Ask HN: How is your job search going? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How is your job search going?

50 pointsnotpushkin51 comments

I’ve been pretty depressed trying to find a job recently, so I’m wondering how it’s going for you guys. Wanna share your success story? Or are you struggling too and need to vent? This is the place.

Who is hiring? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575537

Who wants to be hired? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575535

Freelancer? Seeking freelancer? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575536

View on HN

I was laid off as a JavaScript developer last from a job where I wasn’t even really writing JavaScript at that job.

After 6 months of what felt like lying on a resume to compete with children I gave up. Then Raytheon contacted me to do geospatial engineering. That was going to be a very long drive through very heavy traffic. While I was waiting on security clearance validation a different group reached to me with a work from home position for a little less money doing enterprise API management.

Shortly after taking that job I made a promise to myself that I would never take a JavaScript job again. I still write JavaScript/TypeScript applications for personal use though. I have since been promoted twice and enjoy the work much more even though I really like writing JavaScript. I am not around a bunch of pretenders afraid to touch a keyboard without two or more ridiculously massive frameworks telling them exactly how to proceed.

My best recommendation is if you cannot find employment doing what you know or don’t like what you are doing try something wildly different.

Absolutely horrible! I am about to complete my MS EECS degree and have been applying to SWE or MLE roles. Even with my previous ~3 years of Backend Dev experience I am not able to get past resume screening. I just get auto rejected all the time.

Doesn't help the fact that I have been in the US for a little bit more than a year and half, so building a network is pretty hard. Attended a hackathon, won 2nd prize with my team and tried to leverage something from there but no luck at all.

Makes me feel that I might be missing something but no idea what's wrong with my profile. (I don't need sponsorship too).

I can't help but feel like I lucked into easy mode given the general consensus that everything sucks right now. Applied to 10 places (mix of FAANG and small startups) after taking a year off from work. Heard back from 5, somehow got offers from all 5 and am starting at one of them next month.

It took a fair bit of prep to get back into things - especially when it comes to system design interviews - but otherwise everything went fine. Really enjoyed how some companies are trying non-leetcode approaches lately like code review and debugging sessions.

Which geographical market? Were you nervous after the time off?

I'm reading people who have been continually employed taking forever to find jobs.

I’m in Pittsburgh but didn't end up applying anywhere local. I was looking for remote-friendly positions to keep things flexible due to an upcoming move, which definitely limited my options. Out of the 50 or so companies I looked into, barely a third turned out to be remote friendly, with some only pretending to be (e.g. Meta seems to have gone out of their way to make remote suck for everyone involved by limiting it to staff+ on top of manager discretion).

I was definitely nervous about the time off being an issue. The usual stream of recruiter emails had pretty much dried up by the time I started looking for work, and I was fully expecting the search to take forever. It wasn’t an issue at all in the end - no one brought up the gap during interviews. I mentioned it in passing a few times when talking about why I left my previous job and mostly just got “dang that sounds like fun” from people. That being said, I have no idea if I would have gotten more responses to my initial inquiries without the gap on my resume.

That's excellent. And congrats for finding what you were looking for, and making some of us jealous about the remote part. You probably have a pretty solid skillset as well.

Now one third of them being remote-friendly isn't the worst stat in the world to hear. I was worried it would be far lower (at least in the Northeast). Was it much higher before?

Do you have experience interviewing / hiring? I wonder if people who find it easier to get offers just have a better idea of what the people on the other side of the table are looking for.

Started prepping/interviewing in Oct after reading this post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41402581

Secured interviews with Facebook, Databricks, Snowflake, and Stripe (3 referrals, 1 recruiter reach out).

Bombed the FB phone screen due to nerves/first interview of the cycle. Completed the remaining three loops by December, and got offers from Databricks and Snowflake (Stripe went on two week holiday break and hasn’t gotten back to me yet).

Accepted the Databricks offer!

Happy to talk about practice/process (within the limits of the interview NDAs)!

Who the fuck is making you sign NDAs just to interview? That seems absurd for most roles/places.

Databricks, Snowflake and Stripe required NDAs for the onsite portion of the loop.

The NDAs covered anything internal discussed during the hiring loop.

