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Tell HN: Employers are not desperate to hire developers
311 points by anon50118810 on Nov 14, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 361 comments
I'm in the middle of a job search and wanted to share my impression after discussions like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33563083.

I'm an unemployed mid/senior-level developer in the U.S. with a mediocre but solid portfolio and passable social skills. I've applied for many jobs at normal non-FAANG places, almost all of which were a decent match for my background, and employers don't seem desperate. Lots of no responses or form rejections, several places where I was rejected after either the initial or tech screen. I haven't gotten to the negotiation phase yet anywhere. When I asked, most seemed serious about hiring: they just got a new round of funding, there was a backlog of work, something, but still no hire. Also almost no response from external recruiters, and very little inbound LinkedIn messaging from anyone.

I'm not complaining, it's just how the grind is. I'm getting enough traction that I'm sure it's just a numbers game. But the employers are not desperate.

If you are a candidate without a golden resume or big network and need a job, then definitely don't get complacent because of HNers telling you that $100k-150k jobs are falling off trees. Put together a decent portfolio and then get those applications numbers up from day one. My personal goal is at least 100 applications before seriously considering pivoting to something else.




It took me 200 applications to land my job, and I think the rest of everyone I know who’s a decent programmer had similar situations. The bottom line is that everyone has employment and only had to move for it if they’re taking a high (120k+ TC for entry level) paying position.

This is “falling of trees” compared to any other industry. Being able to land a middle class job directly in the field of your education without having to move is a very nice thing. Even if it takes 200 applications. It’s not common outside of engineering.

The median individual income in the U.S. is 32k [1]. Software engineers in the U.S., as a generalization of industry around the world, is literally the best that it gets.

That being said. Job hunting is soul sucking. Good luck.

1. https://datacommons.org/place/country/USA?utm_medium=explore...

(Edit because people are concerned about my 200 number. I got an offer for the first 60k position I applied for and decided to turn it down. I was shooting a tad higher. I’m also counting “one click” applications: Zip Recruiter and Linkedin.)


Is this first job in the industry or mid-senior level? I don't think I've ever sent 200 applications in any of my job searches. Last time I didn't send any; I just flicked the switch on LinkedIn and Hired and had almost 60 recruiters reach out to me (followed up with about 18, had initial interviews with about 8 companies, ended up with 4 late stage interviews and 2 offers).

And I wouldn't consider myself an amazing developer (I do alright, but I'm not 10x) or have an amazing portfolio and I don't have a FAANG on my resume, just a large corporation that no one has heard of, a couple medium-sized companies, and several smaller companies / failed startups.

Might be a bit different now, this was back in June/July 2021.


Once you're a part of the club it's dramatically easier to get a job. A year and change ago I made the move into a legit tech company. I think it took me 50ish applications to get that one offer. That job was not meant to be and I went looking after a few months. With just that brief stint I applied to like 10 places, got some level interest from all of them, and ended up with an offer.


This is called a CV stuffing position. It works very well because recruiters can identify brands, but not skill.


> Might be a bit different now, this was back in June/July 2021.

That was near the peak, it was a completely different world back then.


My impression is that it was a lot different back in June/July 2021.

Also that sounds like an impressive background, 6 or 7 or more companies over I'm guessing 10-15 years? Also the stuff on your HN profile looks pretty good too. Don't sell yourself short.


About 10 years ago I applied tot about 200 jobs.


This is one of the reasons why I made this post, to put some numbers out there. A lot of people on HN have ideal backgrounds so that they really are going to get constant unsolicited offers, or at least an interview anywhere they apply. Other people are on the hiring side struggling for one reason or another and blaming it on a hot market. If you're in a group like that, it's easy to get the wrong impression, and worse to repeat it.

I definitely agree that developers have it better than most people. Anyone who's watched someone outside the field look for work should understand that. But there is a huge middle ground between the Stanford graduate working at Google for whom every application results in an offer, and people applying to bad jobs with a 90 minute commute just to find something. That middle ground is what you and I are talking about, where you do have to send out a lot of applications, 100 or 200 or more, but there are also a lot of companies, you can work remotely and they pay really well compared to other jobs in the U.S., let alone worldwide.


I've been a developer going on 10 years now. Do not give up. Stick with it. My first job offer right out of college was for 35k. Sometimes it takes a while to get a job offer. Sometimes you accept a job offer and find out a week or month in, its not a good fit. However know somewhere out there, there is a good fit. Aim for one where you are happy and the company is happy.


Not the OP, but your definition of "falling off trees" and mine are very different if it took 200 applications to land a job.

I'm not saying it's bad, I'm just saying I would never use that expression to describe it.


I would consider sending out 200 applications (for someone with some experience to reasonably targeted openings) to be an extraordinarily high number. I doubt if I sent out that many form letter scattershot from pre-internet grad school.

Certainly hasn't been the case since. To be sure, the few other jobs I've had have all come through personal connections.


I had just assumed that if someone was sending out 200 applications, it was pretty much the same resume going to all of them (no catering it to the individual interests of the employer) - with perhaps some exceptions to jobs the applicant was particularly interested in.

I can't imagine sending out that many having spent large quantities of time on each one.

[edited to fix typing the wrong word]


I would assume so as well although that may be the problem.

Though I'm also open to the possibility that some companies just want to hire some number of developers with 3-5 years of experience in $TECHNOLOGY and aren't too fussy beyond that. In which case, it may indeed become more of a numbers game if a company is basically picking a handful of resumes at random that clear some minimum bar.


OP here. When I think of an employer as desperate to hire, I think of it in the same way that I'm desperate to get more milk when I'm out of milk. I go to the store with milk on my mind, I pick from the few on offer, buy it and take it home. I don't need to taste test or anything like that.

Of course everyone wants to be a premium brand but sometimes it just doesn't work out like that.

A challenge is that most job listings are mostly "3-5 years of experience in $TECHNOLOGY," or rather there are so many $TECHNOLOGIES listed that almost no one is going to be an expert in all of them. It's difficult to tell from the outside whether they want someone who has experience in at least some of the core and can learn the rest, or whether they're holding out for the perfect candidate.


It's actually kind of soul sucking bad, and I have trouble coming to terms with that "this is just how it is now."

I really do feel for those without a decent network.


Given that you're talking about a 60 K position I can only assume that this is out of your first job or at the very least you're a junior or entry-level position.

So of course this is only anecdotal but I've never sent more than 5 applications out at a time even back when I was a junior dev. In the last 10 years I don't even bother looking for jobs actively anymore, I just turn the switch on my LinkedIn indicating that I'm seeking employment, and let recruiters do the rest.

I'm not sure what the difference is, but I would consider myself to be an outlier as far as traditional engineers go, in that I am both exceptionally articulate and naturally extroverted. If I can get to the point where I have a face-to-face or a phone interview, I'm fairly confident that I'll be able to acquire an offer. Without specifics I can only recommend that engineers work on developing their soft skills if they don't already have them.

On the other hand I'm not particularly picky in terms of companies, and I have a wide range of senior level experience in major platforms including C# and node/typescript/JavaScript.

Just a counterpoint for all the gloom and doom but I'd say that you have nothing to worry about if you have the following:

- in demand skillset (ts/js/c#)

- people skills / charisma

- US citizenship

- 10+ years experience

- reasonable salary expectations (140-175k)


If you're selling something that's both highly in-demand and niche, then lots of people will contact you and everyone who contacts you already wants what you're selling. Soft skills aren't really involved other than to avoid messing up the sale. I'm sure you're a very personable sort but I don't think that's really the issue here.


>in demand skillset (ts/js/c#)

Sorry, but what does "ts" stand for?


typescript


Per capita median income is what you get when you include retirees, teenagers, those who do not work at all (they will still have some income from welfare/disability/gifts), and other part time workers. It's not a good measure of average employment earnings in an economy in which labor force participation is only 61%.

What you should look at is median earnings of full time workers, which is about $1000 per week, or $52K per year. This does not include benefits - in the U.S. things like healthcare are primarily funded by the employer and retirement is roughly half funded via social security matching contributions, so total compensation would be about 70K/year.

https://www.bls.gov/charts/usual-weekly-earnings/usual-weekl...


I'm not in the US; if I had to send out 200 or even 100 applications I would change career. If I had to send 50 I would be starting to investigate other careers.


I've been a developer in the US and held... oh... 8 or 9 tech jobs since about the year 2000. I don't think I've ever sent more than 10 applications in a job search. My average is probably 3-4. I'm entirely unremarkable and also didn't have a degree for the first IIRC 4 jobs (I floundered and bailed on a non-tech Bachelor's the first time, then several years later got a CS degree from an unremarkable—but at least not infamous—university).

But I also target the mid-tier, not FAANG, finance, or top-tier startups that hire like FAANG. I'd break down halfway through one of their day-long interviews no matter how much I studied leetcode, and I know it. Put me in any kind of meeting for more than a couple hours and I'm braindead, and interviews count as meetings. Even worse than ordinary meetings, really.

Yeah, if I had to send 50, let alone 200 applications in one search... I can't even imagine. If I hit 100 with no offers I'd for-sure reckon my career was over and I needed to look at jobs several notches down the economic and social ladder (and tech's already not that high on the social ladder).


I'm in the UK and have:

- previously passed a loop with FAANG ( didn't join tho ) - have a strong portfolio in a hard to resource niche

Easily send out 200 apps and get ignored.

The market is dumb, not sure I should quit over it tho


If you’re a FAANG level developer (very top of your field) then surely you’ve got a network of people you can ask for a job anytime rather than having to apply as normal?

I’m not even remotely FAANG level but if I wanted a job I’d email some people I know or Tweet that I’m looking - not fill in a form.

Have you tried working your network? Emailing some friends?


Err this is obviously a bit of a thread now, but the point of my post wasn't asking for help, but rather pointing out that frustrations with the market, and the front door, as it were, are universal.

In the UK the market is pretty dumb. Folks are mainly looking for reasons to exclude you rather than focusing on the positives. Ergo, I fire and forget resumes and only really put effort into the ones that come back positively.

When I get past the gate keepers, I almost always get an offer.

So my point is, "hang in there".


I hate that there's so much talk about networks. There's a ton of talk about anti-discrimination, equity/equality, etc in other areas of HN.

What's the word for cronyism if the person is qualified?


It’s not cronyism - it’s people knowing your portfolio of work and abilities.

And at the end of the day - do whatever you need to within reason to put food on your own table. Don’t worry about someone else judging you for cronyism for feeding your family.


There's nothing wrong with networking, but if we're all agreeing that networking is important to having a job search that doesn't involve hundreds of applications, then let's just be honest about that. In particular let's make sure people who don't have that network and who do have to job search know what they need to do to get where they need to be.


I expect it varies enormously. I can readily believe that people with relatively straightforward in-demand skills, an easy to follow track record, and maybe the right schools can probably (in a reasonable economy) just turn on LinkedIn and let interview requests flow in.

Someone who doesn't really check boxes and doesn't have a network may have to play a numbers game.

On the other hand, more senior and more specialized people (both in and out of engineering) will often have a much smaller number of holes that they would fit properly in and just sending out resumes is unlikely to be nearly as effective as networking.


Yeah you’re also disadvantaged as a senior when you apply by a form - people will obviously think ‘why is this FAANG-level person applying blindly like that’ and think it’s off and discard your application.


This is an odd take given that the majority of remote software developer jobs I've found, with form applications, are specifically listed at the senior level or higher. Maybe you're suggesting it's something like Groucho Marx's quote "I wouldn't belong to a club that would take me as a member."


I think a FAANG-level developer would probably email a team they’re interested in working with.


Is that how it works? Imagine your typical 51-200 person company with your, I don't know, mobile, backend, product teams, whatever you call them. Is there some unspoken rule you pick up at FAANG or the Ivy League that the front door is for the unwashed and people in the know use back channels to get an invitation? If someone reached out to me and I redirected them to the careers page, would I be committing some kind of faux pas? I'm joking but only a little, I really don't know how those circles operate.


> Is there some unspoken rule you pick up at FAANG or the Ivy League that the front door is for the unwashed and people in the know use back channels to get an invitation?

Err yeah kind of. I always recommend people find someone in the team they want to join and reach out to them personally or via a mutual.

If you fill in the form without someone on the other end waiting to pick your application out of the firehouse it can get lost in the HR mystery machine.

I think that’s a pretty common opinion? I’ve never gotten a job with a blind application. I’ve gotten every job I applied to when I did it by reaching out.


At smaller places the HR mystery machine is one or two people with names and faces. If they're not passing resumes down to the tech teams then there is some problem that should be sorted out. The dynamic would have to be pretty broken for me to help some random stranger bypass the system everyone in the company has agreed to use. Plus, accepting back channel applicants could mess up relationships with external recruiters, or DEI hiring initiatives.

Also the teams in smaller places are not anything spectacular, just backend, frontend, data, whatever, with a lot of overlap, so the idea that someone would be aiming for a particular team, meaning whoever is working on that part of the stack this month, is also strange.

What you're saying makes sense with big, complex companies with huge HR processes and teams of varying levels of prestige and expertise. Probably a good idea if you're aiming particularly for a team at Google that works on a particular thing you like.


BTW, this isn't a FAANG/Ivy League thing. In fact, I expect that it's even more common in a lot of other areas. Friend of a friend jobs are incredibly common. If you're just trying to navigate the system from the complete outside by handing your resume around, you're at an incredible disadvantage.


