leetcoders fired by faang to compete.

What do you mean by FED?

Front End Development

I assume front end developer.

I am amazed people are still getting jobs as FED

The corporate world is still in large part using Angular - it's a niche nowadays, but a safe one considering that bootcampers usually pick React.

Why are you amazed? There are many complex front ends out there.

What do you mean? Who are they hiring instead? Or do you mean full-stack is the bare minimum now?

Not really, it's evolving for sure. But maybe you say this because your company's front-end is simple, I've seen complex systems that require specific knowledge of FED, not just general engineering. There are companies who like to separate FED and BED to get more narrow expertise

Reading the other comments, it's wild how different people's experiences with this can be even in the same country. In my experience, in the UK, the availability of types of jobs is dependant on the city and seniority level. London seems to have the most front end jobs for example.

As to how to get hired, although I have succeeded with direct application, recruiters are a very popular way here to get a job, especially in web development.

Finding a recruiter you trust to be working close to your interests is important, but not critical. The best recruitment firms I have found through talking to colleagues and managers. Managers often have a strong opinion on which firms refer the best candidates.

I expect another angle is the type of company you're expecting to get a job at and the compensation level. I've never applied to a FAANG, but I expect all of this advice goes out the window. Perhaps though if it is applying to too-senior jobs that is your problem then talking to a trusted recruiter could be helpful.

I don't know anything about resume scoring services, but perhaps they are flawed in some way? Your CV could be great for applying to certain types of jobs, but not for the ones you are applying for. I can suggest forwarding it on to someone who you look up to, who is able to give candid, honest thoughts on it. For example the company you were working at may not be a prestigious company or the technology you were using may not contain the keywords that hiring managers often are looking for.

You haven't given much information so there are many possibilities as to what is going wrong, including ones outside of what I have mentioned. Good luck.

Applying and interviewing for software jobs has become possibly THE most toxic thing I've ever experienced:

- ghosted by companies if you don't EXACTLY match and 'gel' with their stupid full stack takehome projects to the T

- multiple cases of simply no response

- hours of interview rounds taking my time away, when it's clear they won't take you

The list goes on, there is truly nothing I hate more.

It's not you. The market is really bad. I thought the massive layoffs in the US wouldn't have an effect on me here in Bulgaria but it just took a while to propagate. My LinkedIn spam is just the site looking for engagement, not recruiters.

I was s contacted by Microsoft representatives offering 5000 USD as a B2B. It's that bad.

Feels like my FE days are over.

My sense of the Tech industry is almost all the companies just jump to the new flashy hyped up buzz word "Thing". There is no real expertise any more. So its more sensible for companies to hire inexperienced people at a lower salary or offshore.

If you have to learn the "new tech" every few years there is no point of your experience.

If you have any entrepreneurial tendencies, starting a simple LLC and selling your services to local businesses can be a solid option right now.

Industries outside of VC-backed consumer technology are making money and need technology generalists to amplify their businesses. Just protect yourself with contracts and you’re good to go.

Just from my own perspective and in speaking with recruiters (UK), I've never seen the job market this bad before. I have 20+ years’ experience, Harvard, senior leadership positions, and long tenures at reputable places. Yet I don't hear anything back from applications I put out (and these are senior positions).

I think one huge factor at play is the move to remote work, before you would compete with the people in your area who had to physically be able to turn up to a location to interview. What has happened is the opening of the gates to anyone in the world being able to apply to that same job, so you now have 500+ applications for roles that would have previously gotten 20. There’s only so much headspace one can give to that quantity of applicants so I suspect the first 25 get a look in and the others go in the bin.

Back in 2001 - 2002 I was out of work and it was miserable. I had been doing webdev for 2 years in nyc during the dot com bubble. In addition to looking for work I was also trying to move cross country. I remember days of just spamming my resume out to 40 or 50 new email addresses that I would harvest from monster.com. This got me 2 interviews in 3 months.

I was very surprised in terms of how much harder it was to get interviews compared to just 2 years earlier. During the height of the dot com boom I had arrived in nyc on a greyhound bus and found a job writing java servlets against mysql/postgresql in 3 days w/o any contacts.

Looking back I would have been better off taking any job and reading as much new tech as I could. The long aimless days were as damaging as the lack of income.

I know this is completely off-topic but I am Dutch and never MET anyone that was laid off. Non of my friends, family and even colleague's (and I work in IT-consultancy so I see loads of people). How common is this in America? Is it normal that in your career your are fired at least once?

There have been some industry wide collapses- the dot com bust in 2000-2002 most notably, a few more industry specific slumps such as during the housing market crash in 08, and most recently FAANG-esque companies went on an absolutely wild hiring spree during COVID lockdowns and remote-work period.

Many big tech companies went through a round or two of layoffs in the last year. I interviewed I think two or three junior devs a few months back who had been hired at Facebook or Twitter or some other company and let go within a few months of being hired.

Note that "fired" and "laid off" are very different things, with different causes, worker protections, and expectations around i.e. severance. I don't know that it is uncommon to get laid off at some point, but it also isn't something that you really go into a job expecting will happen either. Personally, the only people I know of who were laid off were in non-tech fields.

They prefer stealth layoffs here in the Netherlands. The end result is the same: you’re out, but with no severance and gaslit AF. Thanks Rutte, I guess?

Yeah but that is only in large corporations right? I have one friend that works at KPN and survived 3 rounds of lay-offs. I personally could not cope with that kind of stress. I only work at and for smaller companies. Currently I am the only employee at my company. It's only me and my employer.

Indeed, it seems to be a large corporations thing.

How do stealth layoffs function and how did the Dutch government make it possible (as I'm understanding your comment saying)?

When a corporation runs out of money, the managers get an assignment to hand out a high number of performance improvement plans to their direct reports. Those who can leave, prefer to resign. Those who can’t, stay and play along and face either no pay adjustment / no promotion or risk getting fired for “underperforming” after a while. Either way, the company achieves its goals of reducing the costs and headcount.

Of course this works only if you have a well-oiled HR machine and docile managers, which is typical for every Big Corp out there.

How old are you? That sounds unusual to be honest, to not even have met someone. I am from Sweden, I have been fired even though there are strong labour protections here. Fired probably the wrong word, made redundant probably more accurate. It happened during the dotcom-bubble in 2001. It comes and goes in periods but I think most people go through life without being fired.

I am 48

It happens in dutch startups as well. A recent example would be VanMoof. I've seen a lot of people being laid off. One time, 3 VPs under the CEO each took a meeting room, and started calling in some of their people to lay off. After they were done, the CEO calls in and fires these VPs. In bigger companies it only happens when the whole company does a reorganisation, otherwise managers don't lay off people because it's a hassle, or they don't want to lose budget. I have a dev colleague now who's written 200 LOC in the past year, no one does anything about it.

I am right there with you. And so are several other super senior (10+ years) developers that I know.

A couple years back employers were begging to hire seniors in a heartbeat, now its nearly impossible to get an interview. I am wondering if I should retake the CISSP and just abandon software for corporate security.

Supply simply far exceeds demand. Unless your highly specialized, connected, lucky or perceived as a “James Bond”, the employment market is dire.

This is the inevitable consequence of too many entrants into the market, past over-hiring, and a profession where experience doesn’t count and your competing against ever more newcomers with a high IQ, less expectations, and a better ability to “leetcode” and memorize those algorithms and data structures.

Your prospective employers probably get 200 resumes or more for every general position, but of course “we’re hiring” (sic).

I think the market is perhaps a little worse for developers, compared to other positions. It might also be localized to certain areas. I'm in Denmark and there is certainly no shortage of SRE/operations types of jobs. So if you know Windows or networking then finding work is really easy, but overall there's a shortage of pretty much everything.

Just the past two months I've gotten four offers (granted two was from the same company), but they are straight up job offers, not asking me to do interviews and I'm an average SRE/operations person.

So I think it depends on the area and whether or not you're want to work for small to midsize companies outside the bigger metro areas. Some of the jobs also isn't that exciting, but it beat doing nothing.

The market is bad. Since getting laid off in March, I've applied to 185 jobs. I'm a director, 25 years, and I can only work remotely.

