The cost of getting a job today
weli.dev
weli.dev
I have to share my stories. For a position I’m a really good fit for at a company I’m familiar with, I asked a guy to ask a guy, and they said they would only hire in the US because the team is in the US.
For another position, they reached out to me. They can’t hire in Japan but offered relocation.
In both cases, I’m super grateful that people are willing to help, but I could sense that times have changed since 2023. Globalization is no longer that strong; many, many jobs are restricted to certain locations, such as certain cities in the US or India. I don’t know about the EU, though.
This gives me some hope that if I’m willing to leave Japan, I can get a good job.
It's not entirely clearly what time periods you're referring to, but when I entered the software development industry (Europe), almost 0% were remote, and it was virtually unheard of. Skype was just beginning to become mainstream around this time, and slowly more remote positions appeared, which culminated with COVID, and then slowly disappeared over time.
But today there is still a lot more remote jobs than existed even a decade ago, and a huge amount of remote jobs available today compared to two decades ago. Globalization seems to be going up and down but nowhere near as isolated as it used to be. But again, I think the perspective changes greatly depending on your reference here.
Go check the “Who is hiring?” thread. About 90% of jobs at US companies that are remote, are “Remote (US)”.
This is much different from a few years ago.
I don’t know what happened, but my guess is that there are many more American software engineers looking for a job, so there is plenty to choose from within the US (which seems an easier hire in terms of bureaucracy and cultural similarity)
It used to be almost no remote jobs at all. With Covid a lot of the jobs that were US only became "Remote (US only)". And over time a lot more timezone restricted ones appeared.
ed: Had Claude put together a small analysis of it: https://bewelge.github.io/whoIsHiring/
So the share of US-only remote jobs seems to have been steadily increasing as long as remote jobs have been increasing.
-If the AI part is so important, why doesn't the company use OpenCode/Kilo etc. and fund it via OpenRouter? That way you could even level the playing field by giving everyone the same access to the same models.
-I believe some of this is temporary. Just about everyone is now constantly using AI, so I believe we'll soon care more about someone actually being able to explain how they'd go about something and why rather than just "can you produce code that does this"
-The idea of "applications are a numbers game" and spewing hundreds of resumes everywhere is dying. I know extremely highly qualified people whose resumes never get looked at and recruiters who never look at applications. Everyone is making application materials with AI and HR teams review them with AI. I believe we'll enter an era that's much more manual and high touch.
Because 90% of IT departments' eyes just glazed over. Assuming you're interviewing at a company big enough to have one.
> Just about everyone is now constantly using AI,
As far as I can tell, this is only true in California. There are plenty of managers at every company who have to do the dance and pretend everyone uses it, I'll give you that.
The post said it's a risk and liability. I assume they mean the applicant may use the AI credits for malicious purposes like hacking or other illegal things and get the company in hot water, their accounts and subscriptions banned or sued or similar.
I suspect LLMs make the "take home coding challenge" even more useless than it already was. If you want to make it part of the candidate interview, then I guess you've got to sit them down with a laptop.
You can wonder why the font gets all wonky or why the Help center link returns an error.
But all that won't matter because STARTUP and AI ;)
Presumably, the job involves the use of LLMs, so they want to check whether they can use LLMs.
Of course, job interviews don't have to be so narrowly similar to job tasks, and they could test for whatever proxy correlates with the qualities they are looking for.
As much as I agree with this, I don't think that the whole rest of the post (about how best to examine LLM usage in an interview loop) coheres with this.
You cannot conclusively test for common decency in either interviews or recommendations. People are on their best behavior in interviews, and it's rare for someone to pass along a recommendation that will criticize them (or their behavior). Length of tenure at prior organizations is not proof, since too many will tolerate poor behavior. Accept that this is a risk involved with any hire, have clear, written business conduct policy, and be willing to show the door to people who cannot control their behavior after written warnings.
Asking how people approach problems with LLMs need not be more than a conversation. Architectural interviews need little more than a whiteboard. If you wouldn't hover over the shoulder of an employee while they work, why do you feel the need to do so in an interview?
I get it - bad hires are expensive in more ways than one. But screen-to-offer should not take longer than two weeks in small companies. Interviews help you derisk, but do not ever fool yourself into thinking that an interview process will ever reduce your hiring risk to zero. Getting a handful of dates before a shotgun wedding will always be risky. Accept it and learn to be more comfortable with risk.
> the energy you bring to a team matter
This is all the more true for hiring managers. Bad management will take strong, high-energy, high-ownership performers and handcuff them. Good management can, sometimes, take people with weaker skills, train them, set them up for success, and inspire them into becoming great performers. Someone who is interviewing, who might accept your job offer, is also taking a risk on whether you are the bad kind or the good kind of manager. The only difference is that job seekers often have more appetite for that risk than job offerers.
in germany i can sue past employers if they give a critical reference. it is assumed that references are subjective, and therefore negative references are inappropriate.
