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Comment by Glyptodon | Hacker News Reader

I think the rate of non-fill is higher. But the reasons for it are all over the map. Everything from "we always leave a posting up even when we're not really looking just in case the perfect candidate happens to walk through the door" but in the mean time nobody really pays attention to applicants, to "we weren't getting the applicants we wanted with this posting, so we took it down and are trying a new posting," to "we're legally obligated to post this, but we already have a plan about hiring" whether it's someone connected, someone internal, or a preference for H1B workers, to all kinds of other scenarios. Anybody who has ever applied for a dozen jobs, sent literate applications and outreach, and has heard from most of them never to months later regardless of actual fit for the job knows this.

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I was a contractor at a FAANG for a few years, and they handed me a job. In the few weeks of transition between the two (some paperwork, etc.) a job posting and req ID was created and posted on their jobs site. I freaked out for a bit, but everything worked out so I can only presume (in California) that was a requirement.

What amazed me was it said (maybe on LinkedIN?) how many poor souls actually took the time to apply to the position. It was in the hundreds. I can't help but feel bad knowing they never had a chance.

Happens in public/gov sector regularly.

PT role turning into FT… it’s going to the PTer.

Temporary budget allocation became permanent and determinate spot becoming indeterminate? Same.

In the public sector, tbh, the quality of candidates is so bad that everyone you get on the first round of applicants can be totally unqualified.

So, you have to reopen the posting or start all over.

And the second set of candidates is just as bad.

So you close it and rewrite the description (not that fucking HR was competent at that in the first place), and go back to step one, which you are highly likely to repeat.

linkedin has one-click applications for many large orgs; in all likelihood they saw something that said "FAANG" and "similar to you skills" and clicked it.

a previous F500 company I worked for and was involved with hiring for was constantly posting jobs but only really took application seriously when they were referrals or through the company job site directly.

By now this seems to be a serious problem. It's too easy to apply for a job. Disincentive all around: it's too easy to be lazy and over-specify or mis-describe a job offer. Then it's too easy for randos to apply because it's just a few clicks at most. Then it's too easy to dismiss with a broad comb because of all the randos. etc, etc. At this point the "job posting to job application" pipeline is completely broken and anyone who cares should rather leverage their network. Both to hire and apply, or use deliberately more obscure pathways such as professional society meetings or company web sites only, or job fairs, etc.

Yes, just go in there, look them in the eye, give them a nice, firm handshake, and don't take no for an answer.

Please.

I went visiting some local businesses in-person the other summer looking for a part-time job. One HR lady seemed annoyed that I showed up, and told me "we don't have a front door", and unironically said "keep checking our web site". She seemed confused when I asked her to hand my resume back to me. One vestibule intercom told me to put my application in the slot. One major international corporation told me that they would give me a decision on the spot, then changed their tune during the interview.

Please.

You're not wrong, but all you've ended up describing to the poster is that you don't actually have a network to leverage for finding work - which is what they're advocating for here, not walking into places to hand physical resumes.

IDK, maybe we should go back to that. At least interaction with a human is guaranteeed.

Netorking has its own problems that are much harder to solve.

Perhaps.

For the time being, leveraging a network is still the best way to get hired.

I think in my career so far in ~8 companies and many clients, I only got one of those jobs From a "cold" job posting application. Everything else was at least a soft referral by an acquaintance.

I've seen similar things happen. This is a great example of the unintended second order effects of regulation. Good intentions don't ensure good outcomes.

If the role was advertised on LinkedIn, out of those hundreds of applicants there's probably only a small minority that have appropriate experience and right to work.

I always wonder about the gathering resumes "just in case the perfect person applies" kind of idea.

1. Would anyone notice if the perfect candidate applied?

2. Does anyone even know what the perfect candidate's resume would look like / are those qualities on a resume / captured by a resume system?

3. Is the perfect candidate actually cold submitting resume to you?

It feels like almost certainly these are all "no".

1. With the current AI bots, likely not. And that basically shows how inefficient these systems currently are.

2. The hiring manager does. The bot certainly does not. The odds of someone able to please the latter while meeting the former is low odds, for a candidate that's already low odds to begin with.

