2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

https://www.teamblind.com/post/2500-Job-apps-46-interviews-1-offer-hm028GVg

by yhosun • 3 years ago

57 123 3 years ago

frontman1988• 3 years ago

The market is bad but one factor is that the quantity of Product manager jobs is much less than the number of dev jobs by a factor of 10-20x so it's much more difficult to find highly compensated jobs for them.

CyanLite2• 3 years ago

$200k+ total comp for a product manager is pretty good.

I wonder if previous experience at FAANG is becoming a negative factor in the hiring process. Run-of-the-mill Fortune 500s aren't going to pay Meta money ($475k+) for a product manager. More like $120-150k. And maybe they're looking to avoid the expectations (read: entitlement) from those who are used to those kinds of outsized salaries.

granshaw2• 3 years ago

Been discussed at length in other HN post comments - yes, faang is often seen as a negative in this market, unless they’re specialized and that specific expertise is needed

guhidalg2• 3 years ago

They also don't need FAANG-level competence. F500 companies would rather pay consultants and contractors truckloads of money than hire a few FTEs at FAANG rates. Ostensibly the reasoning is that it's easy to cut back spending on vendors than to lay people off, but I think a stronger reason is that tech salaries are so high that you'd have software engineers being paid more than some executives at these companies.

scarface_743• 3 years ago

Fortune 500s don’t pay devs Meta money either….

shagie• 3 years ago

I wonder if previous experience at FAANG is becoming a negative factor in the hiring process.

It can be. If you're not able to pay FAANG level compensation, hiring someone who is taking a pay cut to work for you is often just them getting a paycheck until they get another job back at FAANG level.

If this is done before they're contributing positively (onboarding and domain knowledge acquisition takes some time), its a loss (and they've likely commanded higher compensation based on their previous experience).

Unless you are specifically after the knowledge that they bring in, for a company hiring it can be better to hire someone with less prestigious names in their experience who can do the job and is more likely to stay for a few years before jumping to another job.

If they came from making $400k total compensation per year, and you can only offer them $150k salary (and no stocks), its more than likely that they'll be looking for the next position on the day after they start.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

I wonder if previous experience at FAANG is becoming a negative factor in the hiring process

It absolutely can be. It can also be a positive. It all depends on the company you're applying to.

avnfish• 3 years ago

If this person was laid-off on Jan 1st and spent one hour on each application, that averages to 12.5 hours of non-stop job applying every day for 197 days straight

MH15• 3 years ago

I've never spent close to an hour on a job application. In senior year of college I probably sent 200 out at 10? minutes each?

ribosometronome• 3 years ago

10 minutes? To find the position, see if you fit, customize your cover letter and resume to well fit, and go through their portal? I could see maybe with aid of a GPT this being possible nowadays but still non-trivial.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

Dang!

I can't think of a position I applied for that I didn't spend at least an hour working on the initial application. And an hour would be fast-tracking it.

lylejantzi3rd• 3 years ago

from the post: "my wife and brother helped me a lot in doing the application work which seriously is a crazy amount of work"

javajosh3• 3 years ago

$475k TC for a product manager role? I am clearly doing something wrong in my career.

scarface_743• 3 years ago

It’s not what you do, it’s where you work.

granshaw2• 3 years ago

This x1000

Aurornis• 3 years ago

$475K was their old compensation, prior to being laid off.

Great product managers are very valuable. Having someone who knows the customers and the market inside and out helps a company focus their roadmap on the highest value features and products. If you're paying 50 engineers and their managers to work on products, having one highly-paid person dedicated to scrutinizing every last detail of the roadmap to make sure you're not wasting time on the wrong features will produce an efficiency gain.

I think the issue is that there are a lot of bad product managers out there, so chances are good that most people have never actually worked with a good product manager. Product management is a vague position where quality is hard to measure, so a lot of people end up in Product Management because they know how to speak charismatically and present themselves well in meetings.

Anecdotally, the recent downturn has forced a lot of companies to take a closer look at these highly-paid soft positions. Among my personal network the number of engineers who got laid off is much smaller than the number of product managers who got laid off, despite the fact that I know far more engineers than product managers.

janalsncm2• 3 years ago

Small nitpick, $475k was their prior total compensation. Maybe half of that was salary, the rest stock.

zucked• 3 years ago

As someone who drifts in and out of PM roles, this. The very nature of Product Management is quite squishy in practice. I don't have a scientific number on this, but in my experience out of a group of 10 PM's, there are 1-2 great ones, 2-3 decent ones who will likely be great if they keep at it, and the balance are people who want to work in "tech" but only have soft skills.

