Ask HN: How's your job search going in this current economy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How's your job search going in this current economy?

136 pointsmr_o47182 comments

Would love to hear from the folks who have been looking for a new role.

What strategies are they using to find a new role and how much success have they had in terms of landing an interview

Really, really, really bad. I'm a full stack engineer. I took part of the last 4 years "off" due to having savings and finally settling down to pursue my own SaaS attempt.

I've been back in the job market since the beginning of the year. I've probably sent out well over a hundred resumes (definitely over this number since I was keeping track until recently). I had a brief respite when I picked up a temp contract but that only lasted about a month.

I mostly get just rejections. I have over 15 years of experience. I literally know how to build out every part of a normal web/api stack.

I even have an active ongoing project I've run for 13 years and have scaled to support a couple million requests a day.

Nothing seems to matter.

I have maybe managed to get one actual call a week for the last year where I actually speak to someone from the company. And even then, it's been one "thanks for playing" response email after another.

I honestly don't know what to do. I've never had a problem at least getting interviews to the point where I'm at least in the consideration process.

I need help.

I revised my resume a few times and that hasn't helped. I've gotten more involved with LinkedIn and I get more noise but still low results.

I'm basically getting very desperate.

I hope you take this in the spirit it's intended.

There's 5 links on your HN profile:

* One to your personal website that is just "work in progress" and nothing more

* One to your defunct twitter where you didn't appear to have many followers or did much of note

* One that just returns an opaque blob of json which I'm not sure how I'm meant to interpret

* One that seems like an intriguing project that seems pretty trivial on the surface but I'm willing to be convinced is more substantial but with a plus feature "coming soon" for I don't know how long and a twitter account with 12 followers

* One to a github project that you haven't touched in 9 years, also with a bunch of things you've been meaning to work on for a while but clearly haven't.

I'm willing to be disabused of this notion but my instinct via this gestalt is that you're someone who likes to overpromise and underdeliver. My question would be, what have you been doing in the last 9 months if you haven't had time to polish these bits of your public surface area?

That's probably an unfair judgement from me and in a hotter hiring environment, I'd be willing to bring you in so you could disabuse me of my prejudice and I could be pleasantly surprised but it's much easier now to filter based on trivial gut feel like this and you should be more conscious of the digital image you're putting out into the world because HMs won't bother telling you this stuff because it's an awkward conversation with no gain on their end.

I hear this a ton, yet in the past decade, I’ve never looked at more than a resume before filtering into the yay/nay buckets for tech phone screens.

Do you all actually dive deep on every resume?

Whenever I've been on the interviewing side of things if a potential applicant lists their GitHub profile I checked it 100% of the time for interesting side project, open source contributions, etc.

Same here. If you list a GitHub profile in your CV I expect it to show at least one repository with code you have written yourself or meaningful contributions to an open source project.

We don't do coding challenges during the interview, so I want to see you can actually write code.

But make it something useful, I don't really care to see you know how to press the "Fork" button or +1 a bug report.

I don't. I usually have ~100s of candidates per role. Is not practical

Presumably one does not apply with their Hacker News profile that's over a decade old but rather a resume / CV

The jsonip website has some odd behavior, if you add additional characters to the URL it looks like the server tries to run JSON.parse on the extra characters plus a payload. Wonder if there's a way to pollute the server or get remote code execution.

What I'm guessing you're describing is the jsonp behavior. For example:

`https://jsonip.com/mortalcombat` `mortalcombat({"ip":"2601:645:4001:1b57:5832:dcb9:c236:59e4"});`

There's no parsing happening. If you are talking about something else, I'd love to know about whatever it is.

true, at the same time your bumblebeelabs site is down ...

He is also not urgently looking for a job I guess, it's all about context.

And why does everyone have http:// and not https:// in their bio links?

My two cents, your LinkedIn is pretty bare (~130 connections, few skills/words/fluff). If you want to play the LinkedIn game you need to get 500+ connections (connect with a bunch of recruiters to game the numbers).

Don't advertise you are looking for a job (recruiters don't like to hire people looking for a job, that means they can't find a job and are inferior to people already employed). Instead, frame yourself as employed and happy.

Message recruiters and let them know you're passively looking at opportunities in the market and wonder what they are looking for.

Beef up the LinkedIn with some recommendations, skills, etc.

Your personal site can use some updates.. get a headshot/basic whois/bio on it pointing to your LinkedIn/Github/Email and a rundown of some of your projects.

Ageism could be part of the problem as well. A clean shave/haircut/dye wouldn't hurt.

Looks like you expose your git repo in your web root, rookie :)

geuis.com/.git/config

Thanks for pointing that out. That freaked me out for a minute.

Have you tried working with recruiters? In my experience applying directly might as well be sending your resume directly into a black hole. If you turn on the “looking for work” setting on linked in you’ll probably get plenty of opportunities to interview. I was interviewing in the spring and I had a few interviews lined up within a week this way.

Is location a factor in your search. I'm seeing some openings around bay area but all remote opportunities have dried up.

Nah. I live in SF. I'm fine with going to an office. I'm fine with anything at this point.

Take this for what it's worth, but a recruiter that I know has told me that a lot of companies in California are now reaching out to recruiters to hire out of state for the obvious reason - lesser pay. Something to ponder. If you're really desperate maybe look into other regions.

Yes, I am seeing this as well. A lot of tech job openings are even explicitly excluding people from SF (but not less expensive parts of California)

Would you take an in-person job that's not in a big city?

Bad.

DevOps/Software Engineer with 20+ years experience. ~100 applications this year, a good number of interviews, but no offers yet. (2.5 calls this week scheduled)

It seems I either get:

- proto-startups with ~5 people and no concrete revenue stream, or

- 5k-person enterprises who want someone with a very specific skillset

Both are fine, but they're picky... as am I, so I'm doing my own consulting for a bit.

What happened to startups? What happened to the thousands of 50-300 person companies who need tech work done? The other day a headhunter called me... because they were bored! Rather different from last year when they were juggling 4-5 excited companies in front of me.

