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Comment by gravypod | Hacker News Reader

> He’s also noticed the interview process getting longer as companies get “more picky,” he says. One recent company required eight rounds, and he still didn’t get the role.

No one can truely understand how grueling this is until they see this happen. My girlfriend recently had a hard time finding a new gig. Entry level office jobs are doing >7 rounds. Phone, recruiter, HR, manager, manager + team member, manager + skip level, ... etc.

Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.

I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

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> Whats even worse is all the people in your life who are older can't understand this at all.

That's people over 50. Millenials are basically out of job market once losing the current job. I haven't heard anyone from younger generations in my vicinity getting a serious stable job either, and there is nowhere to emigrate to this time.

> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense.

There is no job.

>That's people over 50.

50 is not well-enough experienced.

You're talking to the ones who were not among this category of unemployment statistics.

Their experience is just as real if they never faced as tough a market personally, but it is pure survivor bias.

For many of the other over-70's now, the ones who are still living could often tell you how in the 1970's there would be hundreds of applicants for every entry-level job of any kind. Many with advanced degrees.

You want to work for minimum wage, bus tables in a restaurant or collect trash for the sanitation department? Too bad, the odds are overwhelmingly against you whether you have current experience in the field or not.

>There is no job.

Exactly. That's the way it was, only much worse then.

Still, right now things are looking gradually worse as misguided financial macro forces are gathering steam, without the more mature influence that would make a positive difference.

As for "status-quo" that actually can be something stable, and worth working your way up to reach sometimes. Although very often regarded as mediocrity OTOH.

This type of financial malfeasance is so familiar that I think the better terminology is the SNAFU.

Roger. Situation Normal: All Fucked Up.

There's just a new normal now you're expected to accept.

Same situation though :(

The eight round interviews are incredibly stupid from the hiring side as well. My job’s thankfully not gone quite that far, but I’ve had a bunch of hiring panels where I don’t have anything to add that the four other people who interviewed the candidate didn’t already cover and my involvement in the process was just a complete waste of time.

> It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

Imagine you have a hiring panel of 20 people, and you are a member of it. It's obvious that the whole process is completely broken. What's your correct move? If you improve the hiring process, the size of the hiring panel will be reduced from 20 people to 5, which means there's 75% chance you'll be fired. Congratulations, you played yourself. Instead, the correct move is to keep making the hiring process as bad as possible, so that the company expands the hiring panel even further, which lowers the risk of you being fired.

When you take a look at why soviet economy failed, the biggest issue was that the system actually rewarded inefficient institutions, allocating to them more resources, while punishing efficient institutions. Exactly the same problems exist within a single capitalist company.

On top of that, the employment has shifted from small business to large corporations. The best example is food delivery - 10 years ago you would've been hired directly by the restaurant, which means that either restaurants would freely compete for workers or workers would compete for restaurants, depending on the market. But nowadays either everyone deals with whatever bullshit UberEats pulls off or you're out of the game.

> If you improve the hiring process, the size of the hiring panel will be reduced from 20 people to 5, which means there's 75% chance you'll be fired.

Wait, what?

That only makes sense if the hiring panel is made up exclusively of people whose job is nothing but hiring.

That has never been the case anywhere I have worked or seen.

That's a simplified example I used to explain the point. Of course you rarely have people whose job is nothing but hiring, but often you have people whose all responsibilities revolve around inefficient processes, and making these processes efficient threatens their jobs.

TurboTax is a great example of this - the entire purpose of their existence is to make sure that filling taxes is as complicated as possible so that people keep using their services. In other countries simpler and cheaper tax systems are used, but if such a system was adopted in the US, the entire business model of TurboTax would immediately collapse, so they will fight tooth and nail against any improvement.

> I tried to explain getting ghosted, ghost jobs, online applying, multi-round interviews to my grandma. It just does not make sense. It has never been like this, why is it like this now?

It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof when firing.

Additionally, work is much more streamlined now - it is safe to expect that an employee can wear multiple hats. Engineers are expected to have basic Project, UX, and Product Management skills now. PMs are expected to have basic Project, UX, Sales, FP&A, Marketing, and/or Engineering skills now. Execs are primarily promoted from ICs and are expected to be able to dive into the coalface.

