I have hired (interviewing team member, or hiring manager) hundreds of engineers.
If you are hearing "let me know if I can help" (number 5) you might be doing something wrong. You should be hearing some version of " I will talk to my boss" or "I will call for you" or "XXX person I know is looking".
I have a list of about 30 people who if they call me I'm going to go out of my way to get them a job. That means make a spot for them on my team. Or I will reach into the non overlapping parts of our networks to see if someone is hiring.
Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.
Those of us who survived the bubble did so on hard work and a network. We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done.
Its the new year, it is the perfect excuse to figure out who your network is, and what they can do for you. Make a list of folks you know, call them up, tell them your thinking of changing jobs. If you don't hear a lot of "send me your resume"/"is your linked/site in up to date" then you need to make some changes.
"We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done"
I really appreciate the sentiment. In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.
"You need to make some changes" is not particularly helpful when you're outside the fold. What's typically unstated is something about loyalty, esp. not disclosing the mistakes of others.
> In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.
I think that's all true except for the "more than competence" part and it's a good thing. Competence is directly related to loyalty. When you recommend someone for a job and they excel, it makes you look good. It makes you loyal to them and giving the opportunity makes them more loyal to you. If someone isn't recommended you for job openings they know about, it's because they think you might make them look bad, either through experience with you or the lack thereof. Unfortunately, it takes time to prove you're competent and gain that loyalty.
Sometimes nepotism can creep in and someone can use their influence to get someone under qualified into a position they shouldn't but that influence was, generally, built through competence, including a history of recommended qualified and competent people.
> The best advice someone could give?
> 1. Achieve impressive things
> 2. Never give anyone a reason to dislike you
I think the real advice is be reliable and don't be abrasive. A recommendation for a position goes a long way because it alleviates the risk of hiring an unknown person that may be unreliable or not be able to work with other people.
Loyalty, like love, can be blind. One of the best SREs I work with, is just a stellar performer. Over delivers, solves complex problems quickly and with well thought out and reliable solutions. We needed another SRE, so we hired his best friend. Terrible employee, both in what they deliver and how they act. Night and day difference from the first SRE.
I agree. There is different mindsets though. If someone was my best friend, I would not recommend them because of that, if they were a bad fit. That would be unfair to both the employer and the friend.
Not sure why anybody would do that. Even for inexperienced people or people that need more guidance in general there's usually spots, just in other other companies.
Companies still hire people that chose the completely wrong career and fields. And in many companies there is demand for them for all sorts of reasons. Worst case they have to do shitty jobs, nobody else wants to do.
With the current lay-offs I think it's mostly the result of "hire everyone" during covid.
I agree. Hiring friends and family is dangerous in my view, unless you are running your own small company.
Alan C. Greenberg, former CEO of investment bank Bear, Stearns & Co. said (to paraphrase): "The problem with hiring friends and family: You hire 100% of the dummies." Bear had an incredibly strict policy about not hiring friends and family. As a result, I am always suspicious when people recommend to hire friends and family.
Seconding this. I'm wondering if the person you are replying to might be having a bit of a dunning kruger issue
I only recommend the people that I have worked with that I would want to work with again. Not because of loyalty, but because they are good, and will make me look good for recommending them
To clarify for other users, "dunning kruger issue" means:
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias[2] whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include in their definition the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills.
I'm someone who tends to get along and work well with others. That part definitely has its advantages for employability (and life in general), and is recommended. However, taking it to this extreme is just dangerous advice. Constantly being a people pleaser can carry enormous risks, especially (but not limited to) to yourself. It's important to learn to be ok with people disliking you sometimes.
People pleasers can cause people to dislike them in a workplace, ironically. Being a people pleaser in software dev very often means you will over-burden yourself because you'd rather say "yes, I can do that for you" than "no, I don't have the bandwidth for that".
I'd rather a teammate who is honest about their current limitations than someone who tells me what I want to hear. If someone admits they are stretched thin, it's now an "us versus the problem" to find why you are so overtasked. If someone consistently takes on too much (because they can't say no) and causes the team to miss deadlines, it's now an "us versus you" problem.
The most hated guy at my old job would start every request with an elaborate hand-wrung introduction to make sure no one could possibly be offended by what he was asking for.
Because of this, everyone had to read one or two paragraphs of niceties before they had any idea what he actually needed.
It was incredibly annoying and actually quite selfish in practice since it wasted so much time.
A good manager would have broached the subject with the employee and gently moved them in the direction of adjustment and likely some therapy.
That sort of people pleasing behavior can easily come from a past where asserting even a minor need or boundary was met with abuse from caretakers or peers.
Not saying it's not maladaptive and irritating behavior. It is! But they probably came by it honestly.
I totally agree; unfortunately he was a contractor hired through an agency, which meant his management resources were poorly defined and somewhat diffuse across the two companies' reporting chains.
I'd imagine if he was strictly an FTE he would have been getting that guidance and support, but I guess the politics of trying to do so across company boundaries made it too much of a career risk for the "manager" he was assigned from my company.
Everyone has different and possibly ridiculous expectations;w whether they dislike you or not is not really within your control.
Edit: I'd maybe clarify that trying to get people above you not to dislike you is essentially the nature the politics of careerist ladder climbing. If you get laid off, it's just pretty common for people to see themselves as inherently superior because they weren't let go, and therefore think, right or wrong, that you'll reflect poorly on them, because they're careerist ladder climbers. So maybe it's best to carefully cultivate the people from the very start of meeting them which ones still have souls.
Your first comment re: exclusionary is simply a filter for the flip side of your 2nd point.
The damage of a bad hire is 10x as bad as the positive impact of a good hire.
A network of competent, easy to get along with people allows one to avoid the truly bad hires that we've all experienced.
Sure you may view it as exclusionary, but if you're hiring for seniors, and been in your niche a decade or more.. the likelihood of someone no one in your network has ever heard of being a great hire vs a terrible hire weighs heavily on a managers brain. Many of these niches are small and are the same few dozen people recirculating over and over. If you are going to spend more time with these people than your spouse or kids, you would like it be be minimally painful.
Joel Spolsky has written extensively about avoiding bad hires. Average and above is the ultimate goal. I agree the impact of a bad hire far outweighs good hires because they consumer the time of managers. Good hires only need a quick steer now and again. Bad hires need a manager to spoon feed them until layoff season arrives.
I'm not sure about the 10x part. On my team I have roughly 15 coworkers. Two are pretty useless, or at least perform at a level dramatically lower than the other 13. So how do we deal with it? Like the Internet, we route around them. Sure they're a waste of company resources/money, but big companies often waste so much money in IT that it's not really a significant factor.
Now if your team is very small, one or two bad apples can be quite damaging.
Maybe you've not gotten the truly bad apples, or have enough process in place to mitigate.
I've been in environments with people who are breaking things at a rate that causes a day of their work to cause more than a day of work for others.
Fighting with management for months and then shunting them off to their own 'strategic branch' for 6 months was the only way to protect the team until they were fired.
Most people don’t understand how bad “average” is.
It’s true that a bad hire has a large impact. But people assume this means the folks like you’re describing. When not taking money into account I view those types of people as net neutral.
A good litmus is to answer the question “would the team be any better off if we replaced them with no one”, and usually the answer is “no” or at least close to it.
Factoring money in does change things. Especially for smaller companies. But even then people overestimate what “bad” means when they cite the massive impact of a bad hire
Yup - there are actually net negative contributors that simply removing would cause in an increase in team output.
Whether it be rate of damage to codebase, manual interventions in prod, hurting morale, time suck in meetings/idle chitchat, causing drama with stakeholders that needs to be triaged, etc.
They are rare, but they happen, and the process of onboarding, feedback, giving a chance, documenting, and off boarding can take a year.
The people whom I’d recommend are not on the basis of loyalty but rather on some dot product of competence and willingness/propensity to do hard work.
It’s true that a network referral will inherently be of someone that I worked with (or have other [rare] reason to vouch for). That’s the value of it: if you know me enough to trust my judgment, that vouch has information value for you.
I don’t see any other way it could work more effectively.
The people I would recommend are usually never needing help finding work and are probably already in their ideal role: I never have anyone to recommend!
Something I noticed in tech is that loyalty is generally a consequence of competence.
If competent people are valued, recognized and promoted that leads to more interesting projects and compensation. That's how you build loyalty.
We all know software shops that are always whining about the "tech talent shortage" and whose technical employees don't stay more than two years. And we know why nobody is loyal to those!
I think you are discounting the social aspect of the advice. Most people do great things, but very few can stand out only on the strength of their work. So for the vast majority doing good work has to be coupled with having a network that knows about one's work.
And frankly looking for a job is probably one of the most self-serving efforts in one's life, by definition. That is a good thing.
I have a colleague who almost feels like he's actively trying to make me hate him by throwing completely unrelated to work off-hand remarks in the most basic thing I do, like telling people that I'm gonna take a lunch break or just opening up a terminal prompt while we pair program.
I know it's off-topic but It's hard for me to try to be likeable with people who are actively trying stuff like that, and I don't know what else to do. It feels like I'm sitting on a table and the other side ignores their table manners because they're just that valuable to the company that they can.
Have you told this person what they’re doing bothers you and asked them to stop? If you haven’t, then you are partially to blame for not speaking up for yourself. Good opportunity for you to learn how to tactfully set boundaries with people.
Not the one or replying to, but I’ve encountered this too. Some pair programming takes the form of two people operating one computer. When I’ve done this style and I’m driving, certain people wouldn’t let me finish my thought on what I’m doing. They’ll grab their keyboard or mouse and change programs, or just start typing in stuff while I’m typing too.
I like pair programming with the right person. It is very rewarding. What you describe sounds awful. I would tell them to stop immediately. If it continues, I would stop the pair programming session. What a pain.
Yeah, I like it when it’s good. That experience happened at a company where it was full time mandatory, and with our clients’ engineers too. I had positive experiences from that, but also really frustrating ones.
>In my experience such networks have been self-serving and mostly exclusionary, rewarding loyalty more than competence.
The point being? That is how human social network and constructs work. The ultimate point is to help yourself and not based on some ephemeral grand concept. No matter how competent someone is why would I want to work with them if they will stab me in the back one day? Incompetent people will indirectly stab you in the back eventually so you really want an adequate level of competence and loyalty.
Dislike and loyalty are also very different things so not sure why you're equating them. There's people who do things I dislike that will support others that support them. There are people I like greatly who have a record of stabbing others in the back even if they were helped by that person. Guess which ones I'd recommend for a job?
Loyalty is not a quality that should be selected for. Someone could be "stabbing you in the back" because you're doing something wrong, either morally or because your choices are not good for the business, which is ostensibly what you both should be working towards. Demanding or expecting loyalty blinds you to important signals.
Loyalty is a huge failure of human reasoning, and it's frankly bizarre that people see it as a moral virtue given how easily it can be and has been exploited in the past.
You're confusing giving feedback or pushing back with stabbing in the back. Someone loyal will tell you the truth to your face or confront you directly understanding that you mutually trust each other. In fact the people I consider most loyal are the ones most likely to call me out in situations and give me a different perspective.
Loyalty is defined as devotion to a person, institution or idea. I think"devotion" is somewhat stronger than what you're describing.
I'd say someone calling you out is not exhibiting loyalty to you, but more like integrity, or loyalty to some other ideal, like truth, or business success, that you also value. Devotion to ideals is better than to people, though devotion by definition can still be blinding and dangerous (religion? Laissez-faire free markets?).
I'd say that what you're describing is a respect for people with who will fight for principles that you agree with, and that generates a kind of camaraderie, but don't confuse camaraderie for loyalty.
Anyway, not to go down a rabbit hole, the danger of loyalty as a concept is just something I happened to be thinking about lately. I just can't think of any valid instances of loyalty that didn't have very bad failure modes, so I'm inclined to write it off entirely as a value one should aspire to develop.
> No matter how competent someone is why would I want to work with them if they will stab me in the back one day?
Let me say this bluntly: everyone has the ability to stab some anyone in the back. Maybe some have had the unique pleasure of not needing to be in a position to do this, which is great for them, but highly unrealistic for an overwhelming majority of people.