Given my experience, I'll be giving a "Fast Developer/Startup" class to a number of companies. That'll turn into a day-long workshop that will be very valuable :)

Strategies:

- DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY

- find roles on e.g. LinkedIn, but _never_ do "fast apply": go to the company's site and apply directly

- use a "highlight positives/negatives" tool to draw certain words in a web page different colors. By interactively seeing a mass of green (or orange) you can quickly make a YES or NO decision on a role. I adore the Chrome plugin Highlight This -- https://highlightthis.net/

- apply for jobs on a schedule (e.g. Mon-Wed-Fri), don't just struggle for hours at a time, it's soul-sucking.

- do Studying (job-related tech) interspersed with Fun Programming (generative art!) -- have fun!

- take care of your health and family, go outside and take walks

- DON'T TAKE IT PERSONALLY

> who want someone with a very specific skillset

I’m also probably going to look for a job soon. Do you think that being very skilled in a niche could help if there is work in that niche or would you think that even those jobs are gone?

Honestly, unless youre looking down the barrel of unemployment, keep your job for now. Its so bad right now.

20+ years exp, from greenfield building to managing and improving existing things, physical, cloud, hybrid, virtual, breadth of technologies touched and used. Been looking for 3 months now, and its just been a shitshow

In this economy, companies are looking to save money by hiring people who can wear many hats... probably not the case for the really big companies, but that's what I see in the SMBs. And they don't want to pay you more for your diverse experience, either.

There may be a bias here due to some correlation between employment status and participation in online discussion forums.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I've heard it is increasingly difficult for experienced devs to get jobs now. I know that my team has more or less had a hiring freeze for about 18 months now, even though the company is doing better than ever.

Based on nothing more than headlines I've read, it seems the CEO class got spooked about the economy last year and hasn't eased up yet. It doesn't help that interest rates are high, which typically bodes poorly for tech(despite megatech having plenty of cash right now due to a number of factors, along with debt held at mostly low, fixed rates). Many, many smart folks thought the economy would have died last year. My guess is that we are largely avoiding it thanks to near-record levels of debt-based federal spending(govt debt more or less becomes an asset to private sector). If high rates force the feds to cut spending(unlikely, given war and going into an election year), I think we'll see things cool quickly, but barring that I'm not so sure the economy is going to crash anytime soon. Some sectors, yes.

CEO class is spooked by either haemorrhaging money during Covid or haemorrhaging after (depending on what kind of company is was).

Then economy was “definitely a recession coming” for like 12 months. I think people are waiting for a rate cut to unclench their sphincter and start hiring again.

That, and likely it all got a bit over the top anyway. When you have Meta product managers with TikTok videos about how cushy their job is, you know there was a bubble.

Cosign though seeming teleports off the rails in the 3rd para. Never understood peoples obsession with that video

many of those videos were produced with help from recruiting. it's just culture war nonsense.

It's been incredibly frustrating. I recently did a round of onsites for a staff level position at a big company you've heard of.

After the interviews, I was told I was going to be offered a lower level role instead. I met with the hiring manager and expressed disappointment, saying it felt like a step backwards from my previous job, and I wanted to understand the new lower level role in more detail

What followed was one of the most surreal conversations I've ever had: he assured me that I would have the exact same set of tech lead expectations and responsibilities we originally discussed, just without the staff level title or pay.

Obviously, I rejected the offer.

Was the compensation a step down? Plenty of tech companies levels are different. Boggles my mind someone might turn down a better job with more pay because for whatever reason they give a slightly lower title.

I took a 'step down' in title at a FAANG and still got a huge jump in compensation.

>>> without the staff level title or pay.

Right but senior at Netflix/G/Meta might pay a lot more than staff at IBM or Samsung or Ford.

Just because they want the candidate to be a lead, but won’t give staff level pay, is not a reason to reject a job imo.

It was an absurd catch-22.

I was told, more or less: "We don't think you're qualified for level X, but we still want to hire you into this specific specialized role we advertised as level X, doing all the same specialized work, with all the same expectations and requirements, at level X-1. We pinky promise you we'll promote you quickly because we are confident you are already qualified to handle these level X responsibilities, even though you're not qualified to be level X yet".

That reads like something straight out of McSweeney's.

Right but was it still going to be a big raise? I guess that's what I'm trying to figure out? Did you reject the job because it was a step down in pay, or simply because of the tile?

Usually reqs at Google are for two levels. So a manager can hire a lead, and it can either be senior or staff. G has strict perf requirements so people are much quicker to downlevel and then promote vs. hire at L6 and then fire.

Either way, it's a bait and switch. I wouldn't be interested at all because the company is apparently not to be trusted for their word.

It's not a bait and switch, it's called leveling. People can come with 20 YOE and get an L4 offer at google (mid level). and some people take it, because it's still a compensation increase.

Others try for staff and they get senior, which has a wide pay band and can sometimes pay as much as lower staff offers. So calling it a "bait and switch" isn't really accurate at all.

The people who decide your level are not the hiring manager or the interviewers too.

It started great, I thought, then turned bad. Unfortunately I turned down an offer that likely would have been worth taking at this point.

I’m probably doing something wrong. I’ve likely made 50 applications at this point. 10-15 were earlier on and went well; I had around 5 roles to interview for and 3 went to final stages. One was a no, the other took too long, and the other was an offer. Things seemed to be going alright and the offer wasn’t great, so I kept at it.

Of the 30ish applications since, I’ve had 6 responses. 3 no, one bad interview, and two upcoming interviews I don’t feel too confident in. I’m well suited to everything I apply to, but sometimes you can just feel it. I don’t think these companies will see me as a good fit.

I’m about to ramp it up quite a bit and apply more and more often. Unfortunately I’ve been in the midst of a big move, so finding time to sit and focus on job searching hasn’t been easy. Fortunately, I’m done moving. Here’s hoping it goes well.

Pretty bad. I’ve got a lot of experience as an IC, manager, and leader, and it doesn’t seem to matter; companies seem much more picky (“you were great but we want someone with more tenure in <specific variant of field>”) or wedded to cargo cult methods (the leetcode places).

