Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IggleSniggle | Hacker News Reader

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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.

> 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.

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’ve applied 30 total times across… like eight employers.

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

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