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Comment by lhnz | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I could feel it. In 2023, I practiced ~200 leetcode problems and learned how to create an LLM but I felt like I was the least employable I'd ever been. It was very difficult to get interviews, and even though I managed to get multiple offers, many of these were at companies I'd not normally have accepted offers from. It took a long time to find a job offer I wanted to accept.

I do feel that there are signs of recovery now, so good luck to those that are still looking. I know it's very hard -- particularly if you're also supporting a family.

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I have never had problems finding work, until now. It used to be easy. Recruiters used to call me at night. Now they ghost me.

It could be that required skillsets have shifted in the past year.

Yeah in past 20 years I would receive a job offer from nearly every company I interviewed with. Past few months have been really disappointing with rejections after interviews that I'd normally have said went great.

It's also true that you have now 20+ years of experience. The higher you go, the harder it gets - you might want a different role, etc etc.

If on the other hand you're competing with senior sw devs with 5+ years of experience, there could also be other factors to keep in mind (age, ability in very specific tech stacks, etc).

I think companies are still hiring, but more focused, unlike in 2021-2022 when they over-hired "just in case".

> 20+ years of experience

Welcome to my world.

In-company recruiters are often quite helpful and accommodating, but, as soon as one single tech person gets involved, the temperature drops 30 degrees.

Standalone recruiters send me these breathless emails, extolling my qualifications, but, as soon as they find out my age, they ghost me. I have actually had recruiters hang up on me, as soon as I told them my age. I learned to just mention that up front, to get the ghosting out of the way.

Apparently, they aren't very good at math. I list 30 years+ experience, yet they seem to think that I'm under 35.

After a while, I just gave up, and accepted that I'm retired.

It's not the money; it's the "culture." Many folks, much younger, and much more inexperienced, are paid more than I ever made, in my entire career. I would have gladly accepted less money than I had made before. I don't really need it. The work is what interests me.

Maybe try changing over to management? You might have a shot at a non-tech centric company.

Also, don't be above lying about your age.

I was a manager. That's actually a problem.

I don't lie; especially in my profession. It's a thing. I know that personal Integrity is considered a "quaint anachronism," in today's world, but I won't compromise on that.

You’re right not to compromise and even if you were less ethical, that’s something which is easily detected and could lead to being fired with no recourse. It’s very reasonable for a company to say someone who lies about simple facts can’t be trusted with anything else.

You certainly don't have to lie, but there's no reason you can't simply calculate your age differently. The common 365 days to a year for age isn't a universal given.

You'll be a little less than half as old if you pretend to be a Martian with their 687 Earth days per Martian year.

Just don't go with Neptune, it takes almost 165 years before you turn 1 there.

My grandfather used to say that he was "35 and a few months."

>I would have gladly accepted less money than I had made before. I don't really need it. The work is what interests me.

We need an acceptable way to express this, without desperately extolling you'll take less money. I think a lot of us "old guys" are in the same boat; I don't need 150k, I'll take 100k if the work is interesting, and I'm more likely to be loyal to boot.

> I'm more likely to be loyal

The funny thing, is that I've been told that "Old people are just cruising to retirement," but it's OK to establish your entire business infrastructure on the idea that your young, energetic, engineers will not remain at the company for more than 18 months.

> Old people are just cruising to retirement,

That is just BS. In my company we have quite a few 50+ and it's nice to work with them. They add exactly what younger people can't.

Reality is: They need to squeeze every dollar as much as they can. If they could, they would never hire:

1. People with kids

2. Older than 33-35 (more often than not also 1)

3. Disabled

4. Often sick People (give me your history of sick leave, that kind of stuff)

5. Anything else I am missing?

Just freaking replaceable robots.

I really knocked a smile off a CTO once when I said I wanted to have another kid.

>but it's OK to establish your entire business infrastructure on the idea that your young, energetic, engineers will not remain at the company for more than 18 months.

Yeah, it's a tough nut.

It's understandable that SV companies want ambitious strivers that move on every 2 years, for the same reason many of these CEOs consider the "job done" as soon as they get "an exit". The life of the company is measured in months.