I haven’t extensively tapped my network for referrals, but I get a bad vibe from those, too. I’ve hit up about six folks and they all came back empty - no opportunities, even though they’d like to work with me again.

The only success I’ve heard is from folks grinding it out and playing the numbers game. It’s an employer’s market.

Edit: some data: Seven months, dozens of applications, four interviews. Two interviews were from applications, one from a recruiter cold-call, and one from networking. Applications to interview was about 4 months. Three were EM positions, one was senior engineer. Got through all rounds and was rejected at the end.

Fun fact: I have a canary in my resume that will normally raise a clarifying question during an interview. One of ~20 interviewers caught it. Hard to put effort into a resume when few people seem to read it.

> companies seem much more picky (“you were great but we want someone with more tenure in <specific variant of field>”)

This was my exact experience. I’ve been out of work for a year and I’m more jaded than ever.

I finally got a job through what I assume was nepotism. It was the worst interview I’ve done lately, awkward, because I didn’t have any experience in the particular tech stack, but I got the offer.

What pissed me off were companies ghosting after doing the full set of rounds onsite. At one point, I was interviewing for a position a third party recruiter contacted me about. It wasn’t great, but it would pay the bill and I was desperate. It seemed like a decent fit given my last experience too. I got all the way to the final round which I had to travel hours for. At the end of the internet, one of the people even said “I imagine you’ll be hearing from us soon”. But they just ghosted me. Hell they ghosted the recruiter, who a couple weeks later was calling me asking if I had heard anything because they weren’t talking to him. If a company ghosts after an initial round or two, ok, whatever, but if I go the full distance and you don’t have the respect to even give me a yes or no, fuck you.

Name and shame the company, my man!

My network has been dry as well. I got some contract work, but nothing reliable/full time/long term.

So strange to go from too many jobs to even begin considering to nothing at all.

> The only success I’ve heard is from folks grinding it out and playing the numbers game

I'm still early in my career despite rising rapidly, so I've never had a job search that wasn't "just" a numbers game. But it's given me reasonable success, and something I've always wondered is: instead of painstakingly cultivating your resume for each job posting you come across, why not just write 1 accurate one and put that effort into, say, finding and applying to 10 positions per day for a few months?

Maybe the only reason people don't do this is the obvious one: It's really hard to find 900 open positions to apply to without moving cities unless you live in like, Los Angeles or something.

That was my strategy for most of my career. It doesn't work anymore. AI + remote positions have changed the game. Even the feeblest job description gets 100+, or even 1000+, applications.

ChatGPT can generate a custom resume and cover letter for each position you apply to that's hard to distinguish from the real thing. This makes all 100-1000+ applications look like rock stars.

How does a recruiter filter through all of that? How does a hiring manager?

Probably by using more AI?

No, seriously, you make a good point. The idea of ha resume is fundamentally to de-risk the applicant; in a world where good writing no longer transmits that signal, you probably need to find new tactics to get that info across.

Actually I wold argue the opposite - by using more human contact.

Agency Recruiters have a list of people that they know and trust, and if you keep the recruiters in the loop periodically, then they'll remember you and bat for you when the time comes.

If recruiters are getting swamped with AI generated resumes they can't trust then I'm pretty sure their instinct will be to get on the phone and call people they know and trust.

The resume canary is a great idea - thanks

I like the idea of a resume canary. Can you share the gist of it?

It was a random (and facetious and probably bad) idea to include a bullet point that would elicit a “wait, what?” response from anyone who would read it. My resume highlights, as an academic achievement, that a professor once suspected me of illegal research.

If someone brings it up, I’ll know they read through my resume. If they don’t bring it up, it may mean nothing. The former is a green flag, to me.

I’d suggest something more innocuous sounding, though. “Level 3 pencil twirler” or something that would elicit some conversation.

Or maybe something funnier? "level 6 laser lotus" or "Does all work on an Atari 600XL".

I use one that's to the effect of: migrated legacy Go project to Python2, increasing E2E service latency by 3409ms.

sounds like a good way to get rejected rather than for someone to want to pry deeper, when faced with a stack of resumes

It is taking a while for me. Seemingly lots of jobs out there and I have been interviewing constantly. I've had four final stage interviews and rejected for all of them. I have more screeners lined up, and one promising prospect that is taking a long time. I'm told that everyone is at a summit which is what is slowing down the process.

I get a lot of 3rd party recruiters that seem to follow a similar MO: the recruiters are all people with south Asian names, calling from US numbers (I'm in Canada), with a vague job description, they want to hire me hourly, and they are cagey about the company that they are hiring me for. They ask for my CV, my work status, and what "project" I was on. They don't really seem to consider getting hired full time, they only talk about contract work. I have never progressed with them beyond giving them my CV and an authorisation to "represent" me (letting them act as a middle man).

>I get a lot of 3rd party recruiters that seem to follow a similar: the recruiters are all people with south Asian names, calling from US numbers (I'm in Canada), with a vague job description, they want to hire me hourly, and they are cagey about the company that they are hiring me for. They ask for my CV, my work status, and what "project" I was on.

I've heard of scams where fake recruiters use real peoples' names and résumés to get hired at remote jobs, then substitute in their own Indian or other non-American worker.

How would that work? They have to get interviewed by the hiring company. I've never gotten to that stage via these 3rd party recruiters.

It was discussed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32996953

Thank you for finding it. Yes, this is the discussion that I saw at the time.

Im glad I answered such messages from such a type of recruiter. I work at amazing place because I did and yet I put them through the ringer to prove to me they were legit. Sorta feel bad some for doing that but protecting myself according then and still now (they did say they wouldn't pay me until 30 days which is how i am pay six years later). As if any recruiter came to me asking for my social ... asking for money ... asking me to buy something... asking anything outside of how I am qualified for XYZ position the conversation would end.

So be very cautious and protect yourself from scams, but from what you describe they sound like the type of recruiters who got me where I am after six very happy and stress free years (UX Engineer).