My understanding is that GP wasn't talking about a friend of a friend situation, but approaching strangers on the team purely to bypass HR.


I'm certainly more likely to know people at a random large company, but I know a lot of people in the industry to various degrees from we've met at a conference to I've worked with them. If I were thinking of applying somewhere, one of my first steps would be figuring out who I knew there. I won't automatically refer someone if I don't think they'd be a good fit but if I know them well enough to have a positive opinion about them, I'll let them know what I know or can find out and put in a referral.


> if we're all agreeing that networking is important to having a job search that doesn't involve hundreds of applications, then let's just be honest about that

I think we already were? That's exactly what I said. Who do you think isn't being honest?


No one's lying but one of the grandparent comments said that they would change careers if they needed to send out 100 applications for a job search. If 100 applications is necessary for even a good developer without a strong network, that's a misleading recommendation.


I didn't call it cronyism. I asked what cronyism would be called if the qualifications were met.

The point is that giving preference to someone you know reduces or even eliminates the other person's opportunity. This is especially important for minority groups that may not have as many connections in a given industry. Sure, people do what they need to for work, but people skipping in line...


> but people skipping in line...

But picking someone to join your team isn’t taking the first person who appears in line.


No, but it is timeboxed and it's supposed to be taking the best candidate. Even internally at my company, you have people being selected for positions before the position is even posted. So yeah, you have someone skipping the process while you're standing in line for something that isn't even available.


I think it depends, if you're early in your career you're basically trying to find a company willing to take a chance on you and train you. Once you have some accomplishments under your belt companies will start being more aggressive at hiring you because you can hit the ground running.

If you're applying for "senior" positions and have the CV to back it up and you're still batting 1/200 getting to the first interview then you are either the unluckiest person ever or there's a red flag you haven't noticed.


OP here. GGP said 200 applications to get a job, not an interview. I've had a bit under a 20% success rate on getting a first interview after an application but haven't gotten an offer yet.

Also, there are red flags, and there are red flags. I have some red flags I can't do anything about, I just have to push through them, but they shouldn't be a dealbreaker for anyone actually desperate to hire.


If you are one of these companies, you're the reason I could even get into this space!

The company I ended up working for basically would stick 10-15 potential Junior engineers (majority from bootcamps) in a room for 2 months and give them all 2 identical features to ship. Then access to the dev codebase, docs and the ear of senior engineer.

People would help each other, it was expected. People would go learn parts of the stack come back and teach everyone else (this is how I learned about GraphQL). At the end of the 2 months anyone who couldn't preform was let go, everyone else was placed.

I understand this was a boomtime thing that only works as massive companies, but it makes getting a new person on your team easier if they know the codebase/workflow. For the new engineer it also really helps to get used to how code works in a massive repo when all you've done is tiny self run projects.


Yeah. You're just graduating from school. Maybe it's not a well-known school--or maybe it's not even the "right" (or any) degree. Maybe you're grades aren't the best. It's very reasonable that getting someone to take a chance on you for a job you're not obviously qualified to grow into can be pretty hard.

But, with a track record and you aren't trying to career change? That is a lot.


"and train you"

Frankly, companies don't train. Mt company talks about training all the time and it's a joke.


I'm also very surprised by these numbers. I'm a senior dev in Ireland and my success rate over the past number of years would be around 1 in 5 CV submissions lead to a first interview / tech screen. And once I reach that stage around 1 in 3 lead to an offer.

I'm a reasonably good developer, but not top tier by any means.

But my starting point is usually a recruiter contacting me. It's been a long time since I've chased a recruiter or company. And I've never sent out 100+ applications in my 22 year career.

Maybe geography plays a part. London and Dublin are full of tech jobs. Isolated cities in the US might be different, with moving or commuting to a different city not an easy option.

I'd like to see some of the CVs that keep getting rejected or passed over, because that volume (100-200) doesn't feel right to me.


I've had it take 80 applications to actually get one on-site interview before (and I have a pretty good resume). I would not be suggesting people consider major life changes based on a few dozen attempts not progressing, it can definitely take more than that without reflecting on you.


I applied to 500 openings to get my first job. I think persistence is what matters.


My first development job as a graduate I applied to 5 positions, got 3 interviews and offers from all 3 interviews. Degree from somewhere middle of the road in my country, some side projects, applying to large but not FAANG tech cos. I think I had a good CV for a graduate nothing _that_ spectactular. There's definitely some diverging experiences going on here.


Maybe people should have their resume looked over? I have seen some very talented people make some pretty glaring errors and/or just be pretty bad at making things presentable. I think they may be getting tossed out of the pile due to something they just aren't realizing.


OP here. I'm getting a roughly 15%-20% success rate converting a cold application to a first interview. That's around the industry average from what I've seen on various sites. If my resume were a disaster I'd expect something closer to 0%.


Maybe, but probably not a huge percentage. There are tons of resources for helping review resumes and provide practice interviews. Mine was reviewed by at least 4 people and still took over 200 applications to get a job.


> The median individual income in the U.S. is 32k

The median full-time income in the US - which is a much more applicable reference point - is around $55,000.


Source?

I thought it was $42k a year or two ago, but haven't looked since, and I don't remember if it was strictly full-time.


Asking "source" and saying what you thought it was doesn't contribute to the conversation.

Searching Google for "median full time income" pops up $51,480 in bold. The next link is to the BLS (US Bureau of Labor Statistics): https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.t01.htm

For Q3'22, it was $1,068/wk, or $55,536/yr.


I would have said thanks.


I believe that's household income. Quick google shows census reporting median income at ~31k


When I graduated in aerospace engineering in 2008 during the great recession, I applied for maybe 40 places total and got 2 offers. I probably could have pulled some strings to get 1-2 more from the places where I had interned (didn't bother applying to them because I wasn't interested). Aerospace in the US requires US citizenship so the number of applicants is 1/10th SWE. SWE also just has insane demand from people in India and China. So SWE is a crazy outlier because of salary, remote opportunities, established educational bases in some regions etc.


> SWE also just has insane demand from people in India and China.

this sentence is confusing to me. Are you saying there are a lot of SWE jobs in India and China? Or are you saying there are a lot of people from those places looking for SWE jobs.

Or something different?


The latter. They're looking for H1B jobs in the US. Sorry, woke up too early.


This comparison of what it's like outside is not helping. People usually like to maintain and better their quality of life, and a drop in status hurts no matter where you are. People buy houses, pay mortgages, connect in social circles according to their financial status. No matter who you are, selling your house or not being able to hangout with friends doing the things you love sucks.

Even if it's true, a random statistic fact cannot make your situation better. For example, earning $32K puts you in the top 1% of the incomes across the world. Does it make you feel any better?


It’s always easier to get a job when you have one then when you don’t.


> It’s always easier to get a job when you have one then when you don’t.

This should be emphasized. I have a friend who quit a terrible, stressful job without something new lined up, and it took him a year to find another one. After an excessive number of interviews at one company for one position, he got annoyed and asked them what the deal was. They said that they were impressed by him, but were honest and said they were trying to figure out "what was wrong with him," since he wasn't employed, and then gave him an offer.


I work at Apple and my team has been “hiring” for the last 2 years with no offers so far.

Why? Because even if you are a good candidate, hiring is not as easy as people think.

Among the many challengues we have I can list the following:

1. The people interested in your profile have minimal influence in the process,

2. There are people who are always chasing for the shiny new object (or person, in this case),

3. There is a sea of resumes in our hands, and we pick the best, but they want the world and lose them during negotiations, and the ones at the bottom of the list who really want the job, move on because the process to get to them takes too long (several months),

4. People over estimate their qualifications. Their abilities may be good, but they write over the top accomplishments in their resumes that are hard to believe, at least without proof, and they are the first ones to get rejected,

5. HR interferes too much in the process. They sometimes change the job requirements, sometimes ignore candidates that we explicitely tell them to follow up with, sometimes extend meaningless offers just to keep potentially good candidates in the hook (people with offers at other Big Co.), sometimes force candidates to accept offers without a signed paper, so on and so forth. Obviously, good candidates get fed up with this and decline/renege the offer, we lose them, and the people below them too because the negotiation took too long (3-5 months),

6. I really want to hire motivated individuals, and I know many people like me across different teams, but we lose motivation over time because of all the roadblocks, and the cycle(s) described above repeats.

The whole process is kind of silly. I have reviewed hundreds of resume from people who are doing amazing work at other companies, but we reject them for very small things. Only two of approximately 20 referrals got an offer, and I am 100% sure that all of those referrals are as good or better than me (facepalm).


A lot of companies say "we're hiring" but are not hiring, defined as actually extending an offer and actually employing someone. They're fishing, but not catching, or they're catching and releasing. We need a more precise word than "hiring". Everyone can say they're hiring, but they're not actually hiring anyone--they're just fishing.


I don’t know if this has changed, but I remember most tech businesses were perpetually hiring, because part of the visa process to bring in workers was a requirement to prove that you tried to find local talent first.

(source: I once worked in the states on a TN visa, and this was the practice at the time.)


> We need a more precise word than "hiring".

I think it's precise. Two terms:

* Hiring -- When you are actually ready to make offers to hire people.

* Pretending -- When you are trying to keep the hiring funnel full, or to give the appearance of business doing well, but not ready to actually make offers.


Another way I have heard this is described is, "we're always hiring, and never hiring"


Schrodinger's job opening


This is interesting - I have been passively monitoring LinkedIn and a few others for senior engineering management roles for the last year or so (VPE, DoE). I am not really looking, I have only pursued a couple of them, but my feed/inbox is noteworthy. Many of the "openings" have been out there for multiple months, some a year+. A good handful are tweaked slightly every few weeks to appear new.

I can understand fishing for individually contributing junior-to-senior developers, but for senior management roles? Would a company really troll waters to find a senior leader that they don't really need? "Hey, look what I found, let's find a spot for him/her!"

My theory has been either (1) those companies are super picky, which is understandable given the impact of those roles, or (2) they don't really know what they want, and they are using the interviewing process to figure it out. But regardless of 1v2, those companies likely have people fulfilling those management responsibilities today that they have otherwise deemed unqualified, or are very-senior C-level folks that are too busy to do it well.


If I were a C-level executive planning to extend business to a new area, and none of my reports are quite up to the job, I'd probably be looking to hire a senior manager to fill that spot.

But if I can't find the right person in a couple months time, I have a choice -- do I put some unqualified person there to do the job, or do I wait? I think there are strong arguments to wait, especially if the project is not time sensitive or a huge priority.

Or maybe to replace a person who has left. There's a gap and perhaps a not-quite-qualified (or a qualified-but-too-busy) person is temporarily taking care of things while the company tries to hire. There's a choice here too -- do you hire the least-bad person after say 3 months, or do you wait? Given the impact of bad hires at this level, I think I'd definitely wait.


I think this comes from the fact that we give a lot of leeway to the definition of "supply" and "demand" in common economic talk. "I'd totally buy a Ferrari for $500" says nothing about the supply or demand for Ferraris.

Economists pull demand curves out of their asses when the only verifiable facts are actual, concrete sales.


We're interviewing.


I'm the OP and I don't mean to argue your experience, but my post was more pushing back on the idea that non-FAANG companies are desperate for people. In other words, I'm pushing back on the idea that anyone willing to work outside of FAANG for $100k-$150k should be able to find something super quick.


There's a surplus of devs right now, lots of layoffs and all that. I'm sure compensation is going to take a hit till the market will stabilize itself. We're going to have a how low are you willing to go in the short term future and it's going to be a bit rough for everyone.


I'm not really concerned about this too much. There are millions of software developers in the U.S., the tens of thousands getting laid off from FAANG are a drop in the bucket. Many of them will be absorbed into other upmarket positions that I wouldn't get hired into anyway.


Regarding over the top accomplishments in resumes: every resume writing workshop tells you to do this. I don't think you should be rejecting these first just because someone listened to the advice of "sell yourself".


Or maybe they should, so we can stop with this nonsense and make it easier for everyone.


I think to do that we need to recognize that it is really hard to actually evaluate people. Resumes are only a weak signal.

A lot of people think they're way better at hiring than they are. Just like employees overestimate their skills (and are encouraged to because the resume process) employers also over estimate their hiring skills (and are encouraged to because the bureaucratic process).


Have a relative who's quite accomplished in HR and recruiting and, can confirm, they don't encourage outright lying but they do insist you have to stretch everything to the max and freely imply a lot more than a very honest person might be inclined to.

Judging from the results for people I know who've had this person re-work their résumés, it's extremely good advice. Non-braggy résumés seem to just get round-filed for not knowing how to play the game, even if they're otherwise very well-written. I'm sure there are a few folks hiring—probably almost all at relatively small enterprises—who have the opposite reaction but they're instead rejecting good people who are simply playing their hand the best possible way, given the rules. Those who fluff up their résumés get much better results.


One of the twists in the software industry is that something that looks braggy to a non-technical recruiter can look irrelevant to someone in the know, or from the other direction something that looks braggy to a tech person can be meaningless to a non-tech person.

For example, if you say that you "developed software that saved the company $X million/year," that might look good to a non-tech person but a tech person will understand that could mean nothing. Maybe you spellchecked comments in a sub-subcomponent of a project a thousand people worked on. On the other hand you might say you "worked on v1 of the Frobnicator library" which might look like nothing to a recruiter but which is a legendary accomplishment in the field.

