Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901303

by imadkhan • 3 years ago

711 1038 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

I got laid off at the start of the year, and ever since then, I've been applying constantly but have only gotten one interview. Before being laid off, I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.

I've had my resume looked at by three different services (TopResume, Indeed, Levels.fyi) and am currently subscribed to Resume Worded, which scores my resume. Despite all these efforts, I keep receiving rejection emails.

So, I just wanted to reach out and see if anyone else has had any similar experiences with applying for jobs.

Ilasky8• 3 years ago

I've had similar issues - so much so that I've created Resgen[0] just because it was tough getting call backs. It turns out I really needed to tailor my resume to each job and it resulted in a lot more call backs.

[0] https://resgen.app

ccvannorman• 3 years ago

i've bookmarked ResGen in case i ever become desperate / crazy enough to rejoin the working class. But may I just say sir, I LOVE your lightweight pixel inspired web page -- so clean! We need more sites like this, well organized and thoughtful without the clutter

Ilasky8• 3 years ago

Hey thanks!

ant6n• 3 years ago

Pixel inspired? I think it looks like a Lichtenstein painting. Neat.

ukyrgf• 3 years ago

Wow, that design is modern but brings me back to the days of application skin sites and early digital art communities back in the early 00s. Great job. I'm going to sign up.

shishy• 3 years ago

It's like gumroad.com (the design I mean)

Ilasky8• 3 years ago

Thanks! Let me know what you think when you try it out.

65• 3 years ago

To be fair this Mondrian style is a web design trend right now.

imafish• 3 years ago

I like the idea of ResGen. But I think you should consider changing your pricing.

10 free resumes per month seems too generous. Also, $7 is very low for a paid plan, when your users are likely to churn as soon as they find a job. If this tool is really as valuable for job hunters as it aims to be, they should gladly pay three times that amount.

Ilasky8• 3 years ago

Thanks for the feedback! I'll experiment with it - currently still early stages and feeling out what people are comfortable with.

ricardobayes4• 3 years ago

This site is amazing. Finally something with a clean design, no fluff and it's fast.

Ilasky8• 3 years ago

Gotta love Sveltekit SSR for snappy response

jacob_rezi• 3 years ago

Similar to what we're building at rezi. https://www.rezi.ai/

Ilasky8• 3 years ago

Nice! I've used Rezi a couple of times.

fhaldridge72• 3 years ago

Great project but I don't have LinkedIn. I've previously used ChatGPT to do something similar. Wrote a text about myself, copy-pasted the job description and then asked it to generate resume bullet points. It worked well. Maybe your site can do something similar? Instead of requiring a LinkedIn job posting, users can copy/paste a job description.

Ilasky8• 3 years ago

I plan to have support for other job boards (greenhouse, ashby, indeed, etc.) soon.

zeestar2• 3 years ago

It's really tough for remote jobs. In-person jobs, on the other hand: people are literally reaching out to me (a first in my career) about on-site jobs but it's just not tenable for my lifestyle atm. So yeah I've been unemployed for nearly a year now.

jacquesm4• 3 years ago

How are you making ends meet then? Or are you freelancing or something?

zeestar2• 3 years ago

Occasionally but mostly I'm burning savings. I got pretty used to a low standard of living in the couple of years before I entered software development, so when I started making money, I saved a lot of it. If being confined to one place for work doesn't currently suit me, then neither do many of the material trappings of rooting: accumulation of consumer goods, a nice home, etc.

austin-cheney• 3 years ago

I am right there with you. And so are several other super senior (10+ years) developers that I know.

A couple years back employers were begging to hire seniors in a heartbeat, now its nearly impossible to get an interview. I am wondering if I should retake the CISSP and just abandon software for corporate security.

kypro2• 3 years ago

It's bad, but it's not that bad. The fact you have only had one interview this year is very odd in my opinion. I've been on the market twice this year and it's been harder for sure (especially earlier this year), but it's far from impossible to find something.

I don't know if you're looking for advice or just anecdotes here, but I'll share some thoughts for what might be happening...

Frontend development has changed a lot over the last 5 years. Obviously I don't know what skills you have, but a few years ago it was common for companies to be looking for a "frontend developer" with just HTML5, CSS & jQuery experience. These roles basically don't exist anymore. Typically a frontend developer today would be someone who's got experience with a modern JS framework like React (or similar), knows TypeScript, has experience writing tests, possibly has some experience with dev tools like Storybook or docker, etc... At least this the kind of thing I typically see companies recruiting for these days.

The last 5 years also haven't been very representative. The tech job market from around 2016 on has been very strong and there was a huge under supply of labour (especially during the pandemic). Today tech companies are cutting jobs, or slowing their hiring, meanwhile your average 12 year old has done some basic HTML and JavaScript coding. Just knowing your way around HTML and CSS isn't going to land you a job anymore – companies can afford to be much more selective.

If you're not even getting interviews you can assume your resume is the problem. Again, I don't know what skills you have but you either don't have skills that are being sought after or you are not showing your experience in a way that highlights those skills well on your resume.

It may also be that you're applying for roles that are beyond your experience level. In my experience if you've been a developer for 5 years that would typically mean you're a bit better than a junior developer, but unlikely to be a senior. A couple of years ago you may have been able to land a senior developer role, but today the market is far more competitive and you'll have people with well over a decade of experience applying for these roles in most cases. I know it sucks but you may want to look for roles which require a little less experience even if you believe you're worth more. It's far better to be employed and in a role where you're growing your experience than being unemployed. You can always look for something else when you have the experience you need or when the market picks up a bit.

The fact you've been out of work for about 6 months now would be sending huge warning flags to me if I were a recruiter. Recruiters want to place candidates that are in demand and as harsh as this may sound a 6 month gap in your employment will suggest you are not an ideal candidate. I would seriously consider coming up with a back story to explain why you've been out of work for this long.

Some will disagree with this, but you should think of your resume like an Instagram profile – only show the things others want to see, and don't be afraid to represent yourself in a slightly exaggerated way. Obviously you need to be able to do what you say you can do, but you need your resume to give a good impression of you and your experience if you want any chance of getting an interview. So for example, if I was the primary dev on some project I'll typically say that I "led" the project on my resume. I'll also always include things like "senior" & "lead" in job roles because, "Lead software engineer" looks way better than "Frontend developer" imo. Minor things like this can make a big difference and help your profile stand out from the rest.

I guess to concluded though, the market isn't that bad that you should be getting at least some interviews. It sounds like your resume is being dismissed for some reason and you should try to understand why that is. If you want to anonymise and share your resume I'd be happy to take a look.

DoesntMatter222• 3 years ago

Imo this is the worst market I've seen since 95 when I started.

strombofulous• 3 years ago

Worse than the dotcom burst?

kypro2• 3 years ago

Yeah, I'm not denying it's bad. It's the worst I've seen too – although it's picked up significantly from the start of the year.

I would warn people against blaming the market entirely for their problems finding work. I've seen stats suggesting that most tech employees who have lost their jobs have been able to find work within a couple of months. My own experience suggests this is the case. It's harder for sure, but it's far from impossible.

If someone's been looking for 6 months and are not even getting to the interview stage something else is going on. To blame it on the market would deny themselves the opportunity to self reflect on why they're finding it difficult. I've seen a lot of that this year.

dudul2• 3 years ago

The market is probably not super great, but one interview in 7 months. There's something with your resume or your search.

TechBro8615• 3 years ago

You need to do some personal hustling and find hiring managers or founders of recently funded companies that someone in your network can introduce you to. Otherwise you're just another resume in a sea of thousands. Do something to make yourself stand out.

saluki• 3 years ago

Reach out to your personal network to try to get some connections to get your resume to the top of the stack.

Reach out to former co-workers and see if their current companies have any openings.

It's tough to stand out in a stack of 200 applicants without a connection.

Is your front-end stack or experience too narrow? What are you using for frontend. Are there more front-end languages you have experience with that you could broaden your search/resume?

Have you done any backend? Is now a good time to learn Rails or Laravel?

Can you seek out any alternative job boards that are more specific for your niche? Linked and Indeed are the most saturated with applicants.

Freelance and Contract work might be an option to stay active and show on your resume. Show Consulting as your current gig from when you left your last job.

Lastly you could reach out to your old company if it's a place you'd like to go back to, not sure how things left off. A lot can change in a year.

pjbeam2• 3 years ago

We are getting literally thousands of more or less qualified applicants for most of the roles we're hiring for at Dropbox right now. Can't speak for other places but I imagine it's similar for some. I don't know anything about your resume or qualifications but it very well may not be _you_ that's the problem, per se. As others have suggested I would see who you know places who can pull you out of the pile.

Paul-Craft7• 3 years ago

Thousands, eh?

I'd assume you're not actually hiring "thousands" of people, which means that a very large percentage of those "more or less qualified" applicants are not passing the interview rounds.

Since it's logical to assume that you'd actually want to hire someone for those open roles, it's not too hard to see where the disconnect is.

Of course, I don't mean "you" in the sense of you, personally, and I don't intend this to be a personal attack of any sort, but it really does say something about how utterly insane people on the hiring side have gotten in the past few months.

esquivalience• 3 years ago

I couldn't understand this comment and wondered whether you had misread the parent. The point is that they are posting job openings and getting thousands of applicants per role i.e. They are oversubscribed.

carabiner• 3 years ago

How much have you raised the hiring bar due to the flood of qualified applicants?

pjbeam2• 3 years ago

The internal standards are basically the same but who gets an interview has dramatically changed due to the enormous resume pools. Where we would have interviewed a decent chunk of generically plausible candidates before the lay-off waves we now tend to be interviewing plausible candidates with some kind of special expertise related to the role.

LargeTomato2• 3 years ago

Yes, it's awful. I applied to 60 companies and got 3 responses. I have a background in big tech and applied to mostly large and medium sized tech companies.

sosodev2• 3 years ago

That ratio isn’t bad tho

Paul-Craft7• 3 years ago

That's half the response rate I was getting years ago when I was trying for my first job with no internships and a non-CS STEM degree from BFE Midwest Liberal Arts College.

LargeTomato2• 3 years ago

I'm used to >80% callbacks. Before the pandemic that was standard.

rahimnathwani2• 3 years ago

I'm curious: when you say you've 'been applying constantly', how many jobs have you applied for?

Assuming the number of available roles isn't a limiting factor, you probably applied for ~1000+ jobs in that time. (1 job per hour * 40 hours/week * 4.3 weeks per month * 7 months)

Is that right? If so, where have you had drop off in your funnel? Are you getting dropped before or after the recruiter screening call?

If after, then the problem may not be your CV.

imadkhan• 3 years ago

I'm not even getting an initial screening call. I know this points to it being the resume but I already paid for 3 separate resume reviews, so I'm hoping its just the market right now

rahimnathwani2• 3 years ago

If you've applied to 1000 jobs and gotten only one screening call, I suggest you take seriously what's in this comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901965

jacknews2• 3 years ago

That seems unrealistic unless you're just scattering applicaitons.

By the time you've filtered out suitable jobs, researched the company a little, written a cover letter, customized your CV, gone through their application process/questions, sometimes even a test, you're looking at 3-4 a day quality applications at most.

1letterunixname• 3 years ago

I'm a Sr. SRE (IC5) with corporate, startup, and consulting experience also looking.

zer8k• 3 years ago

My linkedin views are basically rock bottom and the twice-daily recruiter spam has stopped entirely. From my assessment of my network anyone who lost their job is looking, or has been looking for a long time.

The market is effectively dead. Even if you set your sights extremely low. Even corporate suit-and-tie programmer jobs are drying up. I don't know what I'll do if I lose my job. Construction, maybe. I can't be without health insurance so I am always terrified of markets where it might take months to get a new position.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

Feels like the market is good in Sydney but alas you get lower wages and the high and rising cost of living. Stagflation is rampant!

pokepim• 3 years ago

I think the market is shit only in certain HCoL places like US or west europe, everywhere else seem to be normal maybe slightly wordless than last year (but last year was crazy good)

rsynnott14• 3 years ago

It might be dependent on what's in your area. I still get a fair bit of recruiter spam, but the character of it has changed a lot. Amazon seem to have put their ambitions to briefly employ everyone in the world on hold, and I haven't heard from them in a year, say. On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of mail/LinkedIn messages from (a) medium-sized post-startups (~1k employees, probably not a unicorn) and (b) financial firms (HFT and all that). I suspect that these types of companies were starved of applicants over the last few years; they simply couldn't afford to compete with stock-heavy offers from Big Tech(TM).

wildrhythms4• 3 years ago

I have also had LinkedIn recruiter messages dry up in the past 6 months, and as for the geolocation component I'm in NYC, and yes my profile is up to date, I'm listed as 'open to offers', etc. I used to get a dozen messages weekly, now maybe one per month.

macintosh-hd5• 3 years ago

I find it to actually be a bit quicker paced than late last year, I am at least finding enough listings to conceivably apply to currently, couldn't say as much back then.

quickthrower23• 3 years ago

Are you only applying for front end? You might consider trying backend and devops too if not. Anything where code is written. Then if you get interviews, invest in learning the stuff that gets you past their tests and interviews.

John23832• 3 years ago

There are, again, many qualified candidates in backend and devops as well. Changing specialties probably puts you at the bottom of the pile because you don’t have experience that speaks directly to the job.

Leherenn• 3 years ago

Sure but unless your limiting factor is that you can't apply fast enough to every jobs, it's just a long shot with about no downside for you.

scelerat• 3 years ago

Same here. 22 years experience full stack; leadership roles. Can't get an interview. Taking an ML class. I think telling some recruiters I had a baby on the way was a mistake.

sosodev2• 3 years ago

You’re struggling with 22 YOE? That’s unfathomable to me

agumonkey2• 3 years ago

this industry seems to be more and more senseless. or maybe it was a bubble and we're falling back to the norm where enterprises are your enemies..

lrem2• 3 years ago

Possibly the ageism in our profession is not only a myth?

throwaway20379• 3 years ago

I definitely hide everything about my private life when speaking with recruiters or potential employers. On the first day that you walk in the door of your new employer, dump all your personal problems (that you choose) on your new boss. It is the only chance you have to do it. All other times are "inconvenient" or an excuse to say no-to-hire or give you a lousy rating or layoff. Women have been facing this ... forever in the office. The smartest ones learn to play these games.

darkwater2• 3 years ago

Out of curiosity, what's your definition of "full stack", if you started working in the early '00s?

hamburglar3• 3 years ago

I’m confused by the question. Are you under the impression that the term “full stack” didn’t exist in the early ‘00s? I recall the term already being an overused joke by then. It basically just means that whatever stack you got, the person can work on all parts of it.

mpeg3• 3 years ago

I have had the same experience job hunting with 15 years experience as full stack and leadership. The market is awful right now, I either get rejected outright with some automated email or I get through to interviews where they clearly haven't read my cv and they'll ask if I have experience managing teams of 100+ (I don't)

I don't even know what the overlap between people that are looking for jobs at my level and people who have managed huge teams is... everyone I know who have managed teams that large is on massive comp packages at FAANG type companies.

It's all very confusing, it made me feel like I've picked the wrong field. I have been lucky enough in my career that I have a long runway, but I'm also not rich enough to retire and do something crazy like buy a farm like I've seen other people in my situation do.

Very frustrating situation, I have been trying to work on my own projects but I'm not a natural salesperson so it takes a lot of effort to motivate myself to do things like cold calls or even cold emails.

KirillPanov• 3 years ago

I have my system configured to auto-delete all applications containing the phrase "full stack".

Best decision I ever made.

lylejantzi3rd• 3 years ago

Why?

oto9• 3 years ago

There’s a few motives in play; office leases, are part of it.

But senior workers were getting too full of themselves a social agents for good and political status quo is coddle the government agents and their lobbyist/think tank leaders.

Now it’s templated to some dependency imports, leetcode, some well known TF; they can backfill with lower paid newbs.

I’m working on a Linux distro where the install sets up an LLM and boots to GPU accelerated 3D viewport where a little entity acts as my chatbot.

Goal is to show the world we don’t need corporate controlled software.

tayo42• 3 years ago

Its rough and people seem picky. I've been out of work for around a year now, partially by choice. I still get interviews here and there.

Post your resume in a comment here maybe? And as much as it sucks shoot a little lower? Are you you only applying to house hold tech companies?

RomanPushkin3• 3 years ago

It's bad if you're in the U.S. Companies hire folks in the US to fire them later if they want to. That's how it works, and everyone understands that we can hire today, we can fire tomorrow, because of "employment at will". Those high salaries don't mean anything anymore. If your salary was $200K and you spent 1 year to find a job, your salary is now $100K. Compare it to other countries - Germany, for example. Salaries are lower, but if you work, you can't be fired. You're getting your paycheck, you're protected by laws, and it's your American fella who is going under the bridge with his family, not you.

We really need to make "employment at will" illegal.

Personal anecdote from Russia (I hold expired Russian passport and have many friends from there). Auto-translated from chats (reach out if you're curious getting the origin link):

=== 8< ===

Another moment. When I was completely desperate to find a job here in our region, I published a CV on the Russian HH.ru. And there is a lot of activity there. In one day, they wrote to me vk, sber, yandex and several other fairly well-known offices. And all as one are looking for remote employees, but for some fucking reason that is not clear to me, I have to be on the territory of the Russian Federation. That's just an exception with Yandex. They can arrange in Serbia. But you also have to go there.

=== >8 ===

I don't know what they did to the US economy, so now it's even worse here than it is in Russia.

KRAKRISMOTT• 3 years ago

You sure they are not trying to draft you? Don't be a fool, smart engineers let other idiots do the actual fighting.

RomanPushkin3• 3 years ago

I can't leave the US for other reasons, so even if I really want to, I can't go there.

Vibgyor52• 3 years ago

Sidenote: but no, drafting is not so quick and there are multiple ways to refuse to do that.

(I'm in RF at the moment)

Vibgyor52• 3 years ago

There're no EORs (Employer of Record) like Deel etc. operating out of Russia so they'd need you to be legally/officially registered at the very least in Russia.

I know someone who did the same and then spend ~6-7 months outside Russia. Within RU, they work remotely and have never visited the office even. As a sidenote, not only did they get the job, but their income progression has been 1.5x since they joined as a newbie within 1 year.

SxC97• 3 years ago

I posted something similar just a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36876485

I worked as a cybersecurity engineer for 2 years and I've applied for over 300 _entry level_ developer jobs over the last few months and still haven't heard back from most places. It's definitely not just you!

I've heard from family and friends that are still in the tech field that most companies still have a hiring freeze in place and that this will probably stay in place for the remainder of the year, maybe even into Q1 or Q2 of next year.

The best idea right now might be to get _any_ job (even entry level positions) and just hunker down while we wait for the market to recover before we can apply for jobs that are more commiserate with our experience levels.

I decided to go back to school and get my Masters in CS while I wait and I'm also planning on doing some web or app development on the side just to pad my resume a little.

I'm sorry I can't help any more, other than to say that you're not alone in this :)

ulfw3• 3 years ago

The market is bad. I've been unemployed for 9 months, almost no interview invites and the ones I did have led to nothing (also to no alternative hire of someone else for the allegedly position). And I've got almost 20 years of Product Leadership experience, Stanford, Google, myspace, Booking and Trip.com Groups, that stuff. The market (in my case APAC: HK/SG/AU) is shit and frankly not really worth engaging in right now.

I'd love to be employed, but a low IC position (haven't done that in 13-14 years) for 60-70% less pay (the last one who contacted me) is a bit of a tough pill to swallow in a market with (last year) 10% inflation.

MrDresden2• 3 years ago

My humble advice would be to take any job that gets offered (as long as it isn't sweatshop conditions or unrealistically low wages) and then simply continue the job search.

Once in a job, you are more employable. And employers are for sure not entitled to their worker's unquestioning loyalty. So I see nothing wrong with moving positions if a better one presents itself.

iExploder11• 3 years ago

exactly, stealing someone who is already employed feels much better because from the company's point of view you have already been pre-selected. it also gives you a leverage when asking for more $$.

don't hate the player, hate the game...

moneywoes6• 3 years ago

Have you considered your own venture with that experience? Would love to connect

ulfw3• 3 years ago

I am still considering, but assembling the right team and the right locale (to get talent and funding) is a bit difficult as I am based out of Hong Kong and Australia right now. But I am open to ideas.

frontman1988• 3 years ago

Try applying with a different name, maybe there's some discrimination factor at play as well

readthenotes12• 3 years ago

I recall reading many years ago about a woman who had to change her name to be male to get calls.

That is in contrast with a few years ago where a man changed his resume to be of a black lesbian and started getting calls.

pavlov3• 3 years ago

What kind of résumé highlights that the applicant is a black lesbian?

This sounds more like a porn movie script. “Hardcore All-Girl Positive Discrimination XVII”

diavelguru• 3 years ago

Remember the FAANG layoffs were huge. You are competing against those folks (you may also be one of those).

https://fi.money/blog/posts/faang-company-layoffs-what-cause...

RomanPushkin3• 3 years ago

Being in a major corporation sometimes can play against you:

- I see a couple of corporations on your resume, do you have experience working in a startup environment?

- ...

If you have Blind app access, try to search for "I really thought after Google, I should be employable" post

mouzogu2• 3 years ago

blind is the most obnoxiously insufferable community. i'm glad they're not employable!

TC 0. how's that.

raverbashing• 3 years ago

"I really thought after Google, I should be employable"

Well, I can see the employer side as well

"After Google" you'll complain about the lack of chef on site, about how the automation tools are not quite like how it was in Google, how "oh in G we used to do that differently" etc

fwungy• 3 years ago

FAANG is nice, but it doesn't guarantee anything.

qwertynowz• 3 years ago

It seems to be bad. I have applied to 600 software dev jobs in 2/3 months and have had around 8 interviews but still no dice.

mouzogu2• 3 years ago

FED is finished . i would suggest moving into something with higher barrier to entry.

last 4 FED my company hired are ex-sales/ex-whatever bootcampers (yes my company is cheap).

remote working is the final nail.

still few good FED jobs but you have 10,000s expert leetcoders fired by faang to compete.

pkaye2• 3 years ago

What do you mean by FED?

AlbinoDrought• 3 years ago

Front End Development

jml78• 3 years ago

I assume front end developer.

tap-snap-or-nap• 3 years ago

I am amazed people are still getting jobs as FED

Tade0• 3 years ago

The corporate world is still in large part using Angular - it's a niche nowadays, but a safe one considering that bootcampers usually pick React.

bambataa• 3 years ago

Why are you amazed? There are many complex front ends out there.

wildrhythms4• 3 years ago

What do you mean? Who are they hiring instead? Or do you mean full-stack is the bare minimum now?

pacomerh2• 3 years ago

Not really, it's evolving for sure. But maybe you say this because your company's front-end is simple, I've seen complex systems that require specific knowledge of FED, not just general engineering. There are companies who like to separate FED and BED to get more narrow expertise

jameshush• 3 years ago

Reach out to people you've worked with in the past. After having five years of experience, you should have worked with at least a handful of people who need someone to fix another broken website.