That's crazy. Unless they're hiring you to solve a novel problem there's really no reason. If you're not paying me for the interview, I'm not signing an NDA.

From the interviewing side -- if you're under NDA I feel more free to answer arbitrary questions about the business. But your opinion is not unique, so my current company stopped asking for NDAs. We sometimes still do it during the offer stage if a candidate has a lot of detailed business questions

Yeah, I could totally see it being valid if I start asking for business model or implementation details. The only time I thinknid ask something that detailed would be if it's a startup and I want to understand their financial situation to see if they're stable.

If you're interviewing for staff level positions and above, you'll be discussing long term planning and some pretty tactical stuff where an NDA makes perfect sense. Might be a bit overkill for senior and below but meh.

Yeah, I could see it for any sort of high level position. I wasn't thinking in that context. I was thinking for just regular devs.

Are they all in-person now or remote? Also wondering how you secure interviews with the big tech companies if you don't have referrals per se; I do have friends at some of these places but I've mostly worked at smaller companies my whole career, and some contract positions at bigger Fortune 500s, I'm not sure if big tech would go for my sort of profile over others who've worked at bigger companies or other big tech companies.

Are you in the Bay Area? Do you know if Meta requires all employees to commute to their S. Bay campus?

I have a recruiter pestering me from them. I'm open to Meta but not commuting. If their SF office is open though I'd consider an on-site role.

Not in the Bay Area, but I have friends at FB and I believe their RTO policy is strongly enforced unless you’re senior and have been at the company for a year at which point you can go remote.

Is the meta interview process still primarily a leetcode gauntlet?

Phone screen was 2 problems in 45 minutes, I believe the onsite portion would have been more of the same but I didn’t get that far :D

Sounds like yes then. I thought they would have stopped doing this after the layoffs bc they hired too many underqualified people with that method.

I have a job, but it's in a terrible department. I've been actively looking and posting internally. I've been looking externally too, but haven't posted externally.

I've been looking for over a year and there have been extremely few internal postings around my level/role. External postings in my area seem to be mostly garbage, both in the sense that they aren't actually hiring and also the ones who are have terrible culture or pay.

Over the past year, I've probably interviewed for 6 internal roles, most in the past 6 months. I've declined 2 of the postions due their team being even worse than my current one. I have one that I did well on and could result in a double promotion. I should find out about that soon, but I'm really not hopeful. I'm surprised they even took me as a candidate given I'm 2 grades below it.

It seems like it's picking up internally at least. Maybe that will translate to more external jobs next.

> I've declined 2 of the postions due their team being even worse than my current one.

What's your criteria to determine that? Is it just insider knowledge from those departments or do you systematically go over a checklist?

No checklist, it's based on what they tell me about their systems.

One interview was supposed to be for a dev role. It turns out it was for a test automation engineer for a testing only team on a program. I've seen how those testing only teams get treated in my org when you have a whole program throwing code at you to test. You obviously aren't doing TDD, and good luck getting good requirements or access to the business SMEs. Hard pass.

Another was for a dev role for Python and some work for a new Angular UI. I got into the interview and they're talking about Go... which wasn't listed anywhere in the posting. And that Angular work... it's going to be React. Their explaination was that they just didn't update the posting (lazy fuck, wasting everyone's time and the company's money). Then they went on to tell me they didn't really have tests and they aren't thinking about using a CMS for the UI. So they can't even create a valid posting and just shrug at common best practices that are missing. This isn't a startup but a mature company in a regulated industry. Decline.

You have some very strong opinions and a lot of vitriol for your coworkers. Hopefully you can find a path that eases some of what is frustrating you. Maybe you can lead a project or team or something and do it your way and show everyone if that is or is not better than what they are currently doing.

Most of my coworkers are fine. But some teams really are terrible. I don't want to be a leader. You don't actually have any real freedom or power as a leader at a large corp until you're way up the ranks.

It hasn't been great. Applying for jobs in this market while having the post-MSc burnout has been tough. I finished an MSC in AI back in June, but there are so few AI-relevant jobs where I live it's depressing. I've interview for data science and analyst roles, but barely get in the door.

I'm getting a good amount of interviews for developer and data engineering positions, but the competition is tough. Many positions have seen a 5x increase in candidates since the same time last year, according to my interviewers.