Bad situations bring the worst out in people.
Bad situations take competent people and make the incompetent.
Bad situations can make good people behave poorly.
I'd gamble the attitude you've expressed here will cause you lots of issues down the road. The most successful career folks I've met take chances on "incompetent" people but they're systematic. Part of their process allows for tolerance and growth -- i.e. taking a chance. I don't mean to solo you out but this is a very harsh attitude and definitely makes the industry a much worse place to be in.
Nothing in life is absolute but that doesn't mean everything in life is equal. Some people will stab you in the back more likely than others. Other will be more likely to provide support for you in a difficult situation. Likewise competence isn't an absolute value but changes with times and there is both current and future competence. Consequence for actions and judgement of others does not mean absolutes.
If you want to actively aim to have coworkers that in your own judgement are more likely to stab you in the back and more likely to be incompetent for the job at hand then you do you. I'll go with having mutually supportive coworkers who are capable of doing the job at hand.
> If you want to actively aim to have coworkers that in your own judgement are more likely to stab you in the back and more likely to be incompetent for the job at hand then you do you.
No need to be dismissive only pointing out that your valuation of people will likely cause you more grief than benefit (imo). Also, incompetent people would probably be far less likely to actually be a threat because, well, they're incompetent... It's the smart people that you write off as incompetent that stab you in the back (in my experience). Having some coined judgemental framework will definitely cause oversights eventually.
There's no single way to define someone as incompetent or smart. It's all context and job specific rather than some blanket absolute judgement of someone. Someone not competent for the job at hand will have gotten that far in their careers for some other reason. A fairly common reason is being able to play office politics and sacrifice others for their own benefit.
>Having some coined judgemental framework will definitely cause oversights eventually.
Yes, nothing ever is perfect, everything is tradeoffs and likelihoods of certain outcomes. I'd like to note that judging something as broken because it is not perfect is in itself an inflexible judgmental framework.
> Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.
This maybe makes sense from a hiring manager's perspective, but I think a lot of the people who say "let me know if I can help" are non-management peers. At most companies, the best they can do is enter their recently-laid-off colleagues information and resume into the internal referral system. Yes, that's usually better than going in through the "random applicant from the internet" funnel, but it's still limited. Even if they have a good relationship with the hiring manager, often the applicant still has to go through the funnel, and it's easy to get lost there. This usually isn't an issue with smaller companies that have less process, though.
Regardless, on the few occasions where I (as a non-manager) have referred someone and they've been hired, I don't think it gave me much of a reputation boost as someone who brought someone good onboard. Regardless, there are certainly some people for whom I'd go above and beyond to try to help them get an interview, but I'd do that because they are close friends whom I want to help, not because I of any professional perks of successfully referring someone, which I absolutely don't care about.
> This maybe makes sense from a hiring manager's perspective, but I think a lot of the people who say "let me know if I can help" are non-management peers.
A good number of my management gigs were PEERS hiring me in as a fellow engineer, and me getting promoted to be their boss. Much of the hiring I have done is peers of the good engineers on my team. If your peers think your great, that your going to make them look good by doing well then your name will come up.
Every manager is different, "hire this person" with some sort of resume is going to get my attention! Your peer can do that for you!
I thrived in the dotcom crash while I watched many of my friends go to companies with generic names like "Global Digital Media" with silly business plans like putting Internet kiosks in U.S. airports. It was incredible - their entire business plan was to ramp up over the next 5 years with a massive capital outlay just in time for smart phones to make them completely obsolete. This is an actual example:
I thrived by staying put. I got retention bonuses while my friends got tons of equity in companies that became 0. When they lowered their salaries to conserve money, they gave them more equity to compensate. Again, all the equity became 0.
Everything you said about networking is spot on. I would add to it - don't waste time. Don't think, "I'm going to ride on my severance and unemployment for six months and start on x date." Start literally today. If it's the holidays and nobody is hiring, get a certification. Learn a new technology. Work on networking. Exercise. Do 8 hours of productive something every day.
I have a friend who has been unemployed the last 2.5 years. He now wishes he didn't take a year off without improving himself / looking for a job.
In the dotcom crash, when I was laid off I think the first email I sent the next day was to someone who we were a client of at a previous employer. And we had stayed in touch because I had moved onto a competitor of his (until I was laid off). Just a "Hey. I was laid off. Love to pick your brain." sort of thing. Took me out to lunch with his COO the next week. Discussed some contracting but they ended up making me an offer in about of month.
Things got rocky for the company later. And it was touch and go for a bit. Not the greatest period for me financially but I was never really unemployed and it was a pretty great job in a lot of ways which set me up for my current one. Had I decided to take the autumn off, I could easily see myself being unemployed for 2 or 3 years. Other people I knew never really recovered from the dotcom bubble bursting.
This advice boils down to "be the best of the best" because you'd only go out of your way for someone if they're that good.
I don't think people who haven't reached that bar are necessarily doing something "wrong". It takes hard work to reach it and some people prioritize other things in life over hustling. Others simply don't have the talent to reach it.
I would argue most if not everyone has the talent to reach being the "best of the best" but it takes time. Time, Time, Time... It's everything. Some can reach higher bars sooner simply because they were exposed to something earlier and more frequently.
I, too, survived the dot com crash, and, too, benefited from and serve as part of the kind of network described above. When it comes to job hunting, my two favorite career stats are having helped a friend get a job I was interviewing for and working at least a second time for four different former managers. I actually just talked to one yesterday, we hadn't worked together in 20 years.
If this is what's necessary for experienced devs, imagine all the students and upcoming devs that are not allowed a foot in the door. The great social barrier that keeps jobs in very specific parts of the U.S.
Mainly agree, but maybe can be a bit more generous.
"30" sounds low to me, having worked in large companies for many years. Sure, the number of people you worked super-closely with for years is maybe in double digits but you probably know a lot of other people by reputation (which is still good signal) and there may be low effort things you can do for them. I try to, anyway.
This is a hidden danger that I only understood late in my career. I like working at small companies. You can contribute big things relatively easily when there are only a few contributors to begin with. You can build something and nurture it over time - anything from a technical asset to a working relationship with a colleague. You get a more diverse range of things to do because not everyone has to be pigeonholed and not everything needs approval from three different committees. You don't need to constantly try to do "high visibility" projects that will show up in your promotion panel because everyone in the company knows if you're good and the right person to take the lead on the next big thing anyway. You don't need to job hop every year or two to find interesting and well-compensated work for the same reasons.
But then after a while you've only worked in a few different places and with a few different people at each one. Your professional network is much smaller than someone who worked for a variety of big name tech giants in that time doing no-one-really-cares-what and climbing the career ladder by job hopping.
I'm really not bitter. If I could go back and tell my newly graduated self how their career would have gone a few decades later they'd probably still have made very similar decisions even with that knowledge. I've enjoyed many of my roles at small companies immensely and I can't think of many less attractive jobs in this industry than being a cog in the machine at some tech giant whose primary contribution to humanity is turning us all into spyware targets and then ad targets.
But it's undeniably true that sometimes in a tough market - even many years into a career and having reached the equivalent of staff/principal level or followed the independent/entrepreneur route - you can still end up knocking on the front door of an interesting employer or doing the recruiter thing to make a move when habitual networkers with similar YOE would not need to stoop so low because they'd find something via someone some other way.
Doesn’t necessarily apply to every industry… sure to a growing sector like software then maybe yes. In other parts of the economy, teams can have fixed sizes and budgets. This means no wiggle room to bring in new people. I manage a team but can’t hire a new full time person right now…I would put resumes in a pile..
This is very generational and depends on what sort of work circle you’re in too. There’s people I know would do this sort of thing for me but they literally couldn’t. This sounds like the equivalent of “hit the pavement with your resume” advice
I think the author has come away with the wrong lesson here.
Many engineers, particularly those that don't pay too much heed to social mores, think they have some God-given right to share details of all their private interactions publicly. Every tech test they do is pushed to GitHub with an accompanying blog post. Every interview has a transcript (somewhat one-sided) published and shared to Twitter. This is typical oafish behaviour displayed by mamy engineers and frankly, it annoys people. It's often considered a red flag when hiring. Understanding when to be discreet is an important skill for any employee.
Lying about why you're looking for work is a bad idea. That small lie will escalate, you'll have to start stringing together more lies, and when you get found out it won't reflect well.
This has nothing to do with radical honesty. I'm not suggesting you air all your dirty laundry during an interview. But don't lie. And don't publish all private interactions because you're a fan of free software. It's not the same thing.
We've heard "transparency" so much lately that it now gets confused with honesty.
They're not the same.
If a company asks where else you are interviewing an honest but not transparent answer would be something like "I'm exploring other opportunities at various places but don't feel comfortable providing more details." If you were to ask a company who else they are interviewing for the same role, you would expect the same answer. It would probably cause alarm if they actually told you the names of other people they were interviewing!
during one of the first interviews I ever had, the interviewer took me to a private room where I could do the coding part on my own
on the desk was the laptop they wanted me to use, some pens and paper, and a stack of resumes from other people
the interviewer made no mention of the stack as they were leaving or when they came back, and when I asked about it at the end of the interview, they chuckled and changed the subject... to this day I'm wondering if it was some test to see if I threw the other resumes out (didn't get an offer btw)
Pretty sure the test here is to see what you do when you discover them. I'd give them more benefit of doubt and guess that they wanted you to report it immediately, and letting any mention of it wait until the end of the interview was the wrong answer. If you're the sort of person that believes in these sort of tricks (I don't), you'd probably jump to the conclusion that the person ignoring the pile of resumes was okay watching the place burn down around him as long as it wasn't his job to fix it. That's a huge leap of logic to make, except in the whacky world of job interview shenanigans, where it's basically par for the course.
> If you're the sort of person that believes in these sort of tricks (I don't), you'd probably jump to the conclusion that the person ignoring the pile of resumes was okay watching the place burn down around him as long as it wasn't his job to fix it.
Alternative theory: since the information on a resume is not exactly sensitive (it's not the same thing as a job application), then someone who doesn't take the opportunity to study them is labeled as incurious
If a company asks you about stuff that isn't any of their business you have my permission (not that you need it) to lie your ass off if you think it will help you. The power asymmetry is such that unless the counterparty is extremely careful about abusing that power that you will end up being cornered and taken advantage of. If you present yourself as more desirable than you are based on your current situation and it lands you a job at a higher salary than you otherwise would have: more power to you. But don't overdo it and realize that there is some risk involved.
I think it's healthier to instead develop the social skills and confidence needed to answer any questions confidently while enforcing boundaries about what you will and won't answer. Outright lying can come from a place of weakness and fear which isn't good to encourage.
Let me give you an example: you're gay and your employer has a thing about gay people. They will not ask you outright 'are you gay?' because that, while legal might result in an anti discrimination suit upon rejection of the candidate which they could very well lose.
Lots of other situations and questions like that which are strictly speaking none of the employer's business. When given the option between telling the truth, evading the question, enforcing your boundaries or lying the only one that might result in you getting the job (assuming you need a job and wouldn't mind working for a bigot because a paycheck is better than no paycheck) I'd be fine with you lying. That is still problematic, but you don't have any moral responsibility towards your employer if they transgress themselves.
The same goes for questions about unionizing, wanting children, having chronic diseases and so on.
Maybe you picked being gay as a hypothetical out of a hat but it's a terrible example. Unless we're talking about extremely repressive societies where there are literally no professional options available for LGBT people, almost no LGBT person would recommend going back into the closet to find work with a bigoted employer. LGBT people regularly run away from home as teenagers and become homeless to avoid bigotry, that's how serious it can be for LGBT people to live authentically. A key part of the emotional growth involved, what a lot of it goes back to is, as I said, having confidence in yourself and being willing to enforce boundaries.
Leaving aside this particularly bad hypothetical, lying about yourself to get a job probably won't set you up for long-term success. What's the end game of claiming you don't want kids when you really do, after you get the job and then become pregnant? Now you need the job even more and your employer both resents you being pregnant and for having lied to them.
If you're really saying it's okay to lie to employers if you're truly desperate, then sure, why not. If you're actually starving then a lot of things become options, but this isn't really good long-term career advice.