In my case I just say what I did in plain language that includes a bunch of keywords and hope that's enough.


I'd say it depends on the company. Silicon Valley likes to promote on impact. So being able to communicate that impact is a valuable skill.


The company and the position, so a good idea for an employee #1 position, less so if you're the tenth IC on some random team at some random company.


> Non-braggy résumés seem to just get round-filed for not knowing how to play the game

That doesn’t make sense, there must be a different causality.


Why? People expect it to effectively be a sales document. So if you have a bullet item like "One of 100 people peripherally involved with only modestly successful $PRODUCT," readers would be forgiven for discounting that experience.

To be clear, per parent, I'm not saying to lie but things can generally be presented in a positive way.


My objecting is against “for not knowing how to play the game”. You’re arguing for a more plausible causality.


I guess it's also possible that HR people actually believe all the stuff on résumés is accurate and think those candidates are worse than someone presenting the exaggerated version of the exact same work history and abilities. I was trying to be generous and assume they simply think those are amateurish or are some kind of non-conformist or lack-of-social-awareness red flag.


I can say that I have generally been a modest person who has performed well in the past.

The squeaky wheel gets the grease.

People can have fewer accomplishments and make a big deal out of them and get more out of it. I would rather not make a big deal out of meaningless stuff. I recently certified as an AWS practicioner after my associate level certs expired. My manager wants to send an email out to the department about that accomplishment. I don't get it - it's just practicioner.


There's also the possibility that some candidates actually do have the track record they claim. If your default assumption is that anyone claiming really strong experience is obviously exaggerating when you haven't even talked to them then you're going to rule out a lot of the best candidates stupidly.

I've been in the bracket where ageism is a factor for a while now and so have many of the best people I know who still work as ICs. Being told that no-one really has that breadth or depth of experience and unicorns don't exist should be surprising for this group but sadly isn't any more. If the person making the silly comment is an important player in a hiring process then that's not a good sign.

The worst I've seen is when you're personally invited in as an expert/consultant by someone in your network and then HR insist on treating the gig as if they're hiring some random junior developer applicant. Objectively the professional thing to do if you're getting messed around like that is usually to politely disengage but then you risk making your friend/colleague look bad. Sometimes going via your network is a double-edged sword.


Impossible Is Nothing


This team is not hiring, or at least not taking it seriously. The bar is not high, it's just petty. The only explanation is that you literally need something that only a handful of people can do, in which case you wouldn't be talking to that many people.


And yet if op says this to management/HR, he would be the one looking for a job.


It may not be as easy as people think, but there are also items on the list that could be addressed by the company. It should not take several months to go from applications to offer for most jobs.

It sounds like I would not want to work at Apple with all the games HR plays.


Is it possible your recs are just to support the “We can’t find anybody so we have to hire foreigners” narrative.


Your 4th point is very interesting. These days companies seem to want their candidates to tell the specific accomplishments that they, personally, had completed. I wonder how is it possible to do anything like that without looking conceited?

Usually developers of all levels of skills work in teams and if something really good comes out as a result, frequently it's not a single-person merit.

Secondly, I do honestly wonder how many developers, even here on HN, have done something so impressive they think it's worth talking about in detail. Most likely whatever they have done, somebody else has already done it better than them in the past.

Finally, I can speak from personal experience, when I tried explaining how I (either alone or in the team) have fixed something by applying some solution, the interviewer had made me look like a fool by asking trivial questions, like if we had considered doing this or that, or why haven't we done this instead. During the very limited interview time, it is impossible to convey the full context to the interviewer and too often they don't appreciate that.

Too often the companies are looking for unicorn developers but when you somehow get matched, accept a job offer and join the company expecting that maybe this time it's going to be different, better somehow, you are met with the same awful solutions, everything barely working and people being people, just like everywhere else. Suddenly, the fact that you left your ordinary software house and joined FAANG (or MANGA, etc.) loses any significance, except for the financial benefit.


Please start hiring remote folks.


1-4 (and sort of 6 as a result) seem like general hiring struggles, and it's hard to account/adjust for that.

#5 sounds like you have a bad HR team, or don't have the right relationship with them. I've had HR discard good resumes because they were "over-qualified" and try and force me to interview people who aren't qualified, or try and convince me to say that I want someone with a college degree (the compromise was "or equivalent", which basically makes the request for a degree worthless) but ultimately, it seems like you should be able to control your rec more. The quality of recruiters varies wildly, have you tried escalating to get better support? Or maybe it's chicken and egg, because it's been two years without hiring, HR thinks you're the problem and isn't going to put effort into it?


I can confirm the time taken, negotiations, and HR interference at Apple. They took about 6 months to get me through their process, by which time my current company gave me the promotion that I was trying to get by moving companies in the first place. (Really a lateral move but to me it was a promotion.)


What's the political situation ? It may well be that some execs further up the chain don't really want your team to be hiring ? That would explain the friction.


yes, these problems sounds very solvable if/when someone up the chain actually starts to _want_ to hire.


> 4. People over estimate their qualifications. Their abilities may be good, but they write over the top accomplishments in their resumes that are hard to believe, at least without proof, and they are the first ones to get rejected,

You would never get to the next round otherwise.


> they write over the top accomplishments in their resumes that are hard to believe, at least without proof

Do you ask them for proof or reject them without asking?


I'm a business owner and hire SE roles on a regular clip. I'll share some things with you, the market is totally unpredictable right now. Even with some projected wins, we don't know what a new/mixed US Administration will mean. Investigations? Deadlock? New laws that impact us? We have record inflation for our career lifetimes and we seem to have entered a recession, but people still disagree on if we're in it and how long we'll last. My customers are all experiencing this, and while that emotion has slowed orders they have not stopped.

All of these things together as a business owner, going into holiday times; make me keep the mindset that hiring anyone right now for a non-essential position can probably wait until I can understand better what our company's financial picture is going to look like.

edit for typo


This is a good example of what I mean by saying employers aren't desperate. If you're thinking about the outcome of the election or any of that, you're not desperate. Desperate means you have a pile of work and the value proposition of pulling someone in to do it is obvious.

There's nothing wrong with that unless you're giving mixed signals to your applicants. Accepting resumes for a perpetual "general interest" position is no problem. Posting a new listing for a specific position and then assuring an applicant during the first interview that you're actively recruiting when in fact you're really ambivalent is not good. I'm not accusing you of doing that, I'm just saying, is all.


> I'll share some things with you, the market is totally unpredictable right now. Even with some projected wins, we don't know what a new/mixed US Administration will mean.

How does what the US admin look like impact your business? Do you provide services to the government?


Honestly, this doesn't sound much different than a year ago, five years ago, or ten years ago. Companies never seem to be serious about hiring: they go fishing but never reel anyone in, they ghost you after a few communications, they reject your application with automation, and even if you have an internal referral, the referrer is usually only able to do "Go apply through the normal funnel and if you get through the automation, I'll vouch for ya!"

I've got ~20 years in the industry, including startup-sized companies, medium sized companies and FAANGs. Every job hunt for me is still around 100 applications : 10 interviews : 1 offer. These ratios have remained pretty reliable through bull and bear hiring markets.

I suspect people for whom "jobs are falling off trees" are rarer than HN commenters might have you believe.


> Every job hunt for me is still around 100 applications : 10 interviews : 1 offer. These ratios have remained pretty reliable through bull and bear hiring markets.

This rough estimate agrees with the data I've collected from my own job hunting. My data say 100 applications : 14 interviews : 3 offers, specifically.


When I looked for a job 6 months ago, I had the same experience. A dozen applications and no responses. Working with recruiters that put me in front of a hiring person was how I ended up finding my current job.


I don't mean this to come off as insensitive but having a pipeline conversion of 10% on both steps of the process feels quite low to me. Both numbers are very different from my own experience: with a 'true FAANG' name on resume, the application to interview rate should be more around 50-90%. For interview->offer, if you grind out system design and LeetCode, you can get to 40-75%. These numbers are quite attainable for junior/mid-level/senior roles, though there is more variability / poorer predictability for staff-level roles.

Speaking from experience as well as the experience of former colleagues. Of course, you may find that you don't want to grind out prep to increase the latter conversion, which is also fine. Just wanted to provide another data point.


> Every job hunt for me is still around 100 applications : 10 interviews : 1 offer. These ratios have remained pretty reliable through bull and bear hiring markets.

Same here. But, I'm horrible at selling myself.

> I suspect people for whom "jobs are falling off trees" are rarer than HN commenters might have you believe.

I don't think so. The people for which jobs are falling off trees are those who have spent at least 10 years building their brand and their network. It reminds me a bit of this comic I see on occasion: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DRwe2qaU8AAwLE5?format=jpg&name=...

And it's accurate for me. I'm lazy. That's why I became a programmer to begin with.


Contrasting with even just a year ago, the job market is in a lackluster state the way I see it. Don't be gaslit by all the people insisting that it's still a gold rush. It's not that there aren't jobs out there, but many companies right now are either laying off employees, under hiring freezes, or simply aren't that serious about hiring besides through nepotism. Since I got started as a software developer full time 9-ish years ago, I've been relentlessly blasted with messages from various recruiters. In the last 6 months, recruiter activity has slowed to a crawl, and I don't believe it's because there's something wrong with me. Back when I chose to stop working for almost a year, I still got plenty of recruiters reaching out to me.

To add to your point about resumes, people need to not underestimate the power of networking. Networking has been the key factor to my advancement for the last 3 jobs. It's just the way things are. People want to work with developers who aren't dicks, and interviewing is a time suck for both interviewees and interviewers. Today I was informed by a colleague that someone he was interviewing couldn't write a basic loop. Though the need for mere competence is reduced significantly, it's definitely still there.

Another thing to consider is to find companies that actually have a real profit model and apply to those. This is not the time IMO for feeding from the trough of easy money, because that whole phenomenon appears to be hitting a wall.


> To add to your point about resumes, people need to not underestimate the power of networking. Networking has been the key factor to my advancement for the last 3 jobs. It's just the way things are.

It's hard to overstate the importance of this. Without networking, your chances of landing the kind of job you _really_ want are vanishingly close to zero. Every single one of my civilian jobs has come about either through personal friendships ("hey bityard, my work is hiring and I'd like to work next to you") or due to name recognition, e.g. moving in and around the same groups of people that the hiring people are in. I have probably blindly fired off less than two dozen resumes in my decades-long career and while some resulted in an interview, none resulted in a hire.

For someone just starting out in their career, maybe blindly firing off 100 or 200 resumes for entry-level positions is the only option they have. But they should also be broadcasting their availability far and wide to friends, family, randos on the street, basically anyone that will listen. Local tech meetups. Online tech meetups. Career fairs, etc.

But if you've been in the industry for more than 2 or 3 years, and don't have a network that you can leverage in a job search, that is something you need to fix like immediately. That well must be filled BEFORE you need to drink from it.


> Without networking, your chances of landing the kind of job you _really_ want are vanishingly close to zero

Just to offer an anecdotal counterpoint: I switched companies 3 times in the last 4-5 years. Went from enterprise -> local start up -> big tech -> bay area start up. None of those jobs, including the enterprise gig where I got my start, required me to leverage my network.

I don't doubt it's much easier when you have people that can vouch for you, but "vanishingly close to zero" is not the experience I've had. And no, I didn't have to send out 200+ resumes.


Same experience here. I do have a network, but have never leveraged it. I just apply for jobs I'm interested and I get some of them. I never have to apply for more than 10 - 15 positions to get at least one. I don't have FAANG on my resume, but a string of solid, but not amazing experience.


To add to your point about meetups, I don't think there's been a better time to start an IRL tech meetup in a long time. The local tech scene in the SoCal area has definitely not been the same since the pandemic, and I recall a few threads on HN with remarks about how local tech meetups didn't come back. If someone can't find a meetup in their area, they might as well start one and have a good chance of getting networking value out of it.


100%. In school I did the usual on-campus interviews and blasting out resumes. However, the three jobs I've had since I didn't even apply for. I just sent emails to people I knew. (And, in one case, the job description was written for me.) Obviously your mileage will vary with this sort of thing, but it's my personal experience.


1) Tail end of the year - its hard to get full time roles , The hiring definitely picks up after Jan 2nd week or so. 2) Try consulting/contracting - That space is still brimming w hiring. Much faster on-boarding /hiring.


Contracting is not really an option that way in the U.S. market that I've seen, though I'd be interested if you've had a different experience. Either you're contracting through an agency in which case you're applying just like for any FTE job, or you're operating at the high end with an established network. Random gigs at places like Upwork don't pay enough for a major U.S. metro area unless you're willing to hustle full-time to live a student.


There is definitely an opportunity to contract this way, but you have to think outside of the largest companies. You want to start by looking through your network and finding the folks who are at smaller start-ups or even have experience working with venture capital firms. Start there and inquire if they have any need for contract work or looking for an engineer for one of their smaller portfolio companies who might want to take on a contract-to-hire or even just contract.

Smaller companies generally have less red tape to getting contractors, more need (as they are either scaling quickly OR just need something done and don't want to incur high cost of a perm eng). You will need to figure out the appropriate rate (keeping in mind this doesn't come with benefits), but that exercise is left to the reader.


