Looking for a Job Is Tough
blog.kaplich.me
blog.kaplich.me
For context - I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software.
On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition.
I apply for Intermediate and Senior positions.
So far I have 3 interviews lined up out of ~30-40 applications. About 10 rejections so far. 1 of those jobs is actually decent, the other 2 are desperation applications.
It’s brutal. I’m trying my absolute best, I don’t see how people that have been coasting have any chance.
You should be able to coast a bit in life.
I’m sad at the state of things, and sad for people trying to stay in the industry or break into the industry.
Makes me want to become a gardener
Why not?
(Although, apparently it’s not likely you can you do it as a dev in today’s market so)
But if you step up to being a farmer then you'll be playing with way more interesting computers than you'll find on a typical desk.
> (Although, apparently it’s not likely you can you do it as a dev in today’s market so)
Farming isn't in good economic shape right now either, granted.
Anyone considering farming should take note of this. The industry is not in a place where farmers can make any meaningful profit, especially if you're just getting into it. At best the average farmer breaks even after depending heavily on federal subsidies and crop insurance.
There are likely technical roles in the age industry, though personally that runs into a moral problem for me as you will end up being paid well to turn the financial screws even harder on the average farmer or farm hand.
To be fair, there was Onlyfans kind of money in it in 2022. It ebbs and flows. Always has, always will.
It just might not be a good tech backup plan as the ebbs and flows have been perfectly aligned with tech's ebbs and flows for at least the past 20 years that I've been watching both. When tech is good, so is ag. When tech is bad, so is ag.
On the other hand, if you are going to become a farmer (or anything, really) you definitely want to start during the bad times. If you try to start when the going is good you're just going to overpay to get in, and then quickly land in a down market.
Are you thinking about some of the homestead influencer types here?
I have a homestead / small family farm and follow quite a few of the common ones. Those that make good money as influencers don't really farm, and those that do farm are getting by but not making any profits big enough to write home about.
We decided not to make our farm into a business pretty quick. The primary goal was to grow our own food anyway, including meat, but it doesn't take long to see how bad the business fundamentals are if you're unwilling to go into a crazy amount of debt to run what most would consider animal abuse and/or ecological destruction.
Not really. I was humorously comparing farm incomes to incomes of certain pornographic performers. Not quite up there with the 1920s (when the farmers all built mansions after harvest), or the 1970s (when a single crop paid for the entire farm), but it was probably the third best time in history to be a farmer. Of course, good times can't last forever.
> We decided not to make our farm into a business pretty quick.
My farm was a business from the get-go. Some years are great, others not so much, but on balance it's a pretty good gig.
> if you're unwilling to go into a crazy amount of debt
That's the beauty of coming from the high paying tech industry. You don't need to accumulate the debt, you can pay for it out of pocket. I agree that if you start giving bankers your profit, you won't have a good time. That is a trap a lot of farmers do fall into, and perhaps have no choice but to without a tech (or similar starting point) foundation. However, for the typical reader here...
> to run what most would consider animal abuse and/or ecological destruction.
Be the change you want to see. There is always more work to do, but my farm has come a long way in improving upon those things from how things were done before I arrived.
For better or worse, I might not showcase those that much.
But then... you may end up demonstrating that you can take raw ideas and build an entire business out of them yourself, end to end, soup to nuts, and now you're threatening to others on the team who just want someone who codes, not a jack of all trades.
Your side projects could give the impression that you are more dedicated to those than to your primary employer.
For the roles I review resumes for and interview I want a well rounded individual who seems like they would stay in the position for many years. Someone who is studying on weekends and taking extra university courses on coding does not necessarily give me that impression. Again, just a devil’s advocate position.
The bad news is that I'm mostly talking second-hand since I only know people who have gone that path, without having tried it myself
You gotta spam alot since 'everybody' else does it too. You'll just drown in others' applications otherwise.
Looking for any intermediate /senior role in any stack.
I’m based in NZ so there’s barely any jobs
Had an interview with the rudest motherfucker I’ve ever met. Utter disdain for their existing employees (complaining that they can’t just fire them on the spot like in Ukraine or some other Eastern bloc country). Asked “why should we waste Engineers time interviewing someone who doesn’t have C# experience?” I should have ended the interview right then.
This is why people hate immigration. I should have told him to go back to his country if he wants that experience.
I’m so far tipped over the fucking edge I’m going to start a violent revolution.
But for the sake of another perspective, here's how your description reads:
"I’ve made 4 personal projects that currently have over 1000+ daily active users (numbers are ~1500, ~6000, ~14,000, and ~430,000) all created within the span of the last year. I’ve also sold software." --> "I have made personal projects - in fact so many I'm always at it, with a bit too many to make you comfortable. These are so successful and so quickly created that I can clearly do these once I'm with you - and I have the skills to sell software, so I could monetize them. If and when I want to. This says nothing about my ability to follow requirements or work with others"
(my advice: focus on the most successful project, say it's non-profit, and try saying "listened to customer feedback" instead)
"On top of all that, I have an Engineering degree, 4 years experience, no breaks in employment, study on my afternoons and weekends (C, Go, C#) and take extra university courses, and have some other high level achievements/recognition."