You’ve drastically shifted the goal posts from the topic of “are you looking at other companies?” to discrimination. It’s hard to have any meaningful insight with those in the same bucket.
The former is completely standard procedural (do we need to accelerate the process to compete) and competitive (who are we up against).
Lying is always risky, though. If the truth comes to light, you are screwed. Even if it doesn't, you have to remember and internalize your lie, and make sure anything you say in the future is consistent with it. That requires extra work and can be stressful. (And if you mess it up: again, you are screwed.)
I don't buy the "you don't want to work for a company that would ask you XYZ anyway" line. Sure, in some cases that may be true, but sometimes someone (that is, a random person on the interview loop, not a "professional interviewer" like a recruiter) will ask or say something they shouldn't, and that doesn't need to reflect poorly on the company (or even on the person; who hasn't said something dumb on occasion?).
If you think a question is inappropriate, politely decline to answer, using whatever verbal finesse you have available to yourself. It takes practice and confidence to do so, but it's the right thing to do.
The right answer to those questions is: Sorry but that’s quite a direct question, why do you ask? (And how is it relevant to this interview?)
Those are bad questions to ask as an employer, and you should probably move on to the next opportunity anyways. Still, faking to have children when you don’t, or the other way around, is worse.
Gosh, no - strongly recommending not doing this. (The lying part)
Lying is one of the worst things you can do, it usually speaks to an issue with integrity, a concern that comes before almost all of them even intelligence, education, aptitude, skills.
Learn the skill of polite deferral, of saying things without saying them, diverting or embellishing a bit - and then only if it's an issue not relevant to the job.
If someone in an interview asks you your 'political orientation' (which obviously they shouldn't do and it would raise a big red flag anyhow - but just as an example) you do not have to be candid, but don't lie. You can say "I have a variety of opinions, I try to keep an open mind" - so long as you are comfortable with it and it's true. You have not lied, but not fully answered the question because it's none of their business.
I also think the OP here has misinterpreted 'transparency and candor'.
Engineers who 'over share' are a bit annoying but then again, you don't have to read their posts - but this is not the issue.
The 'issue' here is the absolutely truthful information that is 'just too much' for an interview setting.
Everyone needs to be honest and candid but not transparent like you're talking to the IRS or your accountant.
Suppose they ask you why you might want to work at the company, and you don't really feel hugely inspired, well, instead of saying literally that, you can find at least something interesting about the situation and allude to it. There's something interesting about every situation. And of course, if it's truly a bad situation just say that politely and assume you won't be working there.
It's ok to ask 'Elephant in the Room' questions especially if they are asked politely, if they can't handle that you don't want to work there.
It's ok to be turned away for something arbitrary or mundane (or any other reason) there will be other opportunities.
Getting turned down can make you very cynical and brings out our worst, even conspiratorial tendencies so try to stay grounded and keep your head on straight, don't be sucked into the vortex of weirdness and 'ultra competitive civility' of getting job shenanigans, it's not real, it's a big of a game, recognise it a such.
Kind of like telling people to 'don't be nervous' on a date, what I'm about to write is super glib but I think it's true: stay true to your basic values and identity and I think it will be easier to be more relaxed and authentic in interviews. The 'game' will pull you towards negative behaviours I have found it's a lot easier not to do them if you literally just decide that you are not going to do so for reasons of morality or values or whatever.
Companies lie to their prospective employees all the time. About how much runway they have, about the work that you'll be doing, about what it is like to work there.
I wish companies lying to users (in terms of service), shareholders, public announcements, employee announcements were all illegal and criminally prosecuted.
You are generalizing a lot. I outlined a very specific situation: A company inquires into aspects of your life that are none of their business.
In that particular situation as far as I'm concerned - and not as far as you are concerned - you are free to lie. Because the alternative is going to end with you not getting the job, no matter how qualified you are.
Lying about being arrested is a quick way to get fired when the background check comes through. Your antisocial suggestion has now escalated from something you could have preemptively explained into termination of employment. Nicely done.
Of course there is a point in asking, to find out. The background check is verification.
Did you know that employers frequently ask for your employment history in the form of a resume, but then they’ll contact one or two recent employers to confirm you were employed?
Trust, but verify. It’s a leaky but effective check against con artists.
Mmm objectively (black and white) lying is a stupid but man taking a moral high ground is even stupider. If you're caught into a position where you either need to lie or divert it's likely a bad situation. The right people, the right job, the right opportunities won't put you in a situation where your boundaries will be tested or you need to lie.
It shows to me that some people have never been in the situation where they really needed to eat and/or feed their families. The moral high ground is a fantastic place to be but the wrong hill to die on when it comes to employers prying into your private affairs as a means of possibly discriminating against you.
> And of course, if it's truly a bad situation just say that politely and assume you won't be working there
Or "this situation sucks, that's why I'm excited. I want to lead the charge out of the darkness and into the light" or some such self-aggrandizing metaphor. Assuming, of course, you are willing to take a job whose primary function is fixing a broken team.
Even when applying to companies that are LGBTQ friendly? I sometimes self identify on applications if the company has a good reputation with that kind of thing because I’d expect It would give me some diversity points. But maybe that’s not the best idea.
> Even when applying to companies that are LGBTQ friendly? I sometimes self identify on applications if the company has a good reputation with that kind of thing because I’d expect It would give me some diversity points. But maybe that’s not the best idea.
Pretending to be LBGTQ friendly is a good PR while changing actual company culture is hard, expensive and takes time. So don't get fooled by PR stunts and changed policies because they will always be eaten by real company culture.
A ruling by a court isn't the same thing as federal law.
There is no federal law establishing my rights, so if a company tries to ask about my personal life (wife, kids, etc.) I politely decline to answer, or I answer vague enough that doesn't give them any useful information.
> A ruling by a court isn’t the same thing as federal law.
A ruling by the Supreme Court applying a federal statute is binding federal law nationally, it can be overturned either by the Supreme Court itself, or by changing the law that the Court applied, but that’s actually stronger than federal statute law that superficially seems to more directly protect a right but which does not have such a confirming opinion.
How often does that happen though? I'm straight and I don't recall ever being asked about my family or love life in a job interview. Not that I'd keep it secret if asked, but why the hell would they be asking?
Yeah I'm also curious. When I was at Google there were a list of things you were never supposed to ask a candidate because that's Super Illegal(TM) and could expose the company to lawsuits. That included sexual orientation and marriage status. That was more than ten years ago, I'd expect most IT companies would do the same by now, at least in the US.
I've never been asked this sort of question at a large company. Mostly "startups" (scare quotes because they're not Silicon Valley startups; think Orlando or Chicago instead).
They also tend to ask a lot about things that might sound innocuous, like hobbies.
If I was being stupidly honest, I could talk about my involvement in the furry community. Most furries (~80%) are LGBTQ (versus ~3% to 5% of the base population).
Instead, I make vague allusions to being a gamer. (I play video games less than anyone I know, but it's not zero, so that's still technically true.)
The annoying part is that you are essentially cornered, being either LGBTQ and/or furry is a large part of your identity and it is hard to have to divorce yourself from that for the purpose of getting hired. Companies really need to get over this desire to know more about the private lives of their employees during the run-up to being hired than they are willing to disclose about their own affairs (such as: financial health of the company, maturity of leadership, attitude to quality of life issues, health care and so on).
There are ways to ask those without being illegal and these are employed quite frequently. Essentially any kind of probing into someone's private life should be off-limits.
> There are ways to ask those without being illegal
Strictly speaking, its not illegal to ask the question. However, because it is illegal to base hiring decisions on it, asking the question is legally dangerous in two ways:
(1) Asking the question in an employment interview is evidence which can tend to support that you intended to use it in a hiring decision, and
(2) The interviewee answering the question is evidence that you had the information, and thus the opportunity to use it in a hiring decision.
As a result, the usual legal advice is to strictly avoid asking the question: you can’t legally use the response, and by asking it you make yourself unnecessarily vulnerable. The idea that it is illegal to ask the question is probably a consequence of this.
That's exactly the sort of exchange that I had in mind. Likewise for work at a previous company, your current salary, whether or not you plan to have kids and so on. Depending on where you live some of those may be illegal but still, you need that job...
I don't know about that. Something that makes me sick to my stomach is the current only accepted behaviour to react to being laid off by being grateful to such a wonderful company to have given me opportunity to learn and blah, blah, blah. There is so much dishonesty and fake gratefulness around that anything departing from that, including just sharing that you interviewed a lot and only found dead ends, is a black flag.
I get that this is marketing, and that's the game in an employer market. But sh*t, no-one is calling out the fact that maybe the responsibility is not only on the incoming recession, but also how dumb a large portion of the industry has been in trying to ignore as best as possible a freaking war, a pandemic, and flying oil prices, and carried on over-hiring at high wages. I'm grateful mine didn't go in that game and froze hiring very early on.
Maybe it's an emphasis, the way I read it is that you should keep your unpalatable opinions to yourself, because being critical of the system is cause to be rejected by it.
> stomach is the current only accepted behaviour to react to being laid off by being grateful to such a wonderful company to have given me opportunity to learn and blah, blah, blah.
No. You have missed the point.
Nobody wants you to e grateful when you're not. But you do not have to say what you think just because you think it
I was shocked by that too. Maintaining such a sheet is a good idea, but never _ever_ share it. It's bad operational security. It's also revealing more about you (what other companies think of you) than it is about the companies in question.
Also in making it public—even with operational security flags aside—if I’m seeing that a candidate has been through 30 interviews (arbitrary number), at a certain point it’s a flag for me about why they haven’t reached an accepted offer by that point, regardless if they’re a strong candidate.
Would you approach dating the same way? “By the way, here’s all of the dates I’ve been on in the past year and I’m currently still single”—maybe there’s a perfectly valid reason for it, but it’s still going to be off-putting to someone who you’re trying to make a good first impression on. It’s got a non-zero chance to put them in a suspicious place instead of an inquisitive or curious one, which, if you’re still looking for dates (or work), probably isn’t what you want.
Edit: I think it's the difference between "honesty" and "oversharing". It's being honest to say "I've interviewed with multiple companies and we haven't been able to come to a mutually beneficial agreement." It's oversharing to give a pile of details about each of those interviews.
Just got back into the job market, and every potential employer has expressed gratitude for my level of honesty and transparency.
I'm "weaker" at negotiations since I've laid out my cards on the table upfront. The other side of the coin is companies are less likely to waste my time unnecessarily, or play hardball too much when you appear to roll over so easily.
My take on Hard Truth 6 is to be careful and strategic with your honesty. It may not always be interpreted the way you intended, so be honest but be wise about what you're disclosing.
I was laid off in April 2020 as well, and while some of my experience matches the author's some of it was very different.
Being laid off was not a relief -- it was terrifying. All indications were that a severe recession was coming. Frankly, it was quite surprising to me that companies were hiring at all given the uncertainty. It was not obvious at the time that broad sectors of the economy could seamlessly move to 100% WFH. It was also my first experience in fully remote interviewing.
I am a software engineer over fifty. I also have three children two of whom were in college, and my wife works in a travel related industry which was very much affected by the pandemic.
Given those things I approached my job search aggressively and with a sense of urgency, and I made it out OK. I was out of work for about two months and accepted a role at flat comp.
Being laid off is profoundly lonely. I was part of a mass layoff (approximately 2/3 of my company was laid off.) So while I was not alone in that sense, we were all very much alone together. Where you had been a team, you were now five people looking for jobs, each with their own problems and constraints. My wife could not have been more supportive, and yet the process of interviewing and landing a job is one you have to do by yourself. One of the hardest things is to maintain an upbeat outlook, and yet it is so necessary because no one is going to hire a miserable sad sack.
On the other hand, I had no stigma whatsoever attached to the fact that I had been laid off. Part of that might have been that the size of the layoff was such that anyone with any glancing familiarity with the place I was at would know that 2/3 of the company were laid off.
One thing that I would emphasize would be maintain your professional network in good times and in bad. I got a number of good leads that way.
> I had no stigma whatsoever attached to the fact that I had been laid off.