Sounds like a great strategy if you have a big network of people at startups or connected to VC. Not everyone is in that boat, though.


Not to mention being your own full-time benefits manager isn't free and should be reflected in your contracting/hourly/non-W2-with-immediate-salary-and-employer-benefits wage.


Yes. They say that as a contractor you should ask for your desired FTE yearly salary divided by 1000, per hour. So the equivalent for a $120k/year FTE position would be contracting full time at $120/hour. As far as I know it's not any easier to find 40 hours/week at $120/hour contracting than it is to find a $120k FTE position.


It may be easier to find 2 or 3 projects/engagements that are 10-15/hrs/week.


> Try consulting/contracting - That space is still brimming w hiring. Much faster on-boarding /hiring.

Hiring is faster, yes, but onboarding is often still a dreadful mess. At least if it's at a company that expects you to use their equipment and their closed system.


Still getting paid for it. Had a client that made me stare at the walls because of their “security policies” messing things up now and then. Got paid for sitting around.


Any suggestions on how to look for good contracting roles? LinkedIn only seems to have FTE roles.


Start with your network (assuming you have at least a few senior engineers and your career is 4+ years in tech, you should have this via LinkedIn). You are looking for folks you worked with that are now at their 2nd+ job in their career with mostly smaller companies (generally start-ups, 5-100 full-time, 1-50 eng teams) or are now involved with venture capital/investing/anything that suggests they have exposure to smaller teams. These are the companies with high chance of having a contract role open either because they are growing too fast or they just have lots of stuff to build but don't necessarily want to/can spend time on hiring.

From there reach out and ask them for help and provide your skillset, goals (X length contract work with mobile focus), and see if they will help connect you further. Hopefully your resume and past experience with that connection help you get your foot in the door more easily.


Put your resume on Indeed and Dice, and keep a google voice number, you will get a lot of calls from "offshore recruiters" working for primary and secondary vendors.


How legitimate are those? Do they have real jobs?

I've just been ignoring anything from an Indian sounding name as they seemed to me to be scams.


Yes, they are real jobs. But you have to make sure that it is from primary vendors. Often times, many secondary vendors source for the same job listed by primary vendor. One way to cut down secondary vendors, ask for decent rates. If someone asks you to work for $60 per hr, just say NO.

Even primary vendors have outsourced their recruiting to India.


$60 per hour isn't a decent rate?


Try double or triple that at minimum.

$60/hr as a contractor is the equivalent of $30/hr or less salaried. At $60/hr, it's probably even less than $30/hr because you are not eligible for ACA tax breaks and must pay full price for health insurance. The health insurance plans available on the individual market have large premiums and deductibles compared to plans that employers subsidize. You also have a larger tax burden, including the need to file quarterly.

The rule of thumb for contracting is to take your salaried rate and double it at minimum.


Do the math.

If you can bill 40 hours/week for 50 weeks per year, that's about 2K hours so $120K/year. But you can't. You'll probably do well to bill half that because contracts probably don't fill basically the entire year neatly like that. You probably also want to budget time anyway for vacations/illness/etc., selling, billing, learning, and all the other off-the-clock things you need to do.

So now you're closer to $60K per year and that's with self-employment tax and no benefits including health (unless you're on a partner's plan).

So at $60/hr, even with a fairly full calendar, you're pretty much scraping by in the US.


For contract position in the U. S.? Where total comp is going to be...$60/hour, and you pay your own health insurance? For an IC role better than junior, I'd laugh as I hung up the phone...ten years ago. And I'm nothing special, just a grunt with a decent resume.

(Seattle-area, if it matters, and it does.)


Which tech skills? Full stack? Backend? any speciality skills?


Backend. Can't think of any speciality skills unfortunately. Generally building, testing, shipping and maintaining services. Familiar with C#/.NET and Python/Django.


I find that very hard to believe.

All I see is full time jobs, no remote, and certainly no contract jobs. Germany.


2) Consulting makes sense, companies are less likely to hire in a downturn (because they want to avoid increasing ongoing cost). However,is still work to be done, and timelines to be made. A "one time" expense is easier to justify.


Yes. Hiring processes slow greatly this time of year. It's always been that way.


> My personal goal is at least 100 applications before seriously considering pivoting to something else.

I don't think I have especially cool resume or anything, nor do I have extremely many years in the industry as well, but I'd never consider applying for 100 different companies. I don't even know deeply about 100 companies I think, which is something I learn about a company before even considering applying to it.

I think I've applied to about 5 different full-time positions over the years and I have been in about 10 full-time positions in the same time, 5 of those applied to and the others was companies "applying" to me instead. Then bunch of consulting and freelancing gigs in-between.


This. If that is 100x clicks on Apply button on jobs portal, then no wonder the result is mediocre.

Tailoring CV to a role, looking for some insider friends to let then collect the referal bonus... that takes time but is much more effective to put foot in the door.


Sure let me "tailor my CV" to a role just to get ghosted or offered laughable salary. I'm just gonna make friends of random people from that company that don't know me, presumably by cold approaching them via LinkedIn? Lol


Tailoring your CV, in my experience, simply means looking at the job description and then rearranging your achievements so that the things they are specifically asking for are mentioned at the top. Also make sure you use the same language as them and specifically mention the exact technology they put in the job description.

I do this, then I make a copy of the CV as MyName_CompanyName.pdf in my Documents directory so I can refer back to it if I get an interview.

I've never struggled to get an interview with this method and I'm pretty sure I'm one of the mediocre people on HN.


I second this. I find that the investment here is well worth it -- in general it takes me 15-30 minutes to read the job description, read up a bit on the company itself, and adjust the resume. I haven't personally tried the spray-and-pray approach.

It's also not something that requires a bunch of mental energy, so you can do it in the late evening when your brain is tired from the full day anyway.


From this comment and your other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33606053 I think what you're missing is that a lower base rate of acceptance also lowers the advantage you get from tailoring your resume.

From your other comment at the low end you suggest a 50% application -> interview conversion and 40% interview -> offer, in other words 20% application -> offer. That's a 90% chance of an offer after 10 applications. Maybe tailoring your resume gives you a 1.5x greater conversion rate, 30% overall, and now you only have to submit 6 applications for the same 90% chance.

All this is with FAANG credentials and presumably some other advantageous stuff correlated to that: good socioeconomic background, good education, no serious health or legal issues. Now suppose you don't have FAANG or you do have some other problem and your base conversion rate is 10 times lower, 2% application -> offer, 110 applications to 90%. With tailoring, 75 applications.

If it takes you 15 minutes to tailor your resume for each application, then in the first case with 6 applications that's 1.5 hours, but in the second case with 75 applications, it's almost 19 hours.

The point is that this is a rich-get-richer scenario where the extra work takes less time and is less necessary for the advantaged candidate than it is for the disadvantaged candidate.

You might argue that someone who is unemployed has all the time in the world, so why not. To that I'd say you should ask yourself how you'd feel about tailoring your 75th resume to increase conversion from 2% to 3% or if you'd rather just treat each application as disposable and keep moving on.


Yes, it's hard to imagine being on a team where my direct coworkers are vouching for random people who contacted them because they're trying to get a referral bonus. If someone contacted me like that, I'd direct them to the careers page and then let someone in the hiring path know. Very strange.


I meant not to make friends from strangers, but to look for friends/connections who you know already at the company. Referal bonus is an extra for them. I recruited and cashed bonus by bringing a couple of my pro friends this way. But you need network for that.


This what?


No one knows deeply about 100 companies, especially 100 random companies scattered around the U.S. Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.


Maybe that is the problem.

Instead of applying to 100 companies out of desperation, if a candidate practices and develops specific marketable skills and targets specific roles, he only needs to apply to 10 companies that he knows deeply and are in tune with his skills.

The law of reversed effort — When you focus on your own skills and self-worth instead of desperately pursuing random externalities, externalities that are actually suited to you in turn get attracted to you strongly.

So then even if you apply to 10 companies, the number is low but the expected value of an offer is higher than if you applied to 100 companies the other way.


That sounds nice, but it can be a bad really limiting to have high expectations of only getting jobs that initially appeal to you for multiple reasons.

1. Time spent researching or preparing for a job doesn't guarantee you anything. 2. Sometimes the most appealing jobs are the most competitive, meaning you might have less of a chance of getting them and they might have worse comp or quality of life 3. Some positions on websites are already filled or cancelled. 4. Not everything on a job listing is accurate and you can only get a limited sense of what the job will be like after talking to people during the interview process.

Definitely play up your strengths and be selective and discriminating. I've got some jobs through network and some through scattershot, but never have got an offer after sending out only 10 applications. Most companies don't even respond.


Yes, people at the typical small or midsized company you found on LinkedIn know they are not really special and are not going to be fooled or won over that you redesigned your resume just for them or that you talk about how inspired you are by this company you just found out about today. You either are a match or you aren't. If your work experience is 90% backend and 10% frontend, it won't make any difference to tweak and fudge your resume to make you look like a frontend developer. It will come out in the end anyway. Better to focus on applying for the backend jobs that you do qualify for, or if you really want those frontend jobs, try to make your case in the cover letter or in some other way.

It should also be emphasized that jobs at famous organizations that you might legitimately have heard of already or been inspired by are going to be very competitive even if the salary is low and you far exceed the posted requirements.


> fooled or won over that you redesigned your resume just for them

> talk about how inspired you are by this company you just found out about today

> tweak and fudge your resume to make you look like a frontend developer

Did not say fool anyone by redesigning your resume. Did not say apply to a company you just found out today. Did not say fudge your resume to a different role.

Your interpretation -- "that one should make oneself look different from who they are", is the polar opposite of what I actually implied. I literally wrote practice and develop your own skills. Fudging your resume to appease a company is the epitome of desperation -- something I strongly advocated against.

I don't know whether the expected return is better by focusing on yourself or by applying to as many companies as possible. I believe in the former, but it could go either way based on a number of factors based in reality. However, I only replied because I was surprised at the gross misinterpretation of my comment.


Often when people talk about customizing applications, they mean rewriting your existing resume in a way that mirrors the job listing but without actually lying. Whether this is worth it or not depends on the situation, for example I understand this is really useful for U.S. federal jobs, but I don't think it's very useful for places where a recruiter skims resumes for basic fit and then passes them directly to a technical hiring manager. However it sounds like you were talking more about personal growth, which I misunderstood.

When you're unemployed and in the middle of a job search, you need to work with what you have, meaning you should make a resume that emphasizes your existing skills and apply to jobs that will value them. At the mid/senior-level no one will care much about any new skill you only know from a book or a Udemy course, so learning new skills is not a good use of time. At best you can hone your current skills, which might help in the interview but not with the resume, where the biggest drop-off happens.


Shotgunning resumes does not work. You need to tailor each application to the employer. Most importantly that means finding someone at the company who will vouch for you.


I think this is over-generalizing

I've been both on the hiring side and candidate side this year and demand is still very strong (granted moreso for more senior applicants than junior).

Couple of tips that have worked for me:

* Make sure your Linkedin is up-to-date, you have "open to work" turned on and that your experience is filled with direct results and accomplishments. Example of a bad bullet point (Used javascript to build a user-facing dashboard). Example of a good bullet point (Built a new dashboard product that manages x for y number of users. Ultimately drove z result.

* Tweak your resume details over time. Don't blindly apply to 100+ roles with the same resume. Not only could there be something wrong with it that's throwing off employers, it doesn't serve you as well as it could. If it's a full stack role, highlight more of those skills in your resume. If it's a iOS role, make sure more mobile experience is called out. Note: this doesn't mean filling it with things that aren't accurate about your background.

* Don't underestimate a solid cover letter (especially for smaller companies) and also reaching out to recruiters at those companies. Both of these things should take < 15 mins.

* Have a skills section somewhere on your resume that lists the technologies you are familiar with. This is critical to get passed resume screeners and it also helps free up your experience section to list more accomplishment details than technology ones.

* Leetcode, leetcode, leetcode. I know it sucks and it feels like a waste of time but your point of "several places where I was rejected after either the initial or tech screen" makes me feel like you could use some work here. Try to do as many mediums as you can. When I've been deep in interview mode, I try to solve 1 medium problem/day every single day. I set a 45 minute time and make sure I can get something working in that time. If I fail, I study the answer and get ready for the next day. After 1-2 months you should be in good shape.

Hope this helps!


I don’t agree on a few of these.

I wouldn’t personalize your resume for any company, nor do I recommend writing a personalized cover letter for any of them — you have no idea the skill set that will be valued by the person reading the resume, as they are an unknown random variable. I feel it’s just a time waste and there is no proof that this sort of thing is fruitful.

Also fuck leetcode. I’ve refused to do the leetcode and still gotten the offer to do an interview without it. Imo, we should all show some backbone and stop accepting all this superstitious mumbo jumbo as the accepted form of recruitment.


> I wouldn’t personalize your resume for any company

No one wants to read a multi-page resume, so you have to leave things out. Some of the things you normally leave out might be super-relevant for a particular role, due to the industry or business domain.


OP here. I agree with not customizing the resume, that's not sustainable for a necessarily high-volume job search. I'm lucky enough that my background is in a relatively popular field, so it's a much better strategy to just apply to places that are already a good fit for my existing resume. Definitely not going to do micro-tweaks to a resume based on whatever happens to be in the listing. Keep in mind recruiters spend literally seconds per resume. However a simple cover letter is generally a good idea and also a good place to add or highlight skills that may be especially relevant but not in the resume.