These could be managers, people on your team, people on OTHER teams, vendors, salespeople you've spoken to, anyone.

Ideally, you should ALWAYS keep in contact with people you've worked with, even if it's just emailing them "Happy Birthday!" every year for the rest of your life, but the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, the second best time to do it is now.

A warm referral is the best way to get a job. It's tough doing cold outreach. Good luck!!!

a_t483• 3 years ago

So much this - nearly every job I’ve gotten in tech has been due to knowing someone working there, or knowing someone who knows someone.

mattigames2• 3 years ago

I have around 13 years in the business but I suck at socializing and I'm thankful this hasn't been the case for me, I would be broke if I depended on acquaintances to find work, instead I just have landed positions by applying to offers found at LinkedIn and elsewhere.

tomp2• 3 years ago

Interesting. Literally every job I’ve gotten was either through a recruiter or cold outreach.

xlbuttplug2• 3 years ago

The problem being that when you muck up the interview, you get outed as a quack to someone you know.

fhaldridge72• 3 years ago

I would it very strange to get happy birthday messages from former colleagues. Do people really do this?

Cthulhu_2• 3 years ago

Yes, but in my limited experience it's been former managers who are looking to see if they can re-hire you (at either your previous job or wherever they moved onto themselves).

sanderjd5• 3 years ago

I'm not really a birthday person in general, so no, not that specific thing, but I definitely have a set of like five to ten past coworkers who I really respected and enjoyed working with, some as peers and some as managers and mentors, and maybe about once a year I'll think "I wonder how XYZ is doing" and reach to them.

herbst3• 3 years ago

I would be totally weird out if some of my past co-workers suddenly reaches out to me with bullshit smalltalk to ask for a job.

Or random people from my past sending me happy birthday ever year.

I am probably not social enough to understand that, but that sounds like a lot of work just to stand out as kinda weird.

icemelt8• 3 years ago

Yes you are not social enough to understand this, I regularly get mails or messages from past colleagues who I've never talked to in years suddenly ask me that they are looking for a job and if I know an open position. I absolutely understand their quandary and go out of my way to help them out, cuz we're humans.

fnordpiglet4• 3 years ago

This is literally how I got every job I’ve had over the last 30 years. You ought to give it a try. People who know you and you know them are the best way to get good jobs. You can ask frank questions, they can give frank advice, and they will talk you up with the hiring manager. I’m about as antisocial as humans get, but it sure beats beating pavement and cold calling.

Roark665• 3 years ago

Haha, I once had to reach out to two guys I worked with 5 years ago for references, because the role I was applying for required two references from two previous jobs and these two guys were the only ones that were still working in that place. No doubt it was a bit weird for them, but one's gotta do what one's gotta do. They both agreed BTW.

laichzeit02• 3 years ago

Yeah this is weird. Work is not just a place where you transact time/utility for money. You can also get to know people and form friendships. I still regularly chat with past work colleagues and meet up with them when I travel.

In the last 20 years I’ve interviewed for exactly one job, and that was my first one out of university. Since then it’s always been people I know offering me new positions. People don’t just hire a random person off the street unless it’s some MegaCorp sausage machine or they’ve exhausted all other options.

Look you can follow this disengaged, unsocial approach, but it’s suboptimal.

softwaredoug3• 3 years ago

I personally get these and want to connect and help people if I’ve had any kind of working relationship with them. But maybe I’m weird.

It helps you also because most people aren’t sociopaths and will pay it forward. It’s a way for you to build your own network.

Your career is often only as strong as your network.

xmcqdpt23• 3 years ago

I agree the small talk is weird, I prefer when people are direct and message me asking if I know of an opening. I usually check on our internal job bank and give them a referral (if they are good!)

IMO it is absolutely not weird to ask connections if they can refer you for a job? The company even pays me bonuses for successful referrals! (Well maybe that's over now, I haven't checked recently)

sanderjd5• 3 years ago

I would be totally weird out if some of my past co-workers suddenly reaches out to me with bullshit smalltalk to ask for a job.

What, why? This is what professional connections are all about! Sure it is weird when like a social friend from childhood reaches out with an ulterior motive, but it's not weird when professional connections reach out for professional reasons. You're the weird one on this one :) And you're probably limiting your own career with this hang up.

I love it when past colleagues reach out. Even if I'm not personally hiring or don't think they'd be a good fit for my current company, I probably know of other people and companies to introduce them to.

cmrdporcupine2• 3 years ago

The job market as a whole and the industry as a whole doesn't give a crap about you. Your ability to extract a decent life out of working in software in the long run depends on the relationships you make. It's rare to actually work on a team that executes well and where you enjoy those people's company. In my 20+ year career it's only happened less than a handful of times for me.

So if any of those people reach out to me looking for connections, I'll absolutely do so because I also expect they'll return the favour when I need it. It's worked out for me before.

You don't have to invite them to your wedding. But having a brief if awkward friendly interaction and then passing on a referral for a posting or letting them know about some opportunity you may have heard of isn't "socializing", it's just a career skill.

We're all in this together. Being able to have a career that doesn't suck depends in large part on networking, not on your coding skills.

solarmist6• 3 years ago

It's about showing that you care about the person, not JUST what they can do for you, your job search, or your career.

People don't like feeling like a tool other people use to get what they want.

Or do you mean reaching out at all for a referral? This is simply because HR and managers love knowing that someone, ANYONE, likes you enough to be willing to work with you again.

yieldcrv2• 3 years ago

Same here. No problems with call backs but many rejections after technical assessments as each company only had 1 position.

Except the very first in person interview I did resulted in a job offer, just like in the beforetimes.

But it is hybrid, but I also wasnt opposed to that in the whole job search.

ochronus• 3 years ago

The market is definitely bad! Headcount is tight at companies, so they are trying to make each hire count hard, plus the market is saturated with talent (compared to how it used to be) because of layoffs.

jacknews2• 3 years ago

Rejection email?

You were lucky to get a rejection!

Or an email.

We used have to lick the bosses boots clean, applying for a job paying penny a year, an' if we were lucky we might get a thrashing to within an inch of our lives, and a rejection screamed in our ear.

Luxury....

Yes sure, I'm in the same boat, but probably with worse prospects (took a 'career break' to work on side projects, etc), and it feels like I'm boxing in a cloud - 90%+ of applications are just ignored, not even a rejection.

rewmie6• 3 years ago

- 90%+ of applications are just ignored, not even a rejection.

I recall being at that position. I firmly believe those 90% of applications are actually fake job ads to trawl for personal data. The most suspicious cases come from recruiters who post the most generic job ad over and over and over again.

mattigames2• 3 years ago

Yep, I also noticed those fake positions usually promise a very high wage, higher than similar positions.

EddieJLSH3• 3 years ago

A rejection screamed in your ear? Luxury! When I was a junior developer we used to stand in job line 25 hours a day for tuppence and if they didn't hire us we'd be shot.

JasserInicide• 3 years ago

You were lucky to get a rejection!

You could say that again. In the early 2010s, I always got rejection emails. 10 years later with milliennials now in hiring manager spots, ghosting is now the norm.

arp242• 3 years ago

33 applications since 1st of June:

- 2 rejected after interview.

- 2 ghosted after interview.

- 3 declined on my part after interview for various reasons (1 paid essentially below minimum wage, and 2 required relocating to a different country which is fine by me for the right job, but I didn't really have a good feeling about either).

- 8 rejected by email.

- 18 no reply (but some might still reply, since it can take a few weeks).

So that's about a 50% reply rate, give or take (assuming I'll get a reply from a few of the application from the last few days).

macintosh-hd5• 3 years ago

I would kill for even a 10% reply rate.

ryanhupfer• 3 years ago

Applyall.com is a good option for you, too. I feel like the longer you're out of the interview game, the more you need to get back into the flow of interviewing / talking to new options.

firefoxd2• 3 years ago

I hate to say this, stop applying.

Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.

rewmie6• 3 years ago

This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link.

It sounds like your recruiter is purposely ignoring any resume that is not explicitly sent to her personally. It sounds like a job security move at the expense of both the company and candidate's best interests.

firefoxd2• 3 years ago

A lot of resumes are not even for the job she posts. Bots and other 3rd party recruiters are also trying to game the system so they drown real candidates.

When a resumes is from her link, there are high chances it's a real person who took the time to read the job description.

dumpsterdiver4• 3 years ago

It sounds like your recruiter is purposely ignoring any resume that is not explicitly sent to her personally.

Curious, how does one ignore something that is never actually sent to them, explicitly or not?

viraptor• 3 years ago

Why stop applying? If you have time to apply - apply. Meanwhile, if you're not happy with results, engage a recruiter too.

seanmcdirmid• 3 years ago

Recruiters will get you in the door. Better yet, recommendations from the company you are applying to will work even better.

Varriount4• 3 years ago

I've had the best luck with recruiters that have contacted me directly on LinkedIn. Conversely, I've had zero luck with the recruiters that contact me via phone call.

My assumption is that this is because many of the latter are operating under the "if we get you hired we get XX% percent of your salary" model, and are thus inclined to submit as many applications as they can.

noitpmeder• 3 years ago

I think this is only really an option for some sub-spaces of tech.

As someone in a middling HFT shop my linkedin inbox is flooded with recruiter spam. But most of my friends in frontend work don't get any of this.

Pmop• 3 years ago

I also had good results with recruiters. They will actually get you at the door, so you better be prepared. Seems to be a decent strategy for people who are bad at networking like I am.

supriyo-biswas2• 3 years ago

Recruiters get a lot of flak here and elsewhere, but having recently interacted with a few for a recent job change, their incentives are aligned to have some skin in the game, and they can do the emotionally draining part of pushing the company to speed up the process for you without having to send multiple emails or waiting for months for your rejection.

misja1114• 3 years ago

Exactly, this is my experience as well. It has happened more than once to me that my application didn't get any response, but then when I contacted a recruiter he could get me in for an interview at the same company. One time I even got the job.

kuchenbecker2• 3 years ago

I have three recruiters that I contact every job hunt, makes the process better and I actively like the recruiters as people.

It's like reconnecting with a work collegue every few years.

ricardobayes4• 3 years ago

So true, if you are applying through a webform or an email address, chances are, your application is never even going to reach human eyeballs.

skrebbel5• 3 years ago

Fwiw: I’m an employer, and sometimes people ignore the “how to apply” instructions on our site (which say to email to jobs@) and reach out straight via eg LinkedIn and I always file those in my “can’t follow a simple instruction” pile.

Not to say that what you say will never work, but I think it’s worth pointing out that at some companies, application processes might exist for a reason. For me, having all applications in a single place is key to actually being able to deal with them effectively.

jkaplowitz3• 3 years ago

Finding a recruiter to apply through jobs which the recruiter is contracted or employed to hire for is very different than sending unsolicited spams to employees at a target company, even if both can happen on LinkedIn. It was the former suggestion that was being given.

fatfingerd2• 3 years ago

Sure it works for you but if you need tools to manage then I can't imagine the average applicant in your process has very good odds.

Even if only a few companies hire through direct contact, many of the ones that do will hire more than 1 in 10 of the relatively infrequent direct contacts, while their HR process may be sitting on the thousands of regular applications.

ryanbrunner6• 3 years ago

If they're doing both, I'd reconsider that policy. A lot of people will submit a normal application and additionally reach out through LinkedIn, since for many companies their direct application process might as well be a garbage bin even for qualified candidates.

If it's solely through LinkedIn fair enough I guess.

mooooooooooooo• 3 years ago

As someone on the other side of this - applications sink to the bottom and often never receive a response when sent to places like jobs@, so LinkedIn is a way to at least get the attention of a real person.

I’d suggest calling out on your job posting that LinkedIn messages may be missed and the email is the correct place to reach out.

oxfordmale• 3 years ago

For what it is worth, I see a slight recovery in the software engineering job market. In the first half of 2023, voluntary staff turnover was historically low in my company after redundancies at the beginning of the year. Now the economy isn't doing as badly as predicted, industry-wide layoffs are reducing frequently, and staff are regaining the confidence to move jobs again.

mightykipper• 3 years ago

Depending on sector, you may find you only get traction through recruiters. I work in finance, almost everything is through third party recruiters and there are two reasons for this.

1. We are only allowed to hire through either an approved recruiter or the company job portal. The company job portal gets so many applications for each job it's absurd, and we have to sift these ourselves to some degree (HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots) so rather than sifting the portal applications we mostly use 2-5 known recruiters who only give us candidates who can do the job. They do the first screenings, if they give us shit candidates we never use them again, so we rarely get a bad candidate through them.

2. Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).

heavenlyblue3• 3 years ago

Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a venue though).

How badly are you paid?

carlosjobim• 3 years ago

If you have no qualms to participate in the lowest kind of corruption, then it's not hard to understand why the labor market is dysfunctional.

batch12• 3 years ago

yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates

Maybe 99%. This doesn't work on me. Any swag I am sent from a recruiter gets handed to someone else. I turn down dinner and drinks because I feel like I'm being manipulated. The harder a vendor or recruiter pushes here, the more uneasy I feel about using them. I don't want to hang out with people who only want to be around me so I can give them something.

Edit: Sadly, I think this doesn't help me from the perspective of being recruited, but I can't help not being comfortable playing this game.

tetrep• 3 years ago

(HR are meant to confirm we only see qualified candidates, but they're idiots)

My last job tried to address this by having a small technical test of skill that could be thrown at anyone as a first pass before getting any technical people involved. We got virtually no senior role "spam", so we didn't have to worry about making a challenging technical test, we just needed to weed out junior applicants who basically didn't know how to do anything other than apply for the job.

It worked pretty well for us but we were a relatively small company. I don't remember the exact stats, but I'm pretty sure we hired less than 50 people a year (across a couple offices in the US) for the technical roles we used that test for.

kaycey20225• 3 years ago

How do I find these recruiters?

wizardforhire• 3 years ago

This and…

Use your new free time by not applying to…

Work on a project that interests you and share it online

Exercise both physically and fiscally

Spend time with people you care about and also care about you

And keep working on projects and sharing them, maybe even with hn

The comments on here are legion of individuals who post some project and have to then fight away recruiters…

azangru5• 3 years ago

What do fiscal exercises look like?

Roark665• 3 years ago

Work on a project that interests you and share it online

This is good advice, but remember it's not the only way. Not everyone is comfortable giving their work away for free.

(maybe its a new product/business idea etc). If the new business idea fails or you decide not to proceed with it you can still put it in your CV as long as you can describe it in detail and/or show potential employers your work. Assuming the project is related to your work of course.

herodotusxviii2• 3 years ago

If you don't mind, could you tell me how I should go about finding a recruiter directly on LinkedIn? I've been out of the market for three years now (had to take care of sick family) and it's extra brutal; I've been contacted by a few recruiters but I'd really like to speed up the process of networking with them if possible. Thank you. (I'm in the Inland Empire in Southern California).

nelsonic• 3 years ago

Connect with me: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nelsonic I will help you fast-track this.

hanselot• 3 years ago

This is weird. I've stopped going on LinkedIn because there is a constant barrage of recruiters.

If you list the right skills they will find you.

whstl4• 3 years ago

Add them as a friend on LinkedIn and start a conversation.

This is how they do it, they don't mind if candidates do it back.

orwin2• 3 years ago

Tbh once I listed my AWS architect qualifications, I went from 1 contact/week (since March, it was a bit better before) to 5/day.

mooreds3• 3 years ago

Ask around, google "inland empire recruiter", look on social media for recruiters (I know a few active on Twitter/X).

But asking around is best; shoot a few messages to ex-colleagues on linkedin.

username_my1• 3 years ago

Not necesarly the only way as someone who often interviews candidates, if I'm getting bombarded by spam applications, the least you can do for me to take your CV seriously is a cover letter related to the job posting / company.

I don't understand any candidate who sends out a letter without researching the company for 30 minutes and taking another 10 to write a thoughtful cover letter. if you're not willing to put that effort into your potential future position, it's not even worth opening the CV from my side.

hef198982• 3 years ago

That goes a long way, tailoring the CV and, if absolutely needed, cover letter for each application. The CV also when recruiters reached out to you, as they still have to present it to HR and hiring managers (also having a recruiter presenting the CV and candidate helps a lot, and means the CV can be a bit less polished). And if recruiters, or the companies behind them, require a cover letter, being contacted first by the recruiter makes writing those a lot easier since you don't have to cold sell yourself as much. And the first discusion / phone screening, ehich propably didn't require a cover letter, gives you hints and hooks to use in the letter (I say that as person who hates selling myself and especially writing cover letters, also I found my last job that way).

Now the trickey part is, so, to have solid recruiters hiring for real positions reaching out to you. For some reason, they did in my case more or less every time I kind of needed it. I have not the slightest clue so why, my LinkedIn profile was up to date but far from polished...

Well, I content myself with being lucky for some reason, and I am aware how lucky I am when it comes to that and quite grateful to universe, and hope to never have to go through that whole process again, because applying, getting new jobs, tinse and repeat, gets stressful at a certain point. And now I reached a point in my career where I like the stability of a job, collectively (and relatively high) bargained salary, good, bordering very good to almost stellar, retirement benefits, I job that is truely challenging (new stuff that allows me use my experience almost completely, while being borderline scary at times) working on a product for which projected end-of-service-life is over a decade after my legal retirement age.

That being said, I had a period in which I had to write a ton of applications whipe seeing the clock running down on my unemployment benefits. That alone can be soul crushing, so I try to cut people somenslack when it comes to CV and cover letter polishing. It still means one shouod put some thought behind both tasks so.

xmcqdpt23• 3 years ago

I've been on the interviewer side too and I must say that I had the complete opposite experience. I've never seen a cover letter help a candidate (they mostly don't get read at all), only hurt a candidate chances. I wouldn't even read them unless they had glaring issues (like it's way too long) in which case I'd bin the applicant.

jimmychoozyx3• 3 years ago

I will never do cover letters-- "Hey, spend 30-60 minutes on this so we can slip it into the pile of 500 applicants where it will never see the light of day! Yay!"

johnnyanmac2• 3 years ago

I don't understand any candidate who sends out a letter without researching the company for 30 minutes and taking another 10 to write a thoughtful cover letter.

I sent a cover letter to my first 3 jobs. They never checked it. Never directly asked but it comes up in conversation at some point when talking about other new recruits.

I don't see the point in a CV if you're reaching out to the recruiter. That fried request message on LinkedIn or first email is your "cover letter". Letting them know who you are and what you want.

whstl4• 3 years ago

I've given up on applying through company portals for a few years. Last job I applied myself was in 2016. The rest was people reaching me via LinkedIn.

I'm not a recruiter and have no vested interest in this, but the experience with recruiters from the candidate side is just completely different to justify their existence. From the company side, we also get better candidates from recruiters.

Applying through portals make you feel like a second-class citizen. Companies often ignore you, ghost you, have terrible screening, take ages to respond, give no feedback. Recruiters that reached directly to you have your back and will push for timely responses, will help you negotiate a salary and will prepare you for the interview.

With that said: I had good experience with internal recruiting too. My best salary offer I got was from a company that had internal recruiting (I accepted and work at this company).

But I hope I never have to fill a form in a website ever again.

mooreds3• 3 years ago

I think the right time to apply through a company portal is when you already have had conversations with folks at the company (hiring managers, recruiters, other team members) and are just "checking the box".

Definitely agree, hope I never have to apply via a portal again.

pnutjam• 3 years ago

Just anecdotally, I got 2 of my last 4 jobs by direct applying with no networking, and 2 from recruiters. One internal and one external. The internal recruiter oversold the job and it was not great. The other jobs were all good and about what I expected.

otikik• 3 years ago

Not completely disagreeing with the OP but before going the recruiter route make sure you have exhausted the social network route.

Your resume has way more chances to be considered seriously if instead of just sending it to the company inbox someone already working for that company recommends you. If you have any friends, family or ex-colleagues working on a nice place, tell them that you are looking for a position and ask them if they would mind referring you. Although it's becoming rare, some companies still have a "referral bonus" for employees that bring up other employees. You might even do them a favor.

beowulfey• 3 years ago

I would say an order of magnitude more likely, even. People always underestimate just how much even a tangential social connection improves your chances.

(FWIW, this is also why I think recruiters work.)

marcusverus• 3 years ago

I would add to this that you should find a handful of recruiters and check in with all of them regularly. As long as you make sure that you don’t get submitted to the same job twice, the more recruiters you have working for you the faster you’ll find something. To find recruiters, do a Google search for recruiting firms that have physical offices in your town, find an experienced recruiter who works for them on LinkedIn, and call into the front desk asking to speak with them.

jamal-kumar• 3 years ago

I suggest an even more devious tactic.

Run enumeration on their company and see if you can figure out their boss's PERSONAL direct email address. Send resumes there instead of info@whatevercompany.com - Often if you can figure out some scheme like first initial last name @ whatevercompany.com you can get that contact.

I tend to do this by simply waltzing into the office and asking for a business card if I can. Apparently nobody does that anymore but it gets results.

the_only_law7• 3 years ago

Find a recruiter on LinkedIn.

They keep fucking me over. Had one a few weeks back that messaged me with 2 roles that looked like a perfect 1:1 fit for my resume. Never heard from him again.

ajhurliman• 3 years ago

I’ve literally never gotten a job that didn’t come through a recruiter (except my most recent job). 10 years experience, every time I want a new job I just reach out to recruiters who have contacted me recently and recruiters I’ve had good experiences with in the past, they’ll bring me a handful of random jobs and I interview for the ones that sound like a good fit.

The most recent job the hiring manager saw my post on HN: who’s looking to be hired, and they just reached out directly.

drumttocs8• 3 years ago

I hate to say this, but many recruiters who contact me seem to reside and work from India. I get all kinds of recruiter attention, including unsolicited emails, calls, and texts, but most of them seem to be looking for a relationship where I do the work, and they subcontract with a subcontractor who's subcontracting for another contract for a major firm.

It's basically spam at this point. How can we "stand out" without getting bombarded with low-quality "proposals"?

hnaccountme• 3 years ago

My sense of the Tech industry is almost all the companies just jump to the new flashy hyped up buzz word "Thing". There is no real expertise any more. So its more sensible for companies to hire inexperienced people at a lower salary or offshore.