The commonality in the best PM's I know is having more than a passing knowledge of the domain they work in.

anon2912• 3 years ago

I'm a dev and I apply to like 8-10 roles each job cycle and usually get call backs on 4-5 and then offers from 2-4. I cannot fathom 2500 job apps or 46 job interviews.

ActionHank• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity when last did you go through this? I've heard from a few friends that even dev is brutal right now with many places leaving listings open, but not filling them, hoping for a FAANG dev to come along.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

I'm not the OP, but I went through it last year. Outside of FAANG, the job market doesn't look bad at all, as near as I can see. And I didn't find any companies who seemed to be looking for FAANG devs, but it's hard to tell.

anon2912• 3 years ago

Well I was laid off in January, Found a job in March, and am now in the process of interviewing again, since while this job is good, it's not in my preferred salary range or field of expertise.

Someone else mentioned FAANG levels of comp. My base comp is anywhere between 240 and 270k with these jobs + stock / options.

bamfly2• 3 years ago

Similar here, 20+ year career. I think it's because I've never targeted the FAANG tier. Started in the low hump of the trimodal dev comp distribution before I'd ever heard of it, noticed there was a middle hump and moved into that before long, expect never to make it to the top one. I don't think I could handle an entire day of their interviews, as being in high-pressure meetings like that for hours on end wipes me out and turns my brain to mush in short order—and that's if I put in a ton of prep time first and were prepared-enough for the material to pass.

w0m• 3 years ago

turns my brain to mush in short order

I assume this is everyone. Can only carefully answer so many questions in crappy lighting before the brain dissipates.

bdcravens3• 3 years ago

We are more highly desired than a typical PM, especially at the salary this person previously received.

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

Yeah, this is closer to my experience as well.

mabbo• 3 years ago

I'm in a similar boat.

12 years experience as a dev, was previously making pretty darned good money for Canada. Laid off on early May. Starting a job on Wednesday that pays 60% of my old TC.

It's tough times out there.

That said, I had about 25 applications, and did interviews with only 7 companies.

SkipperCat• 3 years ago

Sorry your pay grade dropped that much. But this industry has peaks and valleys so there's a good chance you'll have an opportunity to get back to your previous comp levels. Best of luck to you!

One question - do you think your comp level was due to lack of experience with current "hot" skills/languages or do you think it was market factors of number of unemployed devs and the number of jobs in your region?

dabbz• 3 years ago

At those numbers, something is wrong with their process. Poor resume formatting/content, bad social skills during interview process. That's barely 2% call-back rate after an application.

janalsncm2• 3 years ago

Agreed. I’m not sure what it’s like for PMs but 1 bite out of 43 applications is pretty bad. And 1 offer out of 46 interviews is also pretty bad.

canes123456• 3 years ago

Seems pretty reasonable to me if you are really just sending your resume to every listing that makes any sense.

I tried to pick roles I am a decent fit at and I am seeing like a 1 in 20-30 response rate. LinkedIn jobs are showing 100+ applications for any job.

tomjen3• 3 years ago

Agreed. I get the "You aren't done till you give up" and "I have been knocked down 55 times, I got up 56 times" thing, but it can blind you to a tactics issue.

But there has to be at least two things wrong here, since he had a very low success rate on applications and on interviews.

umeshunni3• 3 years ago

Job apps, especially if done on LinkedIn or on a company portal are essentially a black hole for your resume.

The signal-to-noise ratio on applications that come in through that channel is so poor that unless you're a tiny company that gets only a handful of resumes, recruiters usually ignore them.

rphv• 3 years ago

Can you provide some data to support this? I’ve had good luck with applying through LinkedIn and company portals. What other channels are you thinking of?

umeshunni3• 3 years ago

In my experience, both as an applicant and a hiring manager, a warm introduction to a hiring manager or a referral works something like 10x better than an online application.

antisthenes3• 3 years ago

Company portal I agree, but LinkedIn? What if the recruiter reaches out to you and asks you to apply?