This point in the article was weird to me, that you should creatively avoid saying that you were laid off. Sure, some layoffs are just an excuse to get rid of people who the company believe are low performers, so if you were laid off from a prominent company where recruiters know why the layoff happened, this could be a problem for you when looking for a new job.
But if you were caught in the string of layoffs happening this year (or at the beginning of the pandemic), I can't see how there'd be stigma attached to that. And I'd worry that being evasive about why you're no longer at your previous company could be a red flag to recruiters; just doesn't seem worth it.
It is none's business about why you left (or are leaving) your previous job, unless perhaps it is due to some legal issue that would show up on a (criminal) background check. Interviewing for a new job is all about the future, and it's totally up to you to reveal only the facts about your past that paint you in a favorable light.
Whether or not saying you got laid off would hurt your chances is a separate question. My guess is most of the time it wont. But as a flip, would saying you got laid off improve your chances of getting the job? If the answer is no, then its not worth saying - focus instead on the things that for sure portray you positively.
The same goes for jobs with short tenures - if you stayed at some place for a few months and left just leave it off your resume. It doesn't do anything to sell you, so why waste time on it?
Just remember, an interview is a short period of time to sell the best parts of yourself that are most applicable to the job. It is not a 100% confession of all the good and bad things that happened to you.
Yes, when lots of companies are cutting back to their most essential employees, it helps provide a little cover.
But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential?
This is a very pessimistic way to view things that I don't fully believe, and of course any reasonable person knows that being part of a layoff is very rarely just the employee's fault. But to perhaps state the obvious, being laid off is never gonna look good, or even neutral. There will always be stigma.
Being able to reframe your layoff in as positive of a light as you can is important.
> But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential?
In the case of a startup, there's often not much you can do to be seen as valued if you're not a founding engineer.
I've been a part of 3 layoffs. 15%, 90%, and 75% reductions, all at small or medium-sized startups. At a startup, they're going to keep founding and early engineers first. There's a selection bias, but those engineers aren't probably "dead weight" if they were there since the early days. Plus, there's a cliqueness to startups that will favor them.
Yeah, and all of this is relevant, and the kind of stuff you would wanna talk about with a new potential employer. Maybe you did really amazing work with a killer team, but that team got cut as the founders tried to reduce scope.
But... it's still set against the default backdrop of "they kept some people, but not me", so it's important to be able to tell your story well.
But, y'know, regardless of the environment, what does it say about your
abilities that your employer didn't consider you essential?
I think it depends on the company. If you're laid off from from a small or medium sized startup, with more or less one product, then I can understand how being laid off can be seen as a reflection of your skills (or lack thereof) as an engineer. But if you were laid off from a larger company, all it means is that some director saw a team (or teams) which were working on more speculative projects, which could be axed as a way of saving money during a recession. It doesn't mean that you're an unskilled engineer. It just means you were unlucky enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time when the ax fell.
I have a bit to go before I’m a software engineer over fifty, but I have a lot of anxiety about it primarily from an ageism standpoint. I don’t really want to go into management because I love coding and solving problems, but I fear that one day I’ll will struggle to find work due to my age.
I worry about it too. What I have found is that it's important to keep your skills very, very current. It's OK to be reasonably skeptical about the latest hotness, but it's imperative to know about it and why it's the latest hotness. No one cares (OK very few people care) about the systems you built in perl in the 90's. They will care about your opinion Go vs. Rust vs. C++, even if you are not an expert in any of them. You needn't have used every no-SQL data store, but again you need to know about them.
On the other hand if you are a subject matter expert in a particular domain, then your twenty years of experience are indeed very useful, and while no one wants to replicate the risk reporting system you built in Motif/X in the 90's, they may well want build it in React.
Over 50 in 2022 is very different than over 50 in 2000.
I’m GenX and grew up with the internet but I know life before the internet. I know technology more than most and keep up with it. I play video games (finished elden ring earlier this year) and watch TikTok 2 hours a day. I’m not young but the gap between me and someone younger isn’t a vast canyon like it used to be.
My last job hunt a year ago I got over 5 job offers. I wouldn’t be too worried.
Well, the issue unfortunately is that we know that but a thirty y-o hiring manager doesn't. A few years back I saw folks commenting on YouTube about the "good old days" of 2013 and had good sensible chuckle.
I myself lead a software development team. I am 31 and the last two people I hired were almost 50 and they are very good devs.
In my opinion age alone isnt a reason not to hire someone. What is the "common reason" older people are not considered to be hired? I guess because people think they cant adapt or are stuck in some ways in theire thinking. If your future you can show that this is not the case, I guess you are fine :)
Only "REAL" age related reason is (and I have to admit that I myself didnt hire someone because of that) if the person wants to retire in the near future and you think you want to invest your time in someone who will, hopefully, stay longer.
It depends on what part of the industry we’re talking about. One aspect of this is startup culture and needing to “fit in.” Or in other words “culture fit.” You see it on HN all the time where people mention many of their friends are coworkers. Sometimes that means not hiring the person who has a life outside work, isn’t going through the same issues everyone does in their 20s, and is perceived to not fit in. In some cases, I think it is simply the threat of possibly having a life outside of work and not signing up to overwork yourself by default.
Another is pricing yourself out of the industry. And another is the mistaken idea that all an older dev knows is older out of date technology. The usual stuff.
I’ve found that firmware and regulated industries in general do not have as rampant of an ageism issue.
Some IC roles do fit more younger candidates than older. E.g. in a startup - often better they not have outside commitments like a family, or need for a healthy work-life balance. Sometimes "work smarter not harder" falls apart and they need to work like a maniac. On balance I've found older colleagues less willing to do that. That isn't meant as a criticism, just an observation about role-fit, those people usually didn't last long.
That's not the underlying belief in a startup. It's more like: we have not fully figured out market fit. We may need to build something very very quickly (I'm talking about hours/days, not weeks/months) and then maintain them for while.
That's why I say "work smarter not harder" can fail - that only works if you make assumptions about the future, in a startup that can only take you so far.
> Only "REAL" age related reason is (and I have to admit that I myself didnt hire someone because of that) if the person wants to retire in the near future and you think you want to invest your time in someone who will, hopefully, stay longer.
If you're in the US, you might want to ask your HR about whether that can be a factor in hiring criteria.
If HR says "Don't do that", then they might prefer not to hear that it was already done (so maybe don't volunteer the info, unless they ask), in which case it's a for-future-reference.
I think age gets thrown around a lot but it's never really appeared to me from my singular data point.
I think the larger (at least post screener perspective) is that you always need to stay relevant. If you're working for a company 10+ years doing roughly the same thing doing amazing work, that doesn't mean you're employable in the market at large. You need to feed the trends to at least know what the larger community is doing, and keep relevant skills in your resume (and actually know them) to show you aren't a dinosaur (not in age, but in competence in obsolete tech). I update my resume every couple years if I'm looking for work or not. Not helping, there are a bunch of dead end companies that are the only companies willing to employ the people at the level they do, so it can lead to bleak perspectives when you're forced out and try to work outside your comfort level. I've known more than a few exit software entirely as they were unable to find suitable alternatives.
Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I decided to spend Christmas break in CDMX[0] by myself in order to reflect not only on the past year, but just how far I've come since I got laid off. This is the result.
Thanks for making all those hours at the café (instead of at a museum or bar or whatever) worthwhile.
[0] I'll be here for a few more days if you'd like to meet up!
When I was laid off in 2010, I found another way in which honesty bit me. Or maybe it was a lesson in recognizing the limits of offers of help, because it wasn't my "transparency" which was the problem.
Of course I had my friends looking for opportunities and making referrals. One of them had a kind of clunky opportunity for me as an independent contractor for their company. It was a lengthy process to get it done, in part because they didn't really have their own contractor infrastructure so I organized an LLC, got my proper insurance, etc. Of course, I didn't tell me other friends about this opportunity because it wasn't a done deal yet, and I kind of knew the contracting thing was going to be short-lived anyway. Well, it turned out to fall through completely, which wasn't a huge surprise; but I found out that the hiring manager had told all my other friends to stop looking for jobs for me, because I was coming to work for him! So I was back to square one.
> Only in retrospect did I understand the connotations that post broadcast to potential employers.
So, you wanna share with us what the connotations were? Is it just that the recruiter read "oh, you're failing a lot, you must suck"? Or is there something else more interesting to this?
I'm disappointed that this post is somewhat vague on specifics. But on the one situation that is set up very specifically, we don't get the punchline.
Not OP, but I'll take a guess that it makes the OP look like a troublemaker. Someone who has the nerve/gall/gumption to be so open as to name/shame other companies may not pull any punches when it comes to naming 'company X' in the future after something bad goes down.
Posting "here's a list of companies that haven't got back to me" (which is possibly implicit in an open spreadsheet sort of post) is likely perceived as a troublemaker.
The connotations I had in mind (although I obviously cannot be sure what the recruiter thought):
- what mgkimsal said
- "This employee is applying to really big companies. I'm not sure they know what they are really looking for. This is a mission-driven company, and we want people who want to be here"
- "This person has applied to 30+ places and hasn't landed a job yet? Must not be that great after all"
- "Someone who posts this information publicly has low EQ, I wouldn't want to work with them"
Part of it is, indeed, talking about unspoken rules. But part of it is that the hiring managers and CEOs are humans like everyone else - some may have ego issues, or buy a little too much into their company's branding.
Exactly this. The first rule of fight club is don't talk about fight club.
What surprises me more: Many people don't think interviewing is a game. They think it is straightforward and "rules-based". I guess those same people also believe PR. :)
Well written thoughts! I've definitely shared many of your feelings more times than I would have thought at the start of my long career.
Corporate jobs disappeared due to the financial crisis one time and a hostile takeover another time (both of those I was personally happy about). And a couple startups were acquired sooner than expected. There can be upsides, yes, but it can still leave you with months of trying to figure out what to pursue next, and that can be a weight on your mind even when you're making the most of your time off. When you are committed to a full-time job, something you have to do every day, you may dread going to work sometimes or just wish you could hike up a mountain or something, but it helps frame your day and reduce the number of decisions you have to make, so when you don't have that there can be a significant cognitive load trying to decide how to spend your time in a way that others may not understand. "Oh, that's nice, you're consulting, how flexible, lucky you!"
Early in my career I learned about how to come out of the gate blazing fast since when I graduated from college a couple decades ago half of the tech jobs were gone, and I had to work hard for months after graduation just to find a specific kind of application development work I wanted at the time. I was fortunate to find that but many others were not and had to take whatever came their way. But it wasn't easy, and like you said, I found out early that lots of interviews on your calendar isn't necessarily promising, so over the years I've tried to find alternate routes to work by meeting with people inside the company first to find out what it's really like, and how much they want to fill a specific position, etc.
And more important than all the above, I recommend finding a listening ear to share your journey with, someone who will try to understand where you're at! I have some friends who have had the same job for a couple decades and even though they may not relate well, we can still try to share our different lives with each other and it's more helpful than you might think!
Given that you now know what it will be like if you get laid off again, have you changed anything about how you approach your non-work life? Things like non-work friends you hang out with, non-work activities that you do for fun, Etc. Sort of "if I'm laid off again, then I'll fill my days with interviewing and ..."
Glad you're back up and running and have processed the layoff!
thanks for the post Steven. I especially appreciate Hard Truth #5. Most folks end up not knowing exactly how you may want to be helped and having a clear and specific ask helps a lot.
#1 it's lonely? April 2020, 1 month into the pandemic.
I found the pandemic lonely. I saw less than 1 person a month for the first 14 months of the pandemic. And i find WFH incredibly lonely. I haven't recovered. I'm utterly alone most weeks. I see no one. Even if I go to work, no one is there. I moved cities a year ago and have only 1 friend and 2 acquaintances in the new city. 2 of those 3 are married and I see them maybe once a month, if I'm lucky. The 3rd I haven't seen since August. The pandemic as killed meetup.com. It used to be full of activities. I don't think there is 1/20th of the activities there used to be.
For what it's worth, I've been working from home for about 8 years now. The only way to make it work for me was deliberate social activities with my neighbors, people from church or local charity orgs (Rotary, etc).