3. Not impossible. And that's all the justification they need as long as they aren't penalized for what basically a ghost job.

From my experience this is one of the ways it might work.

Recruiting (company's internal function, which is part of HR) is tasked with soliciting profiles to see what's available on the market. There's no real position but the recruiter(s) invent one according to what the business told them they would eventually need. There's no hiring manager behind it (as there's no position to be be filled). Recruiter either periodically meets with the business group that requested the research or prepares a report on the results (number of resumes that came in, salary requirements, etc) and presents to the business group that requested it.

So there's a reason these resumes are being solicited, it's just the reason is not to hire somebody. Sometimes it is done to justify business decision (ie to move to a different technology, or to expand to a new geographical area). Sometimes the business group _might_ be willing to open a new req if "the right candidate" comes up, but it's not guaranteed.

It also allows HR and recruiting to justify their presence (they are busy despite the fact that the company might not be hiring at all currently).

So there's reasons why these positions are posted and virtually none to prevent the company from doing that.

I think the answers to these is usually no, but there's one (questionable) person in leadership who's like "what if somebody from Google applies?" (or whatever equivalent). Never seen it work. Encountered it a few times. It tends to be magical thinking embellished by narratives around 10x engineers.

"what if somebody from Google applies"

I'd be immediately suspicious. Why are they leaving Google to come here?

I mean, Google laid off how many employees these past few years? Nearly million?

I do hate this stigma that clearly being laid of means you're a lesser programmer.

I did get hired like that once. Small company with just 3 other employees not really interested in hiring, but I had some useful experience in their domain so they decided to hire me anyway (and then went bankrupt a few months later, but they probably would have happened anyway).

I feel so lucky I haven't had to apply anywhere in my entire career through postings, the good thing of having a solid network is that you get to know who knows a consultant/freelancer before any position is created.

I did post my availability few times on HN "who wants to be hired" but with poor results and lots of wasted time (as again, the person on the other end does not know me or has worked with me everything gets bureaucratic again).

Also, all of the people I had hired for my clients came again from my network, there was never a public posting.

There's also other benefits, in general, you don't get to do silly technical interviews, as you're bringing former coworkers you can vouch for.

Not saying this can scale anywhere, but in smaller companies with good teams and professionals they always know someone from their previous jobs or their online communities (common in open source related githubs/discords/slacks) and I like it.

This is really the best career advice.

I was fortunately able to leave a terrible job 2 years ago and immediately had contract work, now I run my own business and get constant referrals from my network. I make more than ever, have incredible work-life balance, and for the most part love what I do.

If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a job you are dead to the world. Even now I have people approaching me for FTE roles, I haven't even worked with them for 2 years. Am I some god tier programmer? Not really, but I have a good track record and people always want to go to someone they already trusted.

Yeah if you're not a social butterfly in the modern world you're just effed. Or about as good as dead, unless you happen to be extremely lucky.

In academic / white collar work for sure. But if you're something like a skilled craftsman whose services are in demand, you can probably do fine with less social networking.

Carpenters, electricians, and plumbers will be able to name their price in the Los Angeles area for the next few years.

Maybe. All of them have cycles of good and bad times. I've known many Electricians and Carpenters who have been laid off for years at a time before things come back.

> If you don't have a network, the moment you quit/lose a job you are dead to the world.

As someone without a network and left their FAANG-adjacent (or whatever the current acronym is) job in 2022, this is mostly true.

Amazon still hits up my inbox every month or so, though.

What sort of business are you running now, if you don't mind elaborating?

I have two, one is a dev shop for LMS software, mainly working in custom AI solutions now.

The other is a consultancy where I help resolve tech debt and put out fires at SMB's, which I get most of my work from referrals.

It's not advice really. If it were advice, it would be something you could do.

Building a network is something anyone can do. Join meetups. Find local user groups. Find online groups and get active in them. Give talks. Write and publish your thoughts locally and/or online. Talk with people. Ask (good) questions. Let people get to know you and the way you think. Many more ways exist than just these.

Connecting with other professionals in various ways is all there is to building a network and anyone can do it. They just have to do it.