Do you count that as a waste of time? In my experience, those have a much higher rate of response.

umeshunni3• 3 years ago

but LinkedIn? What if the recruiter reaches out to you and asks you to apply?

I meant going to a company's LinkedIn profile and applying unsolicited.

hatchoo• 3 years ago

Overall from recent experience, I've had better luck in LinkedIn compared to other platforms. The time you send your application matters too. I filter out job postings when they are over a week old. There's usually no point being 100th in line.

tayo423• 3 years ago

I haven't applied to as many places but its defiantly demoralizing. Looking at pay cuts feels so bad too. Its not like life stops being expensive. Rent keeps going up, prices for homes out of reach, food keeps getting more expensive, especially eating healthy, gas, electricity bill. it never ends. then you need to listen to some soulless hr robot tell you 180k is to much...

geodel• 3 years ago

Yeah, 180K is so low, it should be a crime. 90% percent of people I know make more than that. And I know tens of people in the world.

bdcravens3• 3 years ago

By most objective measures, $180k is very much on the high end for that role in the US. Markets vary of course, but the lifestyle you've setup for yourself doesn't determine what your skills are worth.

tayo423• 3 years ago

im not a pm, 180k is kind of average for a sr engineer i think. i see stuff like 140k for tech lead or hourly contracts around 60/hr for sr eng work. thats low...

lordnacho• 3 years ago

You have to ask whether there's real effort put into the 2500 applications. I'm sure I haven't applied to that many jobs. Maybe not even 200 in total. But it's also true that some applications are simply sent off with little chance of getting the job: either my experience was too tangential, or the job appeared to already have an intended taker, or the ad had been there too long to still be live, and so on.

I've been on the hiring side as well and you can definitely see that by far most applications (direct from the ATS) are from someone who might as well not have bothered: their experience is only qualifying in a stretch, or they are so completely out there you have to wonder how they thought it was worth 30 seconds to apply.

46 first rounds sounds like a lot too. I get the feeling that applying to too many jobs simply meant that the low probability dusted up a bunch of HMs who thought they'd take a chance.

I don't think hiring is a straight up numbers game, there's probably certain pots that are OOM more likely to get you a job than others. Eg personal network and similar businesses.

squokko• 3 years ago

The thing is that you don't get anything by investing more effort into an online job application. It's all a big stochastic dumpster which might spit out a hire or two every so often.

You're better served by finding 20 companies you want to work for and finding a way to speak live to someone who works at those companies and then applying through them.

jacknews3• 3 years ago

Maybe, but after 50-60 you really start to tire of it, and start firing off lazy applications for all but the best potential matches.

buildbot2• 3 years ago

Have I been incredibly lucky my entire career? I don't think I've applied for more than 10 jobs at once. I have heard stories like this before - maybe the market has shifted drastically, or maybe spamming 2500 applications means each one is ... less good than one might think? Tailoring your application to each job has worked well for me at least.

46 Interviews is also a huge amount. I've done less than that my entire career combined. I agree with others, something else may be off here.

vsareto• 3 years ago

I agree with others, something else may be off here.

IMO Blind is generally full of shit

carabiner2• 3 years ago

IMO it's the best tech career advice you can find on the internet. Literally life changing for so many people, search "thank you blind."

tannerc• 3 years ago

In my experience, when you’re applying to hundreds or thousands of jobs, odds are you aren’t clear on what your strengths are and what you want from your career.

And, unfortunately, that often comes across in a résumé and application.

Much better, I think, to spend time better conveying your strengths and interests as they relate to a specific job (or type of job). You’re much more likely to get the interest of relevant recruiters and hiring managers in this way.

commandlinefan• 3 years ago

Have I been incredibly lucky my entire career?

I wonder that, too, but the last time I was on the market was 2017. This is the first time in my 30-year programmer career that I've heard anybody looking for programming jobs complaining about anything _other_ than recruiters bothering them too much. I haven't been in this market personally yet, but the tone is definitely a new one since the dawn of the internet.

bamfly2• 3 years ago

Stories of people's hundreds- to thousands-of-applications journeys make it on here what seems like a couple times per year, pretty consistently.