If you have to learn the "new tech" every few years there is no point of your experience.

randomuser23423• 3 years ago

For what it's worth, I'm in a 'hot' area and my application response rate is something like 3%. I've also had this bad luck where a lot of the larger companies I've been interviewing with have rejected me without giving a reason, and then a month or two later (or one time, the day after the onsite!), I'd see that they were having layoffs.

edit: and just as an aside, I'm a minority in tech, and I feel a bit like I'm more likely to get an interview (some recruiters have told me as much... wanting to increase diversity on their teams) while also more likely to get a "technical rounds were great, but not a culture fit" final decision.

lokhura• 3 years ago

I'm a minority in tech too and I never respond to the race, ethnicity and gender questions. There are many red flags to find out which companies are likely to be racist. If the company's diversity statement is larger than the job description, I do not apply. So far this has worked pretty well for me. I applied to 25 jobs in the last month and I got 3 interviews so far. I think ethical companies that do not partake in racist statistics appreciate you not answering those questions.

yosito• 3 years ago

When you say "applying constantly", what do you mean? A few years ago, when tried cold-applying to jobs, I had to send several hundred applications to get a few good interviews, and I have a very strong resume (15 years of experience and worked at NASA). During the pandemic, I was hiring for an engineering role at a fairly unknown startup and we had to filter through over 500 applicants and interviewed only 15-20. Now, with LLMs, I imagine those numbers are an order of magnitude worse and applications are looking more and more personalized. A few bits of advice:

- Don't focus your efforts on cold applications, the numbers are against you

- If you must do cold applications, use LLMs to customize applications and aim to send out >50 per day

- Focus on your personal and extended network, reach out personally to people you know and ask them if they have any opportunities they can connect you with. Personal connections are always going to trump sitting in a stack of 1000 cold applications

basisword• 3 years ago

In addition to your network I would say contact recruiters who may have “spammed” you in the past. At least they are almost certain get you interviews as opposed to just sending your resume places. Speak with a few recruiters and you’re almost certainly going to get doing one or two interviews a week for jobs you’re actually interested in.

nelsonfigueroa• 3 years ago

Are you on LinkedIn? I am not currently looking for a job but I still get a lot of recruiters on LinkedIn reaching out to me. I get the impression that there are still a lot of opportunities out there. But then again this may not be the case in your location.

throwaway20379• 3 years ago

Yes, definitely update your LinkedIn profile. Put something catchy in there. And post something once a week to generate some activity. It is totally influencer bullshit, but this war -- getting a job. You can also flag your profile in LinkedIn as looking for opportunities.

Paul-Craft7• 3 years ago

What do you mean "put something catchy in there?"

Traubenfuchs4• 3 years ago

Have you considered moving to Europe? Germany, Switzerland, Austria? With my senior salary and depending on frugality I can save between 1000 and 2000 € a month in Austria and have a very pleasant life. If you ask if there is gonna be leetcode bullshit in the interviews, most people laugh in your face because the idea is so alien to us. People want to hear about your authentic experiences and see you solve real world problems / take home tasks. Small no name companies are as desperate for talent as ever, while the banks, insurance providers, retailers, government related entities and consulting companies feeding on them have open positions all year round.

I don't think anyone experienced with fighting on the US software engineering market would have any struggle to get something here. Though it does depend on your expectations: You generally will not get 300k, 200k or maybe not even 100k starting and won't get any name worthy stock options unless you are doing very special things for very special companies.

Second consideration: Have you considered not applying for those FAGMAN level companies and their inflated salaries or overpaying startups, but something boring instead? Government, insurance, banking? In other words, have you considered lowering your expectations and standards?

frant-hartm• 3 years ago

I can save between 1000 and 2000 € a year in Austria

You mean a month, right? Or you forgot one zero, or something is wrong.

Traubenfuchs4• 3 years ago

Hahaha, yes. Oops.

expertentipp8• 3 years ago

Considering housing situation and extortive taxation and various contributions in these countries, the OP might be joking. Salaries there have been stagnant in numbers for at least 5 years.

mighmi2• 3 years ago

How do you find these positions? I speak German and did my studies there but always worked in other places.

Traubenfuchs4• 3 years ago

worked in other places

...like what? And where did you get/find your jobs? I found a lot of jobs just by checking out all the big name companies directly (banks, insurances, BRZ, ...) of Austria, via recruiters from LinkedIn, I can also HIGHLY recommend contacting the company "ePunkt", they are supportive, almost pushy and forceful in getting you into in person job interviews. IT rat catcher consulting companies like Accenture and CapGemini are probably always hiring. Big 4 is always looking for IT consultants. BRZ, Kapsch, willhaben, Raiffeisenbank Software Gmbh, Raiffeisenbank International, Erste Bank, those are just VERY few that immediately come to mind and none of those are secrets.

papichulo2023• 3 years ago

In my expirience, EU companies dont hire people from USA. They seem to prefer people from middle east and latin america.

Reason? I'd say 90% is because they usually have higher salary expectations so they dont bother interviewing them.

beebeepka• 3 years ago

It's not you. The market is really bad. I thought the massive layoffs in the US wouldn't have an effect on me here in Bulgaria but it just took a while to propagate. My LinkedIn spam is just the site looking for engagement, not recruiters.

I was s contacted by Microsoft representatives offering 5000 USD as a B2B. It's that bad.

Feels like my FE days are over.

isykt• 3 years ago

Have you considered contracting work?

Madmallard• 3 years ago

software engineering is incredibly saturated at this point

you have to be marketable in another way

rvz• 3 years ago

More like a over-saturated field and now 'less engineers' are needed thanks to AI.

"you have to be marketable in another way"

Correct. I would look at personal GitHub projects over Leetcode BS if I was finding a candidate at this point.

hardware2win• 3 years ago

less engineers' are needed thanks to AI.

I dont believe

ItsBob4• 3 years ago

I thought I'd add a data point to this discussion.

I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback.

I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue.

The first agent was more like a headhunter-type in that he arranged to "interview" me the following day via Teams to drill into my background and skillset. It lasted about 40 mins. Now, I can say, hand on heart, that in all my 20+ years of work that has never happened. Ever. He didn't have a role in mind, just that he wanted a few good candidates to pimp around to his contacts (CTO's and such).

My experience in the UK has been that you apply for a role you find on JobServe, you phone and chase the agent, and you hope to get through the cattle market, not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff.

The other agent had a role in mind but he also grilled me extensively. Again, never happened before... they usually ask you about the keywords they're looking for and that's it: call done in 2 mins. This call took over 30 mins.

I asked the first guy what was going on as his style was more like the US system where a recruitment agent will work for YOU, and try to get you a role somewhere, whereas the UK model (unless headhunted!) was very much that the agents worked for the companies in question and acted like a CV-buffer to filter out the crap.

One of the agents hinted that there are a lot of average candidates out there at the moment looking for a smaller number of roles so they are aggressively filtering them before handing over to the clients.

I suspect that there have been a bunch of rejected CV's sent to the clients and they're now wanting better candidates... either that or agencies are indeed swamped in average candidates (not pissing on them, but if you have avg candidates and good candidates, the avg ones will lose out).

Anyway, things are a bit weird in the UK at the moment so I thought I'd chime in.

iExploder11• 3 years ago

as a rule of thumb I ignore all UK agents, they have the attention span of a coked up butterfly. from my experience they try extract as much information out of you (your salary, last company, are they hiring, give me phone number to their manager or hr) and never call even if they scheduled a call. they never update you if the role you applied for have been filled in meantime, you simply get ghosted and your email gets spammed with offers.

I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.

ItsBob4• 3 years ago

My experience echos yours too... lost count of the number of times I've been ghosted.

I've learned not to trust agents. At all.

If I get a call I assume that I'll be ghosted or that they're lying about the role.

If I manage to get an interview, I usually get the role (I'd say about 70%+) but getting to the interview stage is always a pain with the agencies.

That being said, the market is most definitely different at the moment: I'd hate to be applying for entry-level (or even mid-level) roles at the moment!

I have a friend who is looking and he's struggling to get anywhere at the moment and he has more experience than me (I'm more senior than him but his CV has extensive experience on it).

lrem2• 3 years ago

To the contrary, it took about six years until the most persistent UK recruiter stopped calling me back. There is certainly a function of how well does your CV match their clients in there.

SillyUsername2• 3 years ago

Recruiters usually just pay lip service and pretend to send your CV through. They data mine and will have already put people forward at jobs you think you're applying to. About 30-50% of the time your CV won't be sent immediately, if at all, until their other candidate is rejected and I have (personal) evidence of this.

The reason for this is 2 fold:

1. They directly stop you competing with their current candidate, who is probably the highest % cut.

2. They indirectly stop you being put forward by other recruiters when you say "oh another recruiter has put me forward" (which they haven't, but you have a verbal contract with).

So the number of jobs you think you're applying to is actually less .

If you suspect this is happening (and make sure genuinely it's not just a delay in the HR dept first by asking probing questions) call the company and ask them directly, state that the recruiter is being a little slow corresponding and you'd like to confirm the status of your application. If they haven't heard of you, terminate your verbal contract with the recruiter and send your CV directly to the company. This happened for my current job, and now I'm earning a substantial amount of money (think tech arch, top end salary).

My boss said during hiring "I don't know why they wouldn't pass on your CV, you were clearly the better candidate".

benjaminwootton• 3 years ago

In my experience from both sides of the table, agents have always been the route to market in the UK whereas applications through HR have been a black hole.

Not saying you are wrong, but my (London, mainly BigCo) experience and read is that 90%+ of tech jobs are filled through agents.

matsemann3• 3 years ago

Same. Sooo many Norwegian companies for some reason use UK recruiters. I'm boycotting each and every company doing that.

They're nothing but noise. Shotgunning messages to everyone. Calling me out of the blue while I'm at work. Just straight up spam and annoyances. We don't get much robo-calls here, so UK recruiters is the sole reason why I no longer pick up the phone from unknown numbers. It can sometimes be multiple a day. And blocking UK numbers doesn't work. If you don't answer, they call you a minute later routed through a Norwegian number.

F*ck every Norwegian company outsourcing their recruiting to these agencies. I don't think they understand how poorly it reflects on them..

dmaa• 3 years ago

BTW what is it with recruiters being overwhelmingly British also outside of Britain (say, German speaking tech space)?

azangru5• 3 years ago

I would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now.

How do you find out which companies are hiring, please? It's like a catch-22 situation: in order to know that a company is hiring, you need to know that the company is hiring. If I search for open positions for my role on Google, all I am seeing is the endless stream of recruiting agencies with no visibility into what companies they are actually recruiting for... Are there any places left where companies advertise directly?

octagonal• 3 years ago

I won't resort to naming and shaming here but if you ever get contacted by a UK agency that 'resources vividly', immediately request a removal of your contact info per GDPR or you will get phoned daily for months on end.

offices3• 3 years ago

not this US-style agent-works-for-me stuff

These still exist for large companies (especially US companies) and those with internal recruiters. It's a shame that the latter get tarred with the general term - they have very different motivations and methods.

whatatita• 3 years ago

I've had similar experiences with UK recruiters, and heard the same from colleagues and friends in the industry. Recruiters there seem to gather a lot of applicants for a role, promise the world, then drop most of them.

I have had good recruiters in the UK but they're few and far between.

Best to treat them like company contacts. Let them apply for a role or two for you, and contact somebody else for another role. I used a dozen recruiters at any one time when I was last applying in the UK.

jwmoz• 3 years ago

The UK job market, particularly London is pretty good for this. I had a bunch of recruiters doing this end of last year when I started looking for a new role. They are incentivised to put the work in.

eastbound• 3 years ago

France here (not Paris). I’m a small startup, I spent 1 year going beyond 2 employees, and I needed to be 9. I had the income for 9, so I’m not a flimsy startup, wages are cool, tech stack is state-of-the-art.

- Indeed easily costs 500$ per month without result,

- Employees know it so they slack around. Not only they performed bad work during this period, but I also had to deal with firing one to show the other that bad work in unacceptable.

- Took recruiters at 7-10k€ per recruitee, for 1 year, didn’t work out, their candidates kept failing the basic Java tests (like they can’t align 2-for 1-if),

- Took an inhouse recruiter, 3000€ per month for 8 months, he overhauled the communication, wording style, videos, blogging, LinkedIn news, and did those 30-minutes calls before our 2 rounds of interviews.

Now we’re 8 and employees are actually pumped up motivated at work. And thanks to this, work is also more interesting than when we were few, because we have time to innovate, we’re not struggling under support workload or having to run around keeping the servers hot.

—-

I attribute the new fashion of 30-minutes calls to 1. scarcity due to Covid disorganization, 2. radios and media, even business shows, blasting out that the newnormal is 32hrs a week, 100% remote, and that if you haven’t been promoted to management in the last year you are wasting your life with your employer, 3. Students have been incredibly badly taught during Covid, so they suck at programming during interviews, 4. Therefore, employees are not worth spending the money on, and we’re better off spending the money on recruiters. So those 30-minutes call are a redistribution between who provides the value; the employee provides less value, the recruiter does.

koopuluri• 3 years ago

Could you elaborate on how you're applying to these companies?

The highest probability approach to getting an interview is via an internal referral: i.e. someone at the company you want to work at refers you.

After you've exhausted your network, cold emails with a strong pitch to engineers & engineering managers at companies that are aggressively hiring is the best approach to gain referrals.

A couple of friends and I wrote a playbook to help folks land interviews: https://koopuluri.com/get-interviews. We go into detail about what a strong pitch is, how to craft one, and how to effectively cold email.

Happy to help in any way, feel free to reply here / email me (in bio).

physicsguy3• 3 years ago

Things that disqualify CVs straight away for us:

* Unclear if have right to work in country. This needs to be stated up front! Our company can't sponsor visas, so if based in another country unless it says something about the visa status, we basically have to throw it away.

* Poor grammar, spelling, attention to detail on CV. I get some CVs through that are almost unreadable. I'm not saying if there's a single typo then we'd disqualify, but if it's littered with them it shows poor attention to detail and that's quite important professionally!

Things that would make me think twice about interviewing:

* Too much emphasis on stuff that's not relevant.

* Big gaps in employment

* Working for weird companies that show poor judgement in itself. For e.g. - Crypto exchanges, predatory companies, etc.

Tao33005• 3 years ago

Big gaps in employment

Really curious what you suggest as a remedy for this one. It seems to boil down to "sorry, you're screwed now" or "lie but don't get caught"

physicsguy3• 3 years ago

If you've got 300 CVs to review, much of them with similar experience, do you interview the people who've had 2 years off, or the people that haven't?

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK2• 3 years ago

I once took 3 years off to play an MMO game (not joking). After that had to restart from the bottom of the salary ladder, but climbed back pretty quickly. This is a universal secret weapon - drop your salary requirements, like, a lot, to get hired. You can usually climb back.

stonks• 3 years ago

Why working in crypto exchanges would show poor judgment? There are still technical problems to solve.

I knew a principal engineer who heavily disliked blockchain because it uses a lot of energy for proof of work, but with proof of stake this should be better now.

Tao33005• 3 years ago

still technical problems

Namely:

- what schemes are still left for us to pull a lot of money into before they get recognized as scams

- how do we get out in time to leave someone else holding the bag

rsynnott14• 3 years ago

I mean, why don't you want to hire Bernie Madoff's accountant? He was still solving accounting problems, and he'll be out of jail any day now.

physicsguy3• 3 years ago

It’s an industry full of grifters and scams?

grumple2• 3 years ago

As someone who has been on both ends of hiring, why do you care about gaps in employment? People can either do the job or they can't, I don't see why their personal life (or whatever they took off for, willing or not) is relevant.

tossoff49463628• 3 years ago

If you admit that you have a slight bent towards entrepreneurship or similar you are out of the door instantly. If it’s somewhere like a YC startup and they realize you’re not young and willing to sacrifice your life, same thing.

Edit: to make that less bitter sounding.

To be more helpful: A resume gap that you’ll casually admit to or honesty in monetary requirements also are instant disqualified status these days. No more low interest rate free for all.

fullstackchris3• 3 years ago

Can't help but feel this is often the case. A bit of "oh they are not desperate enough yet to join us"

moneywoes6• 3 years ago

How do avoid mentioning that, what is the ICP for an interviewer?

devoutsalsa• 3 years ago

One resource you can look into is specific channels for your skills. For example, if I'm looking for Elixir work, I'll look at the jobs in the weekly Elixir Radar newsletter => https://elixir-radar.com/. And there is also an #jobs channel on the Elixir Slack account => https://elixir-lang.slack.com/

Good luck OP!

SCUSKU5• 3 years ago

I was laid off in August 2022, and it took me 6 months to find a new job. I was able to land a decent number of interviews but I interviewed poorly and didn't get any offers. Doing interview prep actually helped a lot -- now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself.

I found my current job through the January HN Who's Hiring post. This company doesn't post anywhere except HN. Would definitely recommend that since the August post is coming out soon! This experience inspired me to build a tool that uses AI to match your resume to the best matching jobs: https://hnresumetojobs.com/

Give it a try, maybe it'll help you! Best of luck, it truly is a grind and is emotionally taxing -- but you WILL find something soon.

Dylan168072• 3 years ago

now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself.

And now that you can recognize that skill in isolation, do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?

Do you think the people interviewing you could recognize that you were specifically bad at interviewing, and not at everything?

SCUSKU5• 3 years ago

You'll have to forgive me here, I was only drawing on one experience when talking about being on the other side of things. So I am generalizing based only on one experience, however, with that said, I think the unfortunate reality is just that we as humans do bias toward wanting to hire people who are in fact able to communicate well and demonstrate their abilities to you.

Even if someone is really smart, you have no way of knowing if they are if they can't communicate that with you. Not to mention working on a team is all about communication.

withinboredom3• 3 years ago

do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?

I do, yes. IME, candidates that take the time to learn the skill will take the time to learn other skills required for the job. If a candidate can't be bothered to learn a skill to get a job, why should I hire them for a senior position? If it's entry-level, that's a different story.

misja1114• 3 years ago

do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?

Definitely. Motivation is of major importance in whether a new employee will be successful or not. And if a candidate obviously has put a lot of effort in preparing for the interview, then this indicates that he/she is motivated to get the job.

Ofc it is not the only factor to take into consideration, but surely an important one.

mrcnkoba• 3 years ago

Could you describe the process of learning the skill of being interviewed?

SCUSKU5• 3 years ago

For me, I was actually just really bad at selling myself (job interviews are not where you should have false humility I learned).

I was very fortunate in that my girlfriend helped me a lot here. But quite frankly what she did was very straightforward. She would do a 30 minute mock interview with me, and ask me pretty standard behavioral questions. Questions like:

- Can you tell us about a time when you had to work on a project with a tight deadline? How did you handle it? - Can you give an example of a project or initiative that you spearheaded and the impact it had on the company or team? - How do you prioritize and manage your tasks and responsibilities when faced with competing demands or tight deadlines?

I answered these questions on my own in a notes app, and then when she would ask me I would then draw on my previous experiences and figure out how to answer question that tells a story as best as possible.

This really helped me a lot.

One tip I would give is to generate these questions, try copy/pasting the job description into ChatGPT and ask it to generate a list of interview questions for that role! I found that much better than sifting through the SEO spam for interview questions.

pSYoniK2• 3 years ago

I had 7 jobs in the last 9 years. I've quit all of them. I interviewed at probably 50-60 places during this time and I'm currently moving to my next role, so I'll begin the 8th job in 9 years.

To practice interviewing you need to firat get details about the job and company and develop a list of questions. If I really wanted a job I'd get 30-40 questions prepared, from job specific to behavioral ("tell me of a time you had to deal with a difficult stakeholder"). Then add variations of the question so you get used to being asked the same thing different ways.

Then always use STAR (situation/task/action/result) to answer the question. This will help the interviewer remember you a lot better and it will also highlight what YOU did.

Practice going through your CV/resume back to front and front to back. Be prepared to highlight what you learned at each role and why you left from it/got made redundant.

With sufficient grind you will become proficient at this and it will make a world of a difference. I can now confidently say "I wont get this role because I messed up X, so if they were paying attention they will reduce my score for this". You will still get rejected (sometimes there is just someone better than you) but the goal is to improve your odds at being the one that gets the job.

Hope this helps!

InvOfSmallC• 3 years ago

Hey, I tried your website, it selected 314 jobs. Doesn't look like is matching correctly. Or I am a jack of all trades.

ulfw3• 3 years ago

No the website doesn't work at all. It shows me the same 314 jobs. Not a single one relevant.

SCUSKU5• 3 years ago

Hey would be happy to look more into it -- my email is in my HN profile, would appreciate if you sent me your resume there.

m4632• 3 years ago

now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing

I noticed this when interviewing candidates and although it's nice to have someone with their interview skills together, you run the risk of hiring "the master of interviews".

sanderjd5• 3 years ago

I would say that you run the certainty of this.

isbvhodnvemrwvn3• 3 years ago

Well, there's degrees. Last week I did 5 interviews where the candidate gets a full PDF explaining what we are going to do during the interview (along with a sample problem to practice on), and half didn't have an IDE or testing libraries set up for a TDD coding interview...

lizardking2• 3 years ago

I second this, I was hired through a who’s hiring post late last year myself. A director of engineering who is an active HN user was a green flag for me that the company was the right fit for me, and it turned out to be the case.

expertentipp8• 3 years ago

Bots and scams. Housing, dating, job search - these three have become hopeless "marketplaces", hopefully we are at the tipping point and they will collapse. I compile Latex CV for every job application and make an extra effort to apply directly to the company. Every time they have direct one to one communication with an experienced professional with relevant education, and they... insist on digging into inconsistencies and gaps in the CV, search for fraud on my side, ask for salary upfront (ie. "we want cheap" or they simply probe the market for salaries). The market is bad, you have bad luck, the shit's fucked.

iExploder11• 3 years ago

the ideal candidate has 3-4 years of experience in exactly everything you need so you dont need to train. has no idea what they are worth so you can underpay. and doesn't have a family so they can sit in the office 24/7.

this is what the job world has become and it's not going in the right direction.

ragnot2• 3 years ago

Bingo

iExploder11• 3 years ago

how its suppose to be done and how it worked for me in past in order of the most effective to least:

1. social circle 2. attend conferences, exchange business cards, contact info 3. apply to companies through their own job portal or direct hr email 4. don't go for shiny companies (either location or business must suck, less competition this way)

anything else such as random recruiter agencies, linkedin, job portals is not going to yield any effect in this day and age. there is just too much saturation and bots + we are in a layoff cycle and AI uncertainty.

kioleanu• 3 years ago

Good advice about attending conferences. At the last Java conference I went to, most large and good employers had booths trying to catch people. It’s a perfect “demand meets supply” situation

system2• 3 years ago

What state? Also do you apply only 6 figure jobs? What is the minimum are you asking for frontend jobs? IMHO these affect the job hunt the most.

haspok2• 3 years ago

What country? What continent even?

ivolimmen3• 3 years ago

I know this is completely off-topic but I am Dutch and never MET anyone that was laid off. Non of my friends, family and even colleague's (and I work in IT-consultancy so I see loads of people). How common is this in America? Is it normal that in your career your are fired at least once?

zdragnar• 3 years ago

There have been some industry wide collapses- the dot com bust in 2000-2002 most notably, a few more industry specific slumps such as during the housing market crash in 08, and most recently FAANG-esque companies went on an absolutely wild hiring spree during COVID lockdowns and remote-work period.