That all sounds fine.
"You should be able to coast a bit in life." --> Honestly if you lead to employers with saying that you've sold software personally and have 4 side-projects, you haven't been searching for a job long enough to realize that's unwise in this market - you've potentially been coasting on your job search. Have you been studying C/Go/C# instead of applying to jobs because you prefer studying?
The bar has also been raised significantly. I had an interview recently where I solved the algorithm question very quickly, but didn't refactor/clean up my code perfectly and was rejected.
For example, does it mean: the actual skill level (e.g., smartness) people actually look for and hire hasn't changed, but the activities that hiring teams require candidates to have experience with are (seemingly weirdly) not a great thing to need anyway and therefore lots of great candidates end up twiddling their thumbs?
In that way, the "height" of the bar is the same, but it's a "weird" bar, in that one could have to accept it for what it is, or even stoop to it, or perhaps shift over to it, in order to pass it?
Or more that the overall interview experiences are weird caricatures in and of themselves?
Weird is a great word, but it can be a little non-specific, so I'm left curious about the intended usage/meaning.
If you don’t have specific experience with some CTOs favorite esoteric API or don’t have experience in the same, specific corner of some insurance or usury industry, your ability to actually engineer solutions is considered irrelevant.
It’s as if the industry has forgotten that building software is about the application of algorithms to data structures to accomplish some user need. Instead, company after company wants to hot glue some service via some API using some framework on some cloud platform. And because the MBA decision-maker can write Excel macros with GPT, we don’t need programmers to build systems anymore. Just wire up foo SaaS to bar SaaS and MVPFailFastLeanAgile our way to success!
Sorry for the rant…
They just know the keywords the EMs and C suite sent them in the headcount request.
Now that money isn’t free, they think the problem is too many engineers.
This really isn't new. A look at Slashdot will give you similar complaints as far back as at least the 2000s. I'm sure someone older than me will dig up Usenet posts with exactly the same complaints and tell me to get off their lawn ;-)
My 3 months experience searching - and getting only ~3-4 initial interviews - is the New-AI-Kids-on-Da-Block think software-engineering is just another plumbing for their Artificially Great Intelligence. One CEO even used the exact word.
waw. Plumbers make real good $$$..
Well when the discount plumbing they are getting put in starts to leak shit all over the place there will be a premium again in actually knowing how to do it properly.
I play the game then they pass me off to another Indian who is less understandable than the first guy and then they offer $45/hour. I say yeah sure, submit me to the potential client. Then I never hear anything back.
The Indian 3rd party recruiting industry is absolutely horrible. Another anecdote was spending 10 minutes explaining how Java and JavaScript aren’t the same thing. I am convinced there is rampant discrimination happening as well against non-Indians, and especially those who aren’t H1Bs. (H1B is a trap that makes it easy to hire people at lower wages and then also makes it harder for them to switch employers.)
I’m not well articulating the problem, but anyone who has done this dance knows exactly what I’m talking about.
By the way, I used to contract at $95/hour and now I can’t get calls back for $45/hour.
The outsourcing offshoring business needs to be significantly reformed. I had a gig at Best Buy ($70/hour) and I got to spend 3 months training some Accenture H1Bs to replace me. I thought H1B was to fill “critical shortages of highly skilled workers?” Best Buy didn’t have a shortage — they fired my entire team and replaced it with Accenture. Best Buy should be heavily taxed for that and Accenture et al should have their offshore labor tariffed into oblivion. (They typically have onshore H1Bs directing offshore teams.) The Best Buy CEO talks all sorts of DEI crap, while firing people to cut costs. Not very inclusive if you ask me.
You will be sold a dream of infinite scalability by hiring "talent" in those countries for cheap and what you will get is usually disfunctional teams riddled with incompetence and nepotism.
Even if a job/team is meant to be multicultural,diverse they will find a way how to hire more and more of their countrymen until knowing the language is basically a requirement for the job.
I am not even an american and i've seen this happen in Europe as well so I imagine in the US it must be 1000 times worse.
plus the above poster mentioned how it's well known, "based on statistical evidence". so show us.
I was slightly skeptical when I heard of this the first time. It sounds a bit like some post hoc justification for why they didn't get hired. But nothing about it sounds far-fetched, really. It sounds more like a natural progression and part of human nature. But still stinks for a lot of my friends/colleagues who can't seem to get hired anywhere.
Another instance, Intel gave tens of millions to do something that few employees could have done in couple of months. Its basically creating two conda environments, one with intel optimized software stack & one with default and compare the results for 20 use cases.
Not sure its the case with all the contract companies, but this was my experience.
It’s awful catching myself in a “I’m not racist but” situation. It really worries me.
Outside of that, examples abound of racist behaviour by non white peoples, often toward other non white people.
I my opinion all of those are racist.
But in the current woke public opinion it's not and only whites can be racist.
I would love if it was possible to label racism whenever it appears but it's not possible without being called a racist yourself if you are white.
Looking at sibling parent poster there mentioning Germany, a similar example would be trying to make rational arguments about Israeli conduct with regards to settlements in the west bank. Any German even thinking out loud about those would be labeled a Neo-Nazi.