However, I'm hopefully getting an offer as a data platform engineer soon. The department leader has ranked me as their first choice, so unless the higher-ups complain... Knock on wood.

It is not going bad at all. I work as a contractor with EU/US companies that outsource to Asia. And I get paid 35$-40$/hr, which here is a huge sum of money to earn here (2-4x the local rate). In 2024 I was able to choose from 6 different clients, I worked with 4 and made it into 2025 with 2 clients. I am expecting for 2025 to be the same. The interviews are usually all just meeting the team, no technical interviews, then start, work down a backlog in my preferred stack for months + meetings - rinse and repeat. Different clients, same work. Scrum seems to be dead in 2024 as well.

Im glad for you. Would you mind sharing how you discover these positions?

It's a combination of three things, which have been in the making for some years.

1. I have a personal website + blog + YouTube and do some SEO & marketing there.

2. I often connect or interact with technical founders on LinkedIn and end up on good terms.

3. My existing network.

So from the 6 clients that I worked with, 3 reached out to me first.

In 2023, I did work with 2 clients (but long engagements) which found me through monthly YC posts.

This is great! Thank you for sharing.

You put in good effort. And I'm glad it has been going well.

There have been a handful of these threads on HN lately, I thought I'd chime in as someone on the other end hiring engineers, recently.

- If you're using the new "AI Tools" to auto-apply, especially if there are additional questions asked in the application that you use AI to auto-fill - it's relatively easy to spot, and is an immediate disqualifier for me. (fwiw - it may seem like it's providing good/unique answers, but if you get 100 applications from people using ~similar tools, guess what, many of the answers are ~similar or follow the same format)

Sure - AI is increasingly more a part of all our workflows these days, but I'm still hiring a human and so want to hear from the human.

- Speaking of applications with additional questions on them - if the application has those questions, answer them! The more thoughtful, the better. Why half-ass the first step of the interview process?

- There are hundreds of applicants for every job, plain and simple - a resume is not enough. Everyone has experience, and education, and skills, and it all just blends together. You need to stand out. Whether thats your GitHub contributions, a link to a personal website with writings or projects, personal side-projects or cool hobby hacks you've worked on - you need to have something you can point to and standout.

When I get several hundred applications for a role - I can quickly narrow down to a top 5% or fewer just by those that put in effort and had something to showcase.

Hopefully some helpful suggestions to someone.

> Why half-ass the first step of the interview process?

This one is part of the crux of the woes, IMHO: everyone wants life story, heartfelt, detailed but not too detailed answers to everything. So, let's say roughly 30-60 minutes per application. But, after the candidate completes this okcupid-ish application, then crickets. Multiply that times 10 or 20 applications and the burnout is real. Burnout isn't just "well, job searching sucks" it also cuts into the compassion budget left for future applications, reducing the amount of enthusiasm offered for all these cover letters and "gorsh, I really want to work with your unicorn organization!!1"

So, let's turn this back around: for those top 5% or whatever, do YOU reply to say "thank you, but no" or do you just delete the email and go back to whatever else you do all day?

Very bad. In my country, even though I have an excellent master degree, 2 years of work experience in decent sized companies, I'm having a hard time finding a new ideal job as a backend engineer. I want to change my job because this job is 996.There are very few companies that are hiring, and even if they do, it's a 996 job too.

Given that you mention 996, I guess that means you're in China. What are living conditions like currently? How did Evergrande and the emergence of so-called AI affect the job market over there?

Yes, I'm in China. I'm glad I can share this with you.

Overall, living conditions are definitely a bit worse than in previous years. The main signs are that people's incomes have dropped, job opportunities have become fewer, and expectations have worsened. For the IT industry, there are more 996 companies. The Chinese people are very hard-working, so at the moment this doesn't cause serious social problems. But the uneven distribution of wealth will worsen, and people at the bottom will have a harder time.

Regarding Evergrande, there are a lot of people who can't get their houses because of this, even though they have paid for them. The government has also made some efforts to try its best to have these houses finally delivered. Houses are very expensive, so this is a very hard time for them.