This. I'm still benefiting from being in a BSD users group that I went to between 2000-2008 because it was filled with passionate/talented tech people, most of whom have gone onto other things. Find places to get into discussions and show your opinions and have discussions. If you are in a group where your mind is never changed, then find something else.

Ok, now that's advice.

You definitely can.

I always built my network mostly at local meetups and online communities.

It helps if, like in my case, are into functional programming, as people into that niche prefer working with other functional programmers.

IME it's not that bad. My entire network failed when I was looking for work: either everyone was still at my old employer whom I didn't want to return to or they were also out of work. I don't have much online presence, because that's my preference.

I did ~11 applications (on company websites, tailored resume), of which like 9 were moonshots (NVDA, Valve, etc). I heard back from everyone, and then interviewed and accepted an offer with a smaller international company located locally. This was during the 2023/4 downturn (Dec '23 to be exact).

Caveat: I have 15YoE and work in embedded (especially embedded Linux); it seems this specialization has suffered less than others. I also don't have a degree. I had to accept a slight paycut and hybrid - but I was in office before... and hardware generally just requires you to be present sometimes.

Don't be afraid if you don't have a network, the advice is good, but it doesn't apply to everyone.

I would say the extended parts of my network are still getting the interviews, but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face. I’ve been applying since April 2020 (with about 7 interviews so far and 2-3 upcoming interviews total) and I’m getting kind of discouraged at this point.

Honestly in this market there is really only so much your network can do—at least at a “submit my resume for me” level. I’m starting to think I might get a bit more aggressive and bold with my network and have them deliver paper copies to the hiring manager or something. Because even referral submitted applications are black holes at this point.

Hang in there and take what you can get. The market is super shitty and you are absolutely not alone. It ain’t you. The market will pick back up again… it always does.

If they won’t pay for traveling for on-site interview or relocation is that a good sign; when they’re demanding three days a week in the office hybrid?

>The market will pick back up again… it always does.

It will, but this time it's probably going to be several years. It's the covid lock down train wreck. Most people underestimate the cascading damage done by the lock downs.

Yup. The damage caused by that nonsense will haunt us for decades to come.

“It’s what everybody wanted” is something I often say. “Everybody was cheering this on”.

>“It’s what everybody wanted” is something I often say. “Everybody was cheering this on”.

Spot on. I read that somewhere that during WWII when people were sent to the gas chambers, crowds would be cheering on. Common people terrify me.

> I read that somewhere that during WWII when people were sent to the gas chambers, crowds would be cheering on.

Citation needed. The execution of Jews by gas chamber during the holocaust was not a public event.

It's when there were being rounded up to be sent. Not during the event itself.

Cheering on deportation.. I wonder what modern parallels we can draw from that.

The market can remain depressed for longer than you can remain solvent.

We should be encouraging people to look at alternative careers to tech. Life after tech.

We should also be making it clear to students that while there are exciting things happening in tech this is not going to translate into large scale demand for people.

Large parts of technology are mature, indeed moribund. This is not a message that the technology industry wants to hear.

> but I have people I directly literally went to school with, and lived in the same dorm with turn me flat down for work, which was a real slap in the face.

Since referrals became the meta-game, companies have adapted their referral process to be more selective. Most companies I've worked for have required people to enter some basic information about how and where you worked with the referral, why you're referring them, and a statement that your referral means you are vouching for that person's work performance.

It cuts down on the number of people referring people they know by happenstance, which defeats the purpose of a referral program. I doubt your friends meant it as a personal attack. They probably just had referral programs that were more rigorous than putting names into a queue.

They said they hadn’t been happy with the last three months of candidates, and that I was probably going to be it and then rejected me with no feedback and hired some ex-SpaceX person as a contractor. It may have been the investor playing a role.

Maybe you didn't impress them?

Network is important as long as people see you as a reliable professional that can help them.

There's lots of skills involved, last but not least soft ones.

Well, sure but some feedback would’ve been nice at least - it’s not like I was going to sue them.

11 apps to one job last year, huh? With a 100% response rate. Wish I could have had even a tenth of that luck. Heck even during the best booms my response rate was hovering around 30%.

I'm just exhausted with the search. I finished yet another programming take home only for the company to stop hiring at the turn of the quarter.

But yea, my network also failed me. Mostly becsuse 80%+ of them were laid off themselves.