Did you get any insight into how and why these recruiters operate? The parent comment makes it sound liked it's all about contacting, but you got a full-time position. What's up with that?

This was an Indian owned recruiter firm with offices in California and in India. I work for an Indian IT firm based in the states (remote since Covid but worked in the office for two years).

The Indian recruiting firm were a 2ndary / sub contracted firm by the recruiting firm who had the contract with my employer to find a UX Engineer. It was fishy indeed especially saying I wasn't going to get paid for 30 days yet I forced them to pay me in two weeks for the first check to soothe my worries.

Overall if they are contacting you and only asking normal questions and not ones that ring of scam they could be like the Indian firm and they are fishing for the best candidates to send to their client..the primary contractor.

Pretty rough. I'm a senior manager/director (manage software dev managers), 20 years industry, the last 8 in big tech. I've been searching for 2 months, applied to 80 roles at 50 companies...only had three recruiter calls and trying to schedule my first phone screen. Surprised at how slow going it is. Feels like companies are being very selective about who they hire and or which roles they want to fill. I think I have a good CV and I'm barely getting noticed.

do people at this level actually get jobs that arent through their existing network? Who hires externally at the director level, its it assumed they would require lots of domain knowledge?

A lot of the domain knowledge is about running software organizations, shipping high quality software on time, people management; which is transferrable to many business domains. Look at the LinkedIn jobs search filters - there is a specific filter for experience level that include "director" and "executive." Plenty of external job openings.

I'm using my network too, but most of them are at the Big Tech employer which isn't super useful since I want to branch out!

A counter balance: Mine has been fine. I spent 6 years at Meta and was laid off. I found a better paying position and started last month. I interviewed everywhere. Google was a tough slog, I had 3 recruiters laid off while I was team matching. I'm on my 4th recruiter there, but I don't think they can match my current TC and I very much enjoy my current job.

A higher paying position than Meta!? Very curious to hear as much as you’re willing to share on which company this is

Maybe Netflix or TikTok?

Yes. One of the two.

What features about your profile or approach do you think made your experience more reasonable compared to the overwhelming negative consensus here?

I don't know. Most people on HN are in some dimension, at least, qualified for FAANG or better. I have 6 yoe with quite a bit of impact and I've crossed many domains. I've received quite a few offers over the past year but I've also received my fair share of rejections. I just go through the rejections (it's like dating, and heck I've been through rejection there too).

I leetcode daily and have a system design study group. I'm honest in interviews, whether that be about a bad decision I've made or a good one. If an interviewer doesn't want me after I've been honest with them, it probably wasn't a good fit anyway.

Is there any chance you do this group virtually? I tried organizing a group a few year ago and almost got traction but it fizzled out as people moved on. I'm guessing you're in the bay area. I'm in SoCal, but would love to learn from someone like yourself who's been grinding it out and learning. Currently looking for a new position after several years at a company, but taking the long view (it's a marathon and not a sprint etc). I've realized that I haven't invested in my growth as much as I should have. My email is in my profile.

i'm in socal and I work at FAANG, what are you interested in?

Well, I'm currently spending time on going over the Coursera Algorithms course by Sedgewick and Wayne in addition to doing at least 2-3 leetcode problems daily. I'm thinking of having a periodic check-in and code-pair session where we can review and challenge each other. And do the same for systems design/behavioral at some point if that goes well. I have tried pramp in the past and it was useful...until they got bought out. Look up my email and in my profile and hit me up.

Seems like a lot of unicorn hunting out there, right now.

At least for senior data leadership roles, I’ve hit a lot of JDs that were clearly written for one person (either internally, or the random Meta/Google/whatever layoff that this company is sure will take a 75% salary cut for). Networking has been really invaluable. ATS systems seem slightly more inscrutable than when I was looking two years ago (wonder if there’s some weird effect from LLM-enabled resume spam).

I dunno, it’s not horrible, but it’s definitely worse right now than I remember it in the last five or six years.

> Seems like a lot of unicorn hunting out there, right now.

Agreed, and I feel this is happening across job families - JDs seem much more domain-specific, especially around ML/AI. I don’t remember it being like this. Yes, there is absolutely a distinction between someone working Eng in payments vs infra vs ML, but I remember those being nice-to-haves, not requisites.

Totally - and would add that a lot of jobs that clearly don’t need ML experience seem to want hardcore data scientists now.

Orgs that are still trying to put together their first functional data warehouse, or who haven’t even built an analytics environment yet, seem convinced that they need someone to come in and build models day one. It’s weird out there.

On the topic of getting hired, id like to take a moment to rant at the employers, and ask you HN folk to do something.

PLEASE stop applying to jobs that make you jump through stupid hoops or answer stupid questions that dont need to be asked on applications. Every person that applies and answers these questions are just helping to standardize their use on applications, and it needs to stop. Theres so many that i cant even think of a good example right now, but you know the questions im talking about.

Employers, please stop asking these stupid questions, and 100% double check what youre asking is actually allowed. Ive seen at least two places, recently, asking questions that im pretty sure could be considered discriminatory. Ive seen others asking stupid useless questions like "what would be your superpower" you know what mine would be? The power to make the hiring process not feel like a shell game filled with bullshit traps and gotchas.

Canonical, for a Director job, asked for my high school math & language aptitude (e.g. top x% in school), plus "proof" like SAT/ACT score, and my college GPA. For someone with 20 years' experience it felt offensive.

Thats just the tip of the iceberg.

Ive seen all kinds of crazy questions. The big offenders though are ones wanting to see your social media and crap. I even had one that wouldnt even let you finish the application without providing them your facebook page, which i dont even have. Or asking your salary range at application, like wtf.

Its a goddamn mess, i dont even know what to do about it

Yes to not answering stupid questions. One of my pet peeves about job applications is the "Voluntary self-identification" form that has all required answers. So I select "I do not want to answer" and assume they're too stupid to hire me.

Honestly, i think those 3 questions are hot garbage. They shouldnt be asked until an offer is made. Theres no reason to ask them in advance other than to allow for discriminatory decisions, but that decision is easily masked by "we found stronger candidates" auto rejections.