All I can figure is I've been in a totally different part of the market from these folks. I've never once had a job search that looked like that. Typically, I do 1-3 interviews after 1-5 applications, and come out with 1-2 acceptable offers. I don't think my total application count in a given search has ever come very close to 10, let alone 100 or 1,000. Or, the last couple times, I've just gone, "yo, I'm looking" and had someone in my network hand me a job (I get that's a later-career thing—but my early-career searches never, ever looked like these application-gauntlets, either).

I doubt I've sent 50 total applications in a 20+ year career, which career includes most of the usual job-hopping-for-more-pay, so it's not because I'm doing very-long stints with single employers.

A4ET8a8uTh0• 3 years ago

It can depend heavily on timing and industry you are in. Not to search very far, in my neck of the woods, job search can have 6 months lead time even while actively searching. I am passively searching now and I did not have one call back yet ( mostly blind applications without playing HR bingo ). My buddies seem to be experiencing the same thing ( including one relatively recent graduate ). I am not sure if entities are restricting hiring, more people are applying for one spot or its some combination. I am exclusively applying for remote only items, but buddies are not as discriminating.

Still, the number is attention grabbing.

carabiner2• 3 years ago

2500 apps is with his wife and brother helping. 46 phone screens out of that, a 1.8% conversion rate, is totally realistic. My rate was 6% but I was very targeted. I had 32 phone screens. These usually only take 30 minutes and don't require much prep.

maybe the market has shifted drastically

You're catching on. This is the worst job market in 20 years, far worse than the 2009 recession. In 2009, tons of college kids were still getting in Amazon but new grads today are struggling to find anything. This is a tectonic shift causing mountains to crumble, and we will be feeling the effects for decades.

buildbot2• 3 years ago

Is it really? Because unemployment numbers don't line up with it being the worst market in 20 years.

antisthenes3• 3 years ago

In 2009, tons of college kids were still getting in Amazon

Clearly, "tons" of kids getting into 1 company (out of several thousand just public ones), is a great indicator.

Just for reference, I actually lived through the 11% unemployment out of college. The market for fresh grads was absolutely brutal. A good 20-30% of my cohort never recovered and never broke into higher-paying white collar jobs and still works in jobs that don't require a college degree.

It was so bad, that the fresh grads of those years coined the term "lost generation". Millions of fresh grads just couldn't break into adulting for several years.

vehementi2• 3 years ago

Yeah I'd love to see what the conversion rate is on actual referrals.

tennisflyi2• 3 years ago

I’m not spending time to tailor my resume to get ghosted.

jmye2• 3 years ago

If not tailoring it still gets you interviews, then great. But if you're not getting interviews, and you're refusing to do basic things to help yourself, that seems silly and self-defeating, especially if it's an appealing role or company.

As a non-dev, I have between a 90-95% response rate when I do apply because I tailor my resume, and I apply to roles strategically and intentionally. I don't begrudge people who either have high success rates without doing that work, or who don't care about a lower success rate if it means spending less time on the process, but I don't get the people who hate the process so much that they intentionally torpedo themselves because of it.

scruple3• 3 years ago

I feel incredibly lucky that I haven't actually applied for any programming job since my first. I've walked through the back door into my last 4 employers through my network. I'm 20 years in. Don't get me wrong, I'm still interviewing, but the process has moved incredibly fast for me every single time I put it out to my network that I was open.

Just this year, in fact, I put it out that I was looking, on a Tuesday, and I had multiple phone screens set up by that Thursday and Friday. Interviews with 5 companies the following week, followed up by additional interviews that same week, and ultimately I had 3 offers and accepted a new position inside of 10 days.

I wish everyone could have this sort of experience because I have the sense that (from my own personal experience, to some degree, but especially anecdotes like the OP) that it's a really, really rough out there for most people.

efficax• 3 years ago

I have only ever applied to 2 jobs at once, where one was a definite fit and another was just to have an option. Except one single case, I've always gotten interviews and offers at both companies. We're out there, just weirdly lucky people. But also I know where to apply and where not to apply, and having a very narrowly tailored application/cover letter makes a huge difference in getting to the top of the pile (something I know from working with hiring departments).

samwillis• 3 years ago

The thing I would find hard is finding 2.5k job listings that I thought were compelling and would interest me, maybe I'm just picky?

JohnFen7• 3 years ago

Being pickier might actually help you here.

To apply for as many positions as the article claims means that you are basically shotgunning applications. There's going to be a large amount of wasted effort doing that as opposed to being "pickier" and applying for positions that actually look like a good fit for you.