Strangely enough, despite what you might think from HN, I haven't run into a ton of LeetCode algorithm-type puzzles at the places I've been looking.


I wrote above that I don't understand _not_ customizing the resume, but I understand why it would seem not sustainable for a high volume job search.... can't say I wouldn't force myself to do it though as I think not doing it increases the chance of having to apply to more jobs.


It depends on what we mean by customizing. If you're strong in two different areas, for example both web development and devops, and you're open to both types of positions, you should have two resumes. However once you have these resumes, you should look for positions that fit the resumes and not vice versa.

Beyond that I don't think it's worth tweaking a resume for each ad, for example modifying word order. Nothing wrong with it exactly, but the gain is minimal because no one reads your resume that closely, and I think it encourages the wrong mindset for what is unavoidably a numbers game.


I don't understand not considering tweaking your resume for each application. I could write a novel on what I've done in the last year - how do I narrow that down for a resume? I can't buy into the idea that I could write 5ish bullet points today and think it would be the best way for me to represent myself to every position I might apply for.

I don't know what proof you need this is useful - you're selling yourself, so make sure to sell what they're trying to buy.


I don't customize my resume, but if a recruiter asks me to highlight a particular technology, I will temporarily add it to my resume if they legitimately think it will help.

For shotgunning applications, I don't customize. Way too much effort.


> Example of a bad bullet point (Used javascript to build a user-facing dashboard). Example of a good bullet point (Built a new dashboard product that manages x for y number of users. Ultimately drove z result.

Master Drywall Contractor

Built walls using 5/8 in. x 4 ft. x 12 ft. Firecode X Drywall over 178,000 sq. ft. resulting in client generating $1.1b in revenue annually.


I need more understanding with this line of thinking. In the context of a single software engineer, I have a hard time believing that measurable business outcomes are substantially attributed to the actions of a single engineer 99% of the time.

Happy to have my mind changed.


> Example of a bad bullet point (Used javascript to build a user-facing dashboard). Example of a good bullet point (Built a new dashboard product that manages x for y number of users. Ultimately drove z result.

This is one of the most repeated pieces of advice I see, but, as a person who reviews CVs and does interviews, I would rather see the first point. From there, we would have a discussion about the technology you used and the features built for users. It could have been a dashboard that ultimately wasn't useful for users and had little to no result - I don't care. I care that you're able to build it.


It's end of the year, hiring managers may be taking weeks off. Businesses are likely in a unannounced hiring freeze without announcing it. This happened all the time in the corporate world with open jobs but an unspoken hiring freeze. Next year's budgets have not been finalized. Hiring someone now means you might have to pay them a bonus come Q1. A lot of different factors. Since you are in the US, I would try to reach out to some recruiters and get feedback. Hopefully one responds with something instead of nothing like the ones you have already contacted. Try to schedule a lunch of coffee with a few. Those metrics are tracked so they have to schedule them at the places I know.


Go for quality vs quantity - which means personalized approaches and use of your network/recruiters. A cold application through an online portal has a very low probability of success but if you go through a recruiter, previous colleague, or just a friend of a friend your chances are much better (and you might get some inside info like are they really hiring or is that open senior position just for appearances/unicorn candidates - I suspect this is a majority of companies who have are already over-hired and are have been told to preserve cash for 1+ years).


Came here to say this. Rather than a metric of "how many total jobs have I applied to", a perhaps more effective metric would be "how many high quality applications have I put in, how many opportunities have I been exposed to via referral, how many friends do I have looking on my behalf/providing introductions to hiring managers who are actively hiring".

Blindly applying to listings you find online with no "in", is going to be a lot of applications to get to a single conversion/hire event. Find your buddies, the recruiters who respect your time and expertise, even "friend of a friend" as parent mentioned is worlds better than "just another resume on the stack".


OP here. Great advice for people with a big network, though of course if a company is waiting for a strong referral before hiring, they're not really that desperate, which was my thesis.


I would posit that time spent building that network is more valuable than the equivalent amount of time spent blasting out resumes to random job listings. You can network with recruiters to find the right ones with no prior exposure to them.

For the most part, desperate employers are not the ones you want to work for anyhow. They're desperate for a reason. It's not like there's some scarcity of candidates now, especially as layoffs before more common.


I've said elsewhere that I've had better response rates from direct applications (15-20%) than from third-party recruiters (~0%). My LinkedIn says I'm looking for work and I've gotten very little attention there. I'm sure relying on recruiters works for some people but it doesn't look like the way forward for me.

Desperate doesn't have to mean bad, it just means they have a hiring need and you're on hand to fill it. Unfortunately this is really the only option if you're otherwise going to have a tough time competing head-to-head with your peers.


Every time I see people mentioning that they've sent X00 applications for jobs, I always think of this video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__lvS2pjuSg

Recap:

- Think of a job search as social engineering your way into an organization

- Use that framework to figure out what the org cares about, who cares about it and then how to position yourself so that person sees your "work"

- "Work" b/c it's not your resume, it's something that CLEARLY identifies that you are the perfect person for the role.


And after all of this work your resume gets ignored because the recruiter got distracted for the 5 seconds that he has to look at each of 1000 resumes in his pile.


The point of this whole process is to bypass the gatekeeping recruiter.


Ever tried negotiating budgets between the CEO, division managers, and CTO?

You basically run into a few arguments:

1. Can't hire Juniors as they cost a lot to train, and keep leaving for better paying firms

2. Can't hire Seniors as they cost too much, and tend to be a challenge to manage

3. Why don't we keep piling on the ticket queue till the existing teams starts to burnout, as they will burnout in a year anyway

4. That is a "no" to your budget request, as the staffing-agent/Marketer thinks we can get these positions filled for 34 cents to the dollar.

I dream of being a plumber everyday... Check out some local trade-shows in the field you are interested in, and chat with a few folks. =)


Seniors are tougher to manage? I see some ways how, but this seems wrong overall.


Probably correct in that specific context: "till the existing teams starts to burnout".

Seniors would just call out on your BS and let your ticketing queue burn.


Yeah, I can see a number of scenarios where seniors can be more difficult. They're indoctrinated by a different process.

If you want to do something they didn't do in the passed, they'll throw a fit, and insist it isn't needed; after all would a genius senior engineer like them fail to do something? No, they're too smart and accomplished for that.

Similarly, if you don't want to do something that they HAVE done in the passed, they're liable to raise a big stink, maybe go over your head, or try to rally the team to their side. If someone so smart and senior like them was doing something before, it must be crucial, and a prudent use of time.


There comes a point in your career where a 60 hour workweek is unacceptable, and unnecessary. Yet some corporate cultures do not accept people have a life outside a project.

There is also the youth employment tax-credit driven layoff cycles the industry likes to hide as a subsidy. Over 28? good luck staying with some firms...

You are probably thinking this is some dubious startup, but you would be wrong... "They eat their own" is the warning most kids rarely heed.

Have a wonderful day =)


They never were. Oh, they think they are but insist on unicorn candidates that don’t make a single mistake over ~four hours. Almost lottery-level luck required, along with nerves of steel.

Five years ago I saw CRUD jobs unfilled a year after I started looking. They are effectively not desperate.

There’s a reason that the SAT (for example) is hundreds of questions taken as a whole and not a series of several sudden death pass/fail tests over the breadth of a four year degree. The second is simply unrealistic for squishy meat bags.

Next up, the "STEM shortage." :-D


I've just spent over two months looking for a Senior role in EU. I believe EU landscape is vastly different than US but I noticed similar trends. I had a ton of 'offers' on LinkedIn. I applied to few dozens. I got any kind of meeting with a recruiter with maybe third of them. Roughly half of those paid below the market rate. The other half I interviewed with further. Some ghosted me, some straight out told me no after take home assignment without a reason, some had assignment so ridiculously time consuming I just refused to do them. I got to around 5 proper tech interviews, got offers from 3, one being heavily underpaid(even though they knew what I asked for since the beginning). I was fairly picky as I aimed at the higher side of western salaries even though I live in Poland. I managed to get something well paid albeit really boring that I might end up changing in a year. Worth noting that I have mainly experience with .NET/Azure so that limits my options heavily. Very few companies want generalists besides FAANG.


I think the job market will get better by mid January 2023, when budgets open up. TC will probably be quite a bit lower than 2021 offers, but there's work to be done everywhere.


> TC will probably be quite a bit lower than 2021 offers

I mean, if nominal TC is lower, then you're not "desperate to hire". You're not going to woo over someone offering them less TC than their current position, and most of us that are probably ready for a switch are looking to fill a 10% gap in real TC caused by the economy. Just like my landlord says "the economy" and then raises prices faster than CPI, so too am I going to be adjusting my expectations on the real value of offers made.

But you certainly have to come in above BATNA.


Every quarter someone comments that next quarter will be better.


Is this how it works at most companies where new budget leads to new headcount and hiring in January? Is it due to an annual process?


Yes.

Think of it this way: From mid-November to the end of December, there are two major US holidays where most employees will take one if not two weeks of vacation. Onboarding is an issue because you won't always have a full team in place to support the new hire. Vacation is an issue because new employees generally don't get any accrued vacation time, so you end up with idle, directionless, new employees for almost half the period. It's also easier to hide budget issues if you don't hire someone who isn't going to be useful anyway. It's just easier for everyone if you shut it down in November and start again fresh in January.


Yes, it is pretty common for hiring to pick up in January. Usually there are approved number of hires approved and they run out toward the end of the year and then many teams stop trying to hire until new headcounts are approved for the next January.


I'm a little disheartened by this apparently getting downvoted heavily. This needs to be talked about more. The market for developers is not what many people claim. Also, most organizations have blanket policies that restrict who they can hire and disqualify a huge percentage of applicants.


This makes no sense, stories can't even get downvotes, only comments can.


Huh? They do show up different like downvoted comments


The text of a story always shows up a bit dimmed, similar to downvoted comments, but the similarity is only aesthetic.


Others don't. Maybe it's just so weird to see body text on HN


I'm NOT a developer. I'm actually in tech support. I can write scripts, identify bugs in code, and am up to date on cloud and k8s, but mostly I don't write code, I debug systems, write up bug tickets, and deal with customer issues. Even with these less impressive skills I was able to land 3 offers above 150k base comp for TECHNICAL SUPPORT in the past month. It's still a seller's market for skilled people in tech. Yes you need to pump out as many applications a day as you can -- the vast majority will never get back to you, will ghost, or will freeze midway through the pipeline. But there are still plenty of offers going around and only so many people who can credibly do the work.


It's true that the number of job openings doesn't tell a complete story just as the number of layoffs doesn't.

The layoffs aren't a general crash, they're a correction of overhiring and overconfidence by certain companies that disproportionately gained from covid.

And while there are endless job openings, the average urgency to hire is low. Companies are not making offers if they don't fall in love.


Maybe they’re trying to hire all the FAANG developers that are getting laid off?


Been on the grind 9 months now, totally seeing what you're seeing. I'm looking for full-stack Web development work, strongest with Ruby, but flexible to hop into any environment and be productive within 2-3 months.


Ruby is in low demand, always has been.


I don't know about always has been but Ruby is definitely not where I'd stake my career today.


I was interested in an open position that I was uniquely suited for- I have expertise in their field, and I even know a number of people at the company, as they were former co-workers. I wasn't even able to get an interview there because I'm in the US- and they're only willing to hire in Canada and Latin America.

I work at a "second tier" tech company, I'm not making FAANG money, and I wouldn't be asking for FAANG money, but companies may be shying away from US employees who are more expensive than whoever they could find elsewhere.


Anecdotally speaking, but I suspect is common: We were hemorrhaging employees a year ago, but the bleeding has stopped. So we hired over the past year, slowly filled all those empty roles, and are now more picky with new hires. And honestly, we probably were not picky enough a year ago. Some candidates are struggling get work done or have issues with remote work.


I'm not so cynical as to suggest the industry is putting out fake posts like this in order to make it easier on themselves, but I'm not so trustful as to put it past them.

I can only speak for parts of western Europe like the U.K., and it's fine here? I've not had to go looking for work for about 15 years, and I've moved a bunch.


Is it possible that you're not passing a DEI filter? A lot of companies are running into trouble for not meeting their diversity goals, especially bumping into the end of the year.


Companies have diversity goals? I thought that the diversity related info wasn't used in hiring, as is stated in all the job application forms


LOL

Intel pays managers bonuses for hiring people that are "underrepresented minorities".

It's apparently totally legal.


Yes, they do. Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives they are called.... :)


OP here. I'm very pro-diversity but leaving that aside, my experience on the hiring side is that there is a huge pipeline problem of even getting resumes from "diverse" candidates. Any company applying some kind of theoretical "filter" must not be in a rush to hire at all given how relatively rare these candidates are, in which case they wouldn't be likely to hire qualified "non-diverse" candidates without this "filter," either. So it doesn't really matter either way.


There’s no proof of this. Don't throw that bait out there with nothing to back it up.


Why not? Do you seriously believe racism is never a thing that happens in hiring? Because it is, just as it is in academia. At least some of the time. Instead of shaming people for pointing out the real possibility that racism may be at play, consider acknowledging that it may be at play but that there's nothing the op can do about it and he or she should just keep plugging away. It's a numbers game, with or without racism, and you are not helping anyone by dismissing what is entirely fair speculation.