Really truly tired of the state of hiring

I'm pretty sure this is a US law to see if protected categories are even applying, and then if they're getting their fair share of offers.

Sure, but that doesnt change that the employer also sees that info, and can reject still, while using some unknown excuse (like a stronger candidate being found, even if thats nit the case). It should not be information visible to the employer at all. The government should be mandating anonymous data, by removing collection from the employer level, and move it to the job site level. Ive yet to see anyone with a homerolled job application site/process, and so it should be easy to get these apps doing it as well. These apps and sites can then send it straight to the government, rather than the employer storing it, or ever having access to it. Alternatively, the data should be required to be encrypted with a pub/priv pair that the government only has access to the private key before sending to employer servers. Ill take almost anything over the employer having access to this info.

As much as i understand why these questions have been mandated, i feel they've become silently weaponized, due to their visibility.

I just can't find anything as a DevOps/SRE. I had only a few technical interviews over the past 3 months, didn't pay enough attention to details when fixing a broken python program during a live coding interview, not sure why I was rejected in another case. Other than that, I can't get past HR interview and even getting to that point is difficult, in most cases my job application are not even answered with a rejection.

Surviving only thanks to a food pantry and a house I bought for 30k$ in East Cleveland. Doing some upwork and garden work so that I can pay for utilities and taxes.

I feel ya. Glad you have a stable house at least.

(Aus) Going poorly for me. Started my current job a year or so ago, been looking to leave since. Probably into the 100s of applications in the last 12 months now; I will apply for most anything with a tech fit even if (for e.g.) a role requires on-site that I'm not interested in, just to try and get a feel for the market by whether or not I get at least a screening call. I've had 2 final stage interviews: knocked back in one and dropped out of the other (red flags). Have also had 2-3 applications get a "this role now on hold, soz" response. So I'm getting just enough interest to keep hope alive. Even the steady stream of LinkedIn PMs for vaguely-related jobs has dried up.

I touched up the resume a little bit but otherwise I'm not doing anything a whole lot differently. I was almost allowing myself to quit this ass job if I instead got some vendor certs, but I'm increasingly concerned that a decent job market might years away, not months, so the suffering continues. :)

Same location, similar situation. I thought it was just me. At least twenty recruiters on my LinkedIn list, and not a peep since I toggled my 'Open to work' status weeks ago. Used to receive a fairly consistent stream of messages when I wasn't ready.

Applied for a few positions so far just to see whats up. Only one gave me a rejection. The rest ghosted. Moving state next year and need to find a new gig before then. Sounds like I'll need to start applying a lot more

Yep similar for me when I switched Open To Work on. Good luck out there.

On the flip side I’m trying to convince my CTO to fire half our engineering team - a group of jokers he hired during the run-up who are now wildly overpaid and massively under-delivering. With all the tech talent out there I’m convinced we’d replace them all within a week.

>I’m convinced we’d replace them all within a week.

If only. It can take a week just to go from recruiter call to the first hiring manager talk. that gauntlet of 4-6 weeks of interviews is what makes me dread the interviewing time the most.

Why? It shouldn't take two months and multiple interviews to hire a quality employee. I've been hired multiple times by large companies tech and otherwise during my first interview. They liked my resume, they liked my experience and I proved that I didn't have a third head and would wear a suit if totally necessary and that was good enough because they needed the worker. The whole process today seems gratuitous, at least in the United States everywhere is still at will employment, if it doesn't work fire them and hire someone else. Frankly I think the process is so long because a company doesn't want to hire new people/a replacement, they'd rather string the workers along with the "we just can't find the prefect fit" and pocket the savings than hire a needed worker that might not be a prefect fit -nobody is a prefect fit. Or maybe the answer is simpler, they really don't need another worker.

I very enthusiastically want an answer to this as well. If I get an offer on my current farthest company today and start Monday, it'd be the shortest turnaround I'd ever expeienced. I applied on August 31st and got a reply on September 10th (and a call within a few more days). So the process was 6-8 weeks depending on how you measure it.

well, 2nd fastest. My fastest would be my first role if you count "reply back starts the process", since the process was 3 weeks. The problem was they took 6 weeks to reply back (and yes, applying in December is rough. one reason not to graduate in fall semester I guess), so it cancels out. Take that one as you may.

> Frankly I think the process is so long because a company doesn't want to hire new people/a replacement

to give some generosity: a bad fit SWE can certainly do a lot of damage to a codebase and overall team morale, even if kicked out in 3 months. That plus the higher pay compared to other industries makes me understand some scrutiny. those 3 months are still ~30-50k+ just to "test" someone on the field.

But I do agree at some point in your career that it shouldn't take 5 interviews to see if someone is BS'ing their resume (that's what background checks and references are for) nor has "1 years of experience 10 times". I can only see more than 3 interviews (or 2 + recruiter call) being necessary if they are considering you for multiple roles (which you hopefully agreed to, either in applications or in the recruiter call). recruiter call -> technical/leadership evaluation -> soft question/culture fit (this can be 2nd if you want).

Good. Snapped something up that met my salary expectations after 60 days of searching hard. By hard I mean I abused LinkedIn, I messaged everyone I knew in every company I saw that was actively hiring and asked if they’d refer. Then I messaged everyone else letting them know I was on the market.

Then I attended meetups when I wasn’t applying.

I worked harder getting a job than I am working this current job.

That's definitely an awesome mindset.

What helped you land your current job more? The network you already had or the cold messages?

Network I had. I add everyone I connect or work with at every job I have. Export a list of all email recipients, and Slack recipients, dedupe. Manually add everyone.

I do this once a year.

Feels like bragging ... but mine went incredibly well. Wrote 4 initiative applications. This is in Germany and without any job experience outside of academia.

One quickly came back telling me that they did not do what I was applying for at the location I was applying at. Would I be willing to move for the job? No.

One invited me for interviews which I messed up.

One offered me a job after a first interview.

Then I stumbled upon a perfect match job description. Applied, went through 4 rounds of interviews and got the job.