I met them, I got their numbers and I started asking them to lunch at least once a week (sometimes more). That small, very determined activity just leads to more. You have to do it very consistently.
Hosting a poker night is very similar. It will start small and sometimes not happen, but you have to be relentlessly consistent to get it established.
Loneliness is bad in itself, but it can get worse if you are:
- Not going outside every day
- Not keeping yourself fit
- Eating junk food
In my region there is a lot of office only/mostly hybrid (3+ days in the office) jobs, probably for the reason that you mention. Of course when I ask why I need to be in the office people tell me about culture and stuff... But the true reason is probably more along the lines: loneliness, small baby crying at home, apartment not appropriate for remote work, annoying roommates/spouse/during divorce.
Maybe changing jobs right now is not the best idea - so I will not suggest it. I will only suggest to get real human contact, as being on-line and talking on forums/social media does not work (at least in my case).
If you have a chance you may try to find some meetup for startup entrepreneurs, even if you are not interested in startups. I find people there to be really hyped and full of positive energy. Usually there is also a motivational speaker there. YMMV but in my city there are some free and open meetings like this.
Isn't this the crux of the issue? If OP was getting real human contact, they wouldn’t feel lonely.
This pandemic has really thrown us for a loop. New habits have been formed that are hard to break.
One of the first times I dipped my toe in the social pool in early 2022 was at a tech meetup. A bunch of us who went got COVID. I recovered but was the sickest I’d been in about 20 years. It doesn’t take much to withdraw more.
Loneliness is a killer[0]. And we're doing ourselves no favours with the way increasingly we meet people through apps and not face to face.
I'd be lost without the friends I made in education settings. This might sound silly but any chance you could swap a meetup group with some sort of class? Art, writing especially something that involves discussion?
Hey, author here. I get it, trust me. This post meant to encapsulate my feelings during the one year I spent unemployed. During that entire time, I was alone. I had a falling out with my parents. I moved to a foreign country where I knew no one in order to stretch my savings. I totally get it.
If you need to chat with someone, I'm happy to lend an ear. Contact info is in my profile.
> I moved to a foreign country where I knew no one in order to stretch my savings
I have found NomadList (nomadlist.com) and NomadSphere (nomadsphere.io) invaluable for meeting up with people when abroad, although usually people who are there to work remotely.
Another option for meeting people is volunteering.
And almost any sport, appreciate you may not play any, but a group of the same people go to the same thing week in week out. You can even pick something where you can get lessons first then join a club.
Sometimes there are more social sports clubs that aren't really competitive. Here in the UK for example there are social badminton clubs and competitive badminton clubs. You will get a real mix of skill levels at the social clubs, and these might have regular meetups outside of the badminton. The one I'm part of do meals, theatre, outdoor events, etc. together. It depends on the people running it.
Meetup.com seems to be sort of back where I'm at (Chicago area). Some of the groups are now toast (including the one I used to admin), but several are back to regular events again, and there have been some new groups since.
I've tried to be a little careful still (still haven't gotten Covid as far as I know, I don't know if I'll be asymptomatic or end up in the hospital or something in between), and yet I've gone to several picnics, hikes, board game nights, outdoor hangouts, karaoke, movie nights, trivia, dinners, etc. via Meetup.com this past year.
Also supplemented that with Facebook events and the local forest preserve and local library's posted events.
I still have a core friend group (who I met thanks to Meetup.com many years ago), but several of my other friends have drifted off since the pandemic started (married and started having children), so I started doing meetup more again to compensate.
My circle of friends shrunk some during the pandemic and after the vaccines came out I put a lot of effort into building it up (larger than before). Some data in case helpful:
Friends made over 1 year, 3 months:
Meetup - 1 friend. Had a poor time-to-friend ratio for what I put in, but that's an n=1 and I mostly frequented just one meetup, although I tried like 3. Negative experience overall (for me, ymmv). Friend is great.
Local discord group around a hobby of interest - 2 friends. Many friendly acquaintances. Had to find the right group as a few I tried didn't feel like as-good fits. Positive experience, the friend making process was enjoyable and the friends are great.
Meeting at an intro class for another hobby (a semi social one - need at least one partner) - 2 friends. We were all new at the intro class and it was hard to find people, so we swapped numbers. Got to know each other through the hobby then became friends. Probably would be difficult to replicate intentionally.
Friends of Friends - 1 large group. 5 that I'd call friends and several more that I'd call group-friends or friendly acquaintances.
Friends of Friends are exponential. There's an excellent time to friend ratio, and the people you meet come pre-vetted. But note that some friends may be hesitant to make inter-friend connections even after they know you well, depending on how closed-off their other groups are. It's, of course, also not generally accessible until you have enough of a circle that like/trust you enough that you're getting invites to their other group things.
We may revert the hard truths to get soft precautions:
- Always have savings that will cover at least 6 months of expenses, now probably a year (if indeed it takes so much time to find a new job).
- Socialize outside work, ideally have a network of people that work at other companies that you are in touch with. Sports, charities, churches etc. If this is hard, ask yourself if you are overworking yourselves/spend too much time at work.
- Be careful what you are posting on social networks. Employers are more and more concerned about the image that you have on the internet. I propose to have 2 profiles, the first a professional one with portfolio of projects, blog, articles and what's not and the second for your private views (nobody should track that profile to your person using publicly available information).
Also I wonder what the author is doing professionally. I don't see any hard tech articles on his blog. Maybe he is into niche tech or doing some no longer hyped stuff like data science? That would explain why it took the author so long to find a new job. Maybe if this is the case the author should reflect on his skills and maybe change his niche to something more marketable?
> I propose to have 2 profiles, [...] the second for your private views
Or just don't post about your views on anything (controversial or otherwise) on social media. Just opt out. There's no inherent reason why you need to post about anything on social media. If you must, perhaps because you use it to keep in touch with family and friends, just post about things that are going on in your life. There's no reason you need to use social media to air your grievances about society.
The issue I take with this is that employment becomes a form of restriction of free speech. Unfortunately, the reality is most of us can't afford to truly speak our minds because we need a job to put food on the table and a roof over our heads. Still, even with that in mind, I think the best compromise is to provide strong support of your opinions and not just shout whatever political slogan happens to be in vogue.
Honestly if you're going to(hypothetically) rant over the economic system from an extremist viewpoint(like many people on the internet do) i won't be surprised nor blame the employer for not giving you a job in that exact economy you just spent 2k words ranting about; and you shouldn't neither, if you have any integrity that is. Free speech doesn't mean denying any responsibility over what you say, so if an employer refuses to give you the job over some rational reason regarding what you wrote(e.g. hypocrisy in the example before) i really don't think there is anything wrong with it.
Obviously i'm not saying there are no employers discriminating candidates for a political view which may have nothing to do with the job itself, or that they aren't a problem, but i don't think the number of employers that are actually problematic are enough to say that they restrict your freedom of speech. Just find another, and if you can't, well then it's probably on you more so than the employer.
> I propose to have 2 profiles, the first a professional one with portfolio of projects, blog, articles and what's not and the second for your private views (nobody should track that profile to your person using publicly available information).
As someone involved with online privacy&security for a long time... I think almost no one on HN (including myself) can keep multiple online personae unlinked by commercial data brokers for as long as the threat model would seem to require.
If you have alt accounts, consider them low-security that eventually will be revealed, and figured into many employers' data science ranking&filtering, and their AI-model-summarized profiles they can pull up on you. Ideally, it won't be revealed before there's a more enlightened US culture of social tolerance, and more comprehensive and serious US data protection laws, but you can't bet on that.
You might also want to simplify by minimizing use of alts, and instead trying to self-moderate how you put yourself out there. For example, if you voted for a political candidate who rubs a lot of people the wrong way, either own it, or don't rant about it with alts in online public forums. For another example, dating -- without data brokers spying on some of your most intimate private interactions -- is nigh-impossible, but with an awareness of this, you can still try to save some things for offline pillow talk only.
When I created an HN account, I knew I'm more liberal/progressive than a lot of tech people, and that there's some currently popular practices in the field that I'm inevitably going to be outspokenly critical of, and that's going to alienate some techbros and employers. Having my name on the account is partly a reminder to me to try to only say things that I'd be willing to stand behind. (I'm certainly not perfect, but it's an attempt, and always learning from it.)
The number one thing I've learned from being laid off was never to trust your employer. Trust people, if they've shown to be trustworthy, but never, ever trust a company.
A company is not family, they're not your friend, and the perceived loyalty you think you've "earned" doesn't mean a thing if layoffs are coming.
Treat your employment as a business arrangement. You get a paycheck in exchange for labor. Nothing less, nothing more.
Ahh yes. I think most people end up going through this bitter disillusionment at some point in their careers.
Humans are tribal by nature and companies are setup like a big tribe. We even call the guy (and it’s mostly a guy) at the top the chief! Feelings of “family” and “loyalty” are built into humans operating in tribes, and a real tribe looks out for its members.
So when the sudden wholesale internally orchestrated slaughter of a chunk of the tribe happens (metaphorically), it comes as quite a shock (the first time). Both for the people that go and the people that stay. The lesson is that a company is not a tribe.
That said, a company is also a collection of people and the relationships you develop as you work are just as meaningful as the ones you develop in other aspects of life. Loyalty to people is a perfectly good and reasonable thing.
So my take is, you should focus on fostering good relationships with your coworkers and hold loosely to the concept of the “company”. The company may screw you over, but good people will always try to do what is right.
the weird part for me is why I keep falling into that trap again and again. I like the work, I like the employer and I do good work and so I think that there is some kind of safety in that. I guess maybe it's a natural human impulse to think that you're somehow settling into a tribe. But the reality is that you're not in a tribe, you don't have safety and the business has a very calculated view of your value: You already got paid for your time, years mean nothing. There is no sense of "past achievements" (which could be construed as loyalty). There is only: Can you keep working right now for price X, yes or no? If no you go.
I keep forgetting that everytime I settle into a job. Perhaps because I do too much compared to others, that somebody must surely see my massive value. But eh, your extra 20-50% is nothing in the grand scheme of a company, they won't mind paying 1.5 people to replace you. They just take it and say "thx buddy". I'm always far happier in the beginning of a job than at the end, I am starting to think that it's because I don't have any delusions that I have safety or loyalty from the people around me.
I second this. Institutions come and go but the people and connections you make throughout your working life is what counts and transcend your workplace. This is especially true for technical people, if you are middle management/executive your skills are far less transferable.
If feels very very very wrong to compare a search during April 2020 and now.
Why? The year after April 2020 was a booming job market for SWEs. Hiring managers were competing for talent, 2021 was a boom year of low interest rates, euphoria in private and public markets.
This blog post _should not_ be considered a response to the WSJ article.
And sorry, grinding away at leetcode should only take about 2 months tops if you don’t have to worry having to balance leetcode and your job, and not a tall ask for a 250k+ job in tech. if you don’t need that high a salary, smaller companies generally are more lax about leetcode
grinding leetcode is some dumbshit waste of time that I'm not going to bother with -- I've got code to put in production and this simply is never a good use of my time. When you have an obnoxious hiring process that will take multiple hours for your special company, why would I even waste my time? I can click a few more buttons and have offers elsewhere anyways...
Author also mentions that he didn't have any savings at the time he got laid off. So maybe not the normal person that's worked at Apple for 10 years and cashing out RSUs but someone who did short stints at each.
> The year after April 2020 was a booming job market for SWEs.
Did we know that at the time, though? From what I remember, it was all doom and gloom: public markets were trending downward, people were talking about recession and corporate belt-tightening, and the assumption was that we'd see a lot of layoffs, and the labor market would get tight.
True, that's not what happened (at least in the case of knowledge workers) -- in most cases it was the opposite -- but I don't think we had that foresight back in April 2020.
Anecdotal but over the past 20 years I've held about eight different positions in various companies as a software engineer, and I've never even so much as glanced at leetcode. I've been able to live comfortably and put plenty away for the future with 150 to 200K salary.
I feel like companies that emphasize interviews prioritizing rote memorization aren't going to be a good culture fit for me anyway.