What's new this time around is: + Nobody at target companies will respond to questions (via email or linkedin) + At least 50% of application forms require desired salary (seriously who does this for a director or VP role?); I've dropped my limit by 50k + Radio silence from companies. most never even send a rejection. Very few applications get to screenings. + For some openings, I write some test code up front top demonstrate my interest, and still no bites.

I suspect that TA teams are getting blown up by the traffic, but... for leadership roles, I would expect more careful handling.

Perspective from a PM who runs a job board - Yes it's hard right now, but the reason why changes depending on where you look.

We saw mass layoffs (https://layoffs.fyi/) at the beginning of the year from what we used to call FAANG companies. Economic fear is a major motivator, but there's also been a shift in investor's mindsets. Growth at all costs isn't sexy anymore - we want to see realized profits. In response, these big names tightened up their expenses. And where you used to be a hot shot for having 2 years at Google or Amazon, you're now just another in the flood of extremely highly paid workers looking for a similar salary.

At the same time, the VC market sobered up. 10 years ago you could get a couple million on a powerpoint deck for wifi enabled dog food. It was the end of the great recession, let's get rich baby! Today the startup scene is much tighter and SMB's in any industry are nervous.

Then there's inflated title demand and emerging tech. Scroll any job board; 2/3rds of those roles will be at a senior level or be in something new like AI that few have real experience with. Do companies actually need Seniors? Usually no, but they believe 1 Senior can do the work of multiple Mid-levels and the cost per head drops. Do companies actually need an AI team? Usually no, but they believe they can replace departments with it.

So who's winning right now? It's not 'Tech Workers at Tech Companies'. It's not smaller SaaS businesses who can't afford all the talent sloshing around. Consultants might see some gains as a 1099 isn't the commitment a W2 is. But the real winners are the "Non-tech Tech" companies. Insurance companies, construction, brick and mortar retail, the IT department at your local hospital; they don't sell software, but they need tools to stay competitive. Those hiring teams have the pick of the litter right now.

Last thought: Firing all the recruiters during covid was a stupid move. You're not getting a callback because they canned the person who did the callbacks.

In November I was getting ~10 inbound emails a week from top-flight shops, that had been typical for at least 5 years. In December that was zero and has been since. I was an L7 in ML infra at a FAANG a few years ago.

I did some marquee loops in Jan/Feb, and my “fuck this” point was when I did a coding screen at $KNOWN_COMPANY highly recommended by a former colleague and ended up with a 24 year old in a hotel room on a MacBook Air looking at his phone for 45 minutes and the back channel was that he had flunked my trivial 50-line Python program less than 10 minutes after the interview was over.

After that I was like, I’m consulting for a while, catch you all in 2024 once Powell gets brought to heel for the geberal. :)

It’s not just you.

Market is same as before, here in EU, but people just got a bit more cautious and economy is not exactly prospering with the war and inflation. Hence, a lot of risk aversion and tightened purses. Also, due to sudden spike in interest rates, raising investment(previously you gave a shiny pie-in-sky presentation and got money, now you need to demonstrate demand and having actual revenue and improvement plans etc..) hiring became much more slow and competitive. Also a lot of people left school due to inflation and higher taxes and scrambled to find some work as savings were abysmal due to follow your dream and get rich quick schemes(crypto/social media shills etc).

Depends where you are and what you're looking for I guess. Here in Poland the market for remote jobs is great.

Of course a big factor is that on average I estimate the rates paid here are half of these in UK/US (comparing my own rates for remote vs on-site).

Also the way you look for work matters a lot. Every market has its specifics. In some locations it's better to send dozens of cv's in the others it's better to have alerts for exactly matching jobs and when they appear phone the recruiter within the first 5 minutes after the ad was posted. I used both techniques with great results.

And the most important thing. Do not give up! And never trust words, unless they are in a form of a contract.

The volume of applications we are getting for our open roles is huge and the proportion of them applying because they were laid off is higher than I've ever seen.

Given that, as you will expect, hiring teams we need to process a lot of applications and make snap decisions. You need to ensure you rise to the top by

- Keeping your CV brief and relevant

- Making it clear what things you specifically did in previous roles and their benefits

- Make it clear (e.g. in a side panel) your abilities and how they match the role you are applying for.

But yes, it's hard. The days of applicants getting ten job offers at once are over for now. At least outside AI and outside of senior positions.

>At least outside AI

Does the finding job in AI easier? Any examples?

I've started telling new grads / interns that ask me "how 2 get jerb" to cut their resume to 1/3 of a page. Because we still need interns and juniors, and we already know they don't know a damn thing, and the only thing that would stand out at this point is _not_ making me read half a page about your capstone.

If you must apply via online job applications, definitely change your resume to include as many of the keywords in the job description as you can, while still being truthful. If you don't, the first-level automated filtering will screen you out of the group moving on to the HR department. This is a huge amount of work, but even a little bit of an edge can help.

That said, DON'T go through online applications if you can avoid it. Many of the jobs I (and others around me) have gotten are through their personal network.

Develop your personal network now. Question: When is the best time to plant a tree if you want to enjoy it? Answer: 20 years ago. When is the second best time to plant a tree? Today.

1. Connect to everyone you know personally or have ever worked with on LinkedIn, and use the "Send a note" function to give them a reason to remember you, and say you'd like to add them to your network. Once you've got a decent number of connections (at least a few hundred?), post a "looking for work" type of message with your skills, experience, and interests. Be sincere and not "network-y". Do it with the intention that they might be able to help you now, but you may be able to help them in the future.

2. Reach out to friends and coworkers that you had a closer relationship with, and let them know that you're looking for work in a particular area or field, and do they know of anything available (or companies that fit your area). Friends and ex-coworkers are the best because they can get you right into the HR department or the hiring manager.

3. Do not discount the many people on LinkedIn who currently or recently worked at a company that you are considering applying to (but that you don't know). Sign up for the paid LinkedIn service for a month, and use the ability of paid users to email anyone, to reach out to people who might be in the department of the company that you are looking at. You'd be amazed what information or help you can get from total strangers, just by sending them a nice note explaining that you're looking at the company/department and would like to speak to them for a few minutes to get an idea of the company culture. This is scary for many people (a younger myself included), but I've done it and it works. Most people will give you a few minutes to talk to you. And you could get valuable information about the team/department/manager, that could help you present the side of you that works best in their culture (laid back, hard-charging, early-risers, dog-friendly, tabs not spaces, etc.).

Good luck with the search!

I've been applying too. I've landed tons of interviews about 40 total. Did them all.

All failed but one. It's definitely harder than before. Much harder.

I got failed for the most trivial reasons. There were interviews where I passed and did all the tasks required and the interviewer gave me positive signals like "good job", "talk to you soon" and boom the recruiter told me I was rejected the next day.

There was one where I made it to the final round onsite. Everyone liked me in the onsite. Schooled the technicals with code that worked first run and they canned me because behavioral. One guy (the director who I wouldn't even be reporting too) didn't like my reasoning for wanting to work at the company because I focused on my interest in the technology rather then the mission.

Like literally I just didn't talk about the mission... a specific thing and that was it. Besides that 4 out of 5 people during the final interview told me "talk to you soon" and one told me "I hope we see more of you in the future".

So yeah it's harder, brutally harder not just on the screening but even up the pipeline. I would say my resume is impressive enough that recruiters still contact me and I can make it to a first technical.

I think the people who are getting hired the most right now are people with connections. Who knows who.

Market got worse definitely. That's also one of the reasons we have created https://careera.io/ to address all of the usual problems during job seeking and recruitment, like: applying hundreds limes to different companies manually, digging thru hundreds of applicants' CVs by recruiters, ghosting and all types of bias (race, religion, age, you name it..).

Have you considered moving to Europe? Germany, Switzerland, Austria? With my senior salary and depending on frugality I can save between 1000 and 2000 € a month in Austria and have a very pleasant life. If you ask if there is gonna be leetcode bullshit in the interviews, most people laugh in your face because the idea is so alien to us. People want to hear about your authentic experiences and see you solve real world problems / take home tasks. Small no name companies are as desperate for talent as ever, while the banks, insurance providers, retailers, government related entities and consulting companies feeding on them have open positions all year round.

I don't think anyone experienced with fighting on the US software engineering market would have any struggle to get something here. Though it does depend on your expectations: You generally will not get 300k, 200k or maybe not even 100k starting and won't get any name worthy stock options unless you are doing very special things for very special companies.