So 2.5 out of 4 applications.

I'm going through a terrible time, I'm a dev. And last 3-4 months I found the salary has decreased on all openings by a good 20-30%.

I've been at the same company for 15 years. Last year we got a new line manager and he is a bully and makes a lot of our lives miserable, recently he started targeting me. I thought it'd be fine because I can move on with my experience but because of the market I feel trapped and I've now got depression from the stress and being unable to sleep. I take pride in my work and put in more hours than the team but there is no pleasing him and upper management don't care because they love his reports.

Sorry to hear this. Do you have any specific examples of bullying? You should keep a log of them if not already doing so. There is also strength in numbers so find allies.

I finished my job search after 5 months and 1 week. After 179 applications, 22 interviews, 2 offers later, I'd say that it's one of the toughest and miserable job market someone can find into. I job search-ed even during the pandemic, and although it was very difficult, imho this one is order of magnitude worse... The Senior you are the better chance you'll have, but there is no market for JR, and I feel so bad for them because I have a few people that I care about that are in that condition and aren't able to find almost any openings.

Unfortunately even if you feel like your resume is super strong, getting a job now requires to literally excel in every single step of the interview and having the luck of having the team feeling you as a perfect fit for the team. Even a single meh would mean instant rejection. There are literally too many great people in job search and companies aren't certainly in a rush to close their openings.

My perception, and my network seems to confirm this as well, is also that the rate of new opening has slowed down significantly, which means that things are getting harder. I really hope that the market will recover soon for everyone.

> Unfortunately even if you feel like your resume is super strong, getting a job now requires to literally excel in every single step of the interview and having the luck of having the team feeling you as a perfect fit for the team. Even a single meh would mean instant rejection

I'm part of the interview process for a role we're trying to fill, and it's 100% like you describe it. I lost count of how many people we interviewed already (and mind you, we're not looking for anything out of the ordinary).

It sounds like you really don't need to fill the position, is that true? I know when I hire it's because I need someone yesterday not in the next year. The multiple interviews and hoops that applicants have to jump through are akin to fraternity hazing not a interview process especially for non-entry level positions. My last three positions I was hired during my first interview, my guess is that today that would be unheard of, again I question if there is really a need to fill the position or the company is just adding another worker.

Its even worse than dot bomb (2000-2004) however is it all github copilot eating these jobs? I think some, but also with the success with remote work I image most roles were simply sent out of the US, and could be an outsourced team with extra help from copilot and other tools.

> however is it all github copilot eating these jobs?

Short answer: No.

Long answer: No, and it's wild you think this might be the case.

You're delusional if you think that the rise of Generative AI hasn't been a factor in the relative difficulty of finding a job today.

I believe it's taking jobs/gigs from creatives, and that we've unfortunately only seen the start of it. But I don't believe it will affect software engineers nearly the same way.

SWEs utilizing [e.g. tools like] Co-Pilot will rapidly replace formerly dozens-large teams to perhaps just a handful [IMHO: optimistically].

I personally believe, at-present, it is unethical to not utilize LLM systems for underserved legal and medical populations. Here in the US, that is at least a small majority. To not be personally accessing these systems already will cost you thou$and$.

Alright, post the data then.

Copilot makes me work faster, but it’s not replacing me by any means.

How do you think the work is getting done now? Are currently employed developers so much faster with GenAI that you need fewer? Are product managers just doing implementation themselves with Copilot?

Basically I went back to school to be a pharmacy tech because it seems like a hopeless job market after looking hopelessly for 18 months even after having survived as a web developer since 1995.

And companies will still swear up and down that they can't find talent at any price even as talent streams out of the industry to other fields due to being snubbed.

There's also ageism at play

crazy that they claim to want 10+ years experience but also won't entertain the idea of a 20+ year old veteran. Where are all these mid-30's (assumedly) principles and staff engineers coming from, especially since no one wants to invest in junior engineers the past decade.

To be fair, some mid-30s have 20 years of web dev experience. Others have a “lot” of experience because of the quality of the experience gained over a shorter period of time. Some have even fall into both camps.

Heh, username checks out

> Its even worse than dot bomb (2000-2004)

I don't know about that, companies were imploding left and right overnight. Stocks losing 99% of "value" etc.

With that said, this is the worse I've seen since that time, but really can't say it's worse than dot com meltdown.

Most of it is the end of free money, super low interest rates, and companies realizing that an unending war for talent isn't needed. More companies are focusing on on making a profit.

I wish good luck to all job searchers here!

On a related note, now it could be the right time to leave your job and create an opening to searchers if you want to have a software business with upfront development time investment. A lot of great businesses get the ball rolling in a recession. If things don't work out, you will probably face a better market on the way back, and your product has a higher chance of hitting a good market when it's ready.

It's pretty bad. Q1 and Q2 2022 were better than this.

100% agreed,

I have been barely able to land an interview where as in 2022 I remember the situation was very different

Doesn’t budget open up more in Q1 as opposed to Q4? Isn’t Q4 just generally a bad time to be looking, with upcoming holidays, at least in the US?

Yes, Q4 is one of the toughest quarters to get the process going as an applicant.

Well yeah, that was the tail end of the crazy times. I have seen an uptick in recruiter messages since August-ish tho

Really slow, more than anything. My own perspective is as a senior technical product manager, mainly dev tools experience, some entrepreneurship, plus coding. I'm only looking for all-remote roles. I've always been a little bit of a unique combo of skills, but for companies that need someone like me, I'm perfect. Now I'm finding there aren't too many jobs posted, that response rates are low, and then hire rates are low at the end of the interview process.

I think that the low hire rate comes down to more competition, plus some larger companies maybe have zombie hiring processes where the effort to hire someone continues, but if they find someone the funding disappears.

I've been trying to supplement with consulting, but I don't have any experience selling myself in that way so progress has been slow. In the meantime I am looking ay it as a good investment to get some experience on that front.

Extremely rough, getting little-to-no interest on the market with 10+ years of experience. Currently employed but the threat of another massive layoff within my company, and/or the possible elimination of the entire engineering dept. as we know it looms heavy.