Many big tech companies went through a round or two of layoffs in the last year. I interviewed I think two or three junior devs a few months back who had been hired at Facebook or Twitter or some other company and let go within a few months of being hired.

Note that "fired" and "laid off" are very different things, with different causes, worker protections, and expectations around i.e. severance. I don't know that it is uncommon to get laid off at some point, but it also isn't something that you really go into a job expecting will happen either. Personally, the only people I know of who were laid off were in non-tech fields.

meeuwer3• 3 years ago

They prefer stealth layoffs here in the Netherlands. The end result is the same: you’re out, but with no severance and gaslit AF. Thanks Rutte, I guess?

ivolimmen3• 3 years ago

Yeah but that is only in large corporations right? I have one friend that works at KPN and survived 3 rounds of lay-offs. I personally could not cope with that kind of stress. I only work at and for smaller companies. Currently I am the only employee at my company. It's only me and my employer.

MrDresden2• 3 years ago

How do stealth layoffs function and how did the Dutch government make it possible (as I'm understanding your comment saying)?

mongol• 3 years ago

How old are you? That sounds unusual to be honest, to not even have met someone. I am from Sweden, I have been fired even though there are strong labour protections here. Fired probably the wrong word, made redundant probably more accurate. It happened during the dotcom-bubble in 2001. It comes and goes in periods but I think most people go through life without being fired.

ivolimmen3• 3 years ago

I am 48

yolo3000• 3 years ago

It happens in dutch startups as well. A recent example would be VanMoof. I've seen a lot of people being laid off. One time, 3 VPs under the CEO each took a meeting room, and started calling in some of their people to lay off. After they were done, the CEO calls in and fires these VPs. In bigger companies it only happens when the whole company does a reorganisation, otherwise managers don't lay off people because it's a hassle, or they don't want to lose budget. I have a dev colleague now who's written 200 LOC in the past year, no one does anything about it.

Archipelagia• 3 years ago

At my last job, I had a little bit of experience on the other side of the hiring table – our founder walked me through our hiring process, and it was really eye opening.

Any posting we had immediately got a lot of responses. We heavily tailored our postings to appeal only to people we actually wanted (e.g. were super clear about requirements, or talked extensively about company culture), and we still got dozens of applicants almost right away. And IIRC that was just through Linkedin, I hadn't even seen how many applied through other channels.

Granted, most of them were mass-sent resumes, but that still crowded any good-fit applicants and made it a pain to look through.

For positions at bigger companies, you could easily be competing with hundreds or thousands of mass-sent applications. Even if a human being ever looks at your resume, she'll most likely make a decision on whether to throw it away in a few seconds before moving to the next one.

At this point I think applying to postings is pretty much dead. Instead, I'd focus on contacting your past colleagues asking if they know of any openings at their companies.

Instead, I'd suggest: - Contact your past colleagues if you hadn't done so yet. - If there are relevant conferences or meetups in your area, consider attending. - Also, look into meetups for groups that might look for someone like you. E.g. if you go to a front-end meetups, you're just another guy in the crowd, but at a marketing or local chamber of commerce meetup there might be only a few people with the same skillset. Granted, this one often works better for freelancing, but still. - A friend of mine found his previous job by contacting people in the field and asking for advice. He moved to a different city right after university, so had no local contacts – I told him to look up people in the companies he wanted to work for, and just message them asking for a short advice call. I think the third person he spoke to recommended him to someone that was hiring. Though the key here was that my friend was only asking for advice on how to get into the industry – but once he spoke with people, it was easy to make a good impression and they kept him in mind next time they heard of an opening.

Varriount4• 3 years ago

What do mass-sent resumes look like?

rookwood102• 3 years ago

Reading the other comments, it's wild how different people's experiences with this can be even in the same country. In my experience, in the UK, the availability of types of jobs is dependant on the city and seniority level. London seems to have the most front end jobs for example.

As to how to get hired, although I have succeeded with direct application, recruiters are a very popular way here to get a job, especially in web development.

Finding a recruiter you trust to be working close to your interests is important, but not critical. The best recruitment firms I have found through talking to colleagues and managers. Managers often have a strong opinion on which firms refer the best candidates.

I expect another angle is the type of company you're expecting to get a job at and the compensation level. I've never applied to a FAANG, but I expect all of this advice goes out the window. Perhaps though if it is applying to too-senior jobs that is your problem then talking to a trusted recruiter could be helpful.

I don't know anything about resume scoring services, but perhaps they are flawed in some way? Your CV could be great for applying to certain types of jobs, but not for the ones you are applying for. I can suggest forwarding it on to someone who you look up to, who is able to give candid, honest thoughts on it. For example the company you were working at may not be a prestigious company or the technology you were using may not contain the keywords that hiring managers often are looking for.

You haven't given much information so there are many possibilities as to what is going wrong, including ones outside of what I have mentioned. Good luck.

rwky• 3 years ago

I can't say about the current market but I got my last job over a year ago by posting on HN who wants to be hired (this month's post is here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36573869) try posting there on the 1st.

aftoprokrustes• 3 years ago

Something that worked for me is that I have a profile where I am a domain expert who is reasonnably good at data science and software development. I am no rock star in any of the three fields, but this particular combination is pretty rare. I got my last 2 jobs this way: most applications just got lost, or ended in a meh screening interview, but there was this one job posting in the year that required this mix of skills, and I was just the obvious choice and got hired pretty much without competition.

I am not suggesting that you start a PhD in some obscure domain, but any additional skill can help stand appart from all other generalist front end developers. For instance in my last company we did quite a lot with geographical data, and if a front end dev showed even just the slightest knowledge of geodata (like knowing what a map projection is, or a knowledge of the technologies used to display maps efficiently on the web), he would quickly go on top of the pile. So if the is any domain where you know just a bit more than the average guy, even just as a hobby, I would say that it makes sense to display it on your CV and search for postings that might be related.

vasili1117• 3 years ago

reasonnably good at data science and software development.

Could you please specify how good? What exactly are your strengths in those fields? Do you have PhD?

throwaway141422• 3 years ago

I tried advertising as a consultancy, after an exceptional career in tech.

* Client emails me asking if I can help with his site. I respond. He asks for more details. I respond. He provides a website with an MLM video on how to "be your own boss and sell a product that sells itself". I was talking to a bot.

* Try upwork. Spend all day to send 15 proposals, get 3 views, no replies. Upwork wants me to pay money monthly for more "connect" points. Looks like you need to do work for nearly free to get ratings, and you're heavily competing with offshore. close tab ... Try fiverr. Get no messages.

* Startup with revenue contacts me, shows me their business, discusses their problems, seems very interested in hiring. Offers $20 - $30 an hour for Cloud security work; software engineering, seems price sensitive to the extreme, doesn't seem to want want to pay for any time spent reviewing docs/analysis, only wants to pay for the execution time. Say no. Guy keeps calling. Guy agrees to higher rate for a tiny amount of hours to be done next-day. Guy doesn't give access, asks to review more stuff. Wasted many hours for no money.

Lesson learned, try to find a fast growing company and stay away from people that sound like they would negotiate on the price of corn kernels in the back alley of aldi

ricardobayes4• 3 years ago

Thing is with the freelancer sites, they are almost all looking for cheap talent. You can be anyone, with a perfect score on the site, with huge track record, but the moment you raise your hourly above $30, no one is interested.

mpeg3• 3 years ago

Consulting is absolute shit. The only way to make it work is if you already have the contacts with companies that have the money to spend or if you have a channel that can get you those contacts (eg. a huge following on twitter, or a popular blog)

I have a couple companies I do consulting work that are great for but they came to me through my network, I have tried to get more work but either I get stuck in an endless sales cycle (think over 1yr of sales meetings and no money exchanges hands) or their budget is extremely low.

moneywoes6• 3 years ago

What channels did you use to advertise? Can upwork be a good starting spot?

throwaway141422• 3 years ago

I advertised from linkedin and my websites. Upwork is bad. You would need to do some nearly free work for awhile to get some ratings and a 'rising talent' rating, to start to be considered for work.

Once you work for free for a few weeks you might start to get some traction but you'll quickly run out of "connects", that allow you to bid for proposals. Basically you have to pay upwork to apply to gigs, and then upwork takes a cut if you get the gig, and most the gigs posted want to pay offshore rates, eg 10 - $30/hr for AI work, or skilled software engineering.

isaacremuant• 3 years ago

If you're not even getting interviews, neither of those things is responsible and there's so something wrong with your strategy.

Definitely try linkedin, as they said, and talking to your contacts (outside of LinkedIn, I mean).

Basically don't spam the same thing but treat it as scientific experiment and try different things. Also prepare yourself for the different interviews.

When you get those, remember not to work for free "for interview projects" and stuff like that.

ricardobayes4• 3 years ago

I'm still sore about the two times I was asked to do free work:

Create a custom datepicker following a strict design (that is the best part of a week minimum to make it polished perfect)

The other one wanted me to learn a complex product on my own, with no knowledge base and demo their own platform to them. All this while they knew I was working a full-time demanding engineering manager job.

thelittleone• 3 years ago

What is your area of expertise? I have 25 years in cyber security. I left corporate world for a few years which made it very difficult to get back in. So I stated a profile on upwork with with a low rate. Now, after 2 years, I'm flat out, and earning more than I did in corporate world and I can pick and choose the projects I work on.

mrweasel• 3 years ago

I think the market is perhaps a little worse for developers, compared to other positions. It might also be localized to certain areas. I'm in Denmark and there is certainly no shortage of SRE/operations types of jobs. So if you know Windows or networking then finding work is really easy, but overall there's a shortage of pretty much everything.

Just the past two months I've gotten four offers (granted two was from the same company), but they are straight up job offers, not asking me to do interviews and I'm an average SRE/operations person.

So I think it depends on the area and whether or not you're want to work for small to midsize companies outside the bigger metro areas. Some of the jobs also isn't that exciting, but it beat doing nothing.

fullstackchris3• 3 years ago

Applying and interviewing for software jobs has become possibly THE most toxic thing I've ever experienced:

- ghosted by companies if you don't EXACTLY match and 'gel' with their stupid full stack takehome projects to the T

- multiple cases of simply no response

- hours of interview rounds taking my time away, when it's clear they won't take you

The list goes on, there is truly nothing I hate more.

EddieJLSH3• 3 years ago

The market is pretty horrible right now, in my experience. Speak to a recruiter and it should be a little easier to find something. I used to have roughly 1/2 of applications leading to interviews and around 3/4 of those leading to offers but this year had a 20 application dry streak. I think the market is pretty flooded with good talent from the large tech companies layoffs and the number of people going through bootcamps for junior positions too.

Hoping to get an offer in my final interview for a role in 10 minutes!

booi• 3 years ago

good luck!

EddieJLSH3• 3 years ago

Thanks, got it! :)

giovannibonetti• 3 years ago

I think the market is pretty flooded with good talent from the large tech companies layoffs and the number of people going through bootcamps for junior positions too.

I believe this is the key part. I see many people coming from coding bootcamps with a lot of experience with frontend dev in React, since that is (was?) probably one of the few fastest things you can learn to go to the market get a job fast.

Now the market is flooded with people in this situation, since their qualifications are so generic that they become more easily replaceable.

fergie• 3 years ago

As a hiring manager, I would say that the job market is still pretty strong for any engineer who can do fizzbuzz on the spot.

However, its now much tougher in the tech-adjacent fields such as graphic design, copywriting, and project management. Not so many openings, many applicants. Even if you get the job, pay and prospects are not great.

vasili1117• 3 years ago

What about data science areas like machine learning, deep learning and AI?

aleks5678• 3 years ago

Do you adjust your resume before applying to each role? If so how? If not, why not?

Also do you send a cover letter?

nurettin• 3 years ago

Don't use resume websites. Use company links.

fluential• 3 years ago

The key is this:

While you browse various job boards if there is no direct contact to a person or the email / phone is obfuscate, just find contact details online.

I often pay for various services that can give you contact details based on linkedin profile - give them a call and most often then not you will have interview shortly after.

Do the work to reach out to those people, establish rapport and you will be in a good place. If you are great professional they will make sure to keep you on their roster as an ACE candidate.

gloosx• 3 years ago

I got laid off at the end of the last year and had some savings which allowed me to live comfortably for another 6 months jobless. I enjoyed this time, worked on some personal projects, and learned a lot. Eventually ran out of savings and started applying in the spring – the recruiter will set up an interview for you very quickly, so there was no problem on that side, although the quality is low, usually, it is a mechanical interview for X/Y/Z 10000-employee conglomerate looking for 10001st with cosmic high expectations (from a 2007 methodical book), so you have to rely on the quantity a lot to find what you want (it's a good practice anyway). In the end, I was lucky to find my gem by leaving a short resume in an HN "Who wants to be hired" thread :) You never know when and where you will find your destiny – but you can always pull more out of the chance – if you advertise vigorously!

vegancap• 3 years ago

I got laid off, started working for an unfunded start-up, they ran out of cash. Had to look for other jobs, it took something like two months to find one. I applied to probably the most jobs I've ever applied for whilst on a job hunt. Previous job hunts have taken like... a couple of weeks and I've had multiple offers to choose from. It really came down to one solid offer this time around. Most of my applications were just rejected immediately, without even speaking to anyone. It's easily the worst I've ever seen it. I suspect a lot of jobs are waiting to see if folks laid off by Google/Meta/Twitter would apply, hence why I was getting rejected immediately, having not worked for one of them. Just a theory though... but either way, it's really really tough at the minute. Hang in there, mate. You will get something, it's just going to take a bit more digging this time around.

Uptrenda2• 3 years ago

I believe the market really is just bad right now. When I was job searching it probably took me 3 times as long. I noticed that there were hundreds of applicants per role when normally I'd have noticed less than 20 maybe? Even at my current company they told us that hundreds of people were applying. That's how many you have to beat just to get in the door.

I think it's caused by a number of factors:

(1) Investors are spooked about the health of the economy and are giving out less funding. Less funding = slower startup growth = less hiring for new roles.

(2) Since funding is slowing down startups can't count on future raises as much and are being told to preserving capital. Runway becomes more of a priority = also less hiring.

(3) ''"Covid revenue spikes lead to surges in hiring and lay offs when revenues reversed.'" I've been told it was only non-technical roles but I don't buy it.

I think what happened was companies needed to trim fat to satisfy scared investors and Covid was used as the perfect excuse to make layoffs seem like they were outside of companies control. But everything was about the mentality of scared investors. Investors were literally angry that more people weren't fired... So yeah, this is quite a toxic time to be in tech. But I do think it will stabilize eventually.

varjag3• 3 years ago

It's the interest rate. Investment money is no longer (near) free.

toxik• 3 years ago

Meanwhile companies are having record profits. What gives?

idrios2• 3 years ago

At least in regards to competing against hundreds of applicants, I think that's driven by how easy it is to submit a job application now, and by the fact that so many roles are remote. I'm job searching as well at the moment, and a friend I talked to said he had genuinely applied to at least 1000 jobs, in basically any city in the country, before landing the role he has now. Said he submitted 20 applications/day, 5 days a week for 6 months. That kind of math can explain why so many roles have 1000+ other applicants.

Varriount4• 3 years ago

I'm curious though - how many of those applications were for recently posted positions? I ask because I assume that the older a job posting, the more likely its position has been filled but the posting hasn't been taken down.

If you apply to 1000 positions, but 700 are from those "zombie" job postings, then you've really only applied to 300 positions.

Macha6• 3 years ago

I will say as someone who's been involved in the hiring side, the 100s of applicants number is true but also misleading. Especially if you take public applications on linked in or someone. You'll get a lot of people who are unqualified, and I don't mean stuff like "3 years of experience and the req said 5" or "Only worked in scala but we're hiring for python devs", but rather "This person is a cashier and has not indicated anywhere they would have gotten development experience", or "This person is a fresh graduate applying for a team lead role".

Then if there are still too many to interview after that first filter there's the easy ways to cut down numbers further like "This person has no visa and has not started any visa process to work in our jurisdiction" or "this person's entire career is in a single tech stack that is not our tech stack while there's other candidates with our tech stack or a track record of adopting new ones". Could these people work out? Possibly. But it's an overhead that when there's extra candidates, they need something to stick out to make it onto the shortlist. If there's others that have all the same pros and an already valid visa/citizenship or the right tech stack, they'll get on the shortlist first.

After those two processes, the number of applicants per role are not that crazy.

TheCaptain48152• 3 years ago

This would be such a fantastic use of LLMs. Each step you listed to curtail your list could be done fairly easily using a specific model (prob classification oriented). I wonder if there's a market for something like this.

Uptrenda2• 3 years ago

I am always curious what kind of candidates the competition are. You have a unique insight as someone who does hiring.

b20000• 3 years ago

that is why you have to first verify whether they have a master's in CS, if your requirement asks for that. you call the university and find out. if they don't, you can discard the candidate. then, you can filter on the visa requirement etc, and only after doing all these obvious things you go on to your requirements.

this also means you don't need to do leetcode interviews. anyone from a decent university with an actual degree will be able to code, or quickly learn how to. you said it yourself - too many candidates, so no time to do leetcode BS.

codeisawesome2• 3 years ago

We should replace the term ‘trim fat’ with ‘cut flesh’ because it’s ridiculous and demonstrably wrong IME to assume management knows which resources are fat and which resources are actually crucial muscle that they would be (funnily) forced to re-hire for the sake of the health of the business.

coffeebeqn• 3 years ago

Very anecdotally it seems to have picked up in July/August. No major layoffs and at least I’m getting the usual recruiters spam again.

edrxty5• 3 years ago

Same, I've had a bunch of flying car startups start bugging me with weird stuff plus a couple of the primes. It was all rather sudden too so I'm not sure what happened to flip that switch.

fxtentacle• 3 years ago

Be careful when batch applying. My company, for example, requires applicants to repeat a code word in the email subject line. Last time we had an opening, it was clearly stated in the job description, yet 90+% of applicants didn't do it. We then sorted them onto the same pile as those guys from India that booked a CV spamming service, meaning no human ever looked at the CVs of people who didn't follow this simple request.

o1y32• 3 years ago

Assuming we are talking about software engineer positions, at least in the US I have not seen any company that requires applicants to actually send an email to apply for a long time. Just about every company uses an online applicant tracking system, either a third party, common system or an in-house one.

zorrolovsky• 3 years ago

Good tip, but to offer a counter-point: I skip a lot of text when reading job descriptions because 99% of the time they are packed with marketing nonsense. It's so dull, meaningless and repetitive that it's sometimes comic.

Ie toilet paper company: "Here at XYZ corp we believe we will change the world forever through market-leading technology that inspires generations. We hire innovators, explorers and change-makers. We're non conformists on a mission. blah blah blah"

The real job role: "be some sysadmin for an ancient legacy platform".

rsynnott14• 3 years ago

It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.

It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them.

Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overdesigned? For instance, a recent trend in resumes was to show (programming) languages known in a pie chart (do not do this; it is nonsensical). In many companies, the text from your resume is going to end up in a standard format anyway; they'll have tools for this and if their tool can't extract your text they may not bother. Unless you're a graphic designer or something, you probably want a boringly-designed resume.

Are you applying jobs for which you are dramatically underqualified? One thing to keep in mind is that some small companies (if you're coming from one) have _wild_ title inflation; a small startup might call someone with 5 and a half years experience their director of frontend engineering, say, whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.

Does anything particularly unfortunate come up if people Google your name? For instance, a real-life version of that Seinfeld episode where Elaine's dating a guy who has the same name as a notorious local serial killer.

whiddershins• 3 years ago

No, no one calls someone with 5.5 years of experience a junior engineer.

Aeolun• 3 years ago

That depends entirely on their skill. I’ve seen people with 10 years of experience that were still junior.

rsynnott14• 3 years ago

Eh, maybe an "engineer", if they have junior, null, senior grades. A lot of places wouldn't consider that sort of experience level automatically senior; they'd have to be exceptional.

cientifico• 3 years ago

I do, and quite frequently.

After more than a 2 decades in software development (rails/web/...), for me to consider a developer to be a senior it needs to:

* Communicate: For example: can explain tech concepts to non tech people, or inform on Monday that the sprint will be unlikely to be done in time.

* Can estimate and adapt to changes. Be boring and predictable.

* Can work/collaborate/teach with other devs.

I got tired of interviewing tech people that though that to be senior is the same as to be specialist (or worse even, that it was related with the number of years).

animuchan• 3 years ago

That's exactly what the parent comment says: title inflation.

I sometimes get even funnier CVs, where a person with 2-3 years of experience (usually from the Army) is already in a tech lead / architect position.

washywashy• 3 years ago

I think the issue is that people sometimes incorrectly assume job titles are standard and used the same across different companies. At some companies titles are more about pay bands. I’ve worked places with a bunch of “senior” engineers, but that was mainly because the company pay bands couldn’t compete with the market for junior engineers so they’d hire them as seniors. It’s bad too because sometimes once an employee gets that title they expect it at other companies even if the experience level isn’t there yet, which limits their mobility because they refuse to take a backward step in their career, even if the pay is better

shultays• 3 years ago

I worked with a person for about 3 years (and he had previous experience as well) and I wouldn't even call him a fresh-grad level or trust him more than I trust an intern. Some people are immune to learning

artificialLimbs2• 3 years ago

We have a 14 year junior engineer. She refuses to learn new tech, is difficult to work with, and makes a mean bowl of spaghetti code. She does it so quickly though and has so much institutional knowledge that it’s pretty much mandatory she stays.

VoodooJuJu• 3 years ago

but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview.