Regarding ai, the ai-related industries in China are developing very rapidly and there are more job opportunities. For example, Xiaomi Group is recruiting deepseek employees with a salary of 10 million RMB per year. However, due to the uncertainty of ai companies, the high threshold and the large number of unemployed people, it is not easy to find an ai related job.

My wife has been looking for a Javascript/React developer role for the last 6+ months in London with no luck. Not even a single interview call. We relocated from India to the UK for my job. She has 5+ years react experience in a startup in the business analytics space. She also has some backend experience in python, springboot, postgresql etc. She's comfortable in a Linux development environment.

I thought getting a web developer job in London should be easy because like everyone needs a web developer, right? But it's shocking to see rejections after rejections just at a resume level, even for a position in a company in a similar business analytics domain :-(.

Not great so far.

I've applied to about 5 jobs on Upwork and the clients still haven't even hired anyone.

The year is just starting, hopeful still.

I personally gave up on attempting to find a job. I’ve been learning about trading and my best buddy trades for a living, so I’m jumping full time on that because might as well…

The usual disclaimers apply about losing money etc etc… but apart from the job situation I’ve been getting more and more disillusioned my the tech industry, or rather, big tech and all the crap that has infected what seems like every tech company.

I don’t have any recommendations apart from, explore alternate source of income, I’m working, apart from trading on at Etsy shop and some electronic projects.

It’s also been a good time (since Medicaid is better than any other health insurance) to work on my mental health as well. It is hard to find motivation to do anything when I’m looking at over a decade of experience that I have now being almost worthless…

Now that ZIRP era is over, it feels like the AI space is the new tech space.

Senseless investments and exits and high salaries moved to AI and they're hard to find in normal startups. I have two active contracts totalling more than 0.4M€ and I've been working 70+h weeks from how much work there is.

I also fear things will get worse at some point, so it's better to make the most of it.

If I had more free time or downtime from work, I would work on building some products.

Was Searching from July till October, landed a job as a Fullstack TS dev.

While I'm really grateful for having an income, I wouldn't want to do this for more than 2 years. Hopefully they either give me a project that's peaks my interest more or I find a different positions (hey Rust companies!)

I don't even really bother anymore. It's such a giant fraud and time-suck.

We all know that society is propped up by people going to work and doing nothing much of value. But now the do-nothingness pervades even the recruiting stage. It's such an empty faff. WTF are they doing? Why bother? I guess automation makes it cost-free to churn out bullshit job posts and waste our time endlessly; there's no human cost to the perpetrators.

It really does make you wonder about the collapse of our society.

> We all know that society is propped up by people going to work and doing nothing much of value

I don't disagree that there are lots of companies out there doing essentially pointless work and paying high salaries to people who do very little all day. Mostly in the B2B space. But is it accurate to say society itself is propped up by these roles?

Well I haven't done any studies, but I'm going to guess yes. If everybody doing non-value-adding jobs were fired tomorrow, we'd have a massive societal problem... don't you think?

I went from zero monthly LinkedIn messages from recruiters to 2 in December. So one could say infinitely better?

But realistically these contacts have little chance to materialize into a solid, well-paying job.

Awful, and the part of the country I live in doesn’t help at all.

Horrendous. 3 months in. O interviews.

Full stack web development, native mobile apps. Tech lead/architect.

Good, not great. The Market is still terrible.

  Location: Yerevan, Armenia(UTC+4, but willing to work in US timezones)
  Remote: Yes
  Willing to relocate: No
  Technologies:
    - TypeScript, C#, Python, Go, Rust
    - Next.js, React, Angular
    - SQL, PostgreSQL
    - Azure, GCP
  Résumé/CV: 
    https://www.linkedin.com/in/vadimpashkov
    https://drive.google.com/file/d/1N-0hp0OjlMSWGHaNWkggoxGyfamos3IP/view
  Email: vad.pashkov@gmail.com

I'm Vadim, a full-stack software engineer with a degree in software engineering and computer science and 16 YoE working in companies of all sizes: from small, startup-like companies to tech giants like Google. My core principles at work are to do the right thing, consistently ship, and communicate effectively.

I suspect you meant this for https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42575535 as this current thread is to bitch about (no one responding|irrational hiring process|$other)

Absolutely brutal, difficult.

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