Second consideration: Have you considered not applying for those FAGMAN level companies and their inflated salaries or overpaying startups, but something boring instead? Government, insurance, banking? In other words, have you considered lowering your expectations and standards?

> I can save between 1000 and 2000 € a year in Austria

You mean a month, right? Or you forgot one zero, or something is wrong.

Hahaha, yes. Oops.

Considering housing situation and extortive taxation and various contributions in these countries, the OP might be joking. Salaries there have been stagnant in numbers for at least 5 years.

Lol what the hell youre talking about?

About the over 40% cut seen on monthly payslip and the endeavor of rental apartment search in any major city, which is a memic clusterfuck at this point.

How do you find these positions? I speak German and did my studies there but always worked in other places.

> worked in other places

...like what? And where did you get/find your jobs? I found a lot of jobs just by checking out all the big name companies directly (banks, insurances, BRZ, ...) of Austria, via recruiters from LinkedIn, I can also HIGHLY recommend contacting the company "ePunkt", they are supportive, almost pushy and forceful in getting you into in person job interviews. IT rat catcher consulting companies like Accenture and CapGemini are probably always hiring. Big 4 is always looking for IT consultants. BRZ, Kapsch, willhaben, Raiffeisenbank Software Gmbh, Raiffeisenbank International, Erste Bank, those are just VERY few that immediately come to mind and none of those are secrets.

> Kapsch

Luckily they are transparent with salaries... 55k EUR annually in Vienna... before pandemic it was low and meantime we've experienced over 20% accumulated inflation. I bet they complain about the "quality of candidates", right? With this package all they can demand is ability to use QWERTZ keyboard and that's probably the skillset they hire.

In Austria you are forced to name a minimum salary. Many companies decide to publish the lowest collective agreement salaries they can get away with even for positions where they will pay much more, for reasons that are beyond me. A low salary in a job posting has little meaning, a high salary in a job posting is a very good signal.

posting minimum salary is requirement and I guess the HR in those companies is so brain-dead the most they can do is comply and paste a few sentences.

a high salary in job posting can attract the wrong crowd, so it's also not very advisable to do and I understand companies who got burned by this and dont do it anymore.

in Vienna 55k in not a livable wage for someone who has aspirations of having a family. two people making each 55k is fine if you can be reasonably frugal with your life.

most I have seen publicly offered for senior IC is 75k. you can get more through connections or being an extreme outlier.

as far as EU is concerned, best tactic is to find a smaller German town for lower cost of living and join a company there as german industry and IT is spread our fairly evenly all over the place and there are quiet a few smaller university towns with desirable kind of people.

another idea in EU is to move to portugal or croatia or czech republic and contract remotely for western europe from there. language barrier being an obvious but not insurmountable obstacle. if you are US citizen I could imagine you could contract for US from eastern europe without problems as well.

Thank you for the advice!

> ...like what?

Russia and the US. All through personal connections.

In my expirience, EU companies dont hire people from USA. They seem to prefer people from middle east and latin america.

Reason? I'd say 90% is because they usually have higher salary expectations so they dont bother interviewing them.

From the other side of the table, we just went through a few months of interviewing (we're devs) and boy were there a bunch of lemons. We were offering 6 figures for a junior/mid in a low cost of living area too, with 100% remote. Only a few even had the slightest idea what they were talking about when asking questions and they were softballs. One guy was even googling the questions we were asking him. We used multiple recruiters from multiple companies.

We ended up having to pick one because, "it's just a junior, they can learn." We suspect the guy was working multiple jobs because he was hard to reach and wouldn't return messages and calls for a day or two, even when we were letting him go. He was hired as full time salary.

From my experience, the tech labor market is really messed up right now, there are a lot of people who shouldn't be in it. I'm not sure how long that will take to correct. You're not really competing with good people, you're competing with a huge glut of bad people with well written and probably highly embellished resumes. I'm not really sure how to stand out in that type of market.

How many applications have you sent?

Oh average I send 250 applications in a job hunt to get about three offers, two of which are for positions I actually want.

It's my opinion that in general people don't have a proper expectation for the volume of applications necessary to find a good fitting job. Or dating to find a good partner, for that matter.

Many of my friends often "settle" for the first company that gives them an offer because the job hunt is so tedious and emotionally exhausting. It requires a shifting of a mindset imo: every rejection is not telling you literally that you're not a good fit. First of all, I've met very few people that are good at hiring or evaluating engineering ability, let alone their own engineering needs. So most rejections just come from that lack of skill in that area, they failed to realize or evaluatedthat you would have done a good job for them. Second, it's not a reflection on your ability, it's just that you require 197 rejections to get the three offers. It just takes that. If you settle in for the ride I think it goes better.

I've blogged about this in regards to boot camp grads: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/bootcamp-job-search/#the-res...

Whenever I mention this people often say that that strategy is too impersonal, that I'm not leveraging warm leads enough, etc. Of course you should also do this. And attend meetups. All the steps, lol. Treat the job search like a full time job.

I will say this round of my job hunt my numbers are off. I'm at 80 resume sends to one call back. I should be at about 20 call backs now. It might be because I'm full remote now though.

I can only speak to my personal experience of attempting to hire engineers.

We started a hiring 2 weeks ago, the top engineers are taken off the market _before_ we even get a chance to interview them! (usually within 3-5 days).

We had to accelerate our process and nearly double our offers to have a fighting chance. So at least from where I'm standing, the market is pretty aggressive at the moment.

Most people are already employed. Some of them will move if your place looks likely to be an improvement. Limiting your search to the currently available will cut the pool drastically.

It's really easy to write a job listing that will be ignored. It'll still get lots of noise but not so much signal. It's probably also important where you post it, especially if your website doesn't pull a lot of traffic to the careers page by itself.

> the top engineers

How you would define them? What makes for you someone a "top engineer"?

I got laid off, started working for an unfunded start-up, they ran out of cash. Had to look for other jobs, it took something like two months to find one. I applied to probably the most jobs I've ever applied for whilst on a job hunt. Previous job hunts have taken like... a couple of weeks and I've had multiple offers to choose from. It really came down to one solid offer this time around. Most of my applications were just rejected immediately, without even speaking to anyone. It's easily the worst I've ever seen it. I suspect a lot of jobs are waiting to see if folks laid off by Google/Meta/Twitter would apply, hence why I was getting rejected immediately, having not worked for one of them. Just a theory though... but either way, it's really really tough at the minute. Hang in there, mate. You will get something, it's just going to take a bit more digging this time around.

The market is probably not super great, but one interview in 7 months. There's something with your resume or your search.

You did not ask for feedback on your resume (found through your profile), so I hope you won't be offended by my observations. Your resume looks good: format is clean and will probably scan well, you've highlighted your technical skills and kept the list to a reasonable length, and you've done a good job of providing an appropriate level of detail about your past experiences. You probably know all that because the services you have used have told you.

Here are a couple of things that you may not have heard yet. First, I think for now it would be better not to list your intention to start an undergraduate degree in the fall. I think almost any hiring manager would see that and wonder how you were going to be able to balance being a student and settling into a new job. Remember, the point of your resume is to get you an interview, not to give the hiring manager reasons to reject you. Even if you are committed to being a part-time student in the fall, you don't have to put that in your resume. You may feel that showing you are committed to getting a degree will address concerns about education, but hiring managers are selfish -- first and foremost they want to know that you are going to be focused on doing the job.

My second point may not be popular, but I feel I have to bring it up. Your experience and skills, and your stated focus on front-end development, position you in what is essentially a commodity market. There are lots of developers these days with strong Javascript and Python skills. If you want to stand out from the crowd you are going to have to work really hard to differentiate yourself. What particular skills or experience could you highlight that make you a premium resource, and not just a commodity programmer? It might be knowledge of a CMS that is not widely used. It might be practical experience with a very new technology. Maybe it's your familiarity with a particular business function or process. I think you need to figure out what makes you special and highlight it more in your resume.

I hope these thoughts are helpful. Good luck with your job search!

As a hiring manager, I would say that the job market is still pretty strong for any engineer who can do fizzbuzz on the spot.