We need all these engineers twiddling their thumbs to get together and start building things.

Poorly thus far. I’ve got stats from when I applied for jobs two years ago and it’s a very different picture. Previously: 19 applications and 4 solid offers.

Same number of applications this year. I’ve been ghosted, told my skills and experience don’t match salary expectations or level of seniority, and at times not made it past the initial application due to some short tenures on my CV.

I haven’t used any one specific strategy. I’ve been networking, reworking my CV to better present my experience, and building a small personal website to talk about some projects.

It’s a more competitive market for sure.

My job search has been admittedly limited in scope, but so far I’ve received two rejection letters and from the rest complete silence. I’m not at all optimistic if I have to switch jobs next year.

The complete silence is eerie. I’ve never encountered it in my career.

Guessing a lot of companies are on hiring freezes (official or not). economy forecasts are bad and no more low interest rates, so companies are downscaling their growth aspects and switching to focusing on core products.

Things are much much better if you have a security clearance. If you have a TS, experience with Java, fullstack web, and Angular/React you are super in demand and don’t have to be good at any of it.

If you just have a security clearance and high competence with fullstack web you need to know what you are doing well to be competitive but should have no problem landing interviews. These positions are constantly getting candidates for interviews but none of the candidates are competent enough even with consideration for the big stupid frameworks carrying most of your job.

Even better is that security clearance positions appear to pay better if you aren’t already making Bay Area money.

My learnings:

* Applying directly to companies results in a failure to receive a response about 100%.

* GitHub repos need to be ridiculously simple or solve a common already solved problem or they are probably doing you more harm than good (scares people away).

* If you have a LinkedIn profile ensure it’s fully updated, lists all your credentials, and uses only your legal name.

* You stand a vastly superior chance of landing interviews using third party recruiters. They get paid on commission and may not understand the technical considerations of your job but then neither does the client HR or sometimes the hiring manager at the client. That means the job requirements tend to become a qualification checklist.

* At some point you have to make a forced decision between dicking around with arbitrary tools/frameworks or continuing to be unemployed. Keep in mind you gain superior competence by not wasting time on the tool nonsense and you need to be more competent than the next guy but you also need enough time with the nonsense to land/pass an interview.

I stopped 3 months ago. It's not worth the effort. Unless you know someone or find a very specific job that you perfectly fit, it's an up-hill battle. For now with the high rates, the economy is doing badly. But it could get worse. I'll wait for a few weeks and see how the situation in the Middle-East will resolve. An enlargement of the conflict is going to send energy prices to the moon. The economy will be an order of magnitude by then.

much slower than when I got laid off in 2022 that's for sure. But I'm not changing much of my strategies and I was in fact pickier.

got laid off again in May and took a break until September, which of course seemed to be the worst time for my industry. calls were extremely slow in September but I still got a few. got a more typical recruiter reach out in October. More early rejections than last time (i.e. past a recruiter call but not past the first team call), but IDK if that's more on my roles (I am being pickier than last time) or the current state.

I did get a LOT more auto rejects than before. I feel like I applied to more roles this time despite a narrower selection, so I don't know if that's simply a more representative result compared to last year or not.

I seem close to an offer I'll take but I have 3 other interviews to go for if it falls through. so, hopefully it ends with 2 months of job searching, which is about as good as last time. I took a break since I got laid off twice in 12 months and didn't want to rush to a new role like last time, but I probably would have accelerated my options if I knew it would get this bad this quickly.

Pretty good, actually, although I've just been using LinkedIn recruiters. It's important to optimize your profile such that you get recruiters to contact you. I usually have 5-10 recruiter messages per day asking me to work for some company or another. A lot of them are startups though, which is risky in this climate, as I've heard many that got fired or laid off from their startup job this year.

Where are you located? I am in UK and have a difficult time finding jobs, I only have 3 years of experience though.

I'm in the US, around 6 YoE and it's still fairly hot.

Getting recruiters contacting and getting the job offer are very different things in this climate.

It's been fairly reasonable for me, getting offers and all. Probably around 50% or so from reaching out (and those I've replied to), to offer.

Good for you, i am having tough time here in Uk, Ireland though with 13 YOE

How would a forty-year-old electrician (with data center [IBEW] and private residential experience) segway into a more-technical career? I have a STEM degree, but never ended up working anywhere where college wasn't shunned by hard-working co-workers.

The concept of "make six figures" while "working at home" makes literally zero sense to me, except with an image of a young `1337` coder abusing way-too-much speed performing back-end programming. I would love to provide my technical background to [perhaps project] management, but honestly have no github nor online coding examples to cite.

I can "program" an Arduino, by changing others' code/variables [but make it do things I want] — that's about the limit of my coding abilities. I am done with physically building houses IRL. Thank god I have enough savings to last a decade+, but I need/want to be using my brain to problem-solve [behind a computer screen].

If you like programming enough to do it professionally, then it might make sense to do a master’s degree in CS.

Otherwise, in your position, I would try to talk my way into working at a small startup. There’s often enough work to go around that you can customize your role to include whatever area you’re interested in if you show promise.

But now is a really tough time to be trying to make this switch, I’m afraid.

Thank you for this entryway idea.

>now is a really tough time to be trying to make this switch

I am grateful for immense savings (years), but eagerly anticipate an era of fruitful post-singularity employment.

Terrible. I am apparently the only front end developer on the planet without at least 3 years of react experience. I’ve got a third interview next week for a company I’m not particularly excited about, but at least it would be a job.

I don’t mind interviewing, I just hate the pressure and uncertainty of job hunting in general. Just give me some work to do, already.

Not really good. I quit my FAANG job just before the layoffs started (If only I had known...) to pursue a SaaS project. I was the top performer in the team back then. I recently reached out to my manager about getting back into the team but the hiring freeze is still very much ongoing and going to last atleast 6 more months based on his feedback.