Stepping back for a moment from the content, I think it is worth noting what an exceptionally well-written essay this is. Being able to write well is a super power for engineers. It is a reflection of the lucidity and clarity of one's mind, and the ability to understand the needs of the reader. Writing well is an exceptionally useful and powerful skill that can be improved with consistent practice. I would be tempted to add that as hard truth #9!
He is a good writer and clearly a thoughtful individual, which further reinforces truth #6 (honesty can hurt you). I subconsciously approached the article with a bit of negative bias around the fact he had been laid off. His writing has more clarity than many successful CEOs though so who knows.
As someone who also writes and thinks a lot, truth #6 applies particularly to us. People REALLY don't want to hear hard truths from people who think about what they are saying. If you are saying something that is less thought out, honesty can be a good policy - after all, they have probably heard whatever you are saying before.
I will say - most people don’t like hearing that. And you’ll certainly not be a hit at parties if that’s your style.
There is a high correlation between specific types of high performer and people who do like (and benefit) from hearing that type of truth though. At least unless it hits too close to home.
> I subconsciously approached the article with a bit of negative bias around the fact he had been laid off. His writing has more clarity than many successful CEOs though so who knows.
That’s because most people get laid off because of no fault of their own. There’s a false idea that people that are laid off are low performers, but the truth of the matter is that more often than not it, it’s entire teams.
Yes, and if you're in the game thru a few downturns, you will be laid off during them a few times in an otherwise successful career. Severance package FTW.
It took me many years to figure out how to write. Finally, I figured out how to apply that math side of my brain to writing: I treat sentences like math exercises; that is to say I learned how to show my work.
Ironically, I feel that this also helps me identify AI writing since it never shows its work; it has a tendency to mix together multiple "answers" in a swirling morass of leadership-speak (a mixture of management-adjective-soup and the avoidance of direct points). That kind of speech pattern coming from anybody that's not a C level executive stands out. Even executives tend to drop the leadership style speech patterns on forums.
> I treat sentences like math exercises; that is to say I learned how to show my work.
Comports with the advice from _The Sense of Structure_ by George Gopen. You start every sentence with context that links back to the sentence before, and end it with the new information you want it to emphasize. Like a string of steps in a geometry proof.
SAT-type verbal stuff is very different from being able to write well. It's much closer to math with a different alphabet--I've met more than one math major who did better on the verbal sections of standardized tests.
The author mentions the "diamond-in-the-rough" strategy used by organizations, which in my experience can be particularly disrespectful of the interviewee's time. One thing I try to figure out how before applying to a job is how many applicants the organization is considering for the position. If they're interviewing a ton of people for one position, it's probably a waste of my time to apply. This is particularly true for organizations that use marathon interview sessions (doing a series of interviews over an entire day), and/or organizations that expect the interviewee to give a talk of interest to the organization (common in research positions). Customizing an old talk I have takes several hours. I know that I could use an old talk without modification, but I feel that I'd be at a significant disadvantage to do so.
Good thoughts, but (not as a criticism of the author), some of the pain points are at least partially self-inflicted:
To minimize post-layoff loneliness (and not only for that!) make sure you have a life outside of work: the people you like to spend some time with and things you like to do. To minimize money-driven stress of the layoff, build up a cash cushion that can last at least 6 months; with unemployment, vacation time and any severance it can probably be stretched for a year.
And #7, "think whether you want to work for that company after getting an offer" seems off the mark. Sure, reject an offer that is not the best and stretch time on a safety offer until you get a better one. But do not go through the motions of getting an offer with a company you have no interest to work for. If you do not want to work for a company at all, do not apply there. My 2c.
There’s some truth to what you’re saying, but it can be taken too far.
If you have the posture of “I’ll take anything I can get” I think that actually puts you at a disadvantage in an interviewing situation.
In my experience employers can tell who is actually trying to evaluate fit themselves, and who is just saying what they think needs to be said.
I find it’s easier for both parties to make an offer, if they know the counterparty has done their due diligence.
For me when accepting an offer I’m also doing the same, evaluating whether I think the company has actually vetted me properly and has reason to think I will be a good fit.
There is so much mystery in the hiring process, I really need the other party to be doing their half of the work. And that means saying no to opportunities that don’t feel right.
That doesn’t mean I walk away from anything that’s not perfect. It just means I am looking out for reasons to say no, in addition to the reasons to say yes. I think interviewers pick up on that and it helps me get offers.
The problem with going through to the offer stage with companies you do not want to work for is that this is likelier to limit your options rather than increase them.
This is not a very strong prior, but re-applying after rejecting an offer can indicate that you are using the company as a fallback and may bolt as soon as you get a chance.
Being unemployed, I can't support this. Keeping an offer on hold blocks the company from making the offer to someone else who actively needs it. Maybe you meant something else, like a handshake agreement with a manager friend who works there that they'll try to make room for you if you ever want to join.
Have one or more side projects going all the time. If you get laid off, immediately start doing a startup, open-source project, or volunteering full time. A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume.
A year of launching an unsuccessful venture? Running coding classes for the underserved? Focusing full-time on contributing to pytorch? That's a lot better, both at the time and in retrospect.
Side projects are also a good way to get hired. You meet people.
You also learn stuff, and stuff of the type you can't learn in a job.
You can also do the equivalent of an acquihire. If you want to work for the world's #1 drubble maker, and you spend 6 months developing a drubble startup, guess who'll come out the most knowledgeable and passionate about drubbles at the interview? And perhaps even bring in some helpful IP?
Your back story is "I tried to go it alone; I think I can do a lot more good with the backing of a company."
This is terrible, possibly toxic advice. Software devs are people too. They burn out, take time off to travel, reflect, take care of family, or just down on their luck being unemployed.
The only advice I'd consider paramount is to take stock of themselves financially and mentally, to assure themselves that they can take on the chaos and uncertainty that follows.
Honestly, if someone showed up with a gap in their resume and claimed that they were doing start-up, open source, etc. for an interview, I'd dig deep into that hard. The open source contribution/project would have to have a sufficiently high bar for it to be even considered. Else, I'd just assume they were being less than honest. I'd rather someone tell me they spent a year working on themselves, playing video games, hiking, etc.
> Honestly, if someone showed up with a gap in their resume and claimed that they were doing start-up, open source, etc. for an interview, I'd dig deep into that hard.
This is just as, if not more toxic than the advice that you're opposed to. I've had similar experiences with interviewers for non-technical questions, and it comes off as aggressive, antagonistic and traumatizing; especially in your example where they left it off their resume as a gap. The interviewee's perspective might have been to say that they've been spending some of their spare time keeping their skills sharp and now you're hammering them to see if a project left off their resume qualifies for some "high bar," while all they see is a negative and dismissive attitude.
Personally, I would much rather be programming my own projects or doing leetcode than play video games, but I wouldn't judge someone negatively if they told me they played games on their own time.
If you're not passionate about coding, that advice isn't for you. There is a class of people for whom coding is 'work', as in the actual act of coding is work and they would prefer to be doing anything else, but they have bills to pay.
There is another class of developers who like to code so much, that 'work' is merely a project that they don't have directional control over, but the act of coding is a relaxing activity. I know because I'm one of them. I am pretty relaxed at work when I can just sit down and code, then I go home and if I get some free time to work on my own code, I find it relaxing too. It's not that I don't enjoy work and have to supplement with a personal project, I just like the feeling of having absolute control over the project and trying to write the best code possible, because making money or providing some shareholder value is not the goal.
For people like me, I think this is a great advice. I am always thinking of side-projects that can become startups anyway, and I'm tinkering every day to the extent that time allows. I've been doing that for 20+ years. If I ever got laid off, my only hope is that at that point I will have a side-project that can magically be launched to make enough money to keep paying the bills.
>There is another class of developers who like to code so much, that 'work' is merely a project that they don't have directional control over, but the act of coding is a relaxing activity.
I'm in the middle. Imagine you like playing football. You do it for fun. But, if you do it too much, you'll be exhausted and maybe strain a muscle or something. I code for fun, but it still wears me out; it's still a kind of "work" psychologically distinct from, and more taxing than, watching a show.
The only way I would describe it as "relaxing" is if I put little-to-no thought into it, but that's how you end up with very buggy code.
>There is a class of people for whom coding is 'work', as in the actual act of coding is work and they would prefer to be doing anything else, but they have bills to pay.
I always see this set of people highly vocal and against people who actually like to code. It is like they have a tough time accepting that a lot of technical people love to build things.
There are two sides to every coin. Possibly toxic advice for some, but why should anyone give up platforms or avenues that make them standout from the crowd? OP's suggestion is a perfectly valid piece of advice for anyone who has the energy, time, resources, ability, will, and integrity to keep chopping at a meaningful side project. It is not easy, sure. But I don't think we can say it is toxic, either.
> The open source contribution/project would have to have a sufficiently high bar for it to be even considered.
We'd do well to not write this advice off by subjecting it to the most extreme possible treatment?
With three kids, my current side project is my day job, at least if measuring by workload. Taking on more work, voluntarily or not, will be at a significant personal cost for me.
I don’t get the constant peddling of hussle porn in SWE circles.
Terrible advice. One year of lazing around and playing videogames is a good way to lose any self-discipline you would been building up to this point. There is nothing toxic in working to improve yourself and/or building projects you are passionate about - quite the contrary. The feeling of accomplishment can do wonders to one's mental health.
Speaking of toxicity, this idea that the primary means of valuing ourselves and being "healthy" should be through our job or independent job-related work... ugh, super toxic.
I don't think the grandparent was suggesting they literally sit around for a year and do nothing buy play video games. But, hell, taking time off between jobs is a great idea, and if video games are your thing, spending a chunk of that time off playing sounds like it could be great for your mental health. But, just like anything else, moderation!
> Honestly, if someone showed up with a gap in their resume and claimed that they were doing start-up, open source, etc. for an interview, I'd dig deep into that hard
Hah, and you called gp's advice toxic! Taking stock if your financial well-being after being laid off is too late. I fear your advice (take time off) may be toxic - depending on circumstances. My advice is this: as a general rule, avoid interviewing while desperate. Getting an offer generally takes longer than one might think, so interview early and often, before you get near the end of your mental/financial runway.
I think we're abusing the word "toxic" here. Sure, for someone who hasn't planned out their finances and built a cushion, advising them to take some time off would be... well, bad advice. But "toxic"? That's a bit hyperbolic.
> The open source contribution/project would have to have a sufficiently high bar for it to be even considered. Else, I'd just assume they were being less than honest. I'd rather someone tell me they spent a year working on themselves, playing video games, hiking, etc.
You think working on a passion project and trying out a startup is toxic and then you come out with this pessimistic bucket crab viewpoint? You’d be doing people a favour not hiring them, I’d feel bad for anyone working for you.
The comment you're replying to said the advice was toxic, not the activity itself. That is, making people feel guilty for not doing "enough" (contributing to side projects, open source, etc) is the arguably toxic thing.
I don't know if I agree, but let's not twist the words of the comment.
Edit/Addendum : Uff this blew up. If I came on too strong, that wasn’t my intention and I’m sorry.
I was primarily replying to this particular line from OP :
> If you get laid off, immediately start doing a startup, open-source project, or volunteering full time.
The ‘immediately’ didn’t really jive with me. A job loss can be very traumatic to an individual, and I still believe in taking time to recuperate from it rather than diving head long into yet another thing.
I’ve interviewed quite a lot for my employers, big and small, including two of FAANMG companies for about 7 years now. From my perspective, I’m interviewing a candidate to see if they’re a competent engineer and a pleasant team member.
I have absolutely no issues with passion projects / open-source and startups, just not if it’s aim is to be a resume filler.
>Focusing full-time on contributing to pytorch?
Yes! That is amazing and I already know that they’re a far more adept engineer than I am. But, if we were to dive in and I find out it was mostly fixing typos and nits in the codebase to show GitHub greens, then someone else who did something else entirely during their time off would come off better.
As someone who's been in that position at least twice (been fired or laid off and haven't been able to find _anything_ for over a year), I wouldn't go so far as to say it's wholly terrible or toxic, but at least partially so, or a little naive in some way. I'd say you should take at least a few months of personal time if you can afford it, and it's worth having something to chip away on eventually, but not necessarily to have something on your resume. Doing this full-time is borderline stupid advice, it will very likely not be worth trading your otherwise personal time for, unless you're literally charging for consulting services or something. Even still, if you're aiming for employment, just take your time.
