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Comment by qwertygnu | Hacker News Reader

I don't question that is takes hard work, even for more senior devs like the author, but 30 apps leading to 3 offers is a dream. Most early-career people are probably at >100 app with maybe a few interviews and hopefully one offer.

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The author has 30+ years of experience and was applying to jobs paying less than 6 figures a year (USD). His expectation were modest, compared to the average US developer.

This is also not realistic (if other people in his position aim for much more). Wouldn’t you wonder “why is this person with 30 years of experience applying for this role? Maybe got confused? Maybe they’re troubled in some way? Maybe they’ll stay for 2 months and get bored and leave?”.

What is not realistic? We're talking about Sweden here.

"30+ years of experience" is a negative in most cases to most recruiters.

People overfit to their history, making it harder to fit in to a new context.

So unless the match is perfect, you're better off with less of a resume.

exactly my thoughts

This is so sad. If I ever had to get paid 5 figures after 30 years I worked literally switch careers.

>> This is so sad. If I ever had to get paid 5 figures after 30 years I worked literally switch careers.

It's Sweden / Stockholm, not Silicon Valley / San Francisco.

I've looked up real estate there just to point out how ridiculously inflated prices are here. A nice looking 67 square meters apartment, 15 minutes from city center, was selling for some €190,000. By comparison a 50 square meters rather communist-looking apartment here (Romania) sells for €160,000 - €180,000.

A 5-figure salary in the €80,000 - €90,000 range is fairly outlier both there and here. €7,500 gross translates to about €4,400 net both in Sweden and here. To buy an €190,000 apartment here, the mortgage is in the €1,200 per month. In Sweden as far as I know, a rent is in the €600 - €1500 (depending how far from Stockholm city center). So a 5 figure salary goes a long way: you can buy, rent and live, on a single salary. If your wife is also getting top 5 figures, you're settled.

This is pretty accurate. Price/salary ranges are much more stable than the US. His salary ask for 30 years is not as far fetched as the Americans here think. Source: live in Norway.

I guess I got lucky in when I started out as a career switcher in 2017. Iirc I applied 6 places, had 4 interviews, got 2 offers. Mind you this was as an effectively junior person applying to mid-level positions. I like to think that having so few interviews allowed me to concentrate my enthusiasm and highest mental energy into the interviews I had, but maybe it's just survivors bias.

Since then I've taken 3 interviews and gotten two great offers in the 50+% percentile for US based software engineering roles. I'm a not-that-bright grug-brained developer, so I'm sure it wasn't because I was blowing people out of the water with my brain power.

I'm not sure I have the energy to do a numbers-game applicant strategy. I hate interviewing generally, and live coding causes my brain to lock-up. So I only apply places I am genuinely excited to work for, and places that I reason would be generally excited to have a good team player who is nonetheless a grug-brained developer.

I can get genuinely excited about pretty run-of-the-mill work though, and have strong opinions very loosely held. I think maybe those two qualities are my secret sauce.

Energy itself is a winning strategy. It translates to an initiative in an employers eyes, which is something that cannot be taught.

Can confirm. Energy is about the only way I could rely on myself to crack open a totally foreign job market with less than a year of experience under my belt when I was starting out. I set myself the goal of 10 applications a day, every day, anywhere in Finland was acceptable -and within 3 months I had my first offer.

Applying to Finland from where?

Technically still from Finland, I was already physically there. But legally, from the US.

2017 was a very, very different job market for us engineers

2017 through to around 2020/21 was insane worldwide .. All the big co's soaked up the talent, then that sucked the air out of the market worldwide. We were getting people outside of the US headhunted from the US, which had constant ripple effects. Now it seems the rebalancing is definitely taking hold and times are a lot tougher for devs world wide.

Trying to hire in 2020-21 was impossible. You would get people between interviews get massive offers (days/week apart). 50/50 whether even after accepting the offer they'd actually turn up... If you saw someone that had a decent shot at coding you needed to hire right then and there. Reddit/HN was absolutely filled with devs making hay while the sun was shining job hopping and say things like 'if you're not getting a 30% payrise...'

Now the credit crunch has just switched the tap off. I'm about to contract out a small bit of work via one of the freelancer sites and I'm going to be very interested to see what it's like getting freelancers now....

> I'm not sure I have the energy to do a numbers-game applicant strategy.

Neither did I until it became a neccessity. Did 4 job interviews in 7 years and got them all in one go. Then I quit, and there was a long drought of people just not wanting to hire me for 6 months. The first rejection I took personally, but after 10 interviews with crazier and crazier questions you can’t do anything other than see it as a numbers game. Anything else destroys any sense of self worth you have.

I’m not sure I’ve applied 30 total times across… like eight employers.

I also make middle-of-the-trimodal-graph comp, though, not FAANG/finance tier.

For the sake of comparison, I applied for jobs mid-2022. I applied for 12 positions and got 5 offers, and explicitly rejected by 2 - the remaining 5 I either rejected myself or didn't have time to complete the process. This was also in Stockholm, same as the OP.

This market is far worse to be looking for a job in.

I agree. Even as a senior dev, I couldn't help but think, "this story isn't as difficult as I was expecting from the headline". To each his own. ;-)

I guess I got really lucky - I just talked to friends and found three different jobs through their recommendations. Never had a proper job application or interview in my life - I reckon this will bite me in the ass sometime

I mean this is objectively the “best” way to get jobs. If it’s worked for you so far, I also imagine it’s probably gonna keep working.

Good to have a perspective that yeah, this is definitely very far on one end of the “fortunate/lucky” spectrum.

> Most early-career people are probably at >100 app with maybe a few interviews and hopefully one offer.

This has not been my experience at all. I've been at 6 positions in my time and applied to maybe 15

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