Furthermore, companies are now judged based on cashflow positivity, not just growth, so a hire has to be the right hire because tech salaries can make-or-break the P&L of a feature.

As such there is much less tolerance for the wrong hire.

Basically, modern hiring is about efficency and optimization.

You may hate it, but that's the reality. No one has a legal obligation to hire you or optimize for a simplified process.

You can't do anything about it, so you will have to think about how to find that edge.

Edit: can't reply

> There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.

That doesn't protect you as an employer from litigation over Unfair Dismissal or Wrongful Termination

> There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases

Depends on how much documentation you have and how egregious of a mistake the offending employee has had, as the line between perf-based (allowed) and pretextual (not allowed) termination is thin

> economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.

A highly performant and impactful company is orthogonal to mass employment.

Compare Costco with Walmart - Costco pays superior salaries and benefits compared to Walmart with significant upward mobility and is able to outcompete Walmart's revenue per employee.

But Costco only employed 341k people compared to Walmart 2.1 million. The reality is Costco is very employer supportive but also significantly more selective about the employees they hire.

---

Life is competitive. You will have to compete no matter what.

So highly ramped up requirements without additional compensation but also people aren't disposable enough.

> highly ramped up requirements

Yes

> without additional compensation

No. Most SWEs and employees in the tech industry are paid significantly higher in 2024 [0] (1 years after layoffs kicked off( versus 2014 [1].

This isn't true of other white collar professions.

> also people aren't disposable enough

The issue is SUI premiums leading to states incentivizing their labor boards to challenge for-cause dismissals (explained in another comment).

[0] - https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

[1] - https://www.bls.gov/spotlight/2014/occupations/home.htm

> It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made...

There is a thing called employment at will. Particularly in California. Makes firing fast.

There is nothing particularly risky about firing employees in many cases. 2 months firing is a joke compared with 4 months at least, which those same companies spend looking for talent.

The main reason is not enough ideas what to do - economy covers basics, and not enough new companies appear to offer new good products.

>It's much riskier to hire the wrong employee now. If a bad hire is made, it takes around 2 quarters to build the paper trail needed to be litigation-proof when firing.

Now? That's been the case since at least the 1980s, at least in non-union jobs.

What makes you think things were different before the "now" you reference?

> What makes you think things were different before the "now" you reference?

Unemployment insurance premiums. [0]

Employers pay variable UI premiums and state UI funds now use Experience Ratings to increase insurance premiums on those companies where employees are not being fired for-cause, and states are challenging for-cause because the majority of state unemployment funds remain insolvent after 2008 and 2020 [1]. As such, UI funds have an incentive to challenge a for-cause termination in order to justify increasing the insurance premium for an employer.

> That's been the case since at least the 1980s, at least in non-union jobs

States weren't attempting to increase premiums on employees to the same degree as they are today versus the 1980s. Most UI funds in the US entered insolvency in 2008 and never recovered, and whoever scraped by in 2008 got whammied in 2020 during the COVID pandemic.

[0] - https://smallbusiness.chron.com/employers-unemployment-rate-...

[1] - https://oui.doleta.gov/unemploy/docs/trustFundSolvReport2025...

>Employers pay variable UI premiums and state UI funds now use Experience Ratings to increase insurance premiums on those companies where employees are not being fired for-cause

That's as may be, but we're specifically talking about firing people for cause, which makes the terminated employee ineligible for UI benefits.

And even if it was as you say, unemployment insurance is just another cost of doing business and, as such, is tax deductible as a business expense.

The wall of text notwithstanding, your "argument" is sorely lacking in relevance to the topic at hand.

I tried reading your diatribe as if it were in good faith, but the best I could do WRT that was assume you were uninformed.

Have a good day and I wish you nothing but happiness and success.

I don't know where this idea that firing people is hard comes from.

My company, and no I won't say who, have fired hundreds of devs without recourse. And not in official layoffs, mind you.

Not to mention for the first 90 days or so you're fresh meat. Firing you is trivial. But, even past that, you don't need performance reasons to fire someone. You can fire someone for cultural fit, if you want. At will employment is the norm.

Companies are doing far, far too much. You don't need all those stacks of paperwork. You just don't. Am I saying that everyone company is wrong and stupid? Yes, I am. It's become a cargo cult, a self serving beast. You don't need it.

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