Because you have no proof for any “end of year” DEI target rate limiting. It is entirely what you labeled it as, speculation.

I said nothing about racism in hiring practices. I was addressing the statement that was made.


Okay so let's be clear: you think it is wrong or unhelpful to speculate that race or sex may be a factor in what the op claims to be observing? Because "baiting?"

What do you mean by baiting? I read that as you trying to shame people for even discussing the possibility that racism or sexism is a factor. As if it is somehow wrong to discuss these things. If you had a different intent, please share it.


I could speculate because the op is a Taurus. It holds just as much weight in the conversation because there’s no evidence that the op’s zodiac or DEI status are used to eliminate them in the hiring process.

I used the word bait because unsubstantiated “DEI hate” is used on hackernews as lightning rods.

I haven’t shamed anyone. If you actually read what I said above, you would see that I’m not denying racism in hiring exist… but again there’s no evidence of that here.


"You can't speculate that a specific tree was felled with an axe rather than a chainsaw when you weren't in the woods to see it happen."

-- on the contrary, I'm pretty sure a rational person could speculate that a specific tree was felled by an axe vs a chainsaw depending on what she knows about loggers in a given area from a given culture and during a given time period. It's a question of probability. It's normal and rational and fair to discuss probabilities when speculating. It's unclear that you understand the terms you are using though so I'm gonna peace out and wish you luck.


> I'm pretty sure a rational person could speculate that a specific tree was felled by an axe vs a chainsaw depending on what she knows about loggers in a given area from a given culture and during a given time period. It's a question of probability. It's normal and rational and fair to discuss probabilities when speculating.

Given that you know nothing about the hiring practices of the OP's company, it's safe to say that you know nothing about the woods in this analogy either ha.

> It's unclear that you understand the terms you are using though so I'm gonna peace out and wish you luck.

I understand very well. You made an analogy, and I made a more apt one. But when in doubt, resort to ad hominem.


Ad hominem? I don't know if you know this, though you probably don't, but 'ad hominem' is a category of logical fallacy, committed when one argues that one's opponent's argument is wrong because he is, por ejemplo, an asshole or a pedophile or a loser or a dildo. At no point have I argued that your position is logically incorrect because you are an asshole. I've only ever argued that you are incorrect because your logic is dumb.

Move along.


Implying that I’m disqualified from the conversation because I “don’t understand the terms” that I’m using is ad-hominem. It’s being dismissive of the argument because of something you believe to be inherent in me, rather than the subject of the argument.

I think you should learn the usage of terms rather run than me, lol.


No evidence? I was not in on any of those specific conversations and neither was the op but I've overheard a lot of conversations from hiring managers and they did explicitly discuss candidates race and sex, and I think if you ask around you'll see you are the outlier in having never seen evidence that racism and sexism have played a role before.

Just because you may not have been around when a tree fell in the woods doesn't mean it didn't make a sound.


> I was not in on any of those specific conversations and neither was the op

To my point that you're speculating about something you have no evidence of and know nothing about.

> I've overheard a lot of conversations from hiring managers and they did explicitly discuss candidates race and sex,

Anectdata.

> I think if you ask around you'll see you are the outlier in having never seen evidence that racism and sexism have played a role before.

I never said this.

> Just because you may not have been around when a tree fell in the woods doesn't mean it didn't make a sound.

You can't speculate that a specific tree was felled with an axe rather than a chainsaw when you weren't in the woods to see it happen.


When hiring, people discriminate on all kinds of factors, and there are labor economics papers out there that prove it definitively.

Age-ism, ethnic sounding names, etc. What makes you think companies engage in all kinds of biased hiring EXCEPT diversity quotas?

If anything, the burden of proof is on you that they don't.


> the real possibility that racism may be at play

I mean... isn't that the actual justification for DEI policies in the first place?


DEI policies are not necessarily also anti-racism policies. The devil is in the details as they say.

This is taken from CNBC interview with Lybra Clemons(Chief Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging Officer at Twilio Inc.)

"This success, as well as Clemons’ acclaim for the company, is owed to Twilio’s commitment to becoming “anti-racist.” According to Clemons, part of the difference between DE&I and anti-racism is self-awareness.

“Right before I joined, Twilio said, we’re on this journey to become anti-racist. And I think we were all like, what does that even mean,” she tells CNBC Make It.

“I think a lot of people thought it was just a more elevated term for diversity, equity inclusion. But as we’ve started to go through the process, we’re learning that anti-racism is different. DE&I are still very foundational and fundamental to work, but anti-racism is an active term where you are personally responsible. This is about self-awareness and taking full accountability of who you are. We are actively promoting equity and racial justice through consistent, deliberate decisions that we make.”"

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/11/the-difference-between-dei-a...

Same page archived

https://archive.ph/u92e4#selection-737.0-745.506


That is literally the stated justification for dei policies.


In University recruitments in India, a lot of companies like Adobe only hire females. Like 10 people selected from a university with 70-80% male students and yet all 10 selected are women.


That has nothing to do with what has been presented here.


"A lot of companies are running into trouble for not meeting their diversity goals, especially bumping into the end of the year."

Any examples you'd like to share?


I don't think that 'normal' tech / consulting / software house companies have those. It's more of a big corp thing.


Is there any reason not to tick 'African American' and 'Female' on those forms? Surely they can't prove anything, right?


34% of white Americans who applied to colleges or universities admit to lying about being a racial minority on their application

48% of people who lied claimed to be Native American

3/4 of people who faked being a racial minority on their applications were accepted by the colleges to which they lied

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/education/57...


How does this work? Surely you can't be white, say you're black and not get caught. Is that data perhaps anonymized?


How would they catch you? It's very possible to be of African descent and have white skin. Are they going to DNA test you?


Does it also work if you say you identify as a female even though you are a male biologically?


If it doesn't yet then give it 5 years tops.


Gender identity is frequently visible. I don't think many people are going to fraudulently represent their gender identity for a misguided chance at a job.


Well, I can imagine that people who aren't “proper” trans but are comfortable with, say, crossdressing start doing it in order to get benefits. Can't say I'm against that (more femboys IRL :^) and also this is on the queer-ish side so they probably still should get some preference if hiring process does take gender identity into account already.


True but I can't imagine a company calling someone on it. Too explosive of a topic.


there's more evidence to support that actually being african american will hurt you during job interviews


I do not believe you could be charged with a crime, no.


The macro economic conditions are such that only senior technical people and similar high-value employees are getting jobs.


The problem right now is that the FAANG companies and the tier below that have suddenly laid off an absolute ton of people (and not hired a ton of people that they'd normally have hired) so you're competing with those people for the pool of open jobs.

If you're the kind of developer who would usually end up at the second tier companies, those companies are going to be hiring the people Facebook and Twitter just laid off before they hire you. That's perfectly rational because the laid off FAANG developers are, on average, better developers than everybody else on the job market. This isn't good for anybody but is what happens when the market is suddenly flooded with tons of highly desirable developers.


They have announced massive layoffs but I sincerely doubt that a majority of them represent mid/senior level software engineers. There's lots of fields in the tech sector: tech-support, documentation, quality assurance, software testing, etc.

Nothing this last year has led me to believe you'll have any trouble getting a engineering job provided you're not looking for an entry-level position.


It's absolutely true that almost all of the remote jobs I'm seeing are explicitly senior or above, or require 3+ years of experience. I meet this, but for entry level people looking for something immediately, I'd recommend support or QA work to stay afloat while building a personal portfolio and hoping to get lucky with an employer who is actually desperate for developers.


I'm not so sure that QA work even still exists. And I'm pretty certain it's been eliminated as a path to being a developer.

There's been an insanely strong push to eliminate QA and put that work on developers (in addition to all the other specializations they now generalize in) in the past decade.


Support and QA have long been questionable paths into software development, but if you're entry-level and looking for remote work vaguely in the field, these are good roles. This is especially true for support which can be done relatively independently by inexperienced people, unlike software development, which requires a lot of mentoring for entry-level people that remote environments haven't really figured out how to accommodate yet.


The majority of my team started their career as manual testers. We are all software engineers now and do not have a manual test team at all. We don't even have an automation test team. The company does have a few roles like that still but they are massively reduced.


QA is a position/work that has been heavily outsourced. I know because I've met several QA outsourcing firms in Mexico and Ukraine that have really good business in the US.


What a wild thing to post


I recently spent four weeks interviewing before landing a job, which is not an unusual amount of time compared to years prior (at least for me). The company I joined went from first interview to a good offer in two weeks—they were definitely eager. I put my application out approximately 50 times. Changing my LinkedIn status to "Open to work" helped.

The biggest difference this time around: Several companies invoked a hiring freeze while I was in the middle of their interview process. I've never had that happen before, so it felt like a storm brewing. Some were nice enough to tell me right away, while others went completely dark for weeks before getting back to me.

Good luck with the job search! I know it can be utterly miserable, but stay positive and keep those live-coding skills sharp as a razor.


I've been contracting for the past five years.

Still luckily have work when I want it.

However, my general feeling is the market is cooler here in the UK. I used to get annoyed on a regular basis by the number of recruiters who contacted me .. it's happening a lot less often now.


> Lots of no responses or form rejections

To be fair, this was normal at the peak too. (as well as ghosting after doing 3 rounds)


I experienced this same thing in 2020 when I was hunting for my current job. I lost count of how many places I applied to.

Over the past year, I have been on the hiring side, and I can offer a few tips as well, based on filtering through many resumes and doing many interviews.

1) Don't list 20 different technologies and claim to be an expert in all of them. There is no way for someone to be a true "expert" in many technologies/languages, and if you get specific questions about these technologies, you will be exposed (something that happened multiple times when I was interviewing).

2) Pay attention to what tools the job requires and tailor your resume/cover letter accordingly. It doesn't do us much good to tell me you have experience with something else that we don't use or care about. That being said, if you don't have a lot of experience with what we use, make it clear that you are willing to learn. We know that we will not always get someone who meets every requirement.

3) As amazing as it is to have to say this; be courteous and communicate. For instance, if something comes up and you can't make an interview time, let the company know ahead of time; ghosting will hurt you.

4) If you don't do well on a code test (Leetcode, TestDome, etc), don't blame the platform for not doing well. If you are not willing to accept responsibility now, what will you do when you are working for us and something goes wrong with your code?


OP here. This is good advice but is also basic stuff, maybe good for new grads or people with weak social or interviewing skills. I don't think any of this is an issue for me.

For your number (4) it's also important for the hiring side to accept responsibility for choosing to send applicants through one of these platforms. If you set your candidates up to fail, and then they fail, should you own that failure or should they? This is a signal to the candidate too. Practically though, the candidate should just gracefully move on if they are rejected.


Do you really think code tests like the ones you mentioned are an effective way to screen candidates? I will outright drop out of consideration for a role if Leetcode is mentioned. I'm not putting up with it.


Yes, but it depends. In our case, we purposely made them fairly simple, with a 50% passing score required, just to make sure they can do the basics.

When I was applying, I would get code tests that were off the charts, and would take hours, where they would say that setting up a user and roles system on top of everything else should only take 3 or 4 hours, or I would get grilled on language minutia that were things I had never encountered in my day to day work. In ou se case, ee were just trying to have them demonstrate a minimal amount of code capability without overwhelming them.


Not sure what you are doing. But for the few jobs I applied for I always got an offer. Maybe take a look at the jobs you are applying for and what you are putting in your resume?


I've had a flurry of recruiter's contact me lately. A lot more than I usually get. So there is another anecdote for you all.


I've been getting bombarded on LinkedIn recently, but it's all low pay, low quality jobs, or things I'm only remotely qualified for and not really looking to do (generic 'cyber-security' position or some software or system I have on my LinkedIn profile involving a job from 8 years ago, for example)


That might be a little different from person to person and market to market, but I've been getting more and more qualified recruiters contact me. Overall there are fewer, but the messages are now clearly from recruiters that have read my resume and aren't reaching out in bulk.

That being said, I think operations people and SREs are currently doing better than developers.


Wishing you well and success. Been at it 9 months now, full-stack Web, plenty of contacts, dozens of interviews and tech assessments, one offer that was shit, zero signed agreements.


Opinion:

Too much of a blanket statement in my opinion. The way I see it as a consultant that has talked to multiple devs and management over the last year at multiple companies is that remote jobs are competitive at the moment, in person jobs less so, and contracting jobs are always hiring.

We are at the end of the year and operational expenditure is low and getting renewed, while capital expenditure is high and increasing which is good for contractors and consultants.

Factual Anecdote:

Personally if I were you I would go up the top 100 market cap companies [1]. I’m at a company that hired 75 dev in my department alone in the last year. I know personally places like Costco, Home Depot, Caterpillar, Abbott, and Comcast have been steadily having new employees and job postings.

Just don’t stick the jobs that Indeed and LinkedIn throw at you.

[1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com


I spot-checked some of the companies you listed. Problem is that they're a mix of not remote, have complex applications requiring logins which I assume are big time sinks into black holes, the software jobs aren't in the U.S., they use enterprise technology which is fine but just not my skillset, all that sort of thing. Also I'm assuming, maybe wrongly, that big enterprises have a hiring cycle of several months which is just too long for me at the moment.