>From my admittedly anecdotal and narrow point of view, once you clear a baseline of competence, your willingness to do the work takes you much further than knowing a bit more.
From my own, 15+ years of experience focusing entirely on this problem, point of view, I can't emphasise enough how much I agree with this principle. Finding people who are technically capable of doing the job isn't hard. Finding people who can do the job well, that actively make doing the job more rewarding is much more difficult and no technical assessment on earth can screen for that.
>Nobody should burn tokens for a company that hasn’t had a proper conversation with them yet.
PREACH! This same sentiment applies to all tasks that you expect candidates to do during an interview process. If you want them to put in the work, get buy in first. You get that buy in by having conversations with them and helping them understand why they should care about your company and your opportunity in the first place.
I honestly have no notes on this post other than to encourage you to hold on to your current way of approaching the problem because I promise you, you are absolutely on the right track!
- I'd hire someone who keeps building even when jobless.
What you build is your CV/Cover, and your learning opportunity. These days, you have to know LLMs inside and out, which means using them heavily to learn.
- The subscription is probably below or around the daily rate, so it pays off quickly.
I'd argue that it's an investment in your education - not only learning to work with LLMs, but also using LLMs to teach you almost anything (even beyond tech).
I'm not saying it's better or worse, but I don't think assignments are inherently bad. It works the same way in education from what I've heard - written assignments may not be very valuable on their own anymore, but you can ask students questions about specific things irl to see if they actually know their stuff.
At the end of the day, it is the same old 'interview coding game' problem, and I suspect it is working even worse now, using LLMs and agents.
I would definitely like some way to know if they can be trusted with an LLM or if someone is going to be hard reviewing everything they submit forever. Don't know quite how to test that but asking them to use an LLM must be part of it.
I am not sure if this is the same as talking about you buying a hardware when you were 14. You did not had a mortgage and pay for insurance and car oil change then. Everything is super costly now. You have family you need to take care of. Your kids money for their hobbies. Paying for AI in order to be able to afford not a job, but job interview... This is very bad.
I even think it will get cheaper (not short-term, but long-term). But that doesn't matter because:
As long as it is 20 dollars, I as a recruiter expect you to have access to one and will create a job interview task, that asumes you have access to one. If it is 2000$/month, I as a recruiter will not asume you have access to one. Easy as that.
Some things are just obviously implied. You clearly would asume a software engineer has access to a computer, don't you? Would be funny if you apply for a job and ask for a computer so you can prepare for the test, as you don't own any...
I think “we offer a $50 (or $20 or whatever) Visa/Amex gift card as part of this interview step” is easier to admin, might skate by finance more easily, and avoids all the tech support angles of “here’s how to use our specific tooling” and concerns of them misusing your key for something nefarious.
1. Whatever limit I put needs to be completely arbitrary. 5$? 10$? 2. I cannot guarantee they will use it correctly. They might use it for the challenge. They might use it to generate harmful content. 3. It requires me to manually create and revoke keys. Candidates might want more credits. They might get leaked.
There are solutions. I just can't think of good ones.
If you can't give qualified candidates who request it an OpenRouter key with $50 on it how are you affording to pay salaries? How little do you value the interviewing and CV review time of your current engineers? What's the liability you're worried about incurring?
Don't do an on-site either, they might connect to the wifi in the office and guess the password, we can't guarantee they won't guess it and download bad things.
Don't hire in the first place, there is a liability they turn up to work in the wrong mood, we can't guarantee it.
linkedin-drivel.
We require clothes for on-site interviews. We require phone service for phone screens and electricity and internet service for video interviews. We don’t pay gas/mileage for on-site interviews for local candidates. People think of those as incidental/de minimus expenses and we ignore them.
I think LLM subs are going to be just as baseline as mobile phone service very soon (far, far faster than mobile phone adoption was in the US or Europe).
Yes but none of them are solely for the purpose of the interview.
> We don’t pay gas/mileage for on-site interviews for local candidates.
Gas is one of those gray areas because technically it's not a required expense. You could live in front of the office and just walk there, you could live in another state and have to spend 100$ on gas to get there. Since it technically is on the candidate, you applied for this job, on site, knowing how far away it was from your home. Therefore the cost is on you.
But LLM's are different. Is a cost on the candidate, that we require them JUST for the interview. Maybe that person would have spent the money elsewhere, or have spent the tokens for another job. That's where I think the main difference lays.
I think that's probably already the case for the median software engineer and maybe even for the median software engineering candidate.
If you think $200/month is still too cheap for a job, then let's say each individual job application requires a $200/month subscription.