At this point in time, it's completely normal for people breaking into the industry.

smeyer• 3 years ago

But someone with 5.5 years of experience isn't a person breaking into the industry.

yodsanklai• 3 years ago

_wild_ title inflation

I'm wondering if it's important to put a specific title on one's resume. I assume many companies don't have any titles at all and everybody is just a "software engineers", whether they are a fresh graduate or 10 years of experience tech lead. What is more relevant is the scope of the job done which should be listed in a job description.

Macha6• 3 years ago

I think yes. While many companies have unprefixed titles, others have just plain "Software Engineer" as one step above graduate and even some otherwise decent companies will discard resumes applying for senior/lead positions when a HR drone does a first pass and decides "no senior level experience", even if your descriptions are full of business impact and leadership experience.

rsynnott14• 3 years ago

Yeah, honestly if I was coming from a startup that called everyone the Vice-President of Whatever (or indeed a large multinational bank; some of those also have silly title inflation) I'd be inclined to just put engineer.

blitz_skull2• 3 years ago

whereas everyone else would call that person [with 5 years experience] a junior engineer

I’ve met people with 3 years experience who I’d consider more senior than myself (8 years). Some folks just learn really fast and/or don’t do much else other than work.

Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.

tough5• 3 years ago

It's such an old-fashioned way to look at skills and experience.

Tbh there should be real ways to measure all this but there aren't.

If you can code by your own without handholding, are you a junior at that point anyways?

itsoktocry3• 3 years ago

Some folks just learn really fast and/or don’t do much else other than work.

Maybe it's just me, but I don't consider junior/senior to be defined by how "good" you are at programming. Obviously the hope is that senior > junior, but there are other, softer, skills involved with being a senior.

grumple2• 3 years ago

Experience is absolutely relevant. You are vastly more likely to be competent at 10 years than 5 or 3 or 1. Sure, I have worked with incompetent people with more experience and I've been the "rock star" with 2 outperforming devs with 15, but there's still a strong correlation between experience and ability.

BobbyJo• 3 years ago

Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.

I cannot disagree with this more. In my own experience, I've never met anyone with less than 5 years of experience that I'd call "good". And I've worked at several places in SV, FAANG included.

Workaccount23• 3 years ago

The good old "They don't have 10 years experience, they have 2 years of experience 5 times"

Too• 3 years ago

There is the saying that to get 5 years of experience in 1 year you should work in a startup.

This isn't only about title inflation. It is in some ways true in the real sense also. Because in a small team you get exposed to everything and if things don't work, it's very obvious why and there are no excuses to hide behind. Whereas in an enterprise you could sleep behind the wheel, roam around in pointless meetings, wait for the other department blocking you, ride on your teammates merits, close 1 story per month and nobody would question.

This isn't to say there aren't great minds in big organizations, I've been in both contexts and learned tons and met absolutely fantastic colleagues and experiences in both.

jokethrowaway• 3 years ago

I don't think it's about learning very fast. You learn the technology as you use it.

It's about having the brain to reason around problems efficiently.

I worked with someone who become senior & team lead after 2 years (and a really good one at that), after having done business PowerPoints for their entire working life.

I link IQs test (in informal channels) and all the juniors who picked up development really quickly and become very effective, all have high IQ.

If it were allowed, I would definitely use IQ tests in an interview setting.

I think leetcoding started as a proxy for IQ tests (which could totally be, if people couldn't prepare on the subject) but nowadays it's just testing people's ability to memorise different cases and being comfortable enough with coding to be able to implement (and mix and match) them.

ryanbrunner6• 3 years ago

5 years for junior for better or worse is well out of step with the industry - while you're right that you can get some massively inflated titles that are out of step with the norm, the norm is that you're an intermediate developer at a minimum and most likely a senior after 5 years.

It's dumb, but it is the standard nowadays.

pc865• 3 years ago

Intermediate/mid for sure, but if I get a resume from someone whose first programming job was 2018 and they're calling themselves senior, I'm throwing that in the trash unless like you said they're from VC-funded startups that are going to have massive title inflation and they're applying for a realistic (mid-level) role.

WinLychee9• 3 years ago

We just rebranded senior as staff+

nonethewiser3• 3 years ago

Actually I think its pretty rare to even have a junior title nowadays. You can claim anyone with less than 2 YOE is a junior or whatever but when jobs require you to “hit the ground running” AKA run migrations in prod and resolve things when shit hits the fan then you’re not really doing junior level work.

Of course, there are also junior level jobs by responsibility but not title.

pluijzer• 3 years ago

I have to read a lot of cv's and the job title part is just some empty noise for me. Developer, engineer, programmer they're just terms that go in and out of fashion. At first they will become more and more pompous, Senior 10x-Ninja, or whatever, until they become so ridiculous that the actual capable people will call themselves humbly just a programmer.

collaborative3• 3 years ago

I haven't looked for jobs in nearly 9 years now. Is a LinkedIn profile essential nowadays? I have dropped all social media and LinkedIn is one of the most invasive. I really dislike how it notifies you for everything

willsmith723• 3 years ago

You can turn off any notification settings

mrits• 3 years ago

It's a primary tool for a recruiter. If you are in a situation where you need recruiters to help you find work I think it would be worth the effort.

scarface_7421• 3 years ago

I have a very bare bones LinkedIn profile. It mostly serves as an address book.

Cephandrius• 3 years ago

it's bad when you're not looking for a job, but It's great when you are imo.

coldpie2• 3 years ago

It isn't if you have good contacts. It pays to build a lot of bridges at your jobs.

stuaxo• 3 years ago

A lot more seems to be through it, though other job sites do exist.

I don't really bother with notifications or the app for any social media site.

bartislartfast• 3 years ago

LinkedIn is one of the most invasive

surprised to read this, I don't find it invasive in the slightest. I've turned off notifications for most things but its the only "social" app I have on my device.

I will say it's gotten a lot more content focussed lately, with everyone and their mom sharing their thoughts on jobs and employment. Personally I just use it as a profile for recruiters to hit and a way for me to talk back to them

jonfw2• 3 years ago

If you're at the point where you're sending out online applications to jobs where you don't have a connection, I would definitely get a linkedin.

I'd turn off notification entirely or for all but messages

Workaccount23• 3 years ago

Funny story about how linkedin's oversharing ruined a potential date for me:

Recently I have been online dating, and while talking to a match, she dropped that she works a relatively high position in state government. So naturally I googled her name (only had her first name) and the position and clicked the first link. "Oh wow, she is, that's cool!"

A minute later she messages me "Checking out my linkedin?"

I was super confused at first, being that I never use linked in, only set it up for a job change about 4 years ago. I checked the website on my browser and I was not even logged in.

Then I pieced it together.

The first search result was her linkedin, which I clicked. Without me even noticing, it opened in the app on my phone (which I wasn't even aware I still had), which was logged in. Of course then it sent her a notification that I had looked at her page.

She stopped responding pretty much right after that. I am guessing because my totally outdated linkedin didn't at all match what I had briefly mentioned I did for work, and was much more junior.

So thanks linkedin.

aardvark179• 3 years ago

A linkedin profile isn’t essential, I last moved jobs less than a year ago and discovered I had an incredibly out of date profile when somebody mentioned they had searched for me and couldn’t find me on there.

I did however have talks and interviews on podcasts and other things they could find, and a history of things I’ve worked on which I can talk about, and a previous colleague had referred me so I already had an in.

rsynnott14• 3 years ago

I don't think it's essential, but it's probably helpful. I also haven't looked for jobs in a long time, but interview a lot; it's unusual, through not unheard of, for a candidate not to have one (I don't think it counts against them with us, but I'm sure it does in some places).

Also, if I did find myself in need of a job, and didn't have anything particular in mind, I'd probably start replying to the recruiting messages I get on LinkedIn.

I think you can turn off the notifications; it notifies me for messages but nothing else. I assume I configured that at some point.

foobiekr2• 3 years ago

Use your network, not LinkedIn, to find jobs.

But set up a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is the lubricant of "hey, my friend X is looking - here's his linkedin" in a way that "hey ..., here's his personal website" or "here's some word doc or PDF in some random format that is annoying."

I've hired a lot of people and there is little more irritating than highly polished, curated resumes with a lot of noise and fluff on them. There may have been a time when that mattered, but honestly I just want to see your location, education, degrees, and the jobs you've had.

dorfsmay4• 3 years ago

Have you looked for a job recently?

I don't know about you personally, but people in my social circles and employed think the job market is the same as it was from 2015 to 2020. They have no data point and assume their 2+ year old experience of looking for work is relevant today.

The market is bad.

I was getting calls from recruiters in 2020. I looked and found work (contracts) twice in 2022, the first time was not easy, the second time was very difficult.

2023: I am available, contacts and links to resume, linkedin, etc... in my profile!

Workaccount23• 3 years ago

It's strange because economically, tech is roaring back and the job market is tight as ever.

Are employers hedging against this perpetually 6 month away recession? Is there a shift from growth mindset to value mindset?

nonethewiser3• 3 years ago

Yeah its tough. But something like 3 interviews a month (and tough to pass) is more what I’ve seen. With less experience. 1 in 6 months could be bad luck but Id wager he just isn’t applying to enough places.

Varqu• 3 years ago

Yes, the market is pretty bad right now, and Indeed's data shows it quite well: https://www.hiringlab.org/data (go to Sectors and choose Software Development)

We are currently at -64% from the 2022 peak job market and even -20% compared to pre-covid number of job openings.

sigotirandolas2• 3 years ago

I am likely not revealing anything new to you (nor I know much about hiring), but:

Taking a look at your CV, I notice that you have a lot of very short work stints, averaging at about a position per year.

This is probably just the nature of contracting, but I can see this putting off most companies that are looking for someone to dive deeply in the business domain and work on supporting a project long-term.

I also feel a lot of those "we need someone with experience on X technology to onboard us or fix some urgent problem" jobs are on a downtrend, given the rise of XaaS solutions, convergence of development stacks, more documentation, stuff like ChatGPT, etc.

scarface_7421• 3 years ago

What stands out to me is short work stints. You don’t tell a good story and why do you have your work experience dating back to the 80s?

I personally have been working professionally since the mid 90s. But I realize that no one cares about the fact that I did C on DEC VAX and Stratus VOS mainframes in the 90s, VB6 in the early 2000s along with C, C++/MFC/DCOM or C# for ruggedized Windows mobile devices in the late 200x. I’ve cut out everything on my resume before 2012.

Your resume is full of responsibilities. But not accomplishments. If I were to ask you why should I hire you over the dozens of other generic developers who run across my desk, what about your career sets you apart? I’m being completely hypothetical. I’m not in a hiring position and I’ve only been in one for a brief stint in my career. But put yourself in hiring manager’s shoes. Why would you hire you?

I’m not sitting on high judging you by any means. I’ve had a fairly unremarkable career myself until 2018 and nothing that really stood out.

pwpw2• 3 years ago

whereas everyone else would call that person a junior engineer.

Does anyone have advice on what I should call myself? I was a senior in public accounting (~3 years of experience) when I switched into software development after self-teaching for 5 years on the side. I settled for an entry-level role to get my foot in the door, but after 7 months I was made the lead of one of a few teams with the rest being led by principal engineers. I think it’s fair to say im clearly not a recent college graduate and am performing like I have already been a software engineer for a few years now.

I now have 2 engineers below me. My technical skills have grown much stronger than an entry level, and my non-technical skills are on par with the other principal engineers. My team has been thriving and has received quite a bit of recognition from the company.

I’m coming up on a year and ready to ask for a raise since I believe I’m vastly outperforming an entry-level role compared to my peers, but I don’t know what to push for since these job levels are less clear than they are in accounting. Level II? Level III? Senior? It’s tough to rank the experience gained from my CPA and accounting background (that would be very valuable if I were still an accountant of course). Naturally engineers want to devalue it (fair enough), but it’s clearly paying dividends in my ability to deliver the company value.

nicoburns2• 3 years ago

Possibly "Engineering Manager"

cpendery• 3 years ago

I’ve seen Team Lead for a technical individual who drives/scopes projects and manages SWEs.

mixtieboo• 3 years ago

This is a topic, I really dont want to comment on:

But here it goes:

Job sites are spam. Supply and demand is all that matters. People who suck got laid off. So what. These companies are incredibly dysfunctional at hiring ANYBODY in software. That includes FAANG.

Software Engineering is no longer a respectable career regardless of pay. The reason is that the goal of "de-professionalizing" software engineers since the mid-90s has been accomplished within 15 years since 2005.

This de-professionalizing effort was the purpose and reason for the H1-B program expansion during the Bush and Obama administrations.

The main drivers behind it were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Neither of whom wanted to pay engineers, (Bill G was more entrenched though as he said in the 90s he wanted to pay software engineers 6-7 dollars an hour)

Unfortunately for both Bill G and Steve J they were caught (red-handed by the way) not only trying to fix engineer wages, create blacklists but also trying to "KILL JAVA" which is all on DOJ grand jury testimony video recordings you can access yourself. Fortunately (for them), however, the US govt cares not about what it pretends to care about in public.

So the GOOD news is: Tech hiring is corrupt, managers are usually going to be gone after they fail to build their "kingdom" which they ALWAYS do and even in a market "full" of genuises and apprentices, noone will read your resume anyway.

Because IT hiring is and has been a scam for almost 2 decades.

Does that answer your question?

Good luck.

debarshri• 3 years ago

Lot of things depends on where you are located.

In EU, market is not very bad as compared to US. It is still easy to find a good opportunity.

In US, it is really hard hit.

In South east Asia/India, it is calm before the storm as operational costs are low, it is last one to experience the stream of layoffs. It hasn't hit the market yet.

eunos• 3 years ago

Grab (one of the biggest in SEA) already laid offs and I can tell you local startups from SEA also have been laying offs.

RGamma• 3 years ago

So this is what neoliberal hellscape looks like from across the big pond. Feel sorry for you :/

wildrhythms4• 3 years ago

Rest assured this is coming for the UK and Europe soon too.

sentinalien• 3 years ago

The job market is already pretty bad in the UK

c16• 3 years ago

This advice won't help you right now, but when you do find your next role, try take an active role in tech interviewing. It's something I pushed hard to take part in two jobs ago, and it's shown me what good candidates and bad candidates look like, how to interview and how not to bomb the interview in the first few minutes. It's also helped me massively as a candidate.

elAhmo• 3 years ago

I was about to write the same. I volunteered in the company to help with hiring and after 20-30 interviews you get a lot of insight, what is looked at when evaluating and just in general being more natural when talking to people you see for the first time.

Can’t recommend it enough!

wildrhythms4• 3 years ago

I am registered as an interviewer at my workplace ($big tech company) and in the past 2 years I've been assigned just one interview. In the past year I've been assigned zero. Interviews are randomly assigned. Front-end web developer. Internally I can see they are hiring countless full-time PMs, PgMs, directors... but developers being hired are here on 6 month vendor contracts, and not full time employees, which is a change. Something is happening.

solarmist6• 3 years ago

This is odd to me. At LinkedIn they always needed more interviewers. And I did more than 100 in my 5 years there.

Roark665• 3 years ago

Depends where you are and what you're looking for I guess. Here in Poland the market for remote jobs is great.

Of course a big factor is that on average I estimate the rates paid here are half of these in UK/US (comparing my own rates for remote vs on-site).

Also the way you look for work matters a lot. Every market has its specifics. In some locations it's better to send dozens of cv's in the others it's better to have alerts for exactly matching jobs and when they appear phone the recruiter within the first 5 minutes after the ad was posted. I used both techniques with great results.

And the most important thing. Do not give up! And never trust words, unless they are in a form of a contract.

zephyrfalcon• 3 years ago

In my experience, the market is a lot worse than a year ago.

fnordpiglet4• 3 years ago

You left off the most important pieces of into - where are you? Are you looking for remote, hybrid, in office? Do you need visa sponsorship?

catsarebetter• 3 years ago

Have you tried niching down on a tech stack, an industry, or even the types of teams you want to work on? It's a good way to stand out from the crowd. You might have to turn away more recruiter screens, but it gives you a much stronger profile against everyone else with the companies you have strong fit in.

thriller• 3 years ago

I was laid off in December, a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe.

I was surprised at how difficult it was to get an interview as I have a somewhat unique skillset. But understandable if 50-150 are applying.

It took seven months before I found something, by which point I had to bullshit about the gap in employment (left to spin up my consultancy!).

Agree with some of the comments here. Find a good recruiter who is a straight shooter, they will be able to get you an interview or tell you what you're missing.

inetknght• 3 years ago

a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe

I strongly wish such things were recorded (eg, in a 1-party jurisdiction) and would be used to file grievances in court against CEO and leadership.

tjrgergw• 3 years ago

I was laid off in December, a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe.

Name and shame please.

openplatypus2• 3 years ago

Currently at WeAreDevelopers congress in Berlin. It is conference that is heavily skewed towards businesses advertising their hiring efforts.

Have no comparison to previous years but it looks like there is tons of jobs offers.

And the compensation seemed to increase as well. It is now SV level, but we are talki Europe, where 100-130k puts you in top 5%.

djsegal• 3 years ago

Hey is there a way to reach out to you? Living in berlin and currently looking for a tech job here

expertentipp8• 3 years ago

OP only want's you to buy a EUR 600 ticket, and probably a EUR 8000 bootcamp as well.

supertofu• 3 years ago

What is your education background? I've noticed that more companies want front-end engineers with STEM education creds than they do front-end devs with non-STEM education.

If you have a non-STEM degree and/or a weak portfolio, your resume might be getting filtered out.

cdavid• 3 years ago

If you want, feel free to send me your resume and I can "review" it for you. I've have hired dozens of engineers and EM across ML, BE, etc roles.

Info to contact me in my user account (handle + gmail.com)

softwaredoug3• 3 years ago

I’ll be honest. Some people are bad at interviewing and selling themselves.

Some of the best people I’ve worked with are getting passed over because they’re quiet and undersell themselves. Some of the more incompetent people can bullshit their way through the process and really oversell themselves. They think they’re gods gift to the field, and believing that, they can sell it.

It’s 100% Dunning Kruger.

I don’t know how to advise someone in this position. You just have to be willing to psych yourself up and believe a story about how great you are. Paradoxically it’s probably a TRUE story, but the great people won’t want to believe it about themselves. You CAN however put energy and practice into putting on a kind of performance of your (actual) competence.

The best people can probably say things like “oh I’ve never done X before”. They think of all the ways that can go wrong doing X. Because they visualize all the things that would go wrong they actually perform better at that task (research shows negative outcome visualization is actually better than positive visualization at achieving a goal[1]). Yet it sets you up to undersell yourself.

You have to suspend disbelief and remind yourself you can do hard things. And say “oh wow X sounds cool! I’ve done Y related thing, not X directly and I really would love to take a crack at X. I think I’d really love digging into it!”

1 - https://mindowl.org/premeditatio-malorum-negative-visualizat...

dmvdoug3• 3 years ago

Some people are bad at interviewing and selling themselves.

100% me.

Also, hi, Doug.

softwaredoug3• 3 years ago

Whenever I meet another Doug we have to fight Highlander style to try to get the others powers. ;)

the_only_law7• 3 years ago

Some of the best people I’ve worked with are getting passed over because they’re quiet and undersell themselves.

I think this was my biggest issue in the beginning after the layoff. There were a few interviews I had that went well until they asked me about my expertise with X, at which point I would get a bit cautious. In some cases, I found out they the company and I had very different definitions of “expertise”.

scarface_7421• 3 years ago

Just so hopefully this doesn’t come across as insulting and for context, I spent my entire long career as a journeyman enterprise CRUD developer until 2020 working for mostly unknown companies.

What do you think you have that sets you apart from all of the other developers who are looking for a job?

If you can’t answer that question and you are randomly applying for jobs through job portals, it’s no better than playing the lottery.

While I have been working for a long time, I stayed at my second job for nine years and by 2008, I was very much an expert beginner at 34 years old. The only thing I had going for me were soft skills and I was a good “developer”. But I was a horrible “software engineer”.

2008 was the first and last time I randomly submitted my resume to portals. After getting another job and while muddling my way through the recession, I answered every recruiters call, accepted lunch invitations, went to local tech events and built a network.

sheepscreek• 3 years ago

Ask your friends, family and university connections/network for referrals. That will almost certainly get you an interview.

fefe23• 3 years ago

I have been getting a lot of spam from India or Pakistan trying to sell me front-end or app development for several years now. If people are so desperate they resort to spam, maybe that that kind of job is just not in high demand anymore?

(I have no idea, it's not my area of expertise; just posing the question)

EDIT: I have heard stories that companies keep job offerings open when they are not actually hiring. They want it to look like they are dynamic and on the way up and just can't find good people to hire, when in reality their business is stale, their prospects are grim and the inflation and previous over-hiring has doomed them and what they are really looking for is a Google to buy them out.

In fact I have heard of companies hiring people they don't need because they think that makes them more attractive as a buy-out opportunity to companies who actually do need those people.

matt3210• 3 years ago

My strategy is being firmware/10 years… works pretty good, getting an interview per week.

the_only_law7• 3 years ago

How did you get into firmware? From what I’ve seen, most of those companies seem to source exclusively from university pipelines for entry level, and only established domain experts for anything else.

TootsMagoon• 3 years ago

33 years in Software Development and the only job I have ever “applied” for was a seasonal job at Costco. All the other jobs, including IBM, 2 startups and currently Accenture were through my network.

dbg31415• 3 years ago

A lot of times people get put on "cool down" after applying.

Apply to a job and even if you don't get a rejection letter, they may still say, "Let's put a pause on this guy for the next 6 months."

So if your resume didn't start out strong the first time, they may not even be looking at the revisions.

Similarly, if you're applying in the same city, in the same sort of work, don't be surprised if the HR teams have shared notes on prospects.

When I worked at an agency, we had one talent scout who was just head and shoulders better than any we had worked with.

I asked her what her secret was, "How are you able to find such consistently good developers?" and she said, "I get plugged in to the network, and I listen to my peers -- if they pass, I pass. Saves me time to go after better candidates."

Anyway I don't know if something like that is impacting your job search, but I'd try and diversify a bit. If you were a dev, look at Test Engineering, or DevOps, or Project Management work for a bit.

Remember you never have to list a job on your resume. It's always OK to say, "I took a sabbatical." And it's OK to shine rainbows on the truth, but it's never OK to outright lie. If you get caught doing that, you're burned -- to everyone in that network.

Anyway, if I had time off, I'd spend time on Udemy, and YouTube, and such. Just learning as much shit as I could.

I really want to get better at SketchUp so I can do more woodworking projects, but I haven't had time.

I have a billion things that need repairs, or modifications in my house, and it's always, "Sigh... I'll get around to it next weekend..."