However, its now much tougher in the tech-adjacent fields such as graphic design, copywriting, and project management. Not so many openings, many applicants. Even if you get the job, pay and prospects are not great.

What about data science areas like machine learning, deep learning and AI?

I have been getting a lot of spam from India or Pakistan trying to sell me front-end or app development for several years now. If people are so desperate they resort to spam, maybe that that kind of job is just not in high demand anymore?

(I have no idea, it's not my area of expertise; just posing the question)

EDIT: I have heard stories that companies keep job offerings open when they are not actually hiring. They want it to look like they are dynamic and on the way up and just can't find good people to hire, when in reality their business is stale, their prospects are grim and the inflation and previous over-hiring has doomed them and what they are really looking for is a Google to buy them out.

In fact I have heard of companies hiring people they don't need because they think that makes them more attractive as a buy-out opportunity to companies who actually do need those people.

Have you tried niching down on a tech stack, an industry, or even the types of teams you want to work on? It's a good way to stand out from the crowd. You might have to turn away more recruiter screens, but it gives you a much stronger profile against everyone else with the companies you have strong fit in.

I can't say about the current market but I got my last job over a year ago by posting on HN who wants to be hired (this month's post is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36573869) try posting there on the 1st.

Reach out to your personal network to try to get some connections to get your resume to the top of the stack.

Reach out to former co-workers and see if their current companies have any openings.

It's tough to stand out in a stack of 200 applicants without a connection.

Is your front-end stack or experience too narrow? What are you using for frontend. Are there more front-end languages you have experience with that you could broaden your search/resume?

Have you done any backend? Is now a good time to learn Rails or Laravel?

Can you seek out any alternative job boards that are more specific for your niche? Linked and Indeed are the most saturated with applicants.

Freelance and Contract work might be an option to stay active and show on your resume. Show Consulting as your current gig from when you left your last job.

Lastly you could reach out to your old company if it's a place you'd like to go back to, not sure how things left off. A lot can change in a year.

I've been mentoring many new engineers and students this past year and there's a lot of people in your position.

Overall, the biggest setbacks are network and a lack of focus in the niche. Frontend developer at a professional level requires a top 5% (roughly) resume to be a competitive applicant.

I live streamed about some of the harsh truths people are dealing with now (not learning fundamentals being one of them) https://youtube.com/live/yNqWwX4jsI4?feature=share

Let me know if you (or anyone) want to discuss this further. There's a lot of ways you can set yourself apart but it's good to understand that we're not in the 2015 tech market anymore. Most people have to have an exceptional resume/network/or a calculated niche.

How do I get a “niche”. I would have loved to work in some particular field I was interested in, but my whole career I was never qualified for that because well, they wanted someone already established in that niche. So I took what I had, which were generalist jobs. Never had a problem quickly picking up relevant parts of the business domain, but never really became an expert in anything particular. I’m an expert in figuring shit out I guess, and I’ve done some more interesting things on the side, but it never mattered.

I went from being contacted once a day to once every two weeks. Market is definitely colder than it used to be. Much colder.

Part of me thinks it's gonna stay like that for some time, some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely as the entry level got much higher.

> some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely

This is what happened in the early 2000s. (ie, dot-com bust)

During the boom, companies were shoving warm bodies in chairs for those who could spell HTML, and paying them great money. People were coming from everywhere to get in on it.

Then it crashed, and those who couldn't cut it went back to car sales or whatever they did before. Those with chops mostly hung on and built the next phase of the market. (I was doing ColdFusion at the time, which was an easy language to learn. Those who were one-trick ponies suffered, and I regularly heard from "ColdFusion Developers" who were desperate as the one-trick rodeos went away)

I'm sorry to say, but if you're just a "front-end dev" you're probably in the same boat. Left a career to do a bootcamp? You may want to start calling those old colleagues.

(not saying this applies to OP necessarily, but I'm just an "old" dev who's seen this before)

Its combination of location, experience, salary expectations and sectoral business conditions.

In a good market everybody needs warm bodies, the standards drop, the pay levels rise.

In a poor market people focus on the absolutely required positions (e.g. replacing critical vacant roles) and pay levels drop.

Location (country / region) is quite important too, there are places with chronic and dire shortages in IT expertise (but salaries might not be great).

These are the fundamentals. Then you have the overlay of market making / matching which is clearly totally broken and only gets worse.

What is important is to find the discipline and energy to keep developing while job searching. Maybe work on a open source project or learn something new, expanding your expertise by going deeper or broader.

It's bad! I got laid off late last 2022 when I had just joined in 2021

When I got 2021 New Job, I continued to interact with recruiters and even did a few more interviews into December! My inbox was full of recruiters, as it had been for the 4-5 years prior.

The recruiter spam started drying up for me around June/July 2022, what used to flow became a trickle. By November 2022, my inbox was a bunch of tumbleweeds and I had just been laid off.

I followed 6 referrals from ex-colleagues and only 2 got me to an actual phone screen.

I got my current job a few months ago, but that was after weeks of pinging recruiters directly on LinkedIn and stumbling on a exactly-perfect fit of a job description to my resume which I boasted about.

My inbox is still mostly dry.

I’ll be honest. Some people are bad at interviewing and selling themselves.

Some of the best people I’ve worked with are getting passed over because they’re quiet and undersell themselves. Some of the more incompetent people can bullshit their way through the process and really oversell themselves. They think they’re gods gift to the field, and believing that, they can sell it.

It’s 100% Dunning Kruger.

I don’t know how to advise someone in this position. You just have to be willing to psych yourself up and believe a story about how great you are. Paradoxically it’s probably a TRUE story, but the great people won’t want to believe it about themselves. You CAN however put energy and practice into putting on a kind of performance of your (actual) competence.

The best people can probably say things like “oh I’ve never done X before”. They think of all the ways that can go wrong doing X. Because they visualize all the things that would go wrong they actually perform better at that task (research shows negative outcome visualization is actually better than positive visualization at achieving a goal[1]). Yet it sets you up to undersell yourself.

You have to suspend disbelief and remind yourself you can do hard things. And say “oh wow X sounds cool! I’ve done Y related thing, not X directly and I really would love to take a crack at X. I think I’d really love digging into it!”

1 - https://mindowl.org/premeditatio-malorum-negative-visualizat...

> Some people are bad at interviewing and selling themselves.

100% me.

Also, hi, Doug.

Whenever I meet another Doug we have to fight Highlander style to try to get the others powers. ;)

There are few enough of us left that if we spread out far enough we will only jostle each other 20ish times per year for, oh, six seasons.

> Some of the best people I’ve worked with are getting passed over because they’re quiet and undersell themselves.

I think this was my biggest issue in the beginning after the layoff. There were a few interviews I had that went well until they asked me about my expertise with X, at which point I would get a bit cautious. In some cases, I found out they the company and I had very different definitions of “expertise”.

I was laid off in March, 2023, a victim of the startup shakeout after the SVG banking collapse. A year previous, I had a small bidding war for my services. When I was let go this March, it was in the midst of the Facebook and Amazon layoffs.

It was terrible. The market had flipped 180 degrees away from where it was in 2022. I did not, however, have problems getting interviews. I got lots of them. I also got ghosted regularly after third and fourth interviews as the companies interviewed dozens of candidates looking for the very best deal they could find.

Now, for some perspective, I am a 30 year veteran of the IT industry, with well over 20 years of programming experience under my belt. You guessed it, that means I'm in my mid-50s. Did I run across ageism in my search? Not overt, but undoubtedly, yes.

Were companies overwhelmed by the number of applicants? Unquestionably. I had one recruiter tell me they had over 150 applicants for a single programming job, and they planned to only talk to 10% of them. 10% is still a LOT of interviews to find the right candidate.

So yes, the job market is bad, although not for traditional reasons. The economy seems to be chugging along, even though it's rumored to have one foot on a banana peel. Companies are hiring. But there's a lot of competition out there for posts, and companies have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the number of candidates to choose from. They don't know how to act.

So if your resume isn't in as-expected format, forget it. If your interviewing skills reveal you're an introvert with poor social skills, forget it. If you don't respond quickly and professionally to every serious inquiry, forget it. If you're not making your job search a 3-5 hour DAILY effort, forget it.

In other words, you have to bring your A-game right now, where you might have gotten by in previous years with just having good coding skills and a halfway decent resume.