In my opinion "the current woke public opinion" is almost entirely a bogeyman construction of primarily the US right wing media with trailing support from their UK, AU, and CA siblings.
It's rare (ie. never.) that I read in "left wing" media of any substance articles about the pressing need for kitty litter trays for Furry students.
It's disturbingly commonplace to hear of what can only be performative manufacted outrage about such things from the asshole tanning bowtie wearing media wing.
The conclusion is that the statement " in the current woke public opinion it's not and only whites can be racist" is very much a localised subjective opinion and not any kind of actual global truth.
localised subjective opinion and not any kind of actual global truth.
And yes in "NA" context, I can definitely say that it's not "right wing outrage" construct. It actually feels like this conversation is the perfect example now. I'm absolutely not a Trump supporter for example. Not even a republican supporter. But it's absolutely my belief that H1Bs (which primarily means Indian nationals) is a very detrimental construct for America. I would never in my wildest dreams mention this "IRL" in my regular social circles for fear of being labeled racist. I am actually struggling to write any further here right now without fear of being labeled racist. I absolutely want to avoid "being thrown in the Trump camp" as well. I absolutely abhor the kind of vote buying Musk engaged in for example. A million a day for a signature? WTF!? It's such a brazen thing for a person with money to do, it's against everything I always believed the United States of America, the leader of the free world, would stand for. But I guess I was just naive. The world is way less fair than I hoped it was. I do recognize that. I still hate it.
I lived in Europe for a few years and didn't feel that same context as well - it wasn't almost assumed that white people were racist and anyone might be seen as racist regardless of their skin color or heritage.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I experience the other end of the spectrum. The skilled Indians that made it to Germany and write to me through my website are usually delightful people.
Consider just how different your experience of most countries would be if you just interacted with their people with the most imbalanced incentives. This is sort of what’s happening.
Don't give these people an inch.
At a startup… who knows? I had an interviewer burn up 25 minutes on a 45 minute coding question trying to “hint me” towards the solution I mentioned in the first 2 minutes.
Apply at https://moduscreate.com/careers/5984037003/?gh_jid=598403700... and feel free to mention that you saw Boris (me) post this on HN.
Bearing in mind the implicit comparison to "a few years ago", a few years ago I interviewed with Google, at which point the recruiter told me I'd passed the interview, wished me congratulations (!), told me to expect a job offer, and finally, ~6 weeks later, informed me that while I'd "passed" the interviews, my scores were too low for them to make an offer.
It remains a mystery what it might mean to "pass" without actually advancing beyond the threshold you passed.
So with that in mind I'll see you all at ReInvent
While it's fine when doing the job the purpose of the interview is to gauge your ability to understand and solve problems, while AI can help you with that you understanding how to do it yourself signals that you'll be able to solve other more complex wider-spanning problems.
Just like with a calculator - it's important for candidates to know _why_ something works and be able to demonstrate that as much as them knowing the solution.
They said the opposite of that. Unless you think it's not possible to figure out problems and you can only do them by rote memorization?
It is not possible to solve a problem from scratch. You must first invent the universe, as they say. Any solution you come up with for a new problem will build upon solutions others have made for earlier problems.
In the current age, under a real-world scenario, you are going to use AI to help discover those earlier solutions on which to build upon. Before AI you would have consulted a live human instead. But humans, while not what we consider artificial, are what we consider intelligent and therefore presumably fall under the same rule, so that distinction is moot anyway.
Which means that, without access to the necessary tools during the interview, any pre-existing solution you might need to build upon needs to be memorized beforehand. If you fail to remember, or didn't build up memories of the right thing, before going into the interview, then you can't possibly solve the problem, even if you are quite capable of problem solving. Thus, it ends up being a test of memory, not a test of problem solving ability.
And for what? AI fundamentally cannot solve new problems anyway. At best, it can repeat solutions to old problems already solved, but why on earth would you be trying to solve problems already solved in the first place? That is a pointless waste of time, and a severe economic drain for the business. Being able to repeat solutions to problems already solved is not a useful employment skill.
This is literally what AI is, and why they don't want it used in the interview.
It is really good at being a "college professor" that you can bounce ideas off of, though. It is not going to give you the solution (it fundamentally can't), but it can serve to help guide you. Stuff like "A similar problem was solved with <insert research paper>, perhaps there is an adaptation there for you to consider?"
We're long past a world where one can solve problems in a vacuum. You haven't been able to do that for thousands, if not millions, of years. All new problems are solved by standing on the shoulders of problems that were solved previously. One needs resources to understand those older problems and their solutions to pave the way to solving the present problems. So... If you can't use the tools we have for that during the interview, all you can lean on is what you were able to memorize beforehand.
But that doesn't end up measuring problem solving ability, just your ability to memorize and your foresight in memorizing the right thing.
With that said, none of the interviews I've had over the last couple months included questions that could reasonably be done with an LLM. The context is usually wrong, technical challenges were done live on a video call and it would be horribly obvious if a candidate was just prompting an LLM for an answer.
And this is why I never give coding-puzzle interviews. I just have a chat about your past projects (based on resume). We'll go deep into the technical details and it is easy in such a conversation to get a feel for whether you actually contributed significantly to the things the resume says you did.