Looking back on the times I've had to deal with this, and looking forward to the times I almost certainly will again, I'd do nothing different than what you've recommended or that I've done, with the exception of haplessly paying rent hoping for that next absurdly long and thoughtlessly designed interview process to work out.
> Honestly, if someone showed up with a gap in their resume and claimed that they were doing start-up, open source, etc. for an interview, I'd dig deep into that hard.
As a counterpoint, I probably wouldn't dig into this too much. But even if I did, would I find it strange that someone got laid off and then used their time to build up a company that didn't work out? Probably not. And if I realized that it was a half-assed effort... so what? Why is that worse than time spent playing video games? Sure, if you told me you were working on building a company and you didn't have any progress, I might feel that you were dishonest. But if you've got at least something to show for it (a basic product, even with zero sales), I think it's fair game.
[Continuing working] is the single biggest thing someone can do to avoid depression after a layoff. The best idea is a paying job because it fills both requirements.
It also keeps you ready to interview and ready to start immediately. When you're on the couch it's always easy to wait till tomorrow.
> I'd rather someone tell me they spent a year working on themselves, playing video games, hiking, etc.
If they were independently wealthy that might be okay but for most people this is self-destructive behavior.
This is a live-to-work attitude. Have some other hobbies and goals, and a year of unemployment will be neither lonely nor depressing. Personally I've gone farther in the work-to-live direction, with an easygoing, "boring" (still fulfilling enough to see some javascript doodad come to life, but not world changing) WFH job I perform well in that supports my homesteading and other hobbies.
Or its "if you enjoy what you do you will never work" attidude
I have met soo many sysadmins and devs that absolutely hate computers, hate programming, hate everything about IT. They were in some career fair at some point in high school and simply picked that because it had high pay with out the 6 or 8 years being a Doctor or lawyer took, and it seemed easier than Electrical Engineering or something.
Me, I have always loved programming and computers. They are both my work and my hobby
Two other factors to consider: 1) people grow and change and 2) working a job is very different than doing "the same" activity as a hobby.
I enjoy gardening and cooking as hobbies, but I don't want to work a job as a landscaper or line chef. After 20+ years of coding, I absolutely hate it despite having started out loving it, but I recognize that my cushy job is less hours for more pay than I could get doing anything else.
> working a job is very different than doing "the same" activity as a hobby.
This is very true. I've been fortunate enough to be able to take a break from working. For a while after quitting my 9-5, I didn't want to touch code at all (hooray burnout). But after a while I started working on my own projects, and have gotten involved in open source again. I'm not doing 40 hours of OSS work per week, but it's much more than I'd be able to do with a full time job.
It's very different to get to work on whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want. "Working" like this feels completely different from working for an employer, even an employer that gives a large amount of autonomy.
> I have met soo many sysadmins and devs that absolutely hate computers, hate programming, hate everything about IT
> Me, I have always loved programming and computers. They are both my work and my hobby
I think you're being too harsh, and clearly, you've never experienced burnout, which will make you loathe programming as work and as a hobby. Unless you are self employed, it is possible to hate your programming job while enjoying coding at home, without being in it for the money.
"If you enjoy what you do you will never work" is such bs, and leads to exploitation (see AAA games' low pay and crunching, or underpaid airline pilots)
I like problems, but mostly the technical ones. Starting programming young, loved computers and networking. Became a sysadmin.
Turns out that at work, the problems are often different to what I want to be solving. Approvals and process can be a real downer. Some problems are people problems and not technical problems at all. Waiting on somebody else to complete their part while you wait sucks. These are the things that burn me out.
At home, I am the approval process. Maintenance is whenever I think is reasonable. Don't like a service/app, throw it away. Found a new project, tinker away. Something is down, I'll get around to it.
I guess that depends on how much you enjoy your side projects.
Over the Christmas holidays, I rooted the vacuum robot, built a workstation from parts, worked on a new compression algorithm, and enhanced my papwrcraft design software... Because that's what I enjoy doing in my free time.
> If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve.
I think this happens to a lot of people. Especially for people who really enjoy the work they do, rather than see it as a necessary evil to put a roof over their head.
This late in my career, I've found 5 of my 7 SIEMs are gone, and the last one is on life support. The one I'm managing now will not be around by the time I retire.
You start to see the patterns and futility and cycles and think 'maybe my career is not making things better, it's keeping the mortgage paid?'
That and while I'm I can get rehired past 50...do I really want to do that dance again?
Same here, past 50 and while my job doesn’t fulfill me, I can do it with little effort and it pays the bills. I’m too tired and lazy to try something new, rather look for fulfillment in my spare time. Actually, all my previous experiences say that every job sucks, no matter how promising it looked like at the start.
I see other comments aggressively criticizing this suggestion (& I'm happy to see it) but I think staying busy with something fulfilling outside of your job is generally good advice. It doesn't need to be resume filler. The constant grindset-mindset is toxic, but staying engaged/fulfilled with something can be tremendously beneficial for your mental health & happiness during a period of setbacks & struggle.
"A year of unemployment? Lonely, depressing, and not good on a resume."
A year of unemployment seems significantly less depressing than this statement. What if you were to travel (or hike/explore your local area), focus on quality time with your family, friends, or dog? This to me seems way less depressing than grinding on some meaningless side-project, and as a hiring manager at a FAANG I would absolutely look at a year on someone's CV spent on these activities as a positive rather than a negative.
I've had bouts of unemployment lasting a year and a half. It's really hard to focus on side projects when you are worried about being able to pay the rent and health insurance and your pittance of unemployment insurance has run out.
My advice to anyone in the tech field is to try to have a lot of reserves, because tech is cyclical, and layoffs are inevitable, like every two to five years.
I've taken time off between jobs without taking on any meaningful projects, and I generally haven't found it to be an issue. When I tell recruiters I just wanted time off to relax, they're sometimes skeptical, but hiring managers more often than not either respond with some variety of "Oh yeah, I did that too and it was amazing" or "Oh man that sounds so great, I'm jealous."
I do apply almost entirely to smaller startups, so that may skew the response vs. what you'd get in the more process-oriented recruiting flows of a larger company. Also it probably helps that my resume has a couple of jobs where I was a very early employee at startups that went on to be extremely successful.
I also really like to just be left alone and read books, so it's something I enjoy - I recognize that many folks need the structure of work, and that's fair.
It's important to quantify how long your time off was for this anecdote to be meaningful. No good employer will bat an eye if you worked at a place for five years then spent three months on a tropical beach. A year spent job searching with no luck like the OP is a different situation altogether.
I actually don't think that's as much of a problem as you'd think - I did nine months off after 2.5 years. I just wouldn't say you've been searching and not getting jobs - much better to say that you've interviewed at a few places, but you're very focused on finding a company whose mission and team you're excited about (particularly if that's true). If they accept that as true, then you're creating a positive sort of scarcity of yourself, as opposed to framing it as jobs being scarce and you being desperate for one.
hiring managers more often than not either respond with some variety of "Oh yeah, I did that too and it was amazing" or "Oh man that sounds so great, I'm jealous."
This only works if you get to even talk to a hiring manager.
Most applications are filtered by automatic systems. Many of those will penalize or discard your application for gaps.
The same AI bots we built when we were employed are now being used against us.
This is a statistically horrible idea. The chance that your startup is going to replace even the compensation of entry level grad in any large city in the US doing enterprise development is almost 0.
The “story” that has worked for me is that “no I’m not going to reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard while juggling bowling balls riding a unicycle on a tightrope. What we can do is talk like adults and we can discuss your real world business problems and see if I can bring my skills and experience to the table to help you solve those problems in exchange for money”
I’m not going to spend 40 hours a week working and more time on the side working on a side project.
Just wondering, what is your TC? My understanding is that story works at Tier 3 companies that lack a structured interview process and are desperate for candidates (e.g. startups).
Seeing that I work at the alphabetically sorted first “A” in FAANG, I don’t think it could be considered a “tier 3” company.
When a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position, I wasn’t interested in either relocating, working as a software developer at any large company or doing the prerequisite DS&A monkey dance.
We kept talking and she suggested that I apply for a fully remote role consulting (yes it’s a full time position) in AWS Professional Services.
I specialize in “application modernization” which is a fancy term for cloud enterprise application development + “Devops” + the standard type of work architects do at other companies.
But as far as the startup I worked for being “desperate”. I got hired at my previous company because of an informal lunch with the then new CTO who needed someone to lead the effort to make the company more “cloud native” and help them pivot toward a micro service architecture because they wanted to sell the services as backend to large health care companies.
Hint: I did that well enough to go from never opening the AWS console in mid 2018 to working at AWS two years later.
My interview was all behavioral where I talked through some of my previous company changing successes at a startup and a company where I led the integration effort when they were on an acquisition spree.
My “TC” is fine. It would be better if my unvested AMZN RSUs didn’t drop by half since I got hired.
(Yes I knew the gatekeeping was going to start when i wrote the first post above)
You mean not being “offered” a position I didn’t want? I have never had any desire to be a software developer at a large company. I like being able to:
- be on pre-sales calls with customers
- writing the proposals/statements of work
- deal with the decision makers from the customers side
- architect the entire solution from the development side and the infrastructure/“dev ops side”
- do the actual work
- lead the user acceptance testing
- move on to another project
You seem to be under the mistaken impression that I care about titles? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. My “TC” allows me to do that very well.
I a not an “SA”. I do hands on billable software development that goes in production at the client site. In the past two years I’ve done hands on keyboard coding in Python, C#, JavaScript, and Go.
BTW, by the time I graduated from college in 1996, I had been a hobbyist programmer in 4 different assembly languages. I’ve maintained proprietary compiler tool chains for Windows CE devices and spent half my career bit twiddling in C and C++ with a little inline assembly.
Just for context, people in scarface’s type of role can “out-TC” many platform/product engineers of the equivalent level, depending on how rewards are structured.
The downside that I’ve noticed is that field roles tend to be cut first in response to market weather/customer focus. But a skilled engineer doing field work is a valued commodity in general.
If I worked for an outside consulting company that would be true - with the inherent risks you stated.
Working at AWS in ProServe, our compensation structure is the same as SDEs - 4 year initial offer, large prorated signing bonus, 5/15/40/40 RSU vesting schedule. It’s different for sales.
The bright side is that there is always work. Worse case, I can be “hired” by another internal team that needs someone to implement a solution to show off a new service.
I think you’re misrepresenting your story in your original comment. If you want to be an SDE at a Tier 1, you have to leetcode. There is no persuading the interviewer to pass you without testing your leetcode.
If you are comfortable taking a non-SDE role, then there are opportunities at tech companies that don’t require programming skills or leetcode.
I’m happy you have found an alternative career path, but you’re comparing apples and oranges.
There are 2.7 million developers in the US. Most don’t work at a tier 1 tech company.
My original story said nothing about where I work. I was originally referring to my process to get a software development job from 1996-2018.
But it’s not an accident I make “FAANG money” without doing “leetCode”. While I fell into a position at AWS, high level consultants make more with the same skillset than your typical BigTech SDE once they build a base. It’s higher risk and more hustle though.
I only brought up where I work now when someone brought up the r/cscareerquestions type reply of “TC”.
I am very sincere about my lack of desire to ever be a software engineer for a large company. I would give up my current compensation and jump back over to the enterprise dev/architect side of compensation before I ever did that.
Again, I already had the big house in the burbs, retirement savings, etc before AWS ever reached out to me.
If I leave my current job at the time of my choosing, it will probably be a compensation cut and probably for some unknown company.
I know for a fact that I could call up a few former managers who now work at different companies and they would give me a job faster than I could say “I am looking for…”
I don't care that you have software engineering experience, you are answering to a thread talking about leetcode interviews by saying you didn't have to leetcode because you took a non-software engineering job. Good for you, but nobody cares.