Paid off?

What an unfortunate typo. Luckily I had time to fix that one.

But sure, I think almost all of them got severance.

Remember when 80% are laid off, they are all looking. Whoever finds a job probably has found a place that is hiring more than one person. So keep in touch, they don't have anything today, but they may have leads. Sometimes it is here is a job that you are a closer fit for than me so I may as well point you at it even if it hurts my already low chances.

Indeed. And my luck continued to fall through the cracks.

Had 3 interviews through contacts that bounced back. Failed two interviews, one technical, one cultural. Third one never really got off the ground; talked to a recruiter and then nothing ever really got arranged. Not even a call.

One got a job at a place I previously worked at and had no interest in returning to. He's on a different team though so I can't say his experience will mirror mine.

One was asking around about any open roles days before he got laid off himself.

Asked a few others and no positions are really open as of now.

Funnily enough me and another colleague applied to the same job and he got it. Right before they invoked a hiring freeze.

And those are just referrals. The nightmares from jobs I just found myself get even better. I'm just tired. This market suuuuuuucks.

There have been ups and downs for decades. I'm sorry it is happening to you, glad it isn't me this time (so far!). I've been there. Hang in, there are always jobs though sometimes you need to become a handyman or something to get any money for a year.

Yeah, no worries. I'm stable for now, just not full time stable. I just gotta survive until the market bounces back.

I work in games so I was pre-programmed far in advance to expect shakey times. Just not times where I'm ghosted for over a year with no sign of anything opening up (quite the contrary, still plenty of gaming layoffs!).

How would I recommend I get into embedded Linux as a total newbie with only Node/Ruby experience? :^)

No joke: just start!

Learn C and C++. Find a cheap micro pc board, pick one of the embedded linux distros that run on it, and make something with it.

Repeat until you get bored, exhausted, or a job. :)

Make sure you touch a little rust too. C and C++ are still big, but embedded is interested in Rust as a potential mitigation for issues they have.

Try getting a single board computer such as a raspberry pi, and see if you can get it to do stuff! Hook it up to some SPI or I2C peripheral boards to read temperature or light. Stream data to a cloud.

Another big part of embedded Linux is managing the OS itself and updates. Things like Yocto handle building an OS image

I think that's relevant if you have a highly specialized skillset like embedded Linux. People don't make embedded Linux job postings to "test the waters" or "see if the perfect candidate applies." If the listing is up, they're probably hiring an embedded Linux developer, and while there will be a lot of resume frauds applying, they actually need to make the hire.

If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.

> If you're applying for a B2B SaaS product manager job there are 50,000 jobs and 200,000 applicants and it's a completely different situation.

B2B SaaS is broad. If you're a generalized you're fucked.

But if you're specialized in a specific B then you should (probably) be doing fine.

That said, most of the new-gen PMs are generalists who drank the "domain experience doesn't matter" koolaid.

Curious, what do you earn?

> My entire network failed when I was looking for work

That's been my consistent experience as well. Conventional wisdom is that you only get good jobs through referrals, but about half of the companies I've worked for have been through referrals and half "cold" through monster or linkedin, etc. and BY FAR the worst working experiences of my life have been the internal referral ones. The last time I was looking for work was 2017, though - I get the impression that things have gotten really, really bad in the past year or so.

My experience is the network typically fails, but it can sometimes work.

Remember with networking there is often only one person in your network of hundreds who can do anything so you need to find that person. Often it will be the guy you just barely talked to who won't think of you at all unless you remind them, but they then know enough to know you are good enough for some position and then they are not interviewing they are convincing you to take the job.

Those cases where the network ensures you are the only candidate are one of the reasons why they work well. My current company doesn't work that way, it doesn't matter how good you are, all I can do is put your resume in the HR stack (unless it is for my department in which case my boss might ask me about a couple resumes). I'd be considered a conflict of interest so I couldn't interview you.

I posted once with a seconds account on who is hiring, the amount of spam and fishing attempts received is crazy, 10-50 DocuSign and the like a day since then.

I decided I wanted a better job in 2025 after being at my company for 6ish years. I started applying to 2-3 jobs a day starting in december and reaching out to old contacts. Complete ghost silence and bullshit. Managed to get 2 leetcode screens that went nowhere even after doing alright on them.