I’ve been out of work for a couple of years due to complicated immigration reasons, and I was most recently a people manager (although with a few direct technical tasks still). I honestly don’t remember many of the deep technical details of things to which I genuinely contributed significantly as an individual contributor or tech lead, despite those being entirely real and despite me still being a capable hands-on technical person. I’ve had so many jobs recently reject me for reasons like this without giving me a chance to actually demonstrate what I can do.
Memory tests are biased toward people who did the work recently, and biased against people with ADHD (who often have worse long-term memory for such details without being worse hires).
The coding interview shouldn’t be just a blind submit and wait for feedback, nor a live rushed and high-pressure puzzle test (you’re quite right in that regard). Ideally it should be the candidate doing what’s expected to be 1-3 hours of work asynchronously at their convenience within a period of a few days, and then discussing (maybe even presenting/demoing) live in a way that shows deep technical understanding and good communication skills. That avoids conflating memory tests with technical tests. Some live tests can also be okay, but I agree it’s easy to make them unnecessarily uncomfortable with a false signal either way.
This doesn't work, because regardless of what the rules say if i think all my competitors are using AI (and you won't be able to reliably detect it) i'll feel pressured to use it as well. This is true of any advantage (spending extra time on 2 hour takehome assignment is the classic version of this)
"Write this code, but don't read the API definition (like a normal developer would do in the course of their work)"
"Whiteboard this CRUD app, but don't verify you did it right using online sources (like a normal developer would do in the course of their work)"
"Type this function out in a text document so that you don't have the benefit of Intellisense (like a normal developer would have in the course of their work)"
"Design this algorithm, but don't pull up the research paper that describes it (like a normal developer would do in the course of their work)"
You're testing a developer under constraints that nobody actually has to actually work under. It's like asking a prospective carpenter to build you a doghouse without using a tape measure.
I've never been in a situation where I could not ask for clarification on something except in interview situations. I asked an interviewer once "is this how people normally work here? they just get a few sentences and plow ahead, without being able to ask for more details, clarifications, or use cases?". "Well, no, but you have to use your best judgement here".
A cheap multi camera system + software, that can be quickly installed at candidates location to watch interviewing candidate. This can be sent by employer before interviews. its cheap enough that it can be thrown away.
traditional way - A company that provides interviewing centers across major cities for software interview, the location will have cameras that will make sure candidates are not cheating.
I’ve never seen this before. It’s always been very hard to find a single highly-qualified candidate.
And with so many people looking for new positions, if you’re not highly keyword targeted, you won’t go anywhere.
The late 2020 period was the absolute best time though. I got multiple offers almost instantly, and after I signed on it felt like the org was bloated with engineers just fiddling away on meaningless projects.
The bigger problem are HRs employed by big companies who autoreject every application and take no responsibility for doing this.
The effect of remote work, seems to be leveling the entry point for everyone; an advantage for people who got discriminated against before and a disadvantage for people who enjoyed their privilege for far too long.
They were saying that by going remote (the last 5 years), people haven't formed as many deep connections by legitimate social connections at jobs and their reputation. You could say this is the "good" or "reputation" based way of getting jobs in the back door and it's not all just likeability. So there is less of this kind of back door hiring right. I don't know if this is true or not.
But the back door hiring for nepotism or "my brothers girlfriend" is still as ever present, since the connections aren't predicated on real life in person social interactions.
Discrimination or disadvantage comes in to neither of these hiring methods innately. Subconscious bias could exist for back door recommendations ofcourse.
So if anything, it's not really leveling anything. It just means for increasingly experienced engineers, benefits don't accrue so much when looking for work if remote. If anything these backdoor references could help people (e.g. from poor families) get a shot even despite other innate culture differences (e.g. style of speaking). And nepotistic hires will remain.
I probably _could_ get a job more easily today because i’ve made connections over 10 yrs. But i’d probably still try the front door first because i’m stubborn lol. But the resume needs to be PERFECT when there’s so much competition, especially for remote roles. Everything on 1 page, needs to be very easy for a hiring manager to visually scan in 10 seconds, to make a quick decision. And obviously add necessary keywords for the stupid “resume filters”. It’s a real chore…
I will say though, there’s something really rewarding about getting the job you want without asking for favors.
It’s tough out there today. Many experienced engineers were laid off, i bet it’s brutal.
My current job is the only one I applied for. Even then, dudes from previous jobs have hit me up in the past for gigs in the last 6 months.
Who you know matters, even w/r/t code, so know people.
I expect most people here won't have a good sense for 2009. While it wasn't great for many industries, for tech it was the "app" boom. You couldn't hardly go outside without someone throwing money at you.
I truly don't doubt that's what happened, I've had it happen, but when it did their feedback was (insultingly) not up to their professional standard. I say insultingly because it was an amateurish evaluation of what I did, specifically because it was like the 5th god damn interview by that point and really they should have been looking for more than trivialities like the coding style I chose to use in HackerRank with a visible ticking clock.