And if you finish your little home project list, hit up your parents for things they need help with. Odds are, if they're elderly, they need a lot of help with tech and cleaning and even simple stuff like getting their oil changed can lead to old people getting ripped off these days. Anyway, if I had more time I'd want to take care of more of that sort of stuff for my mom...

I could be laid off tomorrow in this economy... so who knows.

Oh, also I feel like most companies are aware that salaries have plummeted in the last year. If you were making $200k in SF, and are asking that for a remote job... yeah, basic stuff like that can sink you. Make sure you are pricing yourself for the role.

EDIT: One last thing... I have seen a TON of people lately who are really shiftless. One guy literally said, "I only work remote because I don't ever want to wear pants again." And it's cute I guess, but it's not something you want to bring up in an interview. Make sure you don't come off as someone who got "laid off for cause." Keep your background clean when doing video calls and... put on some pants even if they can't see them! (=

foysauce• 3 years ago

I can't speak for everyone, but in the 6 years and 4 companies I've worked for, we have hired only 2 front-end engineers. Full stack is simply what we want a vast majority of the time. So I'm not saying it's impossible to find something but just from a numbers perspective it's just not in demand (I worked at 2 startups and 2 mid-size companies, big tech probably does hire front end devs, but I can't say for sure).

Etheryte• 3 years ago

As a frontend developer, with the usual caveats of anecdotal experience etc, I'm somewhat inclined to agree when talking about regular employment. Over the last decade or so I've worked in companies that range from a few employees in total to thousands of people, and most of the time I'm either the frontend guy or one of a very small handful. Most of the time the value you bring to the table from the technical side is unblocking other people, that is, making sure the design system is consistent, everything builds, nasty frontend-specific bugs are fixed, etc. Everything else can be delegated to generalists which gives the company a lot more flexibility around how to hire and arrange work.

The one place where this trend does not hold in my experience is contracting. I've done a fair bit of it throughout my career and being a frontend development contractor or similar is like selling hot cakes if you bring a lot of experience to the table. The main customers are generally companies who don't have that one guy who figures out frontend stuff and in the end they have a critical mass of mess that they hire someone from the outside to come in and fix pronto.

jawerty• 3 years ago

I've been mentoring many new engineers and students this past year and there's a lot of people in your position.

Overall, the biggest setbacks are network and a lack of focus in the niche. Frontend developer at a professional level requires a top 5% (roughly) resume to be a competitive applicant.

I live streamed about some of the harsh truths people are dealing with now (not learning fundamentals being one of them) https://youtube.com/live/yNqWwX4jsI4?feature=share

Let me know if you (or anyone) want to discuss this further. There's a lot of ways you can set yourself apart but it's good to understand that we're not in the 2015 tech market anymore. Most people have to have an exceptional resume/network/or a calculated niche.

the_only_law7• 3 years ago

How do I get a “niche”. I would have loved to work in some particular field I was interested in, but my whole career I was never qualified for that because well, they wanted someone already established in that niche. So I took what I had, which were generalist jobs. Never had a problem quickly picking up relevant parts of the business domain, but never really became an expert in anything particular. I’m an expert in figuring shit out I guess, and I’ve done some more interesting things on the side, but it never mattered.

nologic01• 3 years ago

Its combination of location, experience, salary expectations and sectoral business conditions.

In a good market everybody needs warm bodies, the standards drop, the pay levels rise.

In a poor market people focus on the absolutely required positions (e.g. replacing critical vacant roles) and pay levels drop.

Location (country / region) is quite important too, there are places with chronic and dire shortages in IT expertise (but salaries might not be great).

These are the fundamentals. Then you have the overlay of market making / matching which is clearly totally broken and only gets worse.

What is important is to find the discipline and energy to keep developing while job searching. Maybe work on a open source project or learn something new, expanding your expertise by going deeper or broader.

a_square_peg• 3 years ago

I think regardless of the job market situation, the time-to-hire has become unreasonably long and I'm not optimistic that this will change for the better anytime soon.

The trouble with job-hunting these days via web is that the signal-to-noise ratio has decreased dramatically over the years. Being able to apply to hundreds of jobs is a double-edged sword where hiring managers also have to filter through thousands of profiles so now everyone pretty much have to play resume-seo of some sort.

WarOnPrivacy3• 3 years ago

Being able to apply to hundreds of jobs is a double-edged sword where hiring managers also have to filter through thousands of profiles

This has been true outside of tech as well and has given cover for harmful hiring bias to thrive.

Hiring for common jobs is largely done thru portals and most will diminish/disqualify entire classes of people (first-time, age, inconsequential criminal rec, other hidden criteria) with no regard of the candidates' likely capability.

During the worst of employee shortages, there was no sign that portals loosened their ingrained discrimination; qualified and available hires went unconsidered as before.

swat535• 3 years ago

I can only speak to my personal experience of attempting to hire engineers.

We started a hiring 2 weeks ago, the top engineers are taken off the market _before_ we even get a chance to interview them! (usually within 3-5 days).

We had to accelerate our process and nearly double our offers to have a fighting chance. So at least from where I'm standing, the market is pretty aggressive at the moment.

JonChesterfield2• 3 years ago

Most people are already employed. Some of them will move if your place looks likely to be an improvement. Limiting your search to the currently available will cut the pool drastically.

It's really easy to write a job listing that will be ignored. It'll still get lots of noise but not so much signal. It's probably also important where you post it, especially if your website doesn't pull a lot of traffic to the careers page by itself.

vasili1117• 3 years ago

the top engineers

How you would define them? What makes for you someone a "top engineer"?

shagie3• 3 years ago

(note: much of this advice is based on the assumption of a permanent resident of the US applying to a position in the US. Things may be different in other countries)

From the interviewer side of the house, the purpose of interviewing is to hire the least risky candidate - not the best candidate.

As you get closer to senior job titles, a longer duration of employment in the latest position is more desirable.

If you have three or more jobs in that 5.5 years, you may be a more risky applicant. It isn't necessarily the case that you do from your post here ("I held a job as a front-end dev"), but switching jobs frequently is not uncommon and may catch up with people in time as they try to move up. For more senior positions, initiative and projects may last longer than the length of a job hopper's tenure and can be seen as a negative as they are less likely to see the project through to completion and the company may need to hire someone in the middle of the project.

If you have had multiple positions, companies with a longer onboarding process it may be that you won't even get to being a positive ROI before your feet start itching again for a new position.

In companies with faster onboarding (dump into the pool and see who swims) a less risky applicant will have a close match to the skills and responsibilities listed on the job description. This entails making sure that each job application that you send out (my reading of the post is that you only have one) emphasizes familiarity with their technology stack rather than just a list of tech that are tossed into a line on the resume without care for order.

If applying on job boards for listings that do not specify a company or are "an exciting opportunity with a client", you are applying to a 3rd party recruiter and not an actual job.

If applying on job boards for companies themselves, realize that these jobs may be scraped, unmaintained, or otherwise not representative of the current jobs that company has open. I have seen jobs listed on indeed for positions that were posted in January and closed in February showing up months later. Likewise, job listings on the company's current career page may have openings that are not on Indeed.

Make sure that you're applying for jobs that are a fit for your experience. Job boards are notorious for having poor search criteria for experience. Doing a search for entry level jobs will pull up principal engineer positions and searching for senior jobs will find entry level ones. Mass applying to everything that shows up will result in a higher percentage of rejections.

If you only have one resume, create one resume for each type of position that you are looking to apply for. Create one resume for React developer, one resume for Angular developer, one resume for Php developer - and then send the relevant one. If you are sending a "5 years of React experience" to a position that is looking for someone to work in their Angular application, there will be a subset of applicants who are less risky than you (based on the resume) that are selected for interviewing.

While not applying for jobs, use the job requirements for positions that you've applied to (or interest you) as a guideline for personal projects to work on to keep skills fresh or to learn sufficient information about that technology stack to be able to competently answer questions if you are interviewed.

Make sure that you are also looking at public sector employers. State and local government tends not to advertise on career boards but rather on the state's workforce development board.

Make sure you are applying to non-remote jobs. Yes, everyone wants a remote job. The applicant pool for such positions is much larger than the local jobs and instead of competing with people who live in the area or are willing to move there you are competing with everyone who can legally work there.

kasey_junk• 3 years ago

This is an unsatisfying answer but if you are depending on your resume going through the hr process cold you are unlikely to have success no matter what it looks like or what experience you have.

A better approach is to find someone at the organization you are applying to who can shepherd you through the process. The best way to do that is via your personal network from prior jobs. But you can also do it by going to meetups, doing open source work etc. Even your non-work network can be helpful. Churches and country clubs were powerful professional tools for a very long time.

Clubber• 3 years ago

From the other side of the table, we just went through a few months of interviewing (we're devs) and boy were there a bunch of lemons. We were offering 6 figures for a junior/mid in a low cost of living area too, with 100% remote. Only a few even had the slightest idea what they were talking about when asking questions and they were softballs. One guy was even googling the questions we were asking him. We used multiple recruiters from multiple companies.

We ended up having to pick one because, "it's just a junior, they can learn." We suspect the guy was working multiple jobs because he was hard to reach and wouldn't return messages and calls for a day or two, even when we were letting him go. He was hired as full time salary.

From my experience, the tech labor market is really messed up right now, there are a lot of people who shouldn't be in it. I'm not sure how long that will take to correct. You're not really competing with good people, you're competing with a huge glut of bad people with well written and probably highly embellished resumes. I'm not really sure how to stand out in that type of market.

benreesman10• 3 years ago

In November I was getting ~10 inbound emails a week from top-flight shops, that had been typical for at least 5 years. In December that was zero and has been since. I was an L7 in ML infra at a FAANG a few years ago.

I did some marquee loops in Jan/Feb, and my “fuck this” point was when I did a coding screen at $KNOWN_COMPANY highly recommended by a former colleague and ended up with a 24 year old in a hotel room on a MacBook Air looking at his phone for 45 minutes and the back channel was that he had flunked my trivial 50-line Python program less than 10 minutes after the interview was over.

After that I was like, I’m consulting for a while, catch you all in 2024 once Powell gets brought to heel for the geberal. :)

It’s not just you.

bpm140• 3 years ago

It sounds like you’re working with a number of services right now, so take this with a grain of salt.

Joinrelentless.com does resume review and coaching and then gets people first interviews. Not cheap, but it’s nice to literally just have interviews put on your calendar by someone.

(Not a customer, just no the CEO)

JonChesterfield2• 3 years ago

Unspecified initial cost then 12% of first year salary (RSU unspecified) on success. Think I'd better off hiring a PA but still nice to see new approaches to hiring.

WinstonSmith84• 3 years ago

Market job is bad, but it also depends on the industry (tech had a lot of layoff) and on the benefits you are looking for. Speaking of benefits, since "everybody" want a remote position, if you're not too picky, it's probably much easier to find an on site position at the moment, without even compromising on the compensation

myth2018• 3 years ago

The market is indeed not the same it was during the past 2 or 3 years. But these last years were abnormally good for IT professionals. Too much cheap money distorted the job market and, if you don't have much experience on how things used to be before that, you may find it difficult to adapt.

Suggestions:

- Try to expand to back-end and advertise yourself as a full-stack. I'd say that many companies are currently in "maintenance mode", putting their new projects in a wait list and focusing on maintaining their existing systems. A generalist developer, able to work on the entire stack, would be more valuable in such cases -- and that would also explain why UI designers are having such a hard time to find new jobs.

- Submit resumes to the "Who is hiring" lists here in HN

- I don't know if that's your case, but anyway. If you live outside US and EU, worked for companies from these regions in the past few years, and are trying to find a similar job now: it's gonna be harder than before. Those are precisely the countries where the cheap money caused the most severe distortions. Too many small companies with very little potential were full of cash and hired tons of developers from abroad. These days are over. Such jobs still exist, as they existed before the pandemics, but are harder to get and the competition is tougher. If that applies to you, I suggest you to start focusing on "traditional", on-site jobs in your country, and keep looking for better, remote jobs while you are employed and less preoccupied.

WinLychee9• 3 years ago

I've gotten plenty, though I am a decent bit more senior than you. It's very hard to get an offer right now, but for sure you can get interviews. I think I've interviewed with ~10 companies for positions since June, and all passed on me, but it's mostly because I didn't take the time required to prepare. In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, or give the wrong response to a question right now.

I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you.

Tech is a really weird place in general these days, maybe we need a hard reboot in the sector, or maybe we should all go do something else with our lives.

neon_electro11• 3 years ago

I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview.

I have been diagnosed with ADHD (and started medication, to be clear) this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process?

I've been at it on and off for 17 months and have had the worst experience with technical assessments, despite being a 10 year career veteran with plenty of Web development experience.

cosmojg• 3 years ago

I have been diagnosed with ADHD this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process?

You don't. In my experience, any mention of anything resembling mental illness will result in rejection (but obviously they'll cite some other reason to avoid a lawsuit).

edrxty5• 3 years ago

Never reveal ADHD to employers or fellow employees. It will always be used against you.

shmatt• 3 years ago

they will act confused, pause, say they will ask someone, and never get back to you

on the other hand its hard to blame one aspect for "being bad" at leetcode. Plenty of non-diagnosed people with tons of real world experience have a hard time finding the gotcha in a 38 minute interview. It doesn't represent the real world in any way IMO

WinLychee9• 3 years ago

I hate to say it, but you're gonna have to learn coping mechanisms. I think a lot of us in tech have similar issues to be honest, so you're not alone here. Personally I HATE having to sit there and grind, but you've got to find a way to squeeze out the motivation. I also perform really poorly under interview pressure, but I think that wildly over-preparing can help you calm your nerves. Personal network is also SUPER important right now for securing that crucial foot in the door.

hoorayimhelping• 3 years ago

I have been diagnosed with ADHD this year. How do I best tell prospective employers I might need some accommodation in this process?

As someone who was diagnosed with ADHD a decade-and-a-half ago in my 20s: You don't. You don't even think about using your diagnosis as an excuse or a shield for behavior that is unacceptable. You never consider thinking that you deserve special treatment because you were diagnosed with ADHD. You accept that there are tradeoffs that come with it, some positive, some negative, and that you will have advantages in some areas and disadvantages in other areas and you don't let it define you or your behavior.

eric_cc2• 3 years ago

10 year career veteran

A 10 year career does not make you a veteran..

ghotli• 3 years ago

I skimmed this earlier and this comment got stuck in my mind. I came back to others saying similar things but I'm still commenting anyway.

The thing you're asking for? There is no such thing. I've been in your shoes and I've been on both sides of the interview table many times. You probably need to drop the idea that there will be accomodations for anything during this sort of process.

Let me tell you what works for me. Focus on cardiovascular exercise three days a week. Find one habit you can manage to do daily and make that your keystone habit you hang other things around. Sleep well, eat right, see if you still think you need accomodations once these three pillars have been addressed.

If they've already been addressed you're squarely in the realm of practice every day. Flashcards for jargon you missed in interviews, etc. The onus is on you, my friend, and I hope this new diagnosis of yours isn't something that feels insurmountable. You've got this, just not with the mindset that others need to treat you any differently. Especially in the context of finding or even into starting a new job.

throwaway20379• 3 years ago

Hello no, don't tell them anything of that sort. This isn't university; this is real life full of unfairness and hidden discrimination. I wrote more about it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36901303&p=2#36903751

unethical_ban• 3 years ago

What the other guy said about drugs is probably a good idea.

Do NOT tell them until you're in the door, if at all. Maybe mention it casually when you need to assert taking an extra long walk or something.

JohnBooty7• 3 years ago

Middle aged, diagnosed with ADHD about 15 years ago, been in the industry for 25 years.

Not saying my way is best, but this is how I do it.

ADHD is nothing to be ashamed of, and IMO you have as much right to accommodations as somebody with no legs who uses a wheelchair. However, you couldn't pay me to mention ADHD to an employer or prospective employer. It's too stigmatized, and also it's just plain nebulous -- even if an employer is supportive, your manager can't intuit and extrapolate the behavioral health needs of individual employees based on their diagnoses.

    How do I best tell prospective employers I might need 
    some accommodation in this process?

During the interview process I don't mention ADHD or accommodations at all. Best advice I can give here is to either (a) just grind Leetcode until you feel comfortable with it? (b) send your resume to a kazillion places and just bail if the interview process involves some kind of live coding exercise you feel that you'll struggle with. Or, alternately, just do it anyway with zero pressure and maybe you'll surprise yourself. You will get better at live coding and interviews with time.

Once you have the job, I still never mention ADHD ever. What I do is just ask for accommodations that I need. I never worked at a company that really gave a flying fuck if I took my laptop to a spare conference room so I could code in a quieter and less distracting environment. Helps to tell your team where you'll be so it's not like you disappeared.

But from a tactical standpoint I would at all times urge people to think in terms of solutions (specific coping strategies and accommodations) instead of labels and craft your employee/employer relationship accordingly.

JohnBooty7• 3 years ago

I've been diagnosed myself, but ADHD varies greatly from person to person. So I definitely don't assume my experience is the same as yours. However...

    I've been at it on and off for 17 months and have 
    had the worst experience with technical assessments, 
    despite being a 10 year career veteran with plenty of 
    Web development experience.

In addition to my other reply: is ADHD truly the issue for you w.r.t. technical assessments? Are you sure it's not anxiety or unfamiliarity with the source material?

My experience with ADHD is that it causes me to struggle during the long grind of holding a job. 40 hours of focus per week, doing things that might not be very exciting? Yeah. ADHD struggle. But maintaining my focus for 30-60 minutes for some tech assessment? This is not a problem. That's adrenaline time, baby.

If you are ever able to maintain 30-60 minutes of focus for anything at all (movies, gaming, reading, sex, sports, hobbies, whatever) but not for a job interview then I would take a very hard look in the mirror and see if there's something else affecting your performance.

Again, just a prompt for thought. I do not make the mistake of assuming anybody else's experiences and struggles are the same as my own.

vsareto2• 3 years ago

This is exaggerated, we just hired someone and don't give these kinds of tests or expect this level of correctness.

I feel like this is fed by anxiety. I really doubt a large amount of ordinary companies have switched to FAANG leetcode + system design interview formats because of a downtown.

nonethewiser3• 3 years ago

I think its fed by people trying to get good jobs. On average, better companies have harder technical assessments.

qorrect• 3 years ago

How much were you involved in the hiring process ?

hapless• 3 years ago

Everyone uses the FAANG loop + system design + leetcode design now

I don't know when that change happened but it is practically universal

rootusrootus5• 3 years ago

I agree that smaller companies are a lot less likely to spend the effort to emulate a FAANG hiring process. For one, job candidates are less willing to undergo the punishment if they're not going to get to put Google on their resume.

I think HN is over-represented by people who work at a FAANG or would like to. They're probably not applying to many jobs at mid-tier companies.

taylodl3• 3 years ago

It's never been harder to get a job

Were you around for the aftermath of 9/11? What about the crash of 2008? Both times were considerably more difficult for job hunters.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

Interpret it as a figure of speech, otherwise there's going to be someone from the great depression who shows up and clicks his tongue at all of us.

WinLychee9• 3 years ago

Ah sorry this was hyperbole, let me adjust the phrasing. It's hard but probably not as hard as 2001 or 2008.

qez2• 3 years ago

but for sure you can get interviews right now

Apparently this is false for OP. Your problem is different.

criley23• 3 years ago

In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, or give the wrong response to a question right now. I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you.

Did they tell you that they passed on you because of your minor imperfection in the answer? Or is this an assumption on your part?

I might have passed on you based on what you've written, but it wouldn't have been because you gave a B+ answer and I required at least an A- solution or something.

Honestly this entire concept of gamifying your interview is not great. Maybe this is what gets you in at the big shops like Microsoft or Amazon these days? Totally understand that, I'm more of in the start-up world.

In my world, we're looking at personality, attitude, problem solving. I'm not looking for a robot to regurgitate a technically perfect answer. I'm looking for a human who responds like someone would in a job. Depends on the interview (up, peer, or down in seniority), but the interview is a space to basically pair something out and work together and see if you fit with how we operate. We wouldn't want someone to come in and just regurgitate what they think is perfect. We'd prefer to pair it out, talk it through, look stuff up live, and see if there is charisma/chemistry in the working relationship and the culture. Depending on seniority of course but we can teach a Jr or Mid coding and technical material but we cannot change their personality or make them better to work with.

fnimick7• 3 years ago

I got explicitly failed from a first round interview because I took too long to solve a graph traversal problem. I reasoned my way through and got to the optimal solution, the interviewer confirmed that it was the optimal solution, then said I "should have recognized a variant of Dijkstra's algorithm" and that I had failed for not knowing it in advance.

Personally, I think developing it from scratch shows more promise than memory, but a lot of employers are looking for the inverse right now, IME.

edit: and this was not a FAANG, this was a startup with a single digit number of employees!

neon_electro11• 3 years ago

What kind of time pressure do you put on candidates? Do you expect them to sit there live for 45 minutes and complete something that reflects what it would be like to work there day to day?

WinLychee9• 3 years ago

I definitely failed at one or two places on the behavioral / experience questions, but a few told me explicitly I need to improve my technical chops (I was grateful for the feedback). I felt like nobody was unfair at all, and that I just need to refresh my knowledge in the fundamentals. Basic DS & algos, concurrency, programming language trivia, etc.

Startups are kind of hard to get an interview at these days, you ideally should know someone already working in one, who can vouch for you. I don't feel like they have a low bar either, just less rounds.

cableshaft2• 3 years ago

My Facebook phone screen many years ago consisted of an HR-sounding woman asking me three questions, the first two I answered correct (according to her), and the third one I answered correctly (I checked afterwards) but didn't use the term that was apparently written down in front of them, was told 'wrong, it's <term>', was thanked, hung up, and got a rejection email a few days later.

In that case I think it's pretty clear I was rejected based on getting one answer incorrect. The phone call wasn't even that long at all.

And while other interviews have been longer, I suspect I've been rejected a few times based on me struggling with one particular Leetcode problem.

One guy didn't even let me finish it beyond five minutes of trying to figure out the recursive function, just rejected me on the call. That guy had a huge ego and I already wasn't certain I even wanted to work for him anyway (but I didn't have any other offers yet so I gave it a shot anyway), so not a huge loss there.

osigurdson• 3 years ago

It is funny because the industry wants devs who can amplify their productivity with AI. ChatGPT can crack leetcode problems easily, yet the interview process is selecting for people who are good at competing directly with AI.

vipermark7• 3 years ago

Only the software industry can create gatling footguns like this :)

evantbyrne5• 3 years ago

I've started grinding leetcode, reviewing system design, and behavioral questions. You MUST memorize perfect responses to regurgitate as fast as possible on the interview. Again, you cannot afford a single mistake in process right now or they will pass on you.