The good news is that everyone can bring their A-game with some practice and effort. I got hired after two months. It was hard-- gut-wrenching, even -- but after dozens of interviews I finally landed a good job that met my requirements.

If you are working right now and you aren't saving your money for a rainy day, you're being foolish. Fortunately, I had been saving, and my bank account wasn't destroyed. I feel bad for people in this market who don't have savings. Be prepared to weather a six month outage. And keep upskilling. Complacency will get you laid off.

I haven't been on the "applying" side, but in my company we just had four replacement openings in the tech team (after more than 9 months without having a new hire) and to our suprise we received 5x times more applicants to all positions than we used to get one year ago, and salary expectations were at least 15% lower than in 2022.

We ended up hiring five devs on the same budget of the four original positions.

We are a data analysis and digital/mobile marketing survey startup located in São Paulo, Brazil. So at leat around here the job market is much different than the hiring craze of 2022.

I've been looking for 6 months too, I'd say I've had 5 or 6 that got to the interview stage. Lots of screening calls and nothing much afterwards. Came close 2 twice to landing a job but too much competition. It's a bad market. I have another 2 interviews Monday but I'm dreading one that is like a pair programming test which I get anxiety over just thinking about it. I much prefer take homes but IDK we just gotta keep looking and hope things bounce back I guess.

This is an unsatisfying answer but if you are depending on your resume going through the hr process cold you are unlikely to have success no matter what it looks like or what experience you have.

A better approach is to find someone at the organization you are applying to who can shepherd you through the process. The best way to do that is via your personal network from prior jobs. But you can also do it by going to meetups, doing open source work etc. Even your non-work network can be helpful. Churches and country clubs were powerful professional tools for a very long time.

If you want, feel free to send me your resume and I can "review" it for you. I've have hired dozens of engineers and EM across ML, BE, etc roles.

Info to contact me in my user account (handle + gmail.com)

33 years in Software Development and the only job I have ever “applied” for was a seasonal job at Costco. All the other jobs, including IBM, 2 startups and currently Accenture were through my network.

how its suppose to be done and how it worked for me in past in order of the most effective to least:

1. social circle 2. attend conferences, exchange business cards, contact info 3. apply to companies through their own job portal or direct hr email 4. don't go for shiny companies (either location or business must suck, less competition this way)

anything else such as random recruiter agencies, linkedin, job portals is not going to yield any effect in this day and age. there is just too much saturation and bots + we are in a layoff cycle and AI uncertainty.

Good advice about attending conferences. At the last Java conference I went to, most large and good employers had booths trying to catch people. It’s a perfect “demand meets supply” situation

There’s a few motives in play; office leases, are part of it.

But senior workers were getting too full of themselves a social agents for good and political status quo is coddle the government agents and their lobbyist/think tank leaders.

Now it’s templated to some dependency imports, leetcode, some well known TF; they can backfill with lower paid newbs.

I’m working on a Linux distro where the install sets up an LLM and boots to GPU accelerated 3D viewport where a little entity acts as my chatbot.

Goal is to show the world we don’t need corporate controlled software.

The key is this:

While you browse various job boards if there is no direct contact to a person or the email / phone is obfuscate, just find contact details online.

I often pay for various services that can give you contact details based on linkedin profile - give them a call and most often then not you will have interview shortly after.

Do the work to reach out to those people, establish rapport and you will be in a good place. If you are great professional they will make sure to keep you on their roster as an ACE candidate.

We’re trying to solve this exact problem over at https://polyfill.work

If you're not even getting interviews, neither of those things is responsible and there's so something wrong with your strategy.

Definitely try linkedin, as they said, and talking to your contacts (outside of LinkedIn, I mean).

Basically don't spam the same thing but treat it as scientific experiment and try different things. Also prepare yourself for the different interviews.

When you get those, remember not to work for free "for interview projects" and stuff like that.

I'm still sore about the two times I was asked to do free work:

Create a custom datepicker following a strict design (that is the best part of a week minimum to make it polished perfect)

The other one wanted me to learn a complex product on my own, with no knowledge base and demo their own platform to them. All this while they knew I was working a full-time demanding engineering manager job.

I'm curious: when you say you've 'been applying constantly', how many jobs have you applied for?

Assuming the number of available roles isn't a limiting factor, you probably applied for ~1000+ jobs in that time. (1 job per hour * 40 hours/week * 4.3 weeks per month * 7 months)

Is that right? If so, where have you had drop off in your funnel? Are you getting dropped before or after the recruiter screening call?

If after, then the problem may not be your CV.

I'm not even getting an initial screening call. I know this points to it being the resume but I already paid for 3 separate resume reviews, so I'm hoping its just the market right now

If you've applied to 1000 jobs and gotten only one screening call, I suggest you take seriously what's in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901965

That seems unrealistic unless you're just scattering applicaitons.

By the time you've filtered out suitable jobs, researched the company a little, written a cover letter, customized your CV, gone through their application process/questions, sometimes even a test, you're looking at 3-4 a day quality applications at most.

If you can I would recommend making sure you can do some backend work to. I started in front-dev and expanded into backend. Backend devs are often seen as more valuable as that manages the biz logic. You can argue if that's right or wrong but it is what it is. As I look for people I appreciate folks who can do one area very well and want them able to do multiple areas, especially in a startup.

I can relate. I have 25 years of experience as a senior and lead frontend developer, with some management experience.

I've applied at over 80 roles. I've received 35ish rejections and about 18 interviews. 4 put me through to final interviews and chose someone else despite liking me more, I was told. (one person had a smidge of java experience, one was a female and they needed a diversity hire, etc)

I've been looking for nearly a year. I've done the same work having services write/rewrite my resume. Having friends, loved ones, colleagues etc review them.

Few bites here and there. Made it to the third interview once. Ive only had 5 or 6 actual interviews. Not including initial contact interviews with recruiters (more like 10-12 of those). It's rough out there.

Market job is bad, but it also depends on the industry (tech had a lot of layoff) and on the benefits you are looking for. Speaking of benefits, since "everybody" want a remote position, if you're not too picky, it's probably much easier to find an on site position at the moment, without even compromising on the compensation

With all of the layoffs, we're seeing about a 50-100x increase in number of applicants for open rolls, so the market is definitely more flooded. Also I'm regularly finding applicants were over-lelveled in past roles, and so usually have about one or two titles higher expectations for level than they actually are capable of having.

Currently at WeAreDevelopers congress in Berlin. It is conference that is heavily skewed towards businesses advertising their hiring efforts.

Have no comparison to previous years but it looks like there is tons of jobs offers.

And the compensation seemed to increase as well. It is now SV level, but we are talki Europe, where 100-130k puts you in top 5%.

Hey is there a way to reach out to you? Living in berlin and currently looking for a tech job here

OP only want's you to buy a EUR 600 ticket, and probably a EUR 8000 bootcamp as well.

Not sure why I deserve this petty attack.

Lot of things depends on where you are located.

In EU, market is not very bad as compared to US. It is still easy to find a good opportunity.

In US, it is really hard hit.

In South east Asia/India, it is calm before the storm as operational costs are low, it is last one to experience the stream of layoffs. It hasn't hit the market yet.

Grab (one of the biggest in SEA) already laid offs and I can tell you local startups from SEA also have been laying offs.

It sounds like you’re working with a number of services right now, so take this with a grain of salt.

Joinrelentless.com does resume review and coaching and then gets people first interviews. Not cheap, but it’s nice to literally just have interviews put on your calendar by someone.

(Not a customer, just no the CEO)

Unspecified initial cost then 12% of first year salary (RSU unspecified) on success. Think I'd better off hiring a PA but still nice to see new approaches to hiring.

So this is what neoliberal hellscape looks like from across the big pond. Feel sorry for you :/

Rest assured this is coming for the UK and Europe soon too.

The job market is already pretty bad in the UK

Try to add some experience using LLAMA2, OpenAI and AI models. Then add this fancy tags in the CV.

What is your education background? I've noticed that more companies want front-end engineers with STEM education creds than they do front-end devs with non-STEM education.

If you have a non-STEM degree and/or a weak portfolio, your resume might be getting filtered out.

Do you adjust your resume before applying to each role? If so how? If not, why not?