The reason I ask is just for context; if people are interviewing for Senior roles and being rejected for code formatting problems, something is even more deeply wrong than it seems, since they probably shouldn't be concerning themselves with that _at_all_. If it's possible though that you were rejected for some other reason, but that your code style was the strongest negative apparent signal, that's also worth exploring. In my case, that's a possibility, that they were looking for just one more reason to narrow the funnel, but it can be hard to accept.
It sounds like they intentionally present a simple problem because they are not filtering by who can solve it, but by who writes clean maintainable code.
I wish I had thought of that when I was interviewing candidates, because it is a good criterium for a well established organization.
I don't get it. If these companies really believed that working in an office was so beneficial they would invest in them. But they all come across like "I need an office to appear like a real company but I don't want to spend a lot of money". They're these millennial gray warehouses rocking the sad-bachelor aesthetic.
Those roles are going to get squeezed pretty fast as the market heats up.
even at $300+ per hour of engineer time, I can interview 10 candidates with several engineers, and even fly promising ones out, for less than that, while using ATS systems like Taleo.
I don’t want to move someone with obscene housing costs and rampant crime. Most people don’t, especially ones that have families, houses, etc.
Do you have experience with doing this in a way that doesn't come across as desperate or too forward? How close do you need to be with this network? Is Linkedin connection enough, or would you only do this approach with people you've worked with?
I'm very happy to refer and vouch for someone that I've actually worked with (and look forward to working with again), but I'm not vouching for some random stranger...
The proximity to my network doesn't need to be strong, but your resume does.
In terms of reaching out, here are some things I did when I was job hunting:
1. The classic referral
Find the job post and work backwards from there (e.g., is there somebody I know (1st connection) or somebody who knows somebody I know (2nd connection) on LinkedIn who works at the company?).
If I knew the 1st connection, I'd reach out and ask if they were comfortable referring me.
2. The forwardable email
If it was a 2nd connection, I'd reach out with a forwardable email (https://also.roybahat.com/introductions-and-the-forward-intr...) and ask if they'd be able to forward an email and make an intro if they received a positive response.
3. Job hunting as an occasion
I made time to catch up with good friends. It felt energizing to get the moral support, with the added bonus that sometimes they knew people working at companies looking to hire. For example I would eventually get a job offer from Figma and that was because a good friend's partner worked there and was glad to refer me. I hadn't even heard of the opportunity before we talked.
4. The weak ties
I also made time to catch up with people I didn't know that well. There's some research on "weak ties" that suggest that people who you don't know well probably are exposed to a very different network to you, and will come across very different opportunities. The convo would be an opportunity for us to catch up and I'd talk about being open to job opportunities.
I hope this helps!
is how I've done it.
Worst case, you get ghosted. Best case, you get an interview.
Of course things can change rapidly; perhaps the influx of ai-produced applications may bring this practice back.
At our company the (unwritten) policy is anyone who is referred internally will always get at least 1 shot at an interview even if the resume would been have otherwise been rejected. The bar isn’t lowered on merit, though.
It certainly helps if the person is the hiring manager or some skip-level of the hiring manager as opposed to just an industry "name."
social network might not be great for someone who just broke out of their underclass social network to try make it big.
This advice assumes you have such a network anyway.
To be clear, I’m not saying you’re wrong: in a distorted market it’s absolutely about who you know and get on with. So it’s nothing personal that your (astute) observation irks me.
I just can’t see advice like this without feeling a little tick: I’ve been in this business for more than twenty years, and there have been downturns certainly in that time, but I’ve never seen it so firmly in the iron grip of monopoly and nepotism with such predictably grim results for the software outcomes.
And don’t get me started on the party line that “the economy is doing great”.
This September, I finished up a 10 month job search (had a job that was going nowhere, so looked for another) In that time, I started with careful analysis of each role, custom resume building, and applying to one or two jobs a week. When that yielded no results after a few months, I crafted a few resumes to match the broad categories of roles that I saw that were good matches and started applying in bulk. That yielded much better result in terms of actual human contact.
I did also leverage my LinkedIn network, and that yielded lots of nice reconnections with past coworkers, but zero job opportunities. The one reach out that led to anything was to the manager for the FAANG job I rejected in 2019 (always say no very nicely!). That manager made it to VP in that timeframe, and a VP recommendation to the recruiting team WILL get you in the door to talk to someone. Of course, a multi-month process resulted in a kafka-esque situation where the team that wanted me got laid off and that killed the entire process. Oh well.
In the end, I'd sent out over 300 applications, had a few dozen recruiter calls, and 7 full loops (4 offers, one of which was a lowball and 3 that all happened at the same time). Ironically, the job I ended up taking came as an inbound opportunity via LinkedIn from a recruiter at the company.
The good news seemed to be that by the August timeframe, activity had really picked up. The same resumes started getting a lot more traction.
People have been saying that since I was in school in the 90's. I've never found it to be helpful. In fact, even back in the days when there were still jobs to be had, by far the worst jobs I ever held were the ones I was referred into. The reason was pretty obvious at the time - the person who referred me in had to "talk me up" so I was starting in a position where I could only disappoint. The "cold applications" didn't have huge expectations, so when I turned out to be good at what I was doing, they were happy to see it.
i try to help anyone i know (with referrals) as i have personally seen the anxiety, stress, and emotional roller-coaster that accompany the job hunt.