I'm not discounting that it is hard to find tech jobs right now, but have you considered that this attitude of "grinding leetcode" is possibly contributing to companies not biting? I would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

WinLychee9• 3 years ago

No, the first round is usually a timed coding interview where the goal is to get an optimal solution as fast as possible. You should not be talking much with the interviewer. The intro (if there is one) is a quick exchange of names and last job worked at, then immediately diving into coding problem. You cannot start with a naive solution, interviewer will ask you to skip and go straight to optimal (this happened to me more than once). If you solve that, they ask followup questions to probe your knowledge, and if you beat that, you get a second problem.

After that might be more rounds of coding, system design, and hiring manager interview.

The part where you can be charismatic is once you pass the initial technical bar(s). The talking/behavior is a later point in time and is relatively easy IMO.

Examples of questions I've been asked:

1) https://leetcode.com/problems/non-overlapping-intervals/

2) https://leetcode.com/problems/design-add-and-search-words-da...

3) https://leetcode.com/problems/detect-cycles-in-2d-grid/

4) https://leetcode.com/problems/evaluate-reverse-polish-notati...

5) https://leetcode.com/problems/word-search/

So nothing too hard but you have to instantly solve it, and optimally. The hardest one I got was some type of AI search problem, where you have to find a way to navigate obstacles in a 2d grid, and another geometry problem I've not seen before.

Along with this questions like: what pitfalls arise in concurrency? Explain how you would design a pointer type that can be shared between threads, what is epoll? How do you debug a distributed system? etc.

rootusrootus5• 3 years ago

I would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

My guess, as someone who has occasionally been the hiring manager, is that this is true, but so is the leetcode crap. It's leetcode that gets you far enough to meet someone who matters. It's charisma and reasoning ability that will get you an offer.

I've met plenty of applicants who could give me superficially correct answers, but with any kind of detailed conversation it became clear that this was basically all they could do. When I hire someone for my team, I don't want leetcode answers, I want someone who can solve problems. I want someone that seems like they'll work well on the team. I want someone low maintenance and at least adequately productive.

But this is just a medium sized software company and not a FAANG.

adriand2• 3 years ago

I would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

As someone who has interviewed many software developers, I can assure you that charisma is not something that experienced hiring managers in tech are expecting in the candidate pool. For sales positions, sure. For coding, though, competence is often inversely correlated with charisma.

Reasoning through technical problems is a different story.

I think your first observation about grinding leetcode is interesting. I suspect that this is the approach people take when they're trying to get picked up by big companies (FAANG or whatever). Programming problems become a quick way of winnowing the field for companies that have a highly process-oriented approach to hiring. My own experience has been in small companies, where being able to get in the door and make progress through the interview process is often dependent on one's personal connections/network, creativity and so on.

So my advice to the OP would be to leverage your network and try to get inside companies connected to people you know. Maybe look at smaller companies that aren't necessarily tech companies, but have a strong need for tech?

cloverich• 3 years ago

would imagine the most important qualities to have in an interview are going to be charisma and an ability to reason through technical problems.

No, they want the code to match their expectations. I interviewed last year, and breezed through the early and behavioral stuff, occasionally being up leveled or oddly positive feedback in the process. They'd often quickly move from interviewing to selling me, talking openly about (relatively good) salary, etc. Then I'd do the leet code* part and lol, bye bye. And after about 10+ rejections, as I got better (and similar) coding questions, suddenly that all changed. Rejections became offers, "not good enough" became "one of the best ever" -- same person, same(ish) questions. They all just care a LOT about the quality and speed of the coding part (along with the level of style and communication they expect). Its not unreasonable, I guess. Its odd, its frustrating. Maybe its accurate. But its best to accept what it is, get REALLY good at the coding part, and you'll get a lot more wiggle room if you're bad at the other parts. And if like me, you are great at the other parts, expect to do a lot of interviews to get the offers, and / or a lot of practice (but I strongly recommend interviewing first, as demoralizing as it is, because the companies you like tend to all ask same style of questions, I practiced tons of stuff I didnt end up using).

*They were rarely leet code, usually more realistic coding questions. But same vibe.

flanbiscuit• 3 years ago

At my job I created a slack bot that posts a daily random leetcode challenge every morning (easy and medium difficulty only, for now). It's there for fun because we're a team of devs who love coding. But I also created it so I can practice every day just in case I get laid off (we had 2 rounds of layoffs within a year).

But honestly, I'd still enjoy the daily challenge either way

neon_electro11• 3 years ago

And your company doesn't mind you doing that during work hours?

pacomerh2• 3 years ago

I can relate to this situation. I've been interviewing since June, and the only times I've advanced to the next round were those where I made no mistakes at all. In the past, you could complete 90% of the task and explain the rest, which would hint to them that you know what you're doing. However, today's scenario is quite different. Now, you are expected not only to provide a complete solution but also to present it in the most currently accepted way.

ProjectArcturis• 3 years ago

Even when the market was good, I never got jobs by applying for them. It was always either recruiters cold-calling, or through my network. Maybe focus there instead of grinding out hundreds of applications.

hospitalJail• 3 years ago

I held a job as a front-end dev for the previous 5 and a half years.

That work can be done by pretty low skilled people. Get out of that sector.

kraig911• 3 years ago

What market are you in? Are you only going for remote?

marcopicentini• 3 years ago

Try to add some experience using LLAMA2, OpenAI and AI models. Then add this fancy tags in the CV.

epolanski2• 3 years ago

I went from being contacted once a day to once every two weeks. Market is definitely colder than it used to be. Much colder.

Part of me thinks it's gonna stay like that for some time, some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely as the entry level got much higher.

bdcravens3• 3 years ago

some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely

This is what happened in the early 2000s. (ie, dot-com bust)

During the boom, companies were shoving warm bodies in chairs for those who could spell HTML, and paying them great money. People were coming from everywhere to get in on it.

Then it crashed, and those who couldn't cut it went back to car sales or whatever they did before. Those with chops mostly hung on and built the next phase of the market. (I was doing ColdFusion at the time, which was an easy language to learn. Those who were one-trick ponies suffered, and I regularly heard from "ColdFusion Developers" who were desperate as the one-trick rodeos went away)

I'm sorry to say, but if you're just a "front-end dev" you're probably in the same boat. Left a career to do a bootcamp? You may want to start calling those old colleagues.

(not saying this applies to OP necessarily, but I'm just an "old" dev who's seen this before)

bdcravens3• 3 years ago

Do you have skills outside of front-end?

I've said for years that heavy front-end development is a luxury. In down economies companies are looking to do more with less.

tcgv• 3 years ago

I haven't been on the "applying" side, but in my company we just had four replacement openings in the tech team (after more than 9 months without having a new hire) and to our suprise we received 5x times more applicants to all positions than we used to get one year ago, and salary expectations were at least 15% lower than in 2022.

We ended up hiring five devs on the same budget of the four original positions.

We are a data analysis and digital/mobile marketing survey startup located in São Paulo, Brazil. So at leat around here the job market is much different than the hiring craze of 2022.

noodle5• 3 years ago

As someone on the other side, with open positions we're hiring for:

There are probably fewer job openings than there were, but I don't think my company or anyone in my network have changed HOW they're hiring, but we have definitely noticed a huge uptick in volume of applications. Earlier in the year, we were getting almost nothing. Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD.

There's just a lot more to wade through from an HR and hiring perspective now, orders of magnitude more. It takes way more time/resources and is way more draining for the people involved.

I think my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out. Don't go overboard or anything, but if you're submitting your resume to an HR software or something, maybe try and find someone in the hiring chain on LinkedIn and email them directly either with your resume or just asking how its like to work there before you submit. Something like this.

ransom1538• 3 years ago

I remember a report from facebook hiring, when they broke down how each person applied. It was something weird like %0.01 were hired by "walk in". Some person literally walked into FB headquarters and left with a job. I will say, if you walk into an office, you will NOT get ignored.

isbvhodnvemrwvn3• 3 years ago

Of course you won't get ignored, you'll get escorted out by security. The likelihood of a hiring manager being in the office nowadays is also very low.

dustincoates2• 3 years ago

I actually got my first job out of college this way. I was trying to get a job in something completely unrelated to what I studied, so I was doing whatever I could think of to get noticed. I still can't believe it worked, but it set me on a good path, at least.

Dirak• 3 years ago

This type of hiring is most likely reserved for Yann LeCun caliber talent. If you walk in to FB HQ without an appointment, 1) they wouldn’t let you in, and 2) you’d probably just make it awkward for the security guard

wing-_-nuts3• 3 years ago

I know this sounds 'old fashioned' but you really want to work for a particular company, walking in has had a surprising success rate for me over the years. Some are absolute sticks in the mud about requiring the candidate to apply online, but in many, you can at least chat with someone in hr or a hiring manager about the sorts of positions they have available and what skills they need. This all but guarantees your resume will be looked at by an actual human.

eulers_secret• 3 years ago

I got my first job by walking in. It was at a medical center, and I just asked the receptionist for the IT department. Got routed all over the med center. When I got to IT I found the telecom manager was way over worked and needed help, but had no time to search. So he interviewed and hired me on the spot. This was in 2007.

I wouldn’t do that today, you won’t get past security at most places. It does happen, though.

LinuxBender• 3 years ago

As others mentioned this will not work at FB. Their lobby is 100% security and always busy as it is a massive campus. The only way a FB employee is even there is if they are waiting to escort someone in for a scheduled meeting. Getting into the campus would not be useful either. Its like a little college town. Offices require badging in. This might work at smaller companies however.

bsima• 3 years ago

Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD.

What percentage of these resumes do you think are generated by GPT?

noodle5• 3 years ago

Honestly, I don't know. I don't see enough of the "not close, easy rejection" type resumes, I see things after they've been filtered. But I'll see if I can get an answer to that question.

troyvit2• 3 years ago

The last time I had resumes to look at it was a few years ago, pre-gpt. We had pretty a specific hard requirement (elixir experience), and easily 95% of the resumes had no mention of it. So I don't know if I'd blame artificial intelligence, more like natural stupidity.

[edit] And by stupidity I mean people who just spam every job they see trying to get a hit. Like what were you planning to do if you got the job?

MentallyRetired3• 3 years ago

I think this tech downturn is all a collusion amongst tech leaders to bring down software developer salaries. How are so many places hiring yet so many are laying off thousands, and most of them in tech/development? Even the places laying people off are still hiring those positions.

jorts• 3 years ago

More like everyone realized that they can trim down to improve margins without taking a lot of flack.

noodle5• 3 years ago

Well, to give you my POV - my company is still hiring because the business fundamentals are still strong. We're making money and using that money to pay people. But I have friends in network who had to lay off because they were hiring against VC cash instead of revenue, with the expectation of raising another round later. But they now don't expect to be able to raise that next round so easily so they have to slow their burn rates.

Money WAS cheap and easy for a while, and with everyone trying to use that money to grow, you could throw cash around easy to hire/poach/etc. and had to compete heavily for talent. Now you can't, money is much more expensive and tougher to get and you have to be more deliberate.

shiftpgdn• 3 years ago

Tech leaders colluding with the government by abusing the H1B program and ultra-lax enforcement of anti-trust laws to absolutely crater tech salaries has been the name of the game for 15+ years.

hunterhod2• 3 years ago

How would such a joint-coordinated effort work? Is such collusion possible at this scale?

trimethylpurine• 3 years ago

People are spending less time on social media so web marketing spend is down. Businesses are focusing on event based marketing. Web marketing is a very large part of the demand for front end. That's not collusion, it's basic economics.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

What you call "collusion" is what economists call "the market". Collusion doesn't even make sense here when it's so broad based. I could entertain collusion if it were a relatively small number of companies, e.g. in the Apple/Google etc. anti-poaching case. But here tons of companies had layoffs, and it's not hard to see why:

1. There was a ton of over hiring done during the pandemic. I don't think anyone really denies this. We were getting close to the "anyone that can fog a mirror" bar that I last saw during the .com boom.

2. Most people don't understand how the raise in interest rates makes it much more difficult to defend additional headcount even for companies that are hugely profitable. I won't go into the full economic theory, but the short of it is that when cash now earns ~5%, the bar for what new projects need to earn also shoots up. Obviously when cash was earning nothing people were much more willing to make highly speculative investments.

There is no collusion, and I think a lot of folks who didn't start in the job market until after the Great Recession never saw a downturn.

In a note of optimism, I'd argue that I heard all the exact same things during the .com crash, e.g. "they're going to ship all our jobs to India." Yet software dev salaries absolutely exploded in the past 2 decades since. I've talked to some folks who have already seen a marked improvement in the job market over the past month or so - not stellar by any means, but not as awful as it was earlier in the year. In other words, I'm really confident "this too shall pass."

hattmall• 3 years ago

The overall quality of an individual employee has declined considerably. Mass hiring and layoffs are to an extent part of a more elaborate hiring process. Right now market dynamics are making this possible but as things tighten up there will be salary depression and more intern type roles coming back as the "hiring" process gets extended where previously it was compressed.

throwaway5371• 3 years ago

not really

it turns out you need half the people to do the same job

rootusrootus5• 3 years ago

bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD

I've wondered about that. Sometimes I see jobs that sounds super interesting, but I only match maybe 50% of the unique bits of experience they want. Then I see 200 applicants and think ... how many people are just applying for the hell of it, because the job sounds cool, even though they have none of the right experience?

jacobsimon• 3 years ago

recommend tailoring your resume to each job and highlighting the experiences/projects that are most relevant for that role :)

also applying to newly posted positions and using referrals when you can

noodle5• 3 years ago

I've wondered about that. Sometimes I see jobs that sounds super interesting, but I only match maybe 50% of the unique bits of experience they want.

Really depends on what the company needs. We're willing to talk to a pretty wide range of people about some of our roles, while for others we need someone specific. Honestly I think 50% is not that bad. We get a lot of 0% resumes.

rsynnott14• 3 years ago

Unfortunately, it depends on the company. Some job descriptions are sincere “we actually need this”; some are a wish list.

paczki• 3 years ago

I'm always applying for the hell of it, because job descriptions are a mess anyways. These companies actively say they're entry level-junior level and then requires 6+ years experience. If they're gonna waste my time by just trying to get more eyes on their position to game the filter system, then I'm going to waste their time by sending my resume.

Let's not even talk about the companies that actively promote themselves as a remote position, and the chances of it actually being remote are about 10%.

whaleofatw2022• 3 years ago

and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD.

Been seeing a lot of this too. Backend specific job, .NET, and we get a bunch of folks who are front-end devs with maybe python or node.

neon_electro11• 3 years ago

Do you make it clear that you will only accept candidates with strictly .NET experience? I've had plenty of reasonably positive experiences applying to places where I have the overall skill set (front-end or back-end) but do not have the exact tech stack the company uses as my strongest set of hard skills.

surajrmal• 3 years ago

I'm curious why you wouldn't consider those people just because their existing experience doesn't 100% overlap your tech stack? Could they not be trained on how to write backend .net? Wouldn't the diversity of experience be helpful for your team?

jaculabilis• 3 years ago

Man, I have backend-specific experience with .NET and all I can find are job postings for frontend, Python, and node. Where are your job postings?

scarface_7421• 3 years ago

I think my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out

Really, once you are unemployed and looking for a job, it’s too late to do anything to stand out. The time to do something to standout is while you are working.

How will emailing someone directly help if he doesn’t have a unique set of skills that helps him stand out? If he is just another generic developer (no offense intended I don’t know anything about him and that’s how I would have described myself until 5 years ago) why would emdilokb

Mixtape• 3 years ago

The time to do something to standout is while you are working.

This is an issue I ran into recently during my post-undergrad job hunt. Having exited college without an internship, it was difficult to distinguish myself in any meaningful way. In my opinion, major, career-defining work needs to be at least six months' worth of dedication to be of any importance on a resume. Most people don't have the savings to go that long between jobs.

I was fortunate enough to secure a well-paying internship over the next six months, but in all honesty I think I got lucky. It's tough out there if you don't have the existing background to set yourself apart.

eikenberry• 3 years ago

While I agree it is better to look for work while working, I don't see how that impacts how you stand out in a hiring process. How can you leverage an existing job to stand out to a new potential employer (while looking, ie. short time scales)?

noodle5• 3 years ago

Strongly disagree with this. Its very easy to stand out, in many different ways.

How will emailing someone directly help if he doesn’t have a unique set of skills that helps him stand out?

Because they will indicate their very direct interest in the company in a way that people who are spray-and-praying 100s of resumes a day won't. Because they get to briefly demonstrate their soft skills to a potential teammate in a way that might not be conveyed in just a resume.

I'd hire a generic skillset developer who is a great communicator and teammate over a technical genius asshole who shreds teams apart 99.9% of the time. I've made this choice personally many, many times across my career as an engineering leader.

tmaly• 3 years ago

I am seeing the same thing. I have 5 open positions. This past week I have seen a huge uptick in applications. We have streamlined our process to 3 interviews. We do not do Leetcode.

Still with even a streamlined process, we were not seeing any senior Python developers for several months.

theasteve• 3 years ago

When do you think the market will start picking up?

orderedtree• 3 years ago

I'm a new grad and I didn't have too much trouble getting interviews. Most interviews came from large "startups" based in the US.

rootusrootus5• 3 years ago

Everyone wants to work remotely. But that means now you are probably competing with hundreds of other applicants for any halfway interesting job.

ActionHank• 3 years ago

And many of them for a lot less TC

rootusrootus5• 3 years ago

Yep, exactly. I've known some really great devs who lived in the midwest, and didn't want to move to the coasts. They're totally okay with half the comp someone would look for in one of the big cities.

macintosh-hd5• 3 years ago

I figured me not caring between remote and in office would increase my chances, but it really doesn't feel like it has. I think the market is really bad right now.

Shinchy• 3 years ago

Just from my own perspective and in speaking with recruiters (UK), I've never seen the job market this bad before. I have 20+ years’ experience, Harvard, senior leadership positions, and long tenures at reputable places. Yet I don't hear anything back from applications I put out (and these are senior positions).

I think one huge factor at play is the move to remote work, before you would compete with the people in your area who had to physically be able to turn up to a location to interview. What has happened is the opening of the gates to anyone in the world being able to apply to that same job, so you now have 500+ applications for roles that would have previously gotten 20. There’s only so much headspace one can give to that quantity of applicants so I suspect the first 25 get a look in and the others go in the bin.

rdedev• 3 years ago

I am going through the same experience. For now only referrals seems to get me a response from HR. Otherwise it's just radio silence.

MentallyRetired3• 3 years ago

I can relate. I have 25 years of experience as a senior and lead frontend developer, with some management experience.

I've applied at over 80 roles. I've received 35ish rejections and about 18 interviews. 4 put me through to final interviews and chose someone else despite liking me more, I was told. (one person had a smidge of java experience, one was a female and they needed a diversity hire, etc)

Balgair• 3 years ago

I'm outside of FAANGs and the valley and in biotech and formerly DoD.

For us, it's always been 'this bad'. Applying for thousands of jobs isn't too terrible, depending on the economy of course. Covid was a rare bright spot for biotech applications, unfortunately.

My advice is to ditch the applications entirely and go straight to networking. Yes, not exactly the most revolutionary advice here. But, if you;re in that kind of competition/environment, you've no choice but to work your network.

If you've already done that and found no luck, find people at the companies/departments you want to work for and figure out what hobbies/side-projects they do. Then try to make friends and try to get a job through that connection. Yes, it's a lot longer and more fraught process, but it can lead to results. Church or other community based methods are also possible, though it takes longer to build up the network that way.

Outside of that, recruiters/headhunters have been something approaching a way to get a position. Try looking for them online too.

Really though, work your network and don't be shy about it. Let your friends know you are looking for work, don't be embarrassed.

moneywoes6• 3 years ago

My advice is to ditch the applications entirely and go straight to networking. Yes, not exactly the most revolutionary advice here. But, if you;re in that kind of competition/environment, you've no choice but to work your network.

Could you elaborate on this please?

Is there more to networking than just sending personalized connect messages based on a person profile on Linkedin?

I have been doing that without much success

solarmist6• 3 years ago

Yes, meeting someone in person, like at a meetup, even for 5 minutes, will get you 100% better responses than trying to force a connection without even having met the person before.

Alternatively asking someone you know in person to introduce you to the person. You're trying to connect with.

Doing “networking” cold without any personal connections rarely leads anywhere valuable.

moneywoes6• 3 years ago

Nope, in the same boat, unfortunately.

alanpage• 3 years ago

If you must apply via online job applications, definitely change your resume to include as many of the keywords in the job description as you can, while still being truthful. If you don't, the first-level automated filtering will screen you out of the group moving on to the HR department. This is a huge amount of work, but even a little bit of an edge can help.

That said, DON'T go through online applications if you can avoid it. Many of the jobs I (and others around me) have gotten are through their personal network.

Develop your personal network now. Question: When is the best time to plant a tree if you want to enjoy it? Answer: 20 years ago. When is the second best time to plant a tree? Today.

1. Connect to everyone you know personally or have ever worked with on LinkedIn, and use the "Send a note" function to give them a reason to remember you, and say you'd like to add them to your network. Once you've got a decent number of connections (at least a few hundred?), post a "looking for work" type of message with your skills, experience, and interests. Be sincere and not "network-y". Do it with the intention that they might be able to help you now, but you may be able to help them in the future.

2. Reach out to friends and coworkers that you had a closer relationship with, and let them know that you're looking for work in a particular area or field, and do they know of anything available (or companies that fit your area). Friends and ex-coworkers are the best because they can get you right into the HR department or the hiring manager.

3. Do not discount the many people on LinkedIn who currently or recently worked at a company that you are considering applying to (but that you don't know). Sign up for the paid LinkedIn service for a month, and use the ability of paid users to email anyone, to reach out to people who might be in the department of the company that you are looking at. You'd be amazed what information or help you can get from total strangers, just by sending them a nice note explaining that you're looking at the company/department and would like to speak to them for a few minutes to get an idea of the company culture. This is scary for many people (a younger myself included), but I've done it and it works. Most people will give you a few minutes to talk to you. And you could get valuable information about the team/department/manager, that could help you present the side of you that works best in their culture (laid back, hard-charging, early-risers, dog-friendly, tabs not spaces, etc.).

Good luck with the search!

swamp40• 3 years ago

Post a screenshot of your resume, with identification redactions. You have 500 programmers here on this thread ready to give you free advice.