But if you're building a company for the long term, you need smart, loyal people who build institutional knowlededge within the company. This isn't something you can fast track, I don't care if you're the brightest MIT AI grad.

You need both.

I was just struggling, this morning, with the Apple App Store Connect Web interface.

We're in the final stages of releasing an app, so we're spending a lot of time on that Web app.

It's...challenging. I know that they have big issues with security, privacy, and sheer scope (I'll bet they get millions of submissions, every day), but the site is dog-slow, the CDN breaks constantly, I need to refresh the page quite often, and they seem to forget where I was, the last time; necessitating that I follow the breadcrumbs back to where I was (I have admin accounts on several orgs).

I've released over 20 apps on the store, and have dealt with this, for a while. It's actually getting worse.

But Apple is a multi-trillion-dollar company. I think they could afford for this to work a bit more smoothly, and, quite frankly, I'm surprised, as they have some of the best, and most experienced engineers on the planet, working for them. These are the types of things that lots of sites seem to be doing quite well.

</rant>

> get "an exit"

It seems that many startups don’t actually have a product, other than the startup, itself.

A “successful exit” means that the company is sold. The company is the product.

I have spent my entire career at companies that made actual products, for use by actual end-users. These corporations never had any “exit strategy,” because they were meant to be ongoing, perpetual, concerns. They had “future planning,” and “growth strategies,” that often looked a decade into the future.

Things have changed.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=U4zlA6NoSVE

Isn't age discrimination literally illegal pretty much everywhere? Proving it is always hard, but "they hang up on me as soon as I tell them my age" seems pretty clear-cut.

It's probably not even legal to ask in some jurisdictions.

I suspect that it's not so easy to prove with external recruiters, and that may explain the difference in demeanor between the two types of recruiter. The standalone ones aren't on the hook for $MEGACORP's brand and legal.

They just start saying "Hello?, Hello?, Are you there?," etc. It's a convenient way to hang up on people.

That's why I like the "make it illegal to even ask"-type of policy. At some of these American firms they asked me things like my sexual orientation and religion, aspects you often can't infer from appearance, and that always seemed rather odd to me – I'll just have to trust it won't be used to discriminate. If I don't tell this information I know they can't.

Things like age, gender, and ethnic group are harder because you can't always conceal that. Still, "don't ask, don't tell" during the hiring process seems like the best option here.

I'm actually aiming lower in role and salary due to more senior roles being very sparse in my network.

I'm not disagreeing with you per se, but the tech economy seems much worse recently and I don't think I'm suddenly worse, stale, or less productive.

The higher you go, the more expensive you get. And the fewer places see the value you bring compared to a cheaper "senior sw dev" with 5 years of experience.

If you want to be paid more than someone with 5 years, you have to generate more value than they do, and you have to persuade the hiring manager that you can generate more value. The fraction of places that can see that is smaller than the fraction that can see the value of a senior over a junior. (On the other hand, for those places, the competition for the jobs is also less severe - there aren't tons of people with 20 years of experience on the street at any given time.)

So it takes longer than it did when you had 5 years of experience. But keep looking. There are places that will see the value in what you provide.

The job category you're looking for is "principal software engineer" or "staff software engineer".

The mere statement that a 5 year ‘Senior’ software engineer has more perceived value than a ‘Senior’ software engineer with 20 years of experience is just crazy. Let’s replace ‘software engineer’ with ‘electrician’ and then tell me this is sane.

That wasn't my statement. Let me try again.

A 5 year software engineer may have more perceived value per cost than a 20 year software engineer. Sure, if they have the same salary, you hire the 20 year engineer, but they don't. The 20 year engineer expects more pay, and (rightly) won't work for 5-years-of-experience wages. So you have to find an employer that perceives the additional value of the additional 15 years of experience.

Have you seen the salary requirements for these jobs? People are being paid way more than they were being paid 10 years ago. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is turning down jobs because of insufficient wages. The perceived ‘value’ that an employer sees is the ability of being able to exploit a younger engineer with ridiculous timelines and all night ‘coding sessions’ because they don’t have a family waiting for them when they get home.

Then I guess I'm nobody. I was turning down jobs that wanted to pay me like I had 5 years of experience, just a year ago.