Sorry to hear a lot of people are having a difficult time. Let's face it, LinkedIn won [1]. Go ahead and create an account and contact a recruiter. It's the only way that has worked for me in the past several years.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36903624

It's interesting because most of my first calls came from recuiters, but the role I'm currently farthest in came from an ol' fashioned "find the website and fill out application".

I think it depends on company size. large companies are a crapshoot no matter what (and by some point you will probably simply have recruiters come to you). mid sized companies (~200-1000) work best by contacting either a person you know at the company or a recruiter. Small companies that fit your interests and startups (the ones that aren't "growing like crazy") seems to still work fine with the resume submission pipeline in my experience.

I’m not sure what it’s like in your industry compared to the one I work in, but I have recruiters cold call me all the time asking me if I would be willing to switch jobs. Some of the recruiters get my details off of a job seeker website I am on (that’s not LinkedIn), and they contact me. I literally had a recruiter cold call me today.

what is that job seeker website?

I was unemployed for 8 months and only had a little bit of work from my clients to attempt to make ends meet during that time. I was very busy with a huge project and passed most of my clients off to colleagues in 2 years prior. I applied for over 500 jobs and got ghosted by most. Got over a hundred rejection letters. Only 3 interviews. The first 2 ghosted me after making me meet everyone in the company and giving me tours of the facilities.

I recently made a new business partner while interviewing for a position in a company that was just all sorts of wrong. The office manager listed for marketing but the guy wanted salespeople. We ended up hitting it off and now we're working on setting up a few new businesses together. Worked out great. Hopefully I can start hiring some teams, soon, and get some jobs out on the market.

Not so great. Not a single call yet. This after having spent over a decade as CTO at a startup, built all products and teams from scratch. Dont know where I am going wrong. But.. hope is what makes the world go round!

Not many companies hire CTOs through regular channels, and it’s likely you’ll be seen as overqualified for lower rank jobs.

I think you can basically do 2 things: try to get into contact with executive head hunters or make it very clear on your resume and LinkedIn that despite your tenure as CTO you’re very much open to EM or IC engineering roles.

Would second this. I also just dropped the C*O title from my resume in certain cases where I thought it would look worse.

The outreach I’ve gotten for similar positions was always outside-in.

Thanks for your response. I am in touch with the big names like Korn Ferry etc. But are there other individual names you can recommend?

You need an agent. Also reach out to your investors if you had any and are on good terms.

Thank you for responding. Whats an agent? Can you recommend some that I can reach out to? I've thought of investors, but I am an employee and the company is still in existence. So reaching out to investors may be perceived as being in bad taste

Please shoot me a message -- email on profile

I am employed and looking to relocate to the Bay area. I’ve been applying for a few weeks and am going into a third round interview this upcoming week. I am getting responses from established startups, nada from big tech. I’m looking at leadership roles for the first time so I’m not sure what to expect. A decade ago when I took my current job, I was looking at 4 offers after 6 weeks of applying.

There seem to be a lot of open positions, but I suspect not compared to the number of folks on the market. Big tech just dumped a bunch of folks. “Regular tech” seems to be doing fine.

Pretty good, though unlike many here I am in embedded software and on the East Coast. Got a lot of interviews through recruiters finding me on LinkedIn when I marked myself as Open to Work.

After the SVB thing earlier this year I decided to get out of the startup game. Got a great new job though a recruiter on LinkedIn. It went so easy and so quickly I had to double and triple check everyone I was dealing with to make sure I wasn't getting scammed, but apparently they were having a lot of trouble filling the position. This was my first job in the last 10 years that I did not get through my network.

It is highly variable depending on your skillset.

I changed positions in April. I decided after 15 years at the same company that I wanted to work closer to home so I started looking and agreed to an offer about a week later. I gave a four week notice and the transition was smooth.

There are some fields and sets of skills where I think it might actually be impossible for someone to be unemployed except by choice.

Regarding companies requiring very specific requirements: I wonder if those are real adverts, or just ones invented by HR for PR purposes?

> or just ones invented by HR for PR purposes?

That seems like a massive waste of time for no benefit to anyone.

My assumption has been that the company is required to post internal promotion opportunities because their legal team thinks it’s required.

> That seems like a massive waste of time for no benefit to anyone.

Right, we're talking about HR, so ...

;-)

To be honest pretty good. But I made the transition from employee to being an independent contractor just before the market turned around. Now a new project is just a few emails away, because I have quite a bit of clients in my network for whom I already completed a lot of work. But its all temporary (but still enough to fill 6-12 months at any given moment).

It’s finally come to a close. I found a job through a referral via family member. I have to move somewhere I really don’t want to move, and may not even be able to hold done the job for long, but screw it.

I’m just hoping I can find a way out of the industry before it’s too late.

Terrible (I'm available, React, TS, Python, DevOps and prod support experience. You can find my contacts if you click on my username).

I'm curious why you're asking though? Wanting to switch and testing the water? Looking yourself and having a hard time?

Could be worse. Happy in current role but explored the market recently with 6 applications and received: 1 no, 2 interviews, and 3 never even replied.

Will see how the process unfolds, I definitely noticed a reduced variety of roles compared to last year.

I mean it's not that bad, but companies can be very picky.

There is also the issue of job posts that are not real, in the sense that the company isn't actually hiring. Unless maybe a unicorn drops on them I guess.

Noticably bleaker responses than the last time this was asked (maybe a month back?).

Can't help but feel this isn't just SWE. Feels like the world is wobbling for some reason I can't quite place

Something happened on 7 Oct and things haven't really been the same since.

7 Oct while certainly historically significant & likely significant going forward didn't fuck up the US job market and isn't responsible for the effect I'm trying (badly) to describe. Something in the last ~6 months is just severely off

Could be a whole lot better. After 6 months, finally accepted an offer for IT Automation Engineer at a bad rate, 45k. Love the work, hoping to push the pay up quickly.

Good. 1 Application - 1st Interview - 2nd Interview - Job Offer

2 YoE - Cloud Data Engineer - new Job is DevOps Engineer - Location Germany

It's going very badly. I'm not even getting nibbles lately.

For those answering negatively curious what your stack is?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com