HEmanZ• 3 years ago

I’m sorry this is happening to you. The job market is very bad right now by tech standards, but people are definitely still hiring. A few things I notice from my very-myopic view as a backend engineer at a large-ish tech company:

- Hiring has ground to a halt for generic FE developers. The general strategy seems to be that we should have enough FE people to move around to get new features done. No more big UI rewrites that would require an expanding FE dev force.

- Hiring for specific roles is still good, but I guess the applicant spam has gotten crazy bad, and now most hiring moves through direct recruiter interaction and other side channels. We’re still hiring a good number of backend distributed-systems devs, specialized mobile devs, and tons of the ever-popular “ML Engineer”.

- The finance industry is apparently having a great time right now because their recruiters won’t leave me alone. Multiple people we laid off on my team landed at cushy or high paid jobs in banking or finance. All backend engineers tho.

My probably worthless advice would be to start spinning your resume differently and target a new position. I suspect FE rolls are really taking a hit as companies seem saturated. Start reaching out directly to recruiters. If all else fails, consider a career move or even the classic “go back to school to weather out the downturn”. Good luck!

hunterhod2• 3 years ago

If you have any entrepreneurial tendencies, starting a simple LLC and selling your services to local businesses can be a solid option right now.

Industries outside of VC-backed consumer technology are making money and need technology generalists to amplify their businesses. Just protect yourself with contracts and you’re good to go.

formulathree4• 3 years ago

I've been applying too. I've landed tons of interviews about 40 total. Did them all.

All failed but one. It's definitely harder than before. Much harder.

I got failed for the most trivial reasons. There were interviews where I passed and did all the tasks required and the interviewer gave me positive signals like "good job", "talk to you soon" and boom the recruiter told me I was rejected the next day.

There was one where I made it to the final round onsite. Everyone liked me in the onsite. Schooled the technicals with code that worked first run and they canned me because behavioral. One guy (the director who I wouldn't even be reporting too) didn't like my reasoning for wanting to work at the company because I focused on my interest in the technology rather then the mission.

Like literally I just didn't talk about the mission... a specific thing and that was it. Besides that 4 out of 5 people during the final interview told me "talk to you soon" and one told me "I hope we see more of you in the future".

So yeah it's harder, brutally harder not just on the screening but even up the pipeline. I would say my resume is impressive enough that recruiters still contact me and I can make it to a first technical.

I think the people who are getting hired the most right now are people with connections. Who knows who.

johnwatson11218• 3 years ago

Back in 2001 - 2002 I was out of work and it was miserable. I had been doing webdev for 2 years in nyc during the dot com bubble. In addition to looking for work I was also trying to move cross country. I remember days of just spamming my resume out to 40 or 50 new email addresses that I would harvest from monster.com. This got me 2 interviews in 3 months.

I was very surprised in terms of how much harder it was to get interviews compared to just 2 years earlier. During the height of the dot com boom I had arrived in nyc on a greyhound bus and found a job writing java servlets against mysql/postgresql in 3 days w/o any contacts.

Looking back I would have been better off taking any job and reading as much new tech as I could. The long aimless days were as damaging as the lack of income.

JofArnold• 3 years ago

The volume of applications we are getting for our open roles is huge and the proportion of them applying because they were laid off is higher than I've ever seen.

Given that, as you will expect, hiring teams we need to process a lot of applications and make snap decisions. You need to ensure you rise to the top by

- Keeping your CV brief and relevant

- Making it clear what things you specifically did in previous roles and their benefits

- Make it clear (e.g. in a side panel) your abilities and how they match the role you are applying for.

But yes, it's hard. The days of applicants getting ten job offers at once are over for now. At least outside AI and outside of senior positions.

vasili1117• 3 years ago

At least outside AI

Does the finding job in AI easier? Any examples?

trhr3• 3 years ago

I've started telling new grads / interns that ask me "how 2 get jerb" to cut their resume to 1/3 of a page. Because we still need interns and juniors, and we already know they don't know a damn thing, and the only thing that would stand out at this point is _not_ making me read half a page about your capstone.

gdedhitchhiker• 3 years ago

If you can I would recommend making sure you can do some backend work to. I started in front-dev and expanded into backend. Backend devs are often seen as more valuable as that manages the biz logic. You can argue if that's right or wrong but it is what it is. As I look for people I appreciate folks who can do one area very well and want them able to do multiple areas, especially in a startup.

the_only_law7• 3 years ago

I’ve been out of work for about a year. I was never a top player in the field, most of my experience has been enterprise work and non tech companies, with some tech companies (including the one that laid me off. I have a bit more YoE than you.

For the first several months, I screwed myself by operating in a 2010s mindset “I’ll have a job in <= 3mo and I can be at least a little picky”. I was not targeting specific companies and looked at both tech and non tech companies.

I was exclusively interested in remote jobs, mostly because I still had a lease and breaking it would be very expensive, as would keeping it and having to pay two rents. Remote roles were also scarce, adding that single filter could significantly cut the amount of jobs I saw.

I did interview for a handful of on-site roles, mostly for practice, and those tended to progress better, but again, they all wanted me to move to even more expensive areas when moving at all was going to be expensive.

After a while though it got worse and worse, my professional confidence flatlined. There were hardly any recruiters reaching out anymore, cold apps went to the void, and the few interviews I did get never made it past the first round. Never got any feedback. The few recruiters I could get were equally useless, usually showing off some roles that I looked like a good fit for before completely ghosting me.

I wondered if my resume was the issue, and had several people, as well as ChatGPT look at it, and got nothing but good feedback with minor nitpicks.

A lot of the jobs I saw within my area of experience either wanted high senior people, or people with very niche skill sets, and apparently they can afford to be picky right now.

Most recently, I’ve had interviews that seem promising and people (family friends) now claiming they can get me a job, but unfortunately this year has battered me, with large expenses left and right My lease is up now, so I’m looking at on site roles, but the rental market is so bad here I’m afraid it’s too late.

One one hand, I was never happy with my career, and now the golden handcuffs are off, on the other hand, I have nowhere else to go, and the shit that matters just keeps getting more and more expensive

icco• 3 years ago

With all of the layoffs, we're seeing about a 50-100x increase in number of applicants for open rolls, so the market is definitely more flooded. Also I'm regularly finding applicants were over-lelveled in past roles, and so usually have about one or two titles higher expectations for level than they actually are capable of having.

n_ary• 3 years ago

Market is same as before, here in EU, but people just got a bit more cautious and economy is not exactly prospering with the war and inflation. Hence, a lot of risk aversion and tightened purses. Also, due to sudden spike in interest rates, raising investment(previously you gave a shiny pie-in-sky presentation and got money, now you need to demonstrate demand and having actual revenue and improvement plans etc..) hiring became much more slow and competitive. Also a lot of people left school due to inflation and higher taxes and scrambled to find some work as savings were abysmal due to follow your dream and get rich quick schemes(crypto/social media shills etc).

sophe• 3 years ago

The market is bad. Since getting laid off in March, I've applied to 185 jobs. I'm a director, 25 years, and I can only work remotely.

What's new this time around is: + Nobody at target companies will respond to questions (via email or linkedin) + At least 50% of application forms require desired salary (seriously who does this for a director or VP role?); I've dropped my limit by 50k + Radio silence from companies. most never even send a rejection. Very few applications get to screenings. + For some openings, I write some test code up front top demonstrate my interest, and still no bites.

I suspect that TA teams are getting blown up by the traffic, but... for leadership roles, I would expect more careful handling.

raydev• 3 years ago

It's bad! I got laid off late last 2022 when I had just joined in 2021

When I got 2021 New Job, I continued to interact with recruiters and even did a few more interviews into December! My inbox was full of recruiters, as it had been for the 4-5 years prior.

The recruiter spam started drying up for me around June/July 2022, what used to flow became a trickle. By November 2022, my inbox was a bunch of tumbleweeds and I had just been laid off.

I followed 6 referrals from ex-colleagues and only 2 got me to an actual phone screen.

I got my current job a few months ago, but that was after weeks of pinging recruiters directly on LinkedIn and stumbling on a exactly-perfect fit of a job description to my resume which I boasted about.

My inbox is still mostly dry.

NCharby• 3 years ago

Perspective from a PM who runs a job board - Yes it's hard right now, but the reason why changes depending on where you look.

We saw mass layoffs (https://layoffs.fyi/) at the beginning of the year from what we used to call FAANG companies. Economic fear is a major motivator, but there's also been a shift in investor's mindsets. Growth at all costs isn't sexy anymore - we want to see realized profits. In response, these big names tightened up their expenses. And where you used to be a hot shot for having 2 years at Google or Amazon, you're now just another in the flood of extremely highly paid workers looking for a similar salary.

At the same time, the VC market sobered up. 10 years ago you could get a couple million on a powerpoint deck for wifi enabled dog food. It was the end of the great recession, let's get rich baby! Today the startup scene is much tighter and SMB's in any industry are nervous.

Then there's inflated title demand and emerging tech. Scroll any job board; 2/3rds of those roles will be at a senior level or be in something new like AI that few have real experience with. Do companies actually need Seniors? Usually no, but they believe 1 Senior can do the work of multiple Mid-levels and the cost per head drops. Do companies actually need an AI team? Usually no, but they believe they can replace departments with it.

So who's winning right now? It's not 'Tech Workers at Tech Companies'. It's not smaller SaaS businesses who can't afford all the talent sloshing around. Consultants might see some gains as a 1099 isn't the commitment a W2 is. But the real winners are the "Non-tech Tech" companies. Insurance companies, construction, brick and mortar retail, the IT department at your local hospital; they don't sell software, but they need tools to stay competitive. Those hiring teams have the pick of the litter right now.

Last thought: Firing all the recruiters during covid was a stupid move. You're not getting a callback because they canned the person who did the callbacks.

Kalpeshbhalekar• 3 years ago

Have you tried freelancing platforms like Upwork, Fiver and other apps?

Sometimes getting started as a contract worker/part time consultant and then transitioning to a full time role would be easier.

(This helps in building confidence for the recruiter)

komali25• 3 years ago

How many applications have you sent?

Oh average I send 250 applications in a job hunt to get about three offers, two of which are for positions I actually want.

It's my opinion that in general people don't have a proper expectation for the volume of applications necessary to find a good fitting job. Or dating to find a good partner, for that matter.

Many of my friends often "settle" for the first company that gives them an offer because the job hunt is so tedious and emotionally exhausting. It requires a shifting of a mindset imo: every rejection is not telling you literally that you're not a good fit. First of all, I've met very few people that are good at hiring or evaluating engineering ability, let alone their own engineering needs. So most rejections just come from that lack of skill in that area, they failed to realize or evaluatedthat you would have done a good job for them. Second, it's not a reflection on your ability, it's just that you require 197 rejections to get the three offers. It just takes that. If you settle in for the ride I think it goes better.

I've blogged about this in regards to boot camp grads: https://blog.calebjay.com/posts/bootcamp-job-search/#the-res...

Whenever I mention this people often say that that strategy is too impersonal, that I'm not leveraging warm leads enough, etc. Of course you should also do this. And attend meetups. All the steps, lol. Treat the job search like a full time job.

I will say this round of my job hunt my numbers are off. I'm at 80 resume sends to one call back. I should be at about 20 call backs now. It might be because I'm full remote now though.

tekchip• 3 years ago

I've been looking for nearly a year. I've done the same work having services write/rewrite my resume. Having friends, loved ones, colleagues etc review them.

Few bites here and there. Made it to the third interview once. Ive only had 5 or 6 actual interviews. Not including initial contact interviews with recruiters (more like 10-12 of those). It's rough out there.

Alex633• 3 years ago

You did not ask for feedback on your resume (found through your profile), so I hope you won't be offended by my observations. Your resume looks good: format is clean and will probably scan well, you've highlighted your technical skills and kept the list to a reasonable length, and you've done a good job of providing an appropriate level of detail about your past experiences. You probably know all that because the services you have used have told you.

Here are a couple of things that you may not have heard yet. First, I think for now it would be better not to list your intention to start an undergraduate degree in the fall. I think almost any hiring manager would see that and wonder how you were going to be able to balance being a student and settling into a new job. Remember, the point of your resume is to get you an interview, not to give the hiring manager reasons to reject you. Even if you are committed to being a part-time student in the fall, you don't have to put that in your resume. You may feel that showing you are committed to getting a degree will address concerns about education, but hiring managers are selfish -- first and foremost they want to know that you are going to be focused on doing the job.

My second point may not be popular, but I feel I have to bring it up. Your experience and skills, and your stated focus on front-end development, position you in what is essentially a commodity market. There are lots of developers these days with strong Javascript and Python skills. If you want to stand out from the crowd you are going to have to work really hard to differentiate yourself. What particular skills or experience could you highlight that make you a premium resource, and not just a commodity programmer? It might be knowledge of a CMS that is not widely used. It might be practical experience with a very new technology. Maybe it's your familiarity with a particular business function or process. I think you need to figure out what makes you special and highlight it more in your resume.

I hope these thoughts are helpful. Good luck with your job search!

MollyRealized• 3 years ago

My initial thoughts (gotta help out a fellow Chicagoan):

* Let your resume be your landing page, rather than the recent work - save a click. And make your resume viewable on the web, with a PDF version downloadable. Point being, you want to reduce friction. As it stands, if you want someone to look at your resume, they need to (1) visit the site; (2) (i) find and then (ii) click 'Resume'; (3) locate the downloaded PDF; and (4) open it. Compare that to: (1) go to your site.

* I do not recognize any of the names on your 'Recent work' landing page. This may be a fault of mine as my field is not particularly IT-heavy . But for those who might be clueless, it may be worthwhile to briefly state who they are, or what type of work they do.

* FWIW, have someone look at it for grammar/spelling, and tell them to be picky. "Self-taught", for example. When people are trying to seek reasons to wade through tons of candidates, even the smallest stupid mistakes can be used as sorting criteria, under the umbrella of "showing attention to detial."

* I'm not sure if "self-taught" is something to advertise; I see the appeal, but if I'm someone anal, then I may wonder what holes that left. Self-taught means you only had to meet your own standards.

* Are you saying - with your education - that with your Bachelor's, you expect to enroll this fall? I would take this completely off your resume; it's not an existing skill, then. It also is going to leave a lot of people thinking that your focus will be split.

* Generally, overall, retool/rewrite a LOT of your items by backing up claims and orient it more as a sales pitch. If you are an employer, what version of this tiny little sentence would make you want to hire you? You don't want to just say 'experience in...', you want to say the things you did. "Shepherded six major projects in high-level companies from brainstorming to rolling out the door." You don't want to say what you're seeking, you want to say what you can do for the person looking at your resume.

* Some of your verb choices are very passive. "Acted as the developer of" -- no, it's "Developed". "Experienced in implementing a range of" -- "Implemented eight contant management systems" - use active voice and provide specifics.

Look into whether you want some items on your resume at all, given the impression they might give. The National Safety Council was a two-month gig; Thrive Creative was an eight-month gig. If you just HAVE to include it but there are things that explain it, incorporate it into your resume. "(Short-Term Assignment)", etc.

Cypher• 3 years ago

I've been looking for 6 months too, I'd say I've had 5 or 6 that got to the interview stage. Lots of screening calls and nothing much afterwards. Came close 2 twice to landing a job but too much competition. It's a bad market. I have another 2 interviews Monday but I'm dreading one that is like a pair programming test which I get anxiety over just thinking about it. I much prefer take homes but IDK we just gotta keep looking and hope things bounce back I guess.

aryehof• 3 years ago

Supply simply far exceeds demand. Unless your highly specialized, connected, lucky or perceived as a “James Bond”, the employment market is dire.

This is the inevitable consequence of too many entrants into the market, past over-hiring, and a profession where experience doesn’t count and your competing against ever more newcomers with a high IQ, less expectations, and a better ability to “leetcode” and memorize those algorithms and data structures.

Your prospective employers probably get 200 resumes or more for every general position, but of course “we’re hiring” (sic).

dawmak• 3 years ago

Market got worse definitely. That's also one of the reasons we have created https://careera.io/ to address all of the usual problems during job seeking and recruitment, like: applying hundreds limes to different companies manually, digging thru hundreds of applicants' CVs by recruiters, ghosting and all types of bias (race, religion, age, you name it..).

ggariepy• 3 years ago

I was laid off in March, 2023, a victim of the startup shakeout after the SVG banking collapse. A year previous, I had a small bidding war for my services. When I was let go this March, it was in the midst of the Facebook and Amazon layoffs.

It was terrible. The market had flipped 180 degrees away from where it was in 2022. I did not, however, have problems getting interviews. I got lots of them. I also got ghosted regularly after third and fourth interviews as the companies interviewed dozens of candidates looking for the very best deal they could find.

Now, for some perspective, I am a 30 year veteran of the IT industry, with well over 20 years of programming experience under my belt. You guessed it, that means I'm in my mid-50s. Did I run across ageism in my search? Not overt, but undoubtedly, yes.

Were companies overwhelmed by the number of applicants? Unquestionably. I had one recruiter tell me they had over 150 applicants for a single programming job, and they planned to only talk to 10% of them. 10% is still a LOT of interviews to find the right candidate.

So yes, the job market is bad, although not for traditional reasons. The economy seems to be chugging along, even though it's rumored to have one foot on a banana peel. Companies are hiring. But there's a lot of competition out there for posts, and companies have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to the number of candidates to choose from. They don't know how to act.

So if your resume isn't in as-expected format, forget it. If your interviewing skills reveal you're an introvert with poor social skills, forget it. If you don't respond quickly and professionally to every serious inquiry, forget it. If you're not making your job search a 3-5 hour DAILY effort, forget it.

In other words, you have to bring your A-game right now, where you might have gotten by in previous years with just having good coding skills and a halfway decent resume.

The good news is that everyone can bring their A-game with some practice and effort. I got hired after two months. It was hard-- gut-wrenching, even -- but after dozens of interviews I finally landed a good job that met my requirements.

If you are working right now and you aren't saving your money for a rainy day, you're being foolish. Fortunately, I had been saving, and my bank account wasn't destroyed. I feel bad for people in this market who don't have savings. Be prepared to weather a six month outage. And keep upskilling. Complacency will get you laid off.

goddamnyouryan• 3 years ago

We’re trying to solve this exact problem over at https://polyfill.work

JoshDoody• 3 years ago

I have a unique perspective on this as my job is coaching Software Engineers (and others) through salary negotiations when they change jobs.

I would describe the current SWE market as "stuck". I'll start with what I've observed over the past year, then I'll opine on why I think I'm seeing that.

In 2021 and early 2022, there was basically a hiring boom in tech, and particularly Big Tech. This was superficially obvious, but I personally saw it in my business as Jan 2021–August-ish 2022 being the best stretch my business has had _by far_ (and I've been doing this full time since 2016).

Then the macro economy saw some significant changes (maybe the most in-your-face data point being interest rates going up in the US). Big Tech slowed the hiring, froze it, then starting laying folks off in pretty big numbers.

I saw _this_ in my business via a pretty rapid cratering of applications to work with me. People overuse the term "fell off a cliff", but the inbound web traffic to the pages that drove my coaching business ... fell off a cliff. (For screenshots, you can check out this writeup I did earlier this year: https://www.joshdoody.com/2023/06/focus-on-high-earners/)

Traffic to those pages dropped like 90% in 6–8 weeks. It was a dramatic, sudden shift.

Those are pages that one would find if one were searching for, eg, "How to negotiate [big tech company] job offer". So, at least from my business' vantage, interest in negotiating job offers with Big Tech companies cratered around September/October 2021.

Why is that relevant? By now, we all know that happened because there were layoffs brewing, etc. But at the time, that was not widely known and, much to my chagrin, inbound interest in my business was a leading indicator of what was happening with hiring at Big Tech companies.

Fast forward to today: Traffic to those pages is still more or less down 90% from where it was in mid-2022. I believe if there were to be a spike in hiring in Big Tech, I would see it pretty quickly. So, for now, I don't think there's much of a change there.

Why is the overall market for SWEs still "stuck"?

My guess is a lot of those layoffs were mid-level and junior engineers—not the experienced Senior Engineers, who were probably spared. So the market was suddenly flooded with mid-level and junior Software Engineers with Big Tech experience and Big Tech-level salary expectations.

Since those folks couldn't go to another Big Tech company, they just sort of sat on the sidelines (pay in Big Tech firms is very, very good, and even a little fiscal responsibility would net someone a nice cash cushion to live on while sitting on the workforce sidelines).

Meanwhile, the normal attrition in Big Tech SWE jobs that typically happens ground to a halt either because those folks were not working at all (laid off and on the sidelines) _or_ because they were Senior Engineers—who would normally have been looking to hop to their next Big Tech job—deciding to just hunker down and see how things shook out. When there are layoffs happening all around you and you wonder whether you're next, it's easy to just sort of switch to survival mode, lay low, and see how long you can keep your job (I speak from experience here).

So, for several months, everyone was frozen: Either sitting at home waiting for hiring to ramp back up _or_ holding on to their Senior Level job. Eventually, the folks on the sidelines realized this might be a longer-term adjustment, and they needed to get back to work, so they started looking and applying for jobs. Unfortunately, Big Tech still wasn't hiring, so they had to look elsewhere. The good news is "elsewhere" needs SWEs, the bad news is the pay they're offering doesn't look nearly as attractive as what Big Tech was paying during the boom. They also aren't "Senior" level in their experience, so they can't just apply for Senior-level roles at other tech companies (where they might be able to get comp approaching their mid-level Big Tech comp from before).

Or they _can_ apply to Senior-level roles, but they're under-qualified for what that firm needs. A lot of firms saw lots of inbound applications from mid-level Engineers with Big Tech experience and salary expectations applying for Senior-level roles that they just weren't ready for. So those firms are getting inundated with candidates and just trying to figure out how to find qualified candidates among the deluge of applicants.

Meanwhile, you (OP) are applying for jobs at those firms along with all of those folks who are migrating from Big Tech, which means you're not landing interviews.

How does this resolve?

Unclear. But _eventually_ Big Tech has to start hiring again. Not at the rate they were hiring during the boom, but at a normal rate to support normal levels of business growth. When they do, the Senior Engineers will start moving again, and things will start to unstick. All of those sidelined Engineers from the layoffs will start to mix back in with normal Big Tech hiring, easing the pressure on non-Big Tech firms' recruiters, and opening up more interview slots.

I could be totally wrong here. I'm only going off of what I've seen. I can say that when I _do_ coach folks through salary negotiations, the process is the same as it always has been. There are just fewer negotiations happening because fewer people are getting jobs. I have no idea when the market will come back, but it _feels_ like things are slowly unsticking right now.

I know this probably isn't much comfort to you, OP, and I'm sorry you're not getting any traction. I hope you find something great soon.

Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

Related Stories