1. Layoffs happening regularly.
2. Less Senior positions and virtually no junior jobs.
2. AI accelerating and reducing the number of software engineers.
3. Job postings being reposted with less salary and equity in US, EU and especially the UK.
You might as well take yourself off the job market / stay in current job, build a paying SMB company or side project on the side and make that your third income.
If it gets better and reaches sustainability you can choose to leave your job and live off it, or choose to get funding if need be.
After applying for over 60+ jobs after graduation and getting rejected over and over, I took myself off the market and started a pest control SaaS 4 years ago now it's bringing in over $2.2M+ ARR.
While the jobs I was applying for have now either shut down or not even bringing in anything over $100K ARR.
Since you mentioned a specific number of applications (60+), I just wanted to share my job hunt story. When I was last looking for a role (8 months ago), I started out thinking 5 applications a day was good, but then I spoke with an industry mentor, and he laughed me off saying that wasn't close to enough. Turns out he was right.
On his recommendation I started aiming for 50 a day. At first it's very slow, but you build up a corpus of cover letters and other material to submit applications.
This would have been easier if I was employed at the time, since so many places auto-reject if you aren't currently employed. This was also looking for fully-remote in APAC, which has far fewer opportunities than other regions/timezones.
And you might say "but I don't want to work for all these companies" and I would agree. But provided you are applying for a role that you are at least curious about, those ones that are not great fits can provide good interview practice.
That really happens? How do you know they do that? I'm not doubting you, but I've never heard of that before.
How does this work? Are we talking computer bugs?
I don't mean to discount anyone's unpleasantness but you'd be surprised how much worse the rest of the world is.
"Other people have it worse" is not a compelling reason to make people believe their own shitty situation is good
Maybe we could improve the interviewing in all industries?
But we could start with Software since that's where most of the people on this board work
I personally think there's a lot of room for improvement in interview processes, regardless of if they are currently "bad" or not, they certainly could be better
I also don't think things ever really improve broadly as long as there are enough people who think "that's actually not that bad"
If employers were obligated to pay prospective employees for their time then they wouldn't waste time
(Oh, and historically in many cases, it might also have involved moving across the country.)
I was talking to multiple people at an event fairly recently and there was general consensus that tech was in a "weird" place right now relative to the past decade or so.
Leetcode stuff sucks, but it is kind of nice being an industry where I can have no college degree and no references, but over the course of a few 1 hour interviews demonstrate competence.
To me at least, that removes a lot of the uncertainty, since I now know that if I apply to X jobs, I will have a Y percent chance of getting at least one offer, etc. Or maybe all of this is just an indictment of current hiring practices that I no longer think in terms of individual positions but in terms of aggregates of them.
Yes, it is sales. You are doing sales. Leads -> chats -> due dilligence -> offers -> negotiation -> conversions.
This is also how the hiring side looks at it. “How many leads do we need to get a conversion to this role?”. It helps when both sides understand this.
It used to be, applying to places took time and effort. So students (and job applicants likewise) would discriminate. This allowed employers and institutions to actually build culture. An institution could be different from another institution in large ways, all cultural, all "soft" -- unpronounceable by the machine.
This enriched us all, because it allowed pockets of brilliance to form. Actual, real, human variation.
Now, every job has 2,000 applicants. Every HR person is trained at a school whose curriculum is undifferentiated from Harvard or Yale, because every school has the incentive to emulate Harvard or Yale. Every HR person's classmates all, similarly, could not afford to care which institution they applied to, because their application process was -- again, spray and pray. And thus, every HR person at every company creates the exact same institution.
This flattening, this algorithmization, is like an invasive species which has choked out all of the variable, beautiful, at times brilliant flora and fauna which existed, protected, in its isolated institutional ecology. All of that cultural diversity has been destroyed so that we could click "easy apply."
What's the result? Every job application looks the same. Every interview looks the same. Every internal culture looks the same. Every job is the same, so much so that you could switch jobs every 2 years and nobody would even notice or care. Every 2 years! How much does a 2 year old know!? Every company apes Google in their interview process because Google is the Kudzu that choked out their local flora and fauna.
We're all poorer for it, this mass extinction event. Like you say, it's happening all over, not just in companies and schools.
The solution to the problem is trusted intermediaries that act as something of a filter against bad actors. They're just hard to establish, especially in a world where people want the other side to have their hands tied but not their own.
however, there are tech transitions and it appears we are in the midst of one - after which a new set of tech careers seem to emerge. internet/web/mobile/cloud/saas and whatnot. i fully expect the same to happen here.
so, hang in there, and keep your sword sharp.
do not do any other drastic changes (selling houses, divorcing, whatever).
Decide what to do then.
after the dot-com bust, i took a job that involved a 70 mile commute (each way) which was about 100 minutes on the road on average each way. At the time, i thought that was the only option for me. turns out it was one the worst career choices i made.
- The end of 0% interest rates
- The 5 year amortization of the R&D tax credit as part of the 2017 Tax Act (versus same year since 1981)
If you still went for a job that had dropped by that much, but it was still a meaningful amount of money and an interesting sounding job, well ... Good luck and all, but I kind of wish I had your problems.
Seems like it.