I think it's counterproductive, personally. When I've been involved with hiring decisions, it was pretty easy to tell which applicants were actually applying for the specific position and which were basically mass-applying for every position they could find. The ones mass-applying would be among the first to be weeded out and much less likely to be called in for an interview.

bdcravens3• 3 years ago

I can only assume that whenever they discussed their previous compensation, they priced themself out of the role (even unintentionally, for the same reason that "overqualified" applicants struggle to find a job, even when they are willing to take less)

rickreynoldssf4• 3 years ago

I'm a 30+ year experience SWE. I had my own successful startup exit and after that I skipped FAANG to join the founding teams at other startups founded by Ex-FAANG big names. Unfortunately none of them panned out.

I recently went through a series of interviews with a company that were dragged out over two months. Each went very well. My last interview was with a "Senior Engineer" who graduated in 2020 and had a little over a year of experience at Google before joining the company in question.

He vetoed me because I used a debugger in a pair programming interview. Not because I didn't complete the task well.

So yeah, it's a bitch out there.

javajosh3• 3 years ago

Out of (morbid) curiosity - what was his objection to using a debugger?

rickreynoldssf4• 3 years ago

Just that I used it at all. There's a contingent of engineers who feel using a debugger is a waste of time and or a sign of weakness. They're the ones who like to stare at code and "run it in their heads" and dump crazy amounts of "got here" into the logs. Evidently this guy is one of them.

geysersam3• 3 years ago

Isn't it obvious?

Using a debugger implies that you expect the code you write to have bugs. Not a mindset I'd like my coworkers to have.

ninkendo3• 3 years ago

Just to chime in with a different take from the rest of the comments: there’s lots of tools that aren’t really appropriate to use during an interview. If you’re being asked to do (say) tree traversal, then in real life it’s totally fine to Google it and copy/paste a code snippet. But during an interview, presumably they want to know how much you can do on your own without “help”.

It’s not that much of a stretch to say that a debugger is a level of “help” that they want to see you do without during an interview. Using a debugger is a sign that you’re not sure what your code is doing and so you need “help”… maybe the interviewer was looking to see that they could fit the exercise in their head well enough to solve the problem without a debugger.

vehementi2• 3 years ago

Probably a sign of the previous bad overhiring, and title inflation as you point out. Not so much the job market as a shitty company

bradlys2• 3 years ago

Was it actual pair programming (where you actually build something tangible) or was it a leetcode style interview?

In a leetcode style interview, I could see being thrown out for debugging. In a true pair programming exercise, I wouldn’t think this would be super common but guess it depends a lot on the exercise. Pair programming is extremely variable with the tasks.

rickreynoldssf4• 3 years ago

No it was implementing a feature. No palindromes or nonsense like that.

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B• 3 years ago

You dodged a bullet. I’ve been coding for more than 20 and the difference between juniors and seniors is: seniors know how to use a debugger instead of randomly tweaking code and writing logs which is a massive waste of time.

jgwil2• 3 years ago

Oddly enough, I've heard other interviewers at my company state they were impressed when a candidate for a junior position used a debugger in the interview.

frankreyes• 3 years ago

"Senior Engineer"

You were rejected not because of your lack of skills but to the contrary, you had more skills than that engineer. And that is a threat to that engineer professional future. You made that engineer look bad.

BrandoElFollito• 3 years ago

This is certainly a red flag for the organization (not necessarily the whole company).

I have a very senior position in a very large company. I still like to be be in the hiring process of some members of my teams - mostly because I do not want to miss good candidates that may be a bit unusual.

When hiring for my first line, I always wonder if the candidate could replace me. It is surprisingly difficult to find such people, who would be hardcore geeks and want to lead others.

I asked the "would tout like to be in my position" a few times to successful team members. A few responded "sure". I had them present to the board, lead teams, and all but one came back to say that they are done and want to come back to what they were doing. The one that stayed did well, she is a good CTO today.

I can't stand people who are scared by others and would sabotage a team. I can understand that one is afraid of competition but in a sane and big enough organization this can be worked out.

roland35• 3 years ago

I am currently at 24 applications, 3 interviews in progress, and 6 rejections (all at the initial application stage). Most of the applications are cold applies.