If you know of any big companies that have startup-like departments than I can apply to separately, that would be great. Otherwise these aren't really a good fit for me, personally. Maybe other people though!

Also, other people have suggested contracting jobs but I'm not really sure what that means, see my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33598270. If you know of a place that is actually always hiring, meaning they will almost certainly hire you if you have skills and are who you say you are, I'd really appreciate some examples, because I don't know what that looks like.


> I spot-checked some of the companies you listed. Problem is that they're a mix of not remote, have complex applications requiring logins which I assume are big time sinks into black holes, the software jobs aren't in the U.S., they use enterprise technology which is fine but just not my skillset, all that sort of thing.

Personally I don’t think this viewpoint does your point justice. There are jobs, good paying ones. Just the ones you want are less prevalent. Also, I don’t think you would like contract work in this case.

I’m a consultant that works for a firm and the pay is very good. Working no more than 40 hours most weeks. I have a goal of building out my network this way.

Examples of big consulting firms are KPMG, Bain, Accenture, and Cognizant. Alternatively get a start going to recruiting firms like, Michael Page Interim or Hays for contract jobs.


I'm sure they are good jobs, but if they need enterprise skills I don't have or if they don't meet my essential requirements, then it's not worth it for me to apply. I expect enterprise employers are less forgiving to candidates than smaller employers, not more.


I am curious about this as I am not a FAANG person either, have just 3 years of experience, and am having no trouble getting to the verbal offer stage. I am just playing around, so I don't go beyond that, but it is getting there. LinkedIn remains clogged.

Are you sure the tech screens are going well?


They're going well enough for anyone serious about hiring. See my other comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33600444.


If you're not passing tech screens, why are you assuming this means lack of demand on employer side?


FWIW, I agree with the poster.

I'm SR in my current role, 7+ years experience, tech lead for 7+ people...

I can't get an offer to save my life. I've gone through final round about 10 times now and always get either ghosted or "we decided on another person over you" then the role stays open for months. Had Disney offer to create a new role for me and then rescind when I agreed. Or my personal favorite, hiring freeze right after final interview and "we're frozen, can't do anything."

My latest ended with "we hired someone else for the role, but we just opened this role. Do you like it? We'd only need 1 interview from you since you aced the other ones." 3 weeks later and I can't get a reply from them to even schedule that interview...

I don't know if I'm just missing the mark somewhere or what, as all feedback I can get is "you're great we just like someone better." Well, except for the one who rejected me because "we didn't get a strong feeling of how you work with design at your current role." When I explained step by step our cycle for dev/design team ups, user testing and the feedback loop between dev/design.


Any developer with a "mediocre but solid portfolio" would know if they bombed a tech screen. Frankly I think even somebody with zero experience knows if they've bombed an interview. So I've no reason to doubt OP there.

I'm choosing to trust OP here - after all this is HN and we assume best intentions.

    If you're not passing tech screens, why are 
    you assuming this means lack of demand on 
    employer side?
Well, perhaps not so much "lack of demand" as much as "supply exceeding demand."

If you have e.g. 50 applicants who've passed the tech screen you might only seriously pursue 5-10 of them.


OP here, thank you. I've given many tech interviews from the hiring side and know what bombing looks like. In my case as a candidate it's less bombing and more a bad feeling after struggling with trivia questions or a time crunch. Of course I don't know exactly how it's perceived on their side, only that they get back to me later saying they don't want to proceed. However between the various parts of my portfolio it should be obvious I can deliver high-quality code and complete reasonably complex projects, so all this extra stuff shouldn't be necessary if just need someone who can do that.


To be honest I'm not sure you really know what you claim to know about hiring.

On the hiring side, the condition for extending an offer is not "didn't bomb the interview", but rather, being the best applicant that passes the hiring bar (the bar may or may not be reasonable).

Perhaps other candidates were indeed better in some of the cases. Perhaps the interviewers thought they saw some red flags. Or even some other stupid reason. For all I know about hiring processes essentially the planets have to align and maybe a company would make an offer to some random candidate that they believe is the most suitable.

Also, I'm not sure I agree even in principle that an interviewer could obviously see from a portfolio that a candidate could write high quality code in reasonably complex projects. Unless the code available to inspect on github, claims about past work on a CV (or during interviews) don't really mean much. It's not so much about "lying" but rather that it's hard to get an accurate picture from a couple brief descriptions. I've had similar misunderstandings from colleagues reporting their work progress during stand ups (eg. Bob says he completed tasks X and Y. Turns out they didn't work for the difficult case of interacting with Z, which he wasn't aware of and would take another two weeks to complete). The other thing is that when people talk about past work, I get no information about how much support their team or company gave them, how much credit should be given to their colleagues, and how robust the project would be upon stresses, etc.

There's also the well-known Dunning–Kruger effect.

As for github, nobody actually spends significant time reading a candidate's code in github, that's what the interview is for.


I'm not sure if you're saying I'm lying, all I can say is I've spent plenty of time interviewing on the hiring side. If you don't believe me then what are we even talking about?

I agree that tech interviews are first about meeting a minimum standard and second about being one of the best choices among other applicants who also met that standard. I originally said I was "rejected after the tech screen" which matches your take, it's other posters who responded with "not passing" or "bombing." So you are disagreeing with them, not me.

As for "obvious," you implied that public code on GitHub or elsewhere would make it obvious. The fact that no one bothers to look doesn't change that, it just proves my point that employers aren't desperate to hire, otherwise they would make that effort.

It's also interesting to consider how much of a boost a candidate gets from having FAANG or other high-status items on their resume. Simply saying "JavaScript developer at Google" is demonstrably a stronger signal than "JavaScript developer at No-Name Corp" even though all your points about brief descriptions and team support theoretically hold true in both cases. Or, if the candidate went to a famous school, that would extend a halo effect even to the No-Name Corp entry. Quality is apparently more obvious in these cases, so your explanation isn't the whole story.


For the record I'm not saying you're lying (and I don't think you are). It's kind of analogous to what I said about self-reported past experience in the sense that I would expect (maybe expectation misplaced?) that somebody who has plenty of experience on the hiring side would better understand what happens on that side of the process.

I think your claim that employers are "not desperate" is probably true to some extent, but if you're screening for say 30 candidates, the cost-benefit analysis of spending an hour each looking at their github profiles might not work out unless in the "most desperate" of cases (and if they're desperate to the point where if they can't hire a superstar they'd go out of business, then you wouldn't want to work there anyway).

TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a better signal than self-reported experience on a CV. You might disagree (and there are reasonable arguments on that side), but at least whether one worked at a particular company or went to a particular school is an objective fact, while things like "built a well-received service with millions of users" can mean very different things. The supposedly rigorous hiring/admission process of FAANG and famous schools can be a useful thing to know because the hiring process could be quite similar, and thus a useful predictor whether a candidate is likely to do well on the hiring game at hand (not necessarily a good employee, that's another question).

I don't think work quality is obvious for those halo effects you mentioned. There's just some fuzzy correlation (about being in FAANG and interviewing performance) that lazy interviewers/managers tend to mistakenly conflate with employment suitability. There are many reasons why hiring tends to be broken, which I'm not going into because it would be a book length thesis in itself, I'm just saying there's no way code quality of your past work would be "obvious" unless somebody actually spent a couple hours reviewing your code. Nobody would do that unless there's some other signal indicating that that might be the case (and in 99% of the cases they wouldn't do it even if the signals are there).

So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption that it should be obvious to employers that you're employable... maybe that's not a great assumption. I definitely agree that most of the time companies aren't "desperate" to hire -- and TBH you don't want your future employers to be so desperate. If you're not getting offers (and you want to), maybe you'd have to spend a bit more effort advertising yourself instead of relying on potential employers' desperation.


    TBH my belief is that some FAANG or famous school is a 
    better signal than self-reported experience on a CV
Regardless of actual merit, it's definitely true in practice.

Just like the old "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" adage, hiring the MIT or FAANG candidate is going to be pretty safe in the eyes of your manager.

    So my point is that if you proceeded with the assumption 
    that it should be obvious to employers that you're 
    employable... maybe that's not a great assumption
Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves?

Or are you saying that engineers without fancy schools or FAANG-level experience just aren't very hireable?


> Are you saying that OP isn't trying hard enough to sell/present themselves?

It seemed from their wording "various parts of my portfolio it should be obvious I can deliver high-quality code and complete reasonably complex projects" that they might be assuming his positive qualities are obvious to interviewers. That's all I was trying to say.


You'll just need to accept my self-assessment, or not.

"Desperate" is a funny word. In another comment I compared this to buying milk when you need it. Maybe some people wouldn't call that desperate.

This all highlights the differences between being able to do the job, signaling that you can do the job, and being able to get hired to do the job.


It depends on whether the OP is failing tech screens or whether it's the companies/interviewers that are failing the screens. I was on the job hunt earlier this year and, while I'm by no means perfect, I had a lot of tech screens fall apart because the interviewer was awkward, pushy, or arrogant; or the demand placed upon knowledge or skill assessment was unreasonable. My impression is that if hiring really mattered to these companies that they would refine their hiring process rather than leaving it up to whichever dev who has nothing else to do that day.


I'm still receiving tons of mails and LinkedIn offers, even phone calls, and I haven't really seen much of a difference or decline. If anything, the compensation packages have only gone up, but the offers are as tone deaf as always.


That's interesting because my recruiter messages and emails have dropped off a cliff. I might get a few a week now versus getting multiple ones every single day, which was the experience I've had for several years. Maybe whatever bot recruiters are using to blast messages to me was decommissioned? lol

Not that I'm complaining. I loathe most recruiters. It's just an observation of mine that _seems_ to correlate with the state of hiring in tech.


This is anecdotal but if you can, create a LinkedIn account and put your resume there. That's the only good thing about posting your resume there. I think the market will correct itself in Q2(2023).


OP here. A LinkedIn profile is essential, not only to have in general but also because most applications ask for it. However the really irreplaceable thing is having visible connections to people at past or current jobs. I feel like this shows you're an actual person who has worked at the places you say you've worked at and aren't just making things up on your resume. Maybe that's just me, though, because no one else seems to hype up that part of it.


For me the value of LinkedIn is 1.) A self-updating Rolodex given that actual Rolodexes and business cards, for the most part, don't exist any longer and 2.) Because people expect you to have one. That said, the information I have on LinkedIn is very scanty and I've never used it for job hunting although I've (very rarely) responded to recruiters who reached out to me.


During a period where there is a perceived shortage of new devs, existing dev teams still have to meet deadlines and move the ball, this forces streamlining of processes and thus reduces the immediate need for new team members. If someone on my team leaves and I need to back-fill engineering time on a process or app, and I can't back-fill quickly, what other choice do I have other than to reassess the entire process and change it so that it requires less commitment moving forward?


> and employers don't seem desperate.

Hiring follows predictable patterns throughout the year, namely the last month of the quarter is usually relatively hot.

It's November now, so there's still ample time to fulfill recruitment KPIs. My experience is that hiring only picks up speed come mid-December, when there's simply fewer candidates than normally due to Christmas.

That being said this September, which usually burns through the backlog from the summer vacation season, was unusually slow.


At some point, one has to consider that the crazy highly salaries of last years gold rush was putting a dent in shareholder value, and so Something Had To Be Done.


Exactly. Taking the market and supply and demand as justification when salaries are low and complaining when the price is too high for their taste.


How long have you been at it? Recruiting at non-FAANG employers works differently. The father you get from FAANG or startups, the less urgency you will find on the part of your prospective employers. Don't let this discourage you. Have you had to job search much before? I've found it's often a months long process. You might not be at the beginning, but at the middle of it.


Lol I find this to be exact opposite, FAANG has had very long wait times, Google probably with the longest streak of that.

I find non-FAANG to be much quicker.


Outside the US. I always find job searches a grind. No one hands you a job, but if you work it hard you can get multiple offers. I never worked for a company who "got a new round of funding though" - so that might be a tell. Try adding boring companies (bootstrapped, profitable, serve a customer segment that isn't tech) and government into the mix.


Not only that, but lying and stringing people along is extremely prevalent.

I truly feel like people doing the hiring have mental health issues.


I think it's incentives gone wrong/"metric gaming" masquerading as "hiring/interviewing".

People on the other side of the table have metrics to meet and a pipeline to keep filled. They care less about how many offers are extended.


Keep your head up and in mind its allmost christmas and in december basicallly nothing much happens ever. ;)

As for external recruiters: remember their job is not to be there for you. They usually only eat when they fill positions and there is ABSOLUTELY NO entry requirement to become a recruiter.


Beyond 6 years of experience (let's say 2-3 companies), it's somewhat a waste of time for an engineer to apply for jobs.

Your time is better spent reaching out to your existing network and ex-colleagues to fish for openings in my experience.


If you failed the tech screens why would they be desperate to hire you?


If they were desperate to hire somebody, they'd lower the bar on the tech screens.


I don’t agree - I’d rather wait than take on someone that can’t meet the standard, because they’re likely to be an active drag rather than a help. I can hire contractors if I need to fill a seat that quickly.


I’ve never met a tech screen that adequately measured candidate quality (actually I take that back Okta’s SRE interview was fantastic).

I tried to hire a known, trusted, high performing engineer at Google. He was rejected. After reading his packet I could not figure out why. I had to call the recruiter and ask her if he’d said something so unmentionable they couldn’t even write it down.