But what if that wasn't the case at all and they desperately needed an income and were willing to take an unfairly small salary?
Times are tough
I also see it everywhere I look. I have never had this many unemployed friends. People spend a lot longer trying to find a job and don’t seem very successful at it.
An interviewer last week was straight out of a Silicon Valley storyline, asking a “if you were on an elevator with Marc Andreessen” question and explaining his devotion to Malcolm Gladwell’s 10000 hour “rule”. The week before I got ghosted twice by a company who’s leadership team apparently pays no attention to the Calendly invites they forced me to set up “for my convenience”.
I know I’m capable and do good work, so I’m not having any sort of crisis of confidence. At least not yet. But the process is definitely frustrating.
Were they looking for a nice local newspaper story about a misdemeanor assault?
In my case, the process became so awful, humiliating, and hostile, I just gave up, and retired, ten years before I had planned. I’m very fortunate, that I could afford it. I now develop software for free, for outfits that can’t afford people like me.
It’s tough, but looking for work after 50, especially when pivoting from management, back to IC, is unbearable. My heart goes out to those without the means to walk away. I think some companies missed out, but I am under no illusion that I’m missed. I doubt they had any regrets in passing me up.
In my case, it was probably the best thing that ever happened to me. I left a lot of money on the table, but I have been happier than I ever dreamed, while working twice as hard as I ever did, when I was getting paid for it.
What kind of outfits? Might be interested myself.
I would be happy to chat about it, offline, but I don’t usually discuss it in detail, hereabouts, as I deliberately avoid putting my work in the limelight.
I suspect we will see startup founders trending older if it isn't already happening. Companies stuck in the old way of thinking that older is slower will probably be disrupted in the next recession.
Anecdotally, I think it already is. Part of it is simply because the younger you are, the less risk you can take with the cost of housing the way that it is. Older people/Millenials often have housing security and can take more risks this way, plus the other factors you raised.
Can't speak to whether that's universally true, but it's something I've been seeing: including people in their late 30s to mid 40s leaving cushy well paying corporate jobs to try founder life: they have big nest eggs from said previous jobs, so why not!
If you see more older people starting companies it's because we can't find employment and have to find a way to be productive somehow...
Over 50 seeker here (25+ years experience, first IC then mgmt). All of hiring managers I've dealt with this time around are at least 10 years my junior, and they disagree with you. They view me as a risk (higher compensation, less "hungry", higher "flight risk") and prefer people their age or younger. Don't call it ageism though, that's just how the world works :(
Speaking only for myself, I would have been fine, taking a lower salary, if the work (and work environment) were interesting to me.
I also would not have been interested in flitting around, looking for pay bumps. I was already set.
In fact, I suspect that someone like me (and I am sure there are many others, much like me, and likely, far more qualified), could be an absolute Godsend to a startup.
I don't think most companies behave this way. Maybe at one point they did, but I find the reward for doing great work is "That's why we hired you"
Yeah maybe you get a yearly raise and a bonus but it never is big enough to make up for taking a lower salary
The fact is that there's nothing unique about any age group, and the only difference between them is their birth dates. Intragenerational differences are always larger than intergenerational differences. In any age group, there are varying degrees of competence, varying degrees of attitude, varying degrees of personal circumstances (e.g., home, family).
Ageism is treating a person solely as member of a group rather than as an individual. You simply can't accurately generalize based on a job candidate's age. Anyone who claims, "In my experience [members of age group] are mostly like this..." is putting forth weak anecdotal data that is practically useless and totally unscientific.
The paragon is talent plus experience plus willingness to learn from experience. Admittedly, more older devs than younger devs will have this combination, but "social promotion" is no guarantee of success.
I have been looking for a job since the middle of the July with not much to show off. I have decreased my salary expectations but that is not the main problem, there are just no jobs to apply to.
For the last 7 years I have been working remotely for various companies inside the EU but it looks to me remote jobs are almost dead now. Everyone wants people back in the office.
My, probably controversial, opinion is that before Covid remote jobs were jobs for the more skilled people, so companies offered them knowing what they will get in return. But during Covid, when everyone worked remotely, some people not doing that that well, the companies just started considering remote jobs not worth it.
Local jobs are almost not existent too here, sometimes there is an opening at a bank but immediately fills in with tens of applications.
Last time I was looking for a new job, in 2022, after 1 month of the search I had 3 offers to choose from; 1 remote EU job and 2 remote local jobs.
Now, after 4 months, the furthest I got was remote EU job where after 5 rounds I was told I made it into top 3 candidates but was not chosen.
I started brushing up on C#/.NET I did over a decade ago as something to switch to, I am definitely not an Apple fanboy to stick to iOS at all costs, but the situation with those kinds of jobs does not look that much better either.
Or is it a lot better when you're physically in the Bay Area?
I had posted something about jobs and looking for jobs some time before here, but the best advice I can give is that all of this "What color is your rainbow" and "Cracking the coding interview" and so on isn't really applicable or it never seemed applicable to me and my experience.
To expand on my previous comment, I'm now on my 9th job in 10 years. Over the last year or so I've had another 30-40 interviews give or take. It was probably more, but this is as close as I can get. I would have liked to spend more time on some of these jobs, but circumstances didn't work in my favor so I had to make changes. What I've learned throughout the process is that all of this is a numbers game. It also helped me spot red flags and cut the process short.