From what I've heard 6:1 isn't a bad ratio - things are definitely not as good as 2021 but also not as bad as last year.

wonderwonder3• 3 years ago

With respect to OP, I think the real issue is the 46 interviews and only 1 offer, not the job applications. To sit through 45 interviews without an offer points to a serious weakness in the interview department. Instead of all the applications, they should have focused more of their time prepping for the interview. The ability to interview is the most important skill when it comes to getting a job, you can be the greatest X in the world but if people don't come out of the interview both liking you personally and appreciating your skillset then its for nothing. This gets harder as you get older, I always make sure to clean up my diet a couple months before I want to interview to ensure I look good either on camera or in person, make sure you wear good clothes and speak clearly.

Personally I am a good 1x developer but I have never had an interview and not gotten a job offer. Probably had 25+ interviews over my career.

The interview is the most important aspect of any job application process. It is largely responsible for the amount of the offer you get as well. It also manages peoples expectations of you once you start the role as well.

bluesroo2• 3 years ago

It's clear that you haven't had to get an interview from a non-connection in the last year. It's a literal fucking nightmare unless you have connections that can literally hand you a job. I have 8 years of experience.

TL;DR: Connections don't mean shit. Companies require multi-hour takehomes and then ghost you. Every reply is automated unless you are moving forward. Recruiters take a week to reply to even the most basic updates.

For reference, I've job hunted twice in the last 2 years. The startup I joined in Feb of 2022 folded in Feb of 2023. My style is to treat it like a full time job, usually completely filling my schedule with interviews.

2022 stats: In 1 month I interviewed with 31 companies, received 6 offers in under 5 weeks and had a job secured making ~30% more than my previous role. Of the 25 companies that I stopped interviewing with, 13 were me cutting off the process to save time and 12 were rejections. So ~50% success rate depending on how well you count the 13 that I cut off.

2023 stats: First month I interviewed with 14 companies, was ghosted by 6 of them. GHOSTED. 3 of these were from direct referrals from friends and previous coworkers! Not even my connections could get information on my process! I interviewed just as strongly as my previous year and they vanish, not even with a rejection. Of the remaining 8, 4 were not actually software jobs and 4 were rejections that refused to elaborate at all.

Second month I interviewed with 34 companies. 12 ghosted me, 4 of which required a multi-hour take home assignment. With a mortgage and kids, I was doing it all.

Of the 22, 11 didn't work out for non-performance reasons (found candidate before I was through the process, recruiter misunderstood the role, company moved so slow that I couldn't complete the process). Of these 11, 4 were from connections! They could not get their internal recruiters to reply to me in less than 2 weeks.

Of the 11, I was rejected by 6. Again, with no feedback or even a response when I asked for it.

Of the remaining 5, I got an offer and ended the madness before waiting to finish my remaining 4 interviews.

wonderwonder3• 3 years ago

Respectfully I have never gotten an interview let alone a job via a connection in my life. I maintain zero contact with previous coworkers.

Also I don't understand why you said I must have connections and then a sentence later say connections mean nothing.

You are right though, it has been 16 months since I interviewed so things may be different.

nunez2• 3 years ago

1. The OP is a PM, not a developer

2. The market is incredibly rough for non-eng tech at the moment. Completely believable that they are getting passed over by stronger candidates (of which there are many)

3. They didn't specify the interview stages they failed at, or that they even failed at all. Ghosting is a thing, especially with tons of recruiters getting laid off

bedobi• 3 years ago

I had a fundamentally similar but not THAT ridiculous experience looking for roles from around beginning of Feb to late April. 10+ years of experience on the backend, of both legacy and cutting edge tools, including 5+ years at a huge US publicly listed tech company. (not FAANG but not far off) Must have applied for hundreds of jobs, did lots of interviews, ultimately got a handful of offers and picked the best one. I'm happy but sheesh it was def far more work than in the past when people were screaming for talent. Things are tighter now.

titanomachy2• 3 years ago

Product manager is an unusual role. There are few positions, making it very competitive. It's also an expensive role to interview and hire for, and the consequences of a bad hire are high.

The market dynamics are totally different from software engineering. PM positions come up infrequently and they're often looking for someone quite specific. Prestige also seems to factor into it a lot: I think every PM I've worked with has had a Stanford or Harvard MBA.