Hit up an old college buddy on linked in, got a referral, went through a ton of interviews (6) and got a job in two weeks. It's nuts how far a referral will get you.

I think you're right. Speaking from current personal experience, it's not unusual to get 500 applications for a job, especially higher-level jobs like Principal engineer (where people are chasing the title and salary). I would guess 90% of them are clearly underqualified. Of the other 10%, nearly half will never respond to a follow-up email to schedule interviews. Of those that do, 3/4 of them will reject the offer for various reasons. Given I have a lot of other duties beyond hiring, spending the hours upon hours it takes to sort through that only to have it yield no fruit is ... demoralizing at best.

It seems to me that if somebody can actually solve the problem of increasing signal-to-noise ratio, they could do very well.

I think "looking for the perfect candidate" is the most common reason by far.

Great developers with domain knowledge are always possible to fit in, simply because they are money generators rather than a cost.

100% agree. A big issue with tech is there are so many options and domains that for any particular job it can easily take even an amazing developer 6-9 months to get up to speed if they're unfamiliar with your particular tech stack or business area. That's not the case with most other professions - if I'm, for example, a professional violin player, I can play in basically any orchestra in the world and be proficient from day 1.

So if you happen to find that unicorn who is not only a great developer but is also expert in the major areas of your tech stack and your business domain, you hire them in a heartbeat.

Sounds like something many technical professions have to deal with. Even with all the licenses and certs in the world, very few lawyers or doctors are just walking in and learning the process in a week. Other types of engineering need to understand the pipeline in another firm compared to their old one. A firefighter needs time to mesh with the team and figure out what equipment and tools are available here.

But then again, I bet most of those also aren't trying to rely on AI to find talent.

I can't speak about lawyers, but you're definitely wrong about doctors (have a couple in my family). They can and do travel to completely new hospital systems and are expected to do their normal job immediately (and they do).

Even within tech, I think the ramp-up time is faster for literally everyone else besides software engineers, just because the underlying technology can vary so much more (and its more important to be understood at an intimate level of detail) than for other roles.

My girlfriend is an Orthopaedic Surgeon. Great when I've got a broken arm, or need shelves putting up. I wouldn't let her anywhere near my heart or brain. Medicine is super specialised.

I hear you on geography though. Luckily the human body doesn't change too much between locations.

I think the point was that an orthopaedic surgeon can change hospitals and immediately get to work doing orthopaedic surgery. Sure, there might be some difference in how to clock in or who to report to, but they aren't suddenly working with a different type of human. Their job will remain constant despite changing environs, whereas moving between software companies could have you learning entirely different stacks that affect your process in fundamental ways.

I'm not going to speak with authority on medicine, but my understanding is that residency takes some time if you leave your area, and there are various state compliances to keep in mind. So it doesn't sound like you can just grab any doctor and get them to work after a week.

>because the underlying technology can vary so much more (and its more important to be understood at an intimate level of detail) than for other roles.

If most jobs needed intimate knowledge of the language and constructs and weren't just CRUD apps built upon 3 frameworks, I'd almost agree with you. There are definitely roles that need that expertise, but I'd bet a yoke with a solid SWE fundamentals and comletetence in one language can ramp up for another stack relatively quickly. Nat least, no clowwr than any other engineering profession. Companies simply either oversell the work they need done or oversell how urgent the work is (compared to working the existing staff overtime).

I think another very common scenario is just eliminating the headcount. Companies cut headcount at a small scale all the time and the first one to go is usually the unhired.

> we always leave a posting up even when we're not really looking just in case the perfect candidate happens to walk through the door

I've seen one that remained up after the company itself was closed down… which I knew about by having been in it when it closed; even before that, it was so out of date the salary offered was about 60% of what they'd paid me when I joined.

I once got a developer position through a professional group on Facebook. My soon-to-be manager had to have HR create a job posting on a public facing portal so I could apply through it, despite already essentially giving me the position.

I wonder how many people applied for that job before it was taken down.

> I think the rate of non-fill is higher.

I suspect far higher. Largely because there is no serious disincentive.