For anyone else looking for a job and for the OP, here are some things:
1. Someone who is motivated to hire someone for a job will be quick/good to communicate
2. They need to set a clear timeline and steps in the process (and if they don't, ask for one and any deviation will be a red flag)
3. They might also tell you how many others are applying for the role (not mandatory, but it's good so you have a rough idea of what your statistical chances are)
4. Be clear about salary expectations early on and if someone pushes to find your current salary, feel free to say it's higher than it actually is. Any deviation from this or if someone doesn't want to say, it's a red(ish) flag and I'd be careful. It doesn't matter and if a recruiter will comment on this - I don't care what your theory about this is, you will aim to pay the lowest amount you can humanly get away with. It's also the reason we have minimum wage laws, not because companies were showering employees with money, but because they would have kept slavery going if that made sense to their bottom line (and they still do).
5. Ask why they are hiring - did they fire a bunch of people previously, are people leaving every few months or is the team/company growing; these can help you save time later on and at least have an idea of what culture you might be joining
6. Ask how widespread the technology you're going to be using is within the company. If a company has 99% Go roles and you applied to the 1% of the roles that are in Java, why is there such a discrepancy? Is it some old code carcass left over with no documentation, testing and with no desire to further develop it but they just want a body in the chair in case something goes wrong... not sure, but that's not something I'd want to do.
7. Be CLEAR about remote work/hybrid working policies - unless it is clearly stated in the contract, it CAN be changed with no notice. A change in contract would at least generally give you some time, but without this being in the contract, you can't really back out of it (case and point, Atos had remote-ish contracts for some of their teams, then they said they updated the terms and conditions, issued a new contract and forced employees to sign or resign). At a previous role I left I was told that the team is highly flexible and remote working is normal, but it's not in the contract, but it's ok, because everyone likes it. On a Thursday we were told that from Monday its 5 days in the office.
8. Anything outside of your salary or contract is NOT guaranteed, so don't pick a job based on perks. Those tend to vanish at the first sight of trouble and also, don't be one of those people that drinks the free coffee at the office just because its free. Stuff costs to make, grow, ship, build - pay for it.
9. Don't be pressured into accepting. This is a bit weirder, but it can happen. Let's say you are interviewing at 2 companies at the same time, one is more motivated to hire, but you don't like it as much, the other has a longer process but you like their domain more. Be upfront about this - "I am interviewing with another company and would like to see both outcomes to make a decision". Being forced at this stage to drop out, being bullied into saying the company name or anything of the sort is a red flag to me. If you have an offer but you need to wait a few days or a week - say so. "I am waiting for a reply from the other company too and I can provide an answer at the end of the next week".
10. Just because you accepted a job doesn't generally mean you need to take it. This is not legal advice, so take it with a grain of salt, as it depends greatly on what you sign, how enforceable it is and where you reside. But the general idea is that, if you accepted a job, but a week or two after you get a better offer, just tell the company you accepted the offer "No". "No" is a complete sentence. You do not need to give justifications, you don't need to take abuse or anything else. You have to think about yourself. They won't. If there is some legal rationale through which you NEED to start that role, just start it and hand in your notice on the first day. Most of these contracts will have some sort of "1 week notice by either party during probation". So you can join, give your notice, work the week, get paid for it and start at the other job.
Also, it will suck. Searching for a job will suck. More and more companies (especially recruitment companies - Noir, Tietalent, Aristo Group, RM Group and Hays to name a few) are really just mining for data with little to no interest in pushing you to any of their clients. They will also tend to try and say that just because you had read about COBOL during Uni, you are now 100% COBOL dev and set you up with a rather terrible interview with some client. There are more, but I'll stop here. On a side note, if you do end up working or answering to a question from a recruitment company check their reviews, look up the person that contacted you, look up the client and apply the same rigor to them as to the company you would end up working with. This entire industry is focused on selling out people to whomever, so don't end up pushed into stuff you don't want to do by one of these enthusiastic second hand car sales people.
also:
> I'm now on my 9th job in 10 years
like, i'm all about job hopping every 2-5 to get that $$$ but 9 for 10 is a red flag.
How does this work for you? I feel like by the time you would "ramp up" and actually start to have a good idea of the job you'd be moving on
As for ramp up, I always jump in with both feet and ask for tasks and its really domain that you need to figure out. I've worked in a lot of different fields (I think no 2 jobs were in the same field) so I've gotten accustomed to quickly figure out those few processes that keep the lights on in most roles.
Writing software is the easy part. Figuring out the domain is the longer task.
On red flags or that this is a red flag - I don't really care. I've had it mentioned maybe in... 3 jobs and got offers from 2 and rejected both. I'm not here to be questioned around that aspect as I make the decisions that make the most sense for me. Companies do the same for themselves. I'll reconsider once I see C-level pay not be 50 times minimum wage in a company and when executive members give up their salaries/bonuses during downturn to keep people on-board or retrain/redirect the company. In the meantime, I probably care about your company as much as you do about me.
Hope this helps!