Also do you send a cover letter?

Same here. No problems with call backs but many rejections after technical assessments as each company only had 1 position.

Except the very first in person interview I did resulted in a job offer, just like in the beforetimes.

But it is hybrid, but I also wasnt opposed to that in the whole job search.

Its rough and people seem picky. I've been out of work for around a year now, partially by choice. I still get interviews here and there.

Post your resume in a comment here maybe? And as much as it sucks shoot a little lower? Are you you only applying to house hold tech companies?

It's bad, but it's not that bad. The fact you have only had one interview this year is very odd in my opinion. I've been on the market twice this year and it's been harder for sure (especially earlier this year), but it's far from impossible to find something.

I don't know if you're looking for advice or just anecdotes here, but I'll share some thoughts for what might be happening...

Frontend development has changed a lot over the last 5 years. Obviously I don't know what skills you have, but a few years ago it was common for companies to be looking for a "frontend developer" with just HTML5, CSS & jQuery experience. These roles basically don't exist anymore. Typically a frontend developer today would be someone who's got experience with a modern JS framework like React (or similar), knows TypeScript, has experience writing tests, possibly has some experience with dev tools like Storybook or docker, etc... At least this the kind of thing I typically see companies recruiting for these days.

The last 5 years also haven't been very representative. The tech job market from around 2016 on has been very strong and there was a huge under supply of labour (especially during the pandemic). Today tech companies are cutting jobs, or slowing their hiring, meanwhile your average 12 year old has done some basic HTML and JavaScript coding. Just knowing your way around HTML and CSS isn't going to land you a job anymore – companies can afford to be much more selective.

If you're not even getting interviews you can assume your resume is the problem. Again, I don't know what skills you have but you either don't have skills that are being sought after or you are not showing your experience in a way that highlights those skills well on your resume.

It may also be that you're applying for roles that are beyond your experience level. In my experience if you've been a developer for 5 years that would typically mean you're a bit better than a junior developer, but unlikely to be a senior. A couple of years ago you may have been able to land a senior developer role, but today the market is far more competitive and you'll have people with well over a decade of experience applying for these roles in most cases. I know it sucks but you may want to look for roles which require a little less experience even if you believe you're worth more. It's far better to be employed and in a role where you're growing your experience than being unemployed. You can always look for something else when you have the experience you need or when the market picks up a bit.

The fact you've been out of work for about 6 months now would be sending huge warning flags to me if I were a recruiter. Recruiters want to place candidates that are in demand and as harsh as this may sound a 6 month gap in your employment will suggest you are not an ideal candidate. I would seriously consider coming up with a back story to explain why you've been out of work for this long.

Some will disagree with this, but you should think of your resume like an Instagram profile – only show the things others want to see, and don't be afraid to represent yourself in a slightly exaggerated way. Obviously you need to be able to do what you say you can do, but you need your resume to give a good impression of you and your experience if you want any chance of getting an interview. So for example, if I was the primary dev on some project I'll typically say that I "led" the project on my resume. I'll also always include things like "senior" & "lead" in job roles because, "Lead software engineer" looks way better than "Frontend developer" imo. Minor things like this can make a big difference and help your profile stand out from the rest.

I guess to concluded though, the market isn't that bad that you should be getting at least some interviews. It sounds like your resume is being dismissed for some reason and you should try to understand why that is. If you want to anonymise and share your resume I'd be happy to take a look.

Imo this is the worst market I've seen since 95 when I started.

Worse than the dotcom burst?

In my experience yeah. The burst was relatively quick in it's downturn, it felt like hiring and optimism came back pretty quick.

This time, there are the dark clouds of AI and lots of economic instability, along with higher interest rates to deal with. Not to mention record corporate debt.

Also this time is much different because coding was marketed as a way to just go to bootcamp and get rich, so it brought in hundreds of thousands of people on the low end.

Much diff than the dot com bust IMO.

Yeah, I'm not denying it's bad. It's the worst I've seen too – although it's picked up significantly from the start of the year.

I would warn people against blaming the market entirely for their problems finding work. I've seen stats suggesting that most tech employees who have lost their jobs have been able to find work within a couple of months. My own experience suggests this is the case. It's harder for sure, but it's far from impossible.

If someone's been looking for 6 months and are not even getting to the interview stage something else is going on. To blame it on the market would deny themselves the opportunity to self reflect on why they're finding it difficult. I've seen a lot of that this year.

Are you on LinkedIn? I am not currently looking for a job but I still get a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn reaching out to me. I get the impression that there are still a lot of opportunities out there. But then again this may not be the case in your location.

Yes, definitely update your LinkedIn profile. Put something catchy in there. And post something once a week to generate some activity. It is totally influencer bullshit, but this war -- getting a job. You can also flag your profile in LinkedIn as looking for opportunities.

What do you mean "put something catchy in there?"

I wish I knew, currently rolling the dice on going back to school for computational neuroscience, and if tech doesn't bite on that then there's always a masters in psychology as a backup. Or just bite the bullet and remortgage the house for a nice safe MD.

What kind of work can you do with a masters in psych?

1. Skills, add as many skills as you have.

2. You have 2500 words limit in the About section. Write about all the projects you were involved in. Instead of just writing: "Experience in Mongo", it could be "Improved the system's performance by 30% by optimizing Mongo."

3. Again, add skills to each of your working history.

4. you can add the training courses or what you're learning for hot skills in the market.

5. Professional quality photo. You don't need to spend on getting a professional photographer. You can use AI tools to improve a selfie from your phone to look professional.

These will not get you the job, but will increase your appearance in search results.

I agree with 100% of this.

But if I get my next job because I used an AI face fixer to get past the first hurdle of the culture fit, I just don't want to exist in this century anymore.

You need to do some personal hustling and find hiring managers or founders of recently funded companies that someone in your network can introduce you to. Otherwise you're just another resume in a sea of thousands. Do something to make yourself stand out.

Have you tried freelancing platforms like Upwork, Fiver and other apps?

Sometimes getting started as a contract worker/part time consultant and then transitioning to a full time role would be easier.

(This helps in building confidence for the recruiter)

I'm a Sr. SRE (IC5) with corporate, startup, and consulting experience also looking.

Are you only applying for front end? You might consider trying backend and devops too if not. Anything where code is written. Then if you get interviews, invest in learning the stuff that gets you past their tests and interviews.

There are, again, many qualified candidates in backend and devops as well. Changing specialties probably puts you at the bottom of the pile because you don’t have experience that speaks directly to the job.

Sure but unless your limiting factor is that you can't apply fast enough to every jobs, it's just a long shot with about no downside for you.

Even when the market was good, I never got jobs by applying for them. It was always either recruiters cold-calling, or through my network. Maybe focus there instead of grinding out hundreds of applications.

Applyall.com is a good option for you, too. I feel like the longer you're out of the interview game, the more you need to get back into the flow of interviewing / talking to new options.

Do you have skills outside of front-end?

I've said for years that heavy front-end development is a luxury. In down economies companies are looking to do more with less.

Everyone wants to work remotely. But that means now you are probably competing with hundreds of other applicants for any halfway interesting job.

And many of them for a lot less TC

Yep, exactly. I've known some really great devs who lived in the midwest, and didn't want to move to the coasts. They're totally okay with half the comp someone would look for in one of the big cities.

I figured me not caring between remote and in office would increase my chances, but it really doesn't feel like it has. I think the market is really bad right now.

Post a screenshot of your resume, with identification redactions. You have 500 programmers here on this thread ready to give you free advice.

You left off the most important pieces of into - where are you? Are you looking for remote, hybrid, in office? Do you need visa sponsorship?

What state? Also do you apply only 6 figure jobs? What is the minimum are you asking for frontend jobs? IMHO these affect the job hunt the most.

What country? What continent even?

I am going through the same experience. For now only referrals seems to get me a response from HR. Otherwise it's just radio silence.

>I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.

That work can be done by pretty low skilled people. Get out of that sector.

Ask your friends, family and university connections/network for referrals. That will almost certainly get you an interview.

Try applying with a different name, maybe there's some discrimination factor at play as well

I recall reading many years ago about a woman who had to change her name to be male to get calls.

That is in contrast with a few years ago where a man changed his resume to be of a black lesbian and started getting calls.