My recent experience as a senior engineer was less gloomy than this. I applied to ~10 open positions whose needs matched my experience well, was offered an interview at 5, and did 2 full interviews which both resulted in decent offers. My comp decreased slightly (from FAANG-level) but was still reasonable. I also applied to ~5 companies that I knew were a long shot (i.e. no well-matched positions, or significantly more competitive than Google/Meta) and heard back from none of them.

titanomachy2• 3 years ago

dang, did you downmod this? I don't think I've ever seen a post dive from #5 or so to #131 in the space of a few minutes.

bradlys2• 3 years ago

We’re getting a lot of comments from people who are not familiar with different markets. This is HN - where the focus is on Silicon Valley and associated companies. User is posting from having just left Meta. $475k as a PM with 16 YOE isn’t even remotely high when you consider probably living in one of three major cities in the US (Seattle, SF, NYC) and is working for a company known to pay such rates. This is a common compensation - not outlandish at all.

The other aspect is the interviewing. People here are unfamiliar with other markets. If you’re interviewing with FAANG and crew - you probably send out hundreds of resumes. If you’re picking really desperate startups - you might get 25% reply rate if you’re in a good economy. In other scenarios, getting a 2-5% reply rate is common. Thus why people have to apply to so many places and so liberally. You’re just sending the same resume as you do everywhere else.

The other thing is the interview process for a lot of these companies is harder and more selective. You’re competing with people from all over the world and many whom are on visas and want to stay in the USA. Your small shop in a city of 250k that pays one fifth what this person is used to isn’t going to be competing for the same talent.

My point is - wow, yes, people get paid differently in different markets. They also have different interview processes because when you get paid a lot, it tends to bring a much stricter interviewing environment because there are often way more qualified people than they can hire. (Whether you get into FAANG is a mix of luck and preparation - most everyone is qualified enough to do the jobs even if they don’t get hired but the interview process is extremely noisy and highly selective by nature)

I’ve gone through these gauntlets. I had to interview with 100 companies to get one offer. (Including 15 onsites) In other stages of my life, I interviewed with about 60 and got 6 offers. It’s hugely variable and often has little to do with you and more to do with the hiring environment. I was overqualified for most every job I’ve ever had or been interviewed for. As every job I’ve ever had has been a joke in terms of the challenge, the skills needed, or the intellect required. I’m including jobs I’ve had paying $15/hr all the way to $1m/yr. Don’t misinterpret the interview process as really being a strong signal to your ability to do the job. Especially with all the leetcode stuff.

tennisflyi2• 3 years ago

I’m at 200+ applications for a non-tech job.

ninkendo3• 3 years ago

Posts like this horrify me. I’ve been an engineer for 19 years, and I’ve had 7 jobs in that time, from my very first job in 2004. I think there have been a total of 10 jobs I’ve ever interviewed for, 7 of them with offers that I accepted, 2 with offers I rejected or otherwise stopped the process early, and 1 single time I interviewed and didn’t get an offer. Basically my success rate is 90%… some of the jobs were from recommendations within the network of people I know, but many of them were cold.

But I haven’t been in the job seeking market in 6 years, being gainfully employed in my current role.

The idea of having a 1-2% success rate is terrifying. I don’t think I’d have it in me to press on. I’m used to employers rolling out the red carpet, and I really really don’t want to go back into the job market. Godspeed to anyone who’s going through this right now, you have a lot more guts than I got.

tagyro• 3 years ago

I read the post and the comments here and I honestly can't wrap my head around some of them (comments).

Being jobless takes a huge toll on the mental (and physical) health and instead of being supportive and empathic, we deride the struggle that is finding a job in this market.

In 2023 only, more than 200.000 people have lost their job (source http://layoffs.fyi).

Companies use ATS to discard CVs that don't perfectly align, ghost candidates, make bellow market-rate offers, post fake job ads ...and fire people to show strong quarters and make VCs happy.

And when someone has the courage to speak out, we attack them.

[somewhat "self-promotion": if anyone has a hard time getting past ATS, I built a small website to help align their resume to a specific job ad: https://rolematch.me . The service is free, no data is gathered or stored and the invite code is konami]

jacknews3• 3 years ago

That 475k previous TC would have been immediately offputting to most potential employers I would imagine.

2500 Job apps, 46 interviews, 1 offer

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