> In 2023, I practiced ~200 leetcode problems and learned how to create an LLM but I felt like I was the least employable I'd ever been.

You did two superficial things and are surprised you didn't feel more qualified? Practicing / memorizing leetcode and having a rudimentary understanding of LLMs (if I were hiring, we're targeting advanced degrees with a focus in the space) -- yeah, probably not sufficient. This is a feature and not a bug as the employment market moves back to sanity.

OP also had multiple offers they would "not normally accept".

We are spoiled in this industry.

There's no enough information to extrapolate that fact. Were these offers median salaries? Bottom 25th percentile?

Lots of companies low-ball candidates because they are happy with Harbor Freight quality candidates, so long as they will work for Harbor Freight prices.

I had one company ask me to volunteer and another offer $40,000 for a senior dev position.

I'm the OP (of this thread). The main issue caused by the industry-wide hiring freezes wasn't necessarily income but work/team quality. I've been in the top-10% of incomes in my country for more than 5 years and the top-1% of incomes for a lesser period of time.

I was able to get offers in this percentile but the companies making these offers didn't usually hire at this level. If anything, I want to be around people that are more competitive than me, that put a lot of effort into what they do and that can easily walk into high paying roles. I definitely don't want to be the highest paid engineer in the room at a company that frankly doesn't need this.

I know this can be seen as entitled but I'm the sole provider of a 4-person family and willing to work hard and prove myself. I'm happy to say that I now have a higher income than I did before being laid off and at a company with more successful people than me and a higher ceiling, however, that doesn't mean I didn't find it significantly more difficult to get a job this time around than I have in the last decade.

There are people that are going to have a much harder time than I have.

I think this is very unfair. In the few months that I was looking, I put in more than 300 hours of study. It wasn't superficial and I didn't attempt to memorize anything — I wanted to understand fundamental techniques, and put a considerable amount of effort in to doing this, treating it as if it were my job.

Nobody owes me anything but that doesn't mean that I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it. It's very tough for those that have been laid off. Particuarly those have to support families as I did -- I am a sole earner and have two children.

You could benefit from practicing a bit of empathy and not lying to yourself that the market has merely moved back to "sanity" without gaining a bit of recent experience in it.

> I put in more than 300 hours of study. It wasn't superficial and I didn't attempt to memorize anything — I wanted to understand fundamental techniques, and put a considerable amount of effort in to doing this, treating it as if it were my job.

If you landed a job, do you think this new ability to implement a CS 101 data structure would let you keep it? Help in your performance in a measurable way? This is what I mean by superficial. The same applies to the LLM work. You studied enough to where you could buzzword it in a 45 minute interview.

My response, which I'll be more clear with: Maybe it's not that bad that we're more careful and these superficial techniques are no longer adequate to get someone a job in this industry.

> I'm not allowed to point out that this is the weakest I've ever seen the market in my decade or so of experience of it.

Don't think anyone is preventing you from doing anything.

I did land a job making applications for an HFT firm and while I don't think that being able to implement data structures or write my own algorithms is necessarily what will allow me to keep this job, recently I somewhat regularly use the skills I pick up doing competitive programming exercises in my workplaces. Therefore, my answer to your question about whether it will help my performance in a measurable way is: yes.

Leetcode is not superficial when nearly all companies are using leetcode as a barrier to entry these days. Many of us with 10+ years of experience did not need to practice leetcode to get hired originally, but many would fail miserably today due to the time constraint and necessity to socialize/speak the problem while solving it in 45 min. Some practice problems took me all day at first, but after a while it became a skill of quickly identifying the type of data structure to use and solving it. It's great practice.

As for LLMs, it's probably the best thing to learn right now, especially by building something. I personally believe it will lead to an explosion in potential jobs. It's hard to describe but imagine a software engineer learning how to create a rest api for the first time after doing soap. And then integrating various apis to harness saas products, cloud deployments, etc back in the 2000s.

Then again I also talk to an ex-googler I met on Hacker News who built an LLM app and is now spending most of his time selling his saas product because he can't find a job either. That's a very positive go-getter attitude.

Are you seriously saying practicing data structures and algorithms to improve your skills is 'superficial'?

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