What kind of résumé highlights that the applicant is a black lesbian?

This sounds more like a porn movie script. “Hardcore All-Girl Positive Discrimination XVII”

lol you really are not afraid someone's going to press a cancel button on you? based.

Hah. I’m saying the idea that a man could pose on their résumé as a black lesbian sounds more like a male fantasy scenario, because that’s not how professional résumés work at all.

Where do you even put the lesbian part? College extracurriculars?

easy, you put it right under your photo with your pronouns and twitter handle. exhibitionist don't have any qualms about such sort of behavior

In the USA at least it’s highly recommended not to include a photo, even. It puts the employer in an awkward position if you give unsolicited information that they’re legally required not to consider.

photos in resume are not common in North America (and are probably grounds to have your resume tossed honestly)

It was, I believe in the professional organizations and also in a cover letter.

What is your area of expertise? I have 25 years in cyber security. I left corporate world for a few years which made it very difficult to get back in. So I stated a profile on upwork with with a low rate. Now, after 2 years, I'm flat out, and earning more than I did in corporate world and I can pick and choose the projects I work on.

software engineering is incredibly saturated at this point

you have to be marketable in another way

More like a over-saturated field and now 'less engineers' are needed thanks to AI.

> "you have to be marketable in another way"

Correct. I would look at personal GitHub projects over Leetcode BS if I was finding a candidate at this point.

>less engineers' are needed thanks to AI.

I dont believe

In my experience, the market is a lot worse than a year ago.

My initial thoughts (gotta help out a fellow Chicagoan):

* Let your resume be your landing page, rather than the recent work - save a click. And make your resume viewable on the web, with a PDF version downloadable. Point being, you want to reduce friction. As it stands, if you want someone to look at your resume, they need to (1) visit the site; (2) (i) find and then (ii) click 'Resume'; (3) locate the downloaded PDF; and (4) open it. Compare that to: (1) go to your site.

* I do not recognize any of the names on your 'Recent work' landing page. This may be a fault of mine as my field is not particularly IT-heavy . But for those who might be clueless, it may be worthwhile to briefly state who they are, or what type of work they do.

* FWIW, have someone look at it for grammar/spelling, and tell them to be picky. "Self-taught", for example. When people are trying to seek reasons to wade through tons of candidates, even the smallest stupid mistakes can be used as sorting criteria, under the umbrella of "showing attention to detial."

* I'm not sure if "self-taught" is something to advertise; I see the appeal, but if I'm someone anal, then I may wonder what holes that left. Self-taught means you only had to meet your own standards.

* Are you saying - with your education - that with your Bachelor's, you expect to enroll this fall? I would take this completely off your resume; it's not an existing skill, then. It also is going to leave a lot of people thinking that your focus will be split.

* Generally, overall, retool/rewrite a LOT of your items by backing up claims and orient it more as a sales pitch. If you are an employer, what version of this tiny little sentence would make you want to hire you? You don't want to just say 'experience in...', you want to say the things you did. "Shepherded six major projects in high-level companies from brainstorming to rolling out the door." You don't want to say what you're seeking, you want to say what you can do for the person looking at your resume.

* Some of your verb choices are very passive. "Acted as the developer of" -- no, it's "Developed". "Experienced in implementing a range of" -- "Implemented eight contant management systems" - use active voice and provide specifics.

Look into whether you want some items on your resume at all, given the impression they might give. The National Safety Council was a two-month gig; Thrive Creative was an eight-month gig. If you just HAVE to include it but there are things that explain it, incorporate it into your resume. "(Short-Term Assignment)", etc.

What market are you in? Are you only going for remote?

When do you think the market will start picking up?

Don't use resume websites. Use company links.

I'm a new grad and I didn't have too much trouble getting interviews. Most interviews came from large "startups" based in the US.

I have a unique perspective on this as my job is coaching Software Engineers (and others) through salary negotiations when they change jobs.

I would describe the current SWE market as "stuck". I'll start with what I've observed over the past year, then I'll opine on why I think I'm seeing that.

In 2021 and early 2022, there was basically a hiring boom in tech, and particularly Big Tech. This was superficially obvious, but I personally saw it in my business as Jan 2021–August-ish 2022 being the best stretch my business has had _by far_ (and I've been doing this full time since 2016).

Then the macro economy saw some significant changes (maybe the most in-your-face data point being interest rates going up in the US). Big Tech slowed the hiring, froze it, then starting laying folks off in pretty big numbers.

I saw _this_ in my business via a pretty rapid cratering of applications to work with me. People overuse the term "fell off a cliff", but the inbound web traffic to the pages that drove my coaching business ... fell off a cliff. (For screenshots, you can check out this writeup I did earlier this year: https://www.joshdoody.com/2023/06/focus-on-high-earners/)

Traffic to those pages dropped like 90% in 6–8 weeks. It was a dramatic, sudden shift.

Those are pages that one would find if one were searching for, eg, "How to negotiate [big tech company] job offer". So, at least from my business' vantage, interest in negotiating job offers with Big Tech companies cratered around September/October 2021.

Why is that relevant? By now, we all know that happened because there were layoffs brewing, etc. But at the time, that was not widely known and, much to my chagrin, inbound interest in my business was a leading indicator of what was happening with hiring at Big Tech companies.

Fast forward to today: Traffic to those pages is still more or less down 90% from where it was in mid-2022. I believe if there were to be a spike in hiring in Big Tech, I would see it pretty quickly. So, for now, I don't think there's much of a change there.

Why is the overall market for SWEs still "stuck"?

My guess is a lot of those layoffs were mid-level and junior engineers—not the experienced Senior Engineers, who were probably spared. So the market was suddenly flooded with mid-level and junior Software Engineers with Big Tech experience and Big Tech-level salary expectations.

Since those folks couldn't go to another Big Tech company, they just sort of sat on the sidelines (pay in Big Tech firms is very, very good, and even a little fiscal responsibility would net someone a nice cash cushion to live on while sitting on the workforce sidelines).

Meanwhile, the normal attrition in Big Tech SWE jobs that typically happens ground to a halt either because those folks were not working at all (laid off and on the sidelines) _or_ because they were Senior Engineers—who would normally have been looking to hop to their next Big Tech job—deciding to just hunker down and see how things shook out. When there are layoffs happening all around you and you wonder whether you're next, it's easy to just sort of switch to survival mode, lay low, and see how long you can keep your job (I speak from experience here).

So, for several months, everyone was frozen: Either sitting at home waiting for hiring to ramp back up _or_ holding on to their Senior Level job. Eventually, the folks on the sidelines realized this might be a longer-term adjustment, and they needed to get back to work, so they started looking and applying for jobs. Unfortunately, Big Tech still wasn't hiring, so they had to look elsewhere. The good news is "elsewhere" needs SWEs, the bad news is the pay they're offering doesn't look nearly as attractive as what Big Tech was paying during the boom. They also aren't "Senior" level in their experience, so they can't just apply for Senior-level roles at other tech companies (where they might be able to get comp approaching their mid-level Big Tech comp from before).

Or they _can_ apply to Senior-level roles, but they're under-qualified for what that firm needs. A lot of firms saw lots of inbound applications from mid-level Engineers with Big Tech experience and salary expectations applying for Senior-level roles that they just weren't ready for. So those firms are getting inundated with candidates and just trying to figure out how to find qualified candidates among the deluge of applicants.

Meanwhile, you (OP) are applying for jobs at those firms along with all of those folks who are migrating from Big Tech, which means you're not landing interviews.

How does this resolve?

Unclear. But _eventually_ Big Tech has to start hiring again. Not at the rate they were hiring during the boom, but at a normal rate to support normal levels of business growth. When they do, the Senior Engineers will start moving again, and things will start to unstick. All of those sidelined Engineers from the layoffs will start to mix back in with normal Big Tech hiring, easing the pressure on non-Big Tech firms' recruiters, and opening up more interview slots.

I could be totally wrong here. I'm only going off of what I've seen. I can say that when I _do_ coach folks through salary negotiations, the process is the same as it always has been. There are just fewer negotiations happening because fewer people are getting jobs. I have no idea when the market will come back, but it _feels_ like things are slowly unsticking right now.

I know this probably isn't much comfort to you, OP, and I'm sorry you're not getting any traction. I hope you find something great soon.