They decided to pass on him because he was so good his promotion path at the role would be inadequate. I could have told them that before they wasted his time flying him out and sitting him through 8 hours of tech screen.

I literally had to fly him back out and do it all again, because “that’s the process”

I hate to break it to you but the process is broken.


Our process is not particularly difficult, I’m not doing Leetcode or anything. I just ask questions at interview which test whether people have a surface level understanding or whether we’ll have to hand hold people through things.

For e.g. I’ve interviewed backend devs with 5+ years of Django experience who haven’t been able to tell me the general methods of how they might go about tackling a poor performing ORM query. I’m not asking them to even be able to write the code here, I’m just asking them to tell me roughly what their approach would be. If people aren’t able to talk me through that in general terms, they’re not going to help much.

I had one this week where a guy took user input on an API and then used “eval” to run it as code. Where do you even start with that? On CV terms, this person had 10 years of decent looking experience.


OP here. Failing surface level tests is not an issue for me. I agree you should not pass through a candidate who can't demonstrate basic coding skills in front of you, or more specialized skills like simple Django knowledge if that's essential to the position. I've been on the hiring side and watched at least one otherwise qualified candidate fall apart in front of me on a simple coding exercise, probably due to nerves. It can be heartbreaking to watch but at some point you have to draw the line.


If you're willing to wait, I don't think you're desperate, IMHO. You're also probably right, most of the time, of course.


I once lowered my hiring bar because I was desperate. I ended up with a few bad employees that slowed us down more than the ones that turned out good accelerated us. Not worth the tradeoff IMO.


Desperate could mean they just hire someone off the street OR when someone meets the minimum bar throw a bunch of money at them.


Anyone know about ML? It used to be a different job market, I was thinking of moving into that area but now not sure if its bubble has been popped or always will be a premium.


Flooded at the entry level by Coursera certs and MS in Data Science from University You Have Never Heard Of. Used to work for an ML company that hires the entry level cert people for $19 an hour as consultants. They have an endless pool of cheap hires.


ML falls into a few broad categories: model design, data preparation, and deployment. Unfortunately if you don't have a PhD, most serious places won't have you doing model design. To add to that, data preparation is very tedious. So the "sexy" part of ML (making the models) is pretty difficult to gain access to.


I don't have a degree, period, so I can't be hired where I work (contractor). But I spend a lot of time fixing Python code written by PhD's. There's a lot of 'glue' work to be done that traditional IT can't really handle and the actual scientists doing the work usually don't know much about.


You'd fall under the deployment category. The "sexy" part of ML, designing the models, is done by the PhDs, then you clean up their code to help make it production ready.


You don't need the Ph.D if you do Ph.D things (publishing at top conferences).

Hidden cheat code they don't tell grad students about.


The unfortunate catch is that you need good connections to publish in top papers. Either that, or write some rather brilliant papers.


Like everyone else is saying, from what I understand, going into ML as an ML expert only really makes sense if you have a PhD or at least a master's in the field from a well-known school. On the other hand there seem to be lots of ML companies who need more general software developers.


This does not describe our company. We want to hire developers.


I looked at the jobs page off your HN profile. It looks like you're trying to hire firmware developers in-office in Houston, who also have to do customer support with an on-call rotation, and are paying on the low end of what web development pays. Kudos for being so upfront but looking at that I have a sense of where the challenges are for you.


As cliche as it sounds, beggars can’t be choosers. I’ve done customer support and on-call and it can be manageable.


"Beggars can't be choosers" is true in both directions. The problem with hiring beggars into a subpar situation is that they're going to jump as soon as their situation improves. The job listing talks about 12 month goals which suggests they want people for the long haul.

Really though this looks like one of those rare cases where hiring new grads and training them from scratch is the way to go.


Not now, but they were, about a year ago. I was one of them. Now, I'm turning away resumes, because we've filled the positions, after a long slog.


So you advertise jobs, but turn candidates away.


You are right about the portfolio, I personally have one together which is quite nice, I brush it up every month, and it has had companies chasing me.


I've had a flurry of recruiter's contact me lately. A lot more than I usually get. Non-FAANG, 2 YOE. So there is another anecdote for you all.


Recruiter spam is just noise. It has almost no correlation to job offers whatsoever.


A lack of recruiters and surplus of candidates would lead to less recruiter spam on average.


I think we need more info: Age bracket? Are you only going for remote roles? If not, in what metro are you searching?


Employers who do happen to be desperate for developers can easily hide that sentiment amid big tech layoffs.


It's unlikely the screening bar has gone up - are you sure you're doing well on the tech screens?


Sometimes the tech screens have been frustrating enough to just abandon the effort and save everyone some time.


My experience is it's impossible to find people who's experience actually matches their resume.


I've heard this so many times....But, i believe that there is always the possibility that someone who is not a perfect match can evolve and learn to become the perfect match. I've also seen the case - though rare - where the "perfect candidate" fails to evolve to learn new things, or fails to adapt to new conditions because they're too intsrested in only a specific scenario. I've been on both the candidate side as well as (many times) the hiring manager side. I think too many HR departments and hiring mangers lack the mechanism to gauge candidates, so they fall back to metrics that might be too generalized. Granted, a non-standard approach to finding that candidate who can evolve is not super-scalabel - i get it - but its still my preferred direction. In all cases, when i have hired using my approach, i have always had great candidates; my approach has yet to fail me. Meanwhile, my peers who hire using too rigid a set of metrics...well, let's say that they've gotten good candidates only about half the time.


That is the case when hiring entry level and junior, but a senior level should be able to hit the ground running on at least one part of the job requirement.


Agreed, that is true. A senior does not need to meet all requirements but at least 1 or 2, yeah.


We try to hire seasoned linux admins for our ops team. This has become difficult.

I start with this technical interview question so I can calibrate quickly:

"If I run the following two commands:

mkdir a b c;mv *

What happens?"

One person so far has asked if globbing was active. Like half of people get the answer right if they assume it is.

This question is deemed as "not fair", though, because it assumes a linux admin would know about shell globbing. So we're trying to find a modern equivalent that is somehow relevant, even though we're literally hiring people to know some shell.


You didn't ask for advice, but I have some Linux experience and it does feel a little like a trick question since you would normally never do that. Probably I'd give 100% credit for answering the question as asked, and 90% credit if they can explain to you what happened after running it in a terminal or if you tell them the end result.

If you need good questions, maybe ask your current admins the five most common operations or pain points they have every day and then base your questions on that.


Yeesh this feels more like a trivia question and less like a real problem.

You should be focusing on a desired objective in the linux environment and then allow them to outline the steps to get to that objective.


If half the people get the answer right, what's the problem?


If the question is irrelevant or about unimportant trivia then it's a bad signal to use to reject people. An extreme example would be rejecting any candidate who fails to call a coin flip correctly.


Same. The tech exercise we give to candidates is to write two very simple CRUD end points in Django/DRF, and to add date filtering to one of them. There are various ways to implement this and I’d accept a lot of variation in the final solution, but probably 80% of them didn’t work correctly. And that’s from people that mostly say they “know” Django on their CV.


Do your job posts match the jobs?


This only comes into play once you've started the interview process, unless you're saying you're so jaded that you don't even bother contacting candidates with good resumes.


Now, a lot of people might be saying… “Hire remote”.

Here’s why most companies won’t do it.

1. An employee is a big investment to non-FAANG companies.

2. Does the candidate demonstrate that they are capable of remote work? (Sorry, more than 50% aren’t).

3. Employers want to see competence first before they would allow remote work.

These days only companies who are desperate, or have a solid competence and experience in managing remote workers will do it.


I guess I am lucky… but I never had to “look for a job”. My fort job after graduation was the company itself that reached out while I was finishing my studies (and was not the only one… I was overwhelmed by offers). After that every time I changed job is because the company I moved to reached out to me. I am in Europe though… maybe the market in the US is tough!


pro-tip reminder: specialize to differentiate! you only need one job, and employerXYZ needs an expert in <stack>.

ultimate example: COBOL developers are not concerned about this downturn!!


I wonder if this is related to the transition to remote work. A lot of companies are passing on comparatively expensive US developers and getting the same level of experience for 1/2 or 1/3 the cost in other countries.


I've seen the opposite - more on-shoring after realizing that offshoring has led to a lot of tech debt due to a variety of factors. The economy is spooking people though and anecdotally, we've greatly slowed (but not stopped) hiring.


Well communication is more important in remote work, so local developers have an advantage in my opinion.


This is contrary to the evidence that I've seen. Outsourcing to countries with a cheaper cost of living seems like an advantage to a US-based company but it comes with tremendous disadvantages including: time zone difference for standup, cultural differences, communication barriers, complex tax situations, etc. All of this over time just leads to incredible technical debt that builds up.


The large majority of remote jobs I've seen on LinkedIn and other job boards, or applied to, are U.S.-only, sometimes restricted to particular states. Companies using the transition to remote to expand worldwide must be advertising elsewhere and are not really an issue for me.


I am elsewhere and even here jobs are limited to within the country. Op is spreading a far right anti work from home conspiracy theory.


I'm surprised to learn that I'm far-right and against working from home, since I've worked from home my entire career and have a 100% remote team.


To be fair the GP only commented your theory not your person :D

There can be legit reasons to not practice what you preach, eg. to gain an advantage with fewer competitors :D


My company does contract development work. We’ve gotten quite a bit of work cleaning up half-assed projects that have been bungled by offshore shops. If your company is doing that, be sure to keep me in mind for when this blows up in a quarter or two!


My company is not doing that. We don't use contractors at all.


The big thing about remote work is it's going to be very difficult for people to advance up the ladder. A lot of remote work is freezing careers and org charts in place.


Companies have been trying to do this en masse since the 90s, and there's a reason why it usually fails.


We are desperate to hire developers, HMU if you want a job.


OP here. I don't feel comfortable applying for a job in connection with this anonymous handle, but I've been checking the HN hiring threads since I've started my job search. If you post your job there next time, I should see it and apply if I'm still looking and it's a good fit.


Contact info would make that easier...


hussle.work/jobs/hussle


"Hussle Inc is not currently hiring."


We are. https://pldb.com


LinkedIn's algorithm seems to be related to how active you are. One step you could try is reaching out to any recruiters you may have added over the years and ask them if they know of any open positions you might be a good fit for. If you haven't added any you might be able to look in your feed to see if there are any advertising jobs and reach out to them from there.

I know LinkedIn and recruiters get kind of a bad rap but I really like working with them over applying the old fashioned way.

You get more phone calls but it beats filling out forms. If you get multiple recuriters working on your behalf you can setup situations where you try to interview for lots of companies at once in batches. If you're currently unemployed and have the time for that, some companies will eliminate time consuming steps in their interview process to hire you before one of the other companies does.

I haven't looked in the last few months but this is most of my strategy for finding good jobs without having to bother with annoying things like job applications or too many interviews.

Long term an additional thing you can do to boost this is continue to add recruiters on linkedin even when you're not actively looking.

I don't enjoy the job search, so I let the recruiters do it for me.

You can be pretty straightforward with them too because they're incentivized to get you a job with commissions. You might be surprised with what they come back with if you tell them very explicitly what you're looking for (money, remote, type of interview, etc). Of course the more recruiters you work with the more likely some of them will be able to turn up these roles.

I also like this system because it ensure you are only working with companies extremely motivated to hire. At the point where a company has hired an external recruiter, they have already spent thousands of dollars to try to hire you, failed, and now they're spending thousands more in commission to send someone out into the wild to find them someone they can please hire.

One last thing I'll throw out if you're still having trouble past that or if that strategy is unpalatable to you. You could pick up a couple AWS certifications.

They aren't easy, but they aren't that hard either.

AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate AWS Certified Developer

These certs are extremely similar and if you study for one you can do just a little more and pass the other too.

Cloud skills are in especially high demand and some companies agreements with AWS even require them to employ a minimum number of people with AWS certs.

The AWS certs in particular are nice because they are quite cheap compared to many certifications. $150 each for the 2 I mentioned. You'll want study materials as well. I really liked the courses offered by acloudguru which I believe is now owned by linux academy.

https://acloudguru.com/forums/certified-solutions-architect-... https://acloudguru.com/course/aws-certified-developer-associ...

In any case sorry you're in that situation. Job change is always stressful, especially when it doesn't go smooth. Good luck!


> LinkedIn's algorithm seems to be related to how active you are.

I used to keep a spreadsheet of what dates I'd log in, and what actions I'd take, then I'd wait for the summary email from LI and put the results in it. Anecdotally, after logging into LI and making minor edits to my profile, the "number of times you've appeared in search results" emails I receive indicate a 2-3x increase over baseline.

By minor edits, I mean changing punctuation or other small changes to a sentence or two. Major edits would dramatically increase my search results, such as adding certifications, but that's to be expected.


OP here. I've had basically no response from the various third-party recruiters I've contacted, compared to at least some response to my direct applications to specific positions. Letting recruiters do your job search for you sounds like a great way to go though if that's an option for you.

I've gotten certificates in the past and used to put them on my resume or LinkedIn, now I just leave them off. They're so minor compared to the rest of the stuff on my resume that realistically they aren't going to move the needle. In fact, no offense intended, but it feels like a junior move given my existing background, like putting my high school on my resume. I can see them being really helpful for some people, though.




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