The "study" may have assertained 1 in 5 but that doesn't mean there isn't much more.

Having interviewed candidates for full-stack positions, and actually asked them about the entire stack (instead of just the backend), I'm surprised the number isn't higher.

I've been amazed by how many times I've had this conversation:

Applicant: "I love ${LANGUAGE} so much! It's amazing! I'm super passionate about it!"

Me: "Oh that's great! What are some things you like about ${LANGUAGE}, and one or two things you wish the language designers had done differently?"

Silence.

(Replace language with database, framework, etc. as needed).

I always wonder how much that is influenced by the blog / social media world where a few (or even one) neat features in a product or language produces "I love this". So yeah they love it ... in so far as the social media expression goes.

I feel that’s more of an artifact of American culture. I remember discussions where the stakeholder declined to use a technology, and said something like “we love X, but are concerned about Y.”

Too often I find "full-stack" developers who only know how frameworks operate, but have no idea about how the computer actually works.

"How do you do [x] in SQL?" > "I've always had the ORM handle that"

"How do you do [x] in CSS" > "I use this CSS framework and it will do it for me"

"How does a packet get between the front end and back end of your solution" > "I update the object state using [x] in the [y] framework"

Perhaps there's a reason why. The market generally doesn't need people who can do it all. In the same way it doesn't need people writing C++ or Rust to know how to write machine code or assembly. Sure, the ones that can are probably more knowledgable, but their experience with the high level language is more important.

I've done full-stack with no frameworks or non-std libraries (aside from PDO and OpenSSL, the limitations set by CEO decree) for about 8 years now.

I write my own schemas in IBM Db2. Hell, I wrote small application databases in IBM DDS in the AS400's SEU while I was still under the legal drinking age. I've always written our stylesheets from scratch, using SCSS. I've written C++ APIs that run in PASE, talk to the database with ODBC, then send back to a front end through sockets. I do graphic design and photography -- something I started back in middle school and took some formal classes on -- and have led the creation of marketing materials for multiple subsidiaries. I've spent 40 hour weeks working on sysadmin tasks in vim, 40 hour weeks writing libraries in JetBrains and VSCode, and 40 hour weeks working running around with my DSLR or working in Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.

But when I look for full-stack jobs, most of them actually want somebody who is well versed in a framework. There's not much point in doing all of this from scratch. It's more tedious, more error prone, and it takes longer to get to market. Some interviewers have given the impression that I'm a little "less than" because I haven't used any major frameworks.

I think that's actually a valid take, and it's something I've started doing side projects to address. Frameworks improve velocity. Frameworks improve reliability. They reduce the risk of a developer coming up with an out-in-the-weeds solution to a problem they didn't properly understand. They make it easier to maintain the code. They make it easier to onboard new developers who are familiar with that tech.

I once did a take-home project for a full stack role that proclaimed any language/framework could be used to build a browser-based application that satisfied a particular task. I opted to use golang and its standard library to produce an application with no external dependencies and no javascript. In the rejection email they stated the use of outdated development methods was a point of disqualification. I'm sure other reasons for disqualification were present, I wasn't a great candidate in retrospect, but I'll never forget the naivety and hubris of their framing.

They were of course a NextJS shop.

Ultimately disregard role titles. It's a people problem that you have to pull teeth to find out what they really want, and what they really want they often won't say out loud. That's fine, it's their money (and usually a lot of it!) and they should be able to dictate the services that they want.

Really sucks for people new to the industry trying to learn the song and dance.

Sounds like you dodged a bullet in terms of culture mismatch. I think a good number of these mismatches could be mitigated by having some in-depth conversations about the job, team, interactions with other teams, and problem scope, before getting into any technical interviewing.

I think it is valid to expect some experience with major frameworks, but framework experience without understanding the underlying concepts usually indicates someone who is pretty limited in being able to solve more difficult problems.

I guess larger organizations have a role for these kinds of workers, but they’re not the kind of people I want on my team.

This is an exceptionally good question to identify people who have actually used a technology for real. I've used merely the second part ("what gripes do you have about X") in interviews successfully for nearly two decades.

If you've used a tool long enough, you've identified warts and misfeatures. And you will have opinions about them.

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