Nope, in the same boat, unfortunately.

Have you considered contracting work?

My strategy is being firmware/10 years… works pretty good, getting an interview per week.

How did you get into firmware? From what I’ve seen, most of those companies seem to source exclusively from university pipelines for entry level, and only established domain experts for anything else.

(note: much of this advice is based on the assumption of a permanent resident of the US applying to a position in the US. Things may be different in other countries)

From the interviewer side of the house, the purpose of interviewing is to hire the least risky candidate - not the best candidate.

As you get closer to senior job titles, a longer duration of employment in the latest position is more desirable.

If you have three or more jobs in that 5.5 years, you may be a more risky applicant. It isn't necessarily the case that you do from your post here ("I held a job as a front-end dev"), but switching jobs frequently is not uncommon and may catch up with people in time as they try to move up. For more senior positions, initiative and projects may last longer than the length of a job hopper's tenure and can be seen as a negative as they are less likely to see the project through to completion and the company may need to hire someone in the middle of the project.

If you have had multiple positions, companies with a longer onboarding process it may be that you won't even get to being a positive ROI before your feet start itching again for a new position.

In companies with faster onboarding (dump into the pool and see who swims) a less risky applicant will have a close match to the skills and responsibilities listed on the job description. This entails making sure that each job application that you send out (my reading of the post is that you only have one) emphasizes familiarity with their technology stack rather than just a list of tech that are tossed into a line on the resume without care for order.

If applying on job boards for listings that do not specify a company or are "an exciting opportunity with a client", you are applying to a 3rd party recruiter and not an actual job.

If applying on job boards for companies themselves, realize that these jobs may be scraped, unmaintained, or otherwise not representative of the current jobs that company has open. I have seen jobs listed on indeed for positions that were posted in January and closed in February showing up months later. Likewise, job listings on the company's current career page may have openings that are not on Indeed.

Make sure that you're applying for jobs that are a fit for your experience. Job boards are notorious for having poor search criteria for experience. Doing a search for entry level jobs will pull up principal engineer positions and searching for senior jobs will find entry level ones. Mass applying to everything that shows up will result in a higher percentage of rejections.

If you only have one resume, create one resume for each type of position that you are looking to apply for. Create one resume for React developer, one resume for Angular developer, one resume for Php developer - and then send the relevant one. If you are sending a "5 years of React experience" to a position that is looking for someone to work in their Angular application, there will be a subset of applicants who are less risky than you (based on the resume) that are selected for interviewing.

While not applying for jobs, use the job requirements for positions that you've applied to (or interest you) as a guideline for personal projects to work on to keep skills fresh or to learn sufficient information about that technology stack to be able to competently answer questions if you are interviewed.

Make sure that you are also looking at public sector employers. State and local government tends not to advertise on career boards but rather on the state's workforce development board.

Make sure you are applying to non-remote jobs. Yes, everyone wants a remote job. The applicant pool for such positions is much larger than the local jobs and instead of competing with people who live in the area or are willing to move there you are competing with everyone who can legally work there.

A lot of times people get put on "cool down" after applying.

Apply to a job and even if you don't get a rejection letter, they may still say, "Let's put a pause on this guy for the next 6 months."

So if your resume didn't start out strong the first time, they may not even be looking at the revisions.

Similarly, if you're applying in the same city, in the same sort of work, don't be surprised if the HR teams have shared notes on prospects.

When I worked at an agency, we had one talent scout who was just head and shoulders better than any we had worked with.

I asked her what her secret was, "How are you able to find such consistently good developers?" and she said, "I get plugged in to the network, and I listen to my peers -- if they pass, I pass. Saves me time to go after better candidates."

Anyway I don't know if something like that is impacting your job search, but I'd try and diversify a bit. If you were a dev, look at Test Engineering, or DevOps, or Project Management work for a bit.

Remember you never have to list a job on your resume. It's always OK to say, "I took a sabbatical." And it's OK to shine rainbows on the truth, but it's never OK to outright lie. If you get caught doing that, you're burned -- to everyone in that network.

Anyway, if I had time off, I'd spend time on Udemy, and YouTube, and such. Just learning as much shit as I could.

I really want to get better at SketchUp so I can do more woodworking projects, but I haven't had time.

I have a billion things that need repairs, or modifications in my house, and it's always, "Sigh... I'll get around to it next weekend..."

And if you finish your little home project list, hit up your parents for things they need help with. Odds are, if they're elderly, they need a lot of help with tech and cleaning and even simple stuff like getting their oil changed can lead to old people getting ripped off these days. Anyway, if I had more time I'd want to take care of more of that sort of stuff for my mom...

I could be laid off tomorrow in this economy... so who knows.

Oh, also I feel like most companies are aware that salaries have plummeted in the last year. If you were making $200k in SF, and are asking that for a remote job... yeah, basic stuff like that can sink you. Make sure you are pricing yourself for the role.

EDIT: One last thing... I have seen a TON of people lately who are really shiftless. One guy literally said, "I only work remote because I don't ever want to wear pants again." And it's cute I guess, but it's not something you want to bring up in an interview. Make sure you don't come off as someone who got "laid off for cause." Keep your background clean when doing video calls and... put on some pants even if they can't see them! (=

It's bad if you're in the U.S. Companies hire folks in the US to fire them later if they want to. That's how it works, and everyone understands that we can hire today, we can fire tomorrow, because of "employment at will". Those high salaries don't mean anything anymore. If your salary was $200K and you spent 1 year to find a job, your salary is now $100K. Compare it to other countries - Germany, for example. Salaries are lower, but if you work, you can't be fired. You're getting your paycheck, you're protected by laws, and it's your American fella who is going under the bridge with his family, not you.

We really need to make "employment at will" illegal.

Personal anecdote from Russia (I hold expired Russian passport and have many friends from there). Auto-translated from chats (reach out if you're curious getting the origin link):

=== 8< ===

Another moment. When I was completely desperate to find a job here in our region, I published a CV on the Russian HH.ru. And there is a lot of activity there. In one day, they wrote to me vk, sber, yandex and several other fairly well-known offices. And all as one are looking for remote employees, but for some fucking reason that is not clear to me, I have to be on the territory of the Russian Federation. That's just an exception with Yandex. They can arrange in Serbia. But you also have to go there.

=== >8 ===

I don't know what they did to the US economy, so now it's even worse here than it is in Russia.

You sure they are not trying to draft you? Don't be a fool, smart engineers let other idiots do the actual fighting.

I can't leave the US for other reasons, so even if I really want to, I can't go there.

Sidenote: but no, drafting is not so quick and there are multiple ways to refuse to do that.

(I'm in RF at the moment)

There're no EORs (Employer of Record) like Deel etc. operating out of Russia so they'd need you to be legally/officially registered at the very least in Russia.

I know someone who did the same and then spend ~6-7 months outside Russia. Within RU, they work remotely and have never visited the office even. As a sidenote, not only did they get the job, but their income progression has been 1.5x since they joined as a newbie within 1 year.

This is a topic, I really dont want to comment on:

But here it goes:

Job sites are spam. Supply and demand is all that matters. People who suck got laid off. So what. These companies are incredibly dysfunctional at hiring ANYBODY in software. That includes FAANG.

Software Engineering is no longer a respectable career regardless of pay. The reason is that the goal of "de-professionalizing" software engineers since the mid-90s has been accomplished within 15 years since 2005.

This de-professionalizing effort was the purpose and reason for the H1-B program expansion during the Bush and Obama administrations.

The main drivers behind it were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Neither of whom wanted to pay engineers, (Bill G was more entrenched though as he said in the 90s he wanted to pay software engineers 6-7 dollars an hour)

Unfortunately for both Bill G and Steve J they were caught (red-handed by the way) not only trying to fix engineer wages, create blacklists but also trying to "KILL JAVA" which is all on DOJ grand jury testimony video recordings you can access yourself. Fortunately (for them), however, the US govt cares not about what it pretends to care about in public.

So the GOOD news is: Tech hiring is corrupt, managers are usually going to be gone after they fail to build their "kingdom" which they ALWAYS do and even in a market "full" of genuises and apprentices, noone will read your resume anyway.

Because IT hiring is and has been a scam for almost 2 decades.

Does that answer your question?

Good luck.

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