2008: when the director of software was looking for someone with a weird combination of VB6, C#, and low level C and C++
2014: when the new director of software engineering was looking for someone to be on a “tiger team” to go after a new vertical
2016: when the new director of IT was looking for someone who could lead the effort to move from PowerBuilder to C# and JS and to lead the integration efforts as they were acquiring companies
2018: when the new CTO was looking for a developer to lead the effort to make their development and CI/CD processes cloud native
2020: current job.
From 2008-2020 it was mostly developing in C# and JavaScript with a little C++ early on.
In 2018 I started getting into Python.
It’s amazing what you kind of crap you can avoid when you have 12 years of professional experience (in 2008) and a good network.
Yes my career before 2008 was unremarkable and there is a pattern that I gravitated toward positions where I was one of the first technical hires by a new manager.
Each of the jobs I mentioned between 2008-2018 were a recruiter reaching out to me that I knew from network where the director/CxO was looking for someone to help them with some type of strategic initiative. All of them were more interested in my ability to technically lead strategic initiatives than whether I could reverse a binary tree on the whiteboard.
When you can talk to a technical director about how you optimized 65C02 code as a hobby in the 80s and how you wrote inline x86 assembly to speed up a batch processing system, they don’t wonder can you maintain a compiler for Windows CE devices.
You seem to be implying "software engineers" require much more than a business degree, in which case I believe you to be a young person (< 30) and I forgive your naivety and the trolliness of your comment.
SWE is not a profession that requires deep education in math and science, like a physicist or neurologist. Having anything beyond a bachelor's in CS is not worthwhile outside of maybe ML..maybe.
A person with business degree who grinds toy problems on LC will almost always do better on FAANG coding interviews than a CS new grad with no grinding full stop.
The degree is just a stamp for junior engineers to get their foot in the door, which is no longer needed once you have a stamp from a reputable tech company.
Yes, SWE's require Computer Science, if you don't think so you've never done any real SWE work. Business majors do not teach you the problem solving ability required for even basic SWE work.
CS fundamentals can be readily learned without obtaining a degree. If you don't think so, then you've never met a self-taught programmer and are probably (no offense) someone with limited professional experience.
I’ve worked at small startups and dev shops with low hiring hiring bars and I find way more “princesses” than I have working at Tier 2 companies with leetcode interviews.
“Princess” - people that don’t take feedback, are extremely opinionated about their work, and act irrationally in regards to career or business decisions.
So do you consider a “low hiring bar” the director talking about strategy and finding out from the candidates past history that he can probably solve their real world issues?
If he needs to be at two potential customers sites (large health care companies) does he need someone who can “grind leetcode” or does he need someone that can talk to the CxO, the infrastructure team, the development team, etc without embarrassing himself?
But given a choice in 2020 of working at any large company as a software developer where I would have had to relocate and staying at smaller companies, I would have definitely chosen smaller companies.
By 2020, I already had the big overvalued house in the burbs, decent retirement savings, a good work life balance, etc.
I fell into a role at BigTech almost by accident doing the type of work I enjoy - seeing a company’s problem, solving the problem, training, and putting myself out of job and moving on.
Heck, my expenses are lower now than they were in 2020. Within the past year, I’ve sold my house, we sold our cars, and now we have a cheaper investment property/winter home where we stay half the year and we fly across the US the other half of the year staying in hotels. We own nothing physically can’t fit in three suitcases - two of which have to stay under 50 pounds.
Your situation seems unique - not many people are game for 50% travel as they hit mid career.
Consulting does offer an alternative path to engineering at big cos - usually the interview focus is on your experience and ability to interface with a customer rather than leetcode, etc.
I believe the gp was talking about the year of unemployment referred to in the original post.
I was laid off for about a month earlier this year and it was the most productive I’ve ever been, open source contributions wise. Pragmatically, I should’ve grinded leetcode but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I was really enjoying the open source work though, a combination of react and lisp. I did talk about it during the interviews and maybe that came across.
Speaking as someone who has juggled both a full-time job and a part-time startup on the side before, I can answer this: both of them contributed immensely to my professional development, but in different ways, since the business domains were very different (which also meant developing proficiencies with different technologies and tooling).
My perspective is different - not disagreeing with yours.
My goal is to constantly be “putting myself out of a job”. That means I need to be able to recognize a problem or opportunity, understand the business context, do enough of an MVP or POC that the rest of the organization understands, train and move on.
Sometimes the internal organization doesn’t have the desire or capacity to maintain or evolve the solution. In that case it’s my job to find an outside consulting company.
Instead it’s been “Grokking Algorithms”, “The Competitive Programmers Handbook”, Alex Xu’s “System Design”, and enough leetcode that I’m actually doing more than I did at work.
What sucks is that there are still lots of medium problems I cannot do. Hards are right out. Dunno what I’ll do.
What situation are people in that they have to result to this? Is this an issue with getting laid off and trying to find a FAANG job?
I was laid off from one consulting company back in 2018 or so and had a new gig with more pay a week or so later. No leetcode or dev tests, just talking with people in phone interviews. It was a company I had previously done contract work for, and they called me, but nothing at the FAANG level.
Is it an experience issue (are the people getting laid off junior devs?), because I had maybe 6 years of dev experience across various stacks by that time. In my 10 years of being an employed dev, I have never had to do leetcode interviews.
>I was laid off from one consulting company back in 2018 or so and had a new gig with more pay a week or so later. No leetcode or dev tests, just talking with people in phone interviews. It was a company I had previously done contract work for, and they called me, but nothing at the FAANG level.
There's your answer: consulting companies and contract works.
You have a different bubble compare to the LeetCode crowds. The Leetcode crowds tend to work for Product companies as a Full-Time employee in major Hi-Tech cities. Product, Full-Time, major Hi-tech cities, hit those 3 characteristics => higher chance of getting the Leetcode interview jackpot.
Unpopular opinion: If you’re competing for a cattle job, you have to do leetcode. If you want to be a pet, you have to stand out to people who are looking for you (what you have to offer), not just any fungible developer with a pulse.
The challenge is that cattle jobs in tech have historically paid very well thanks to the free money environment. It looks initially like the right strategy: Cushy job, cushy work, much money. But the glass ceiling is hard and you won’t see it coming until suddenly you’ve had the same day-to-day for 10 years and no amount of grinding leetcode gets you to the next level.
Fortunately standing out is easy: My girlfriend got a (not-coding) FAANG-level job out of 2000 applicants in part by being one of the three people who actually read the job description and could hold an insightful conversation about what she can bring to the table.
>What situation are people in that they have to result to this?
Widespread interview advice targets the "worst-case technical interview scenario" which is doing leetcode and running a gauntlet of interviews. This casts the widest net possible in terms of how many interviews you'll pass. There's also a little bit of reasoning like "if you can handle this, you'll be able to ace the easier interviews".
The other things for job hunting - like using your network and being contacted first - are additional layers that you go through.
>In my 10 years of being an employed dev, I have never had to do leetcode interviews.
I think the reason you hear prep advice so often is that no one has any real data on how many companies are doing leetcode interviews vs. non-leetcode interviews. Because of this ambiguity, that's why you hear so much advice about preparing for the worst case.
I get interviews with "coding challenges all. the. time. IDK why, I'm a Linux systems engineer, not a programmer.
But I constantly keep getting jerks wanting btree sorts that are like a college exam or take home challenges that assume I have industry type applications on my home network. No, folks, I don't run containers and terraform infra in my personal network. When I have to spend three hours to install a dodgy application just to start your janky "8 hour project" I lose all the enthusiasm I had for your job.
In very large part what your interviews look like depends heavily on when and where you're searching, what type of job you want and what your background is. It's hard to overstate this. 2018 might as well be an entirely different universe.
That said I would be a little suspicious as a mid/senior-level developer if I got hired at a place that didn't ask me to do any coding for them at all beforehand.
20+ years in. Don't be afraid those positions can lead to a greenfield development project or come from departments that don't have someone to vet your coding preferences. Usually these positions offer more technical freedom. A company who spends more time vetting code will generally be a place with less freedom and more micromanagement.
> That said I would be a little suspicious as a mid/senior-level developer if I got hired at a place that didn't ask me to do any coding for them at all beforehand.
I'd be suspicious if they didn't ask me to do any coding, but I'd be just as suspicious if the coding they asked me to do was leetcode.
While it annoys me as well to have to brush up a little, someone who has both the discipline to review their fundamentals, and that can demonstrate they have the smarts to be good at it, that's a great sign of being a good candidate.
It serves as a great arbiter, if two people seem to have the same experience, how do you pick between the two?
And when hiring a junior, out of school, there will be no experience to go by, so what else would you assess on?
> Why are you opposed to leetcode?
> It serves as a great arbiter
I'm opposed because I don't think it serves as a great arbiter. At best, it selects for logical/academic ability, whereas IMO the most important skill as engineer is pragmatic decision making and building an appropriate solution. In practice it just selects for people who have studied leetcode (and to a lesser extent, those who have a CS degree)
> if two people seem to have the same experience, how do you pick between the two?
> And when hiring a junior, out of school, there will be no experience to go by, so what else would you assess on?
You use a technical challenge that resembles the work that the person would need to fulfil in the job. Perhaps creating a single view of a website/app for a frontend role. Or creating a few API endpoints for a backend role. Or whiteboarding through a technical architecture (with plenty of opportunity to ask clarifying questions).
> Perhaps creating a single view of a website/app for a frontend role. Or creating a few API endpoints for a backend role
Those things are relatively trivial, and easy to coach as well. If someone never did it before, you can easily show them how on the job. You also wouldn't have time to have them work that in an interview, so you'd need to do a take home, and then you can no longer validate they truly did it themselves, how much time they spent to do it, how much googling they had to do, how they approach the problem or delt with issues, etc.
I also find they tend to be framework/language specific, some companies even have internal frameworks and all that so they'd have to relearn part of it anyways.
> Or whiteboarding through a technical architecture
This is normally included as part of a "leetcode" like interview.
It tends to be a half day, where you're asked one or two system design questions, which are of the format you describe, and are asked one or two data structure and algorithms questions, and one or two small programming questions that checks your ability to write readable and maintainable code that is well structured, well organized and well factored. Sometimes the latter two are combined into one bigger question that tests both code design quality and requires an algorithm or special use of data structures to solve.
I'm sometimes involved in the interviewing process for my employer and we don't do any kind of coding tests. We do ask for them to submit a sample of their work and use it in the interview. I ask questions about the problem and about how they solved it. The code itself isn't usually that interesting, but the tangents we wander down usually are. If the person can't communicate well about a technical topic that they essentially chose, then they probably won't get an offer.
That said, I work for a small company and our turnover is pretty low. I haven't been involved in all that many hires.
This is pretty close to what my experience has been on the interviewee side. The conversations have been technical in regards to talking through problem solving, and esoteric coding philosophy conversations over lunch.
The only coding exams I've ever had to submit were while working at consulting agencies for clients that require an interview process to pick what the client regards as the best candidates for the contract.
I also worked at "very small" (15 dev consultants) to "medium-small" (300 or so technical consultants) companies, hence why I was curious if this was a bigconsulting thing or not.
So far it hasn’t been a problem. Junior candidates have shown code from a school project and others have submitted code from a personal project or from something they contributed to an open source project. I think the personal projects are the most interesting to talk about.
Expecting people to have personal projects outside work is very much selecting for a certain type of person. You're ruling out people who devote their time outside work to their families, or sport, or hobbies that don't involve programming.
I’m not ruling out anything. So far I have yet to find somebody who can’t come up with a code sample to bring to the interview. When that happens, I would probably give them a (paid) assignment. Maybe something like “fix issue #12345 on open source project X”. I’d have to think about it a little and discuss it with the candidate.
> What situation are people in that they have to result to this? Is this an issue with getting laid off and trying to find a FAANG job?
It's reflective of the type of company you're interviewing for.
I lived in Seattle for a while, and almost every startup in the area did some form of algorithm lottery interviewing, because the startups were created by ex AMZN/MS/etc employees and they just took the process they were comfortable with to the next company.
I lived in Atlanta and a few other smaller cities for a while before and after that, and no company did anything like this, because the successful tech companies were all born of people with no FAANG experience, with different backgrounds and with different experiences.
For what it’s worth in my 15+ year career I have also never had to do leetcode interviews… until now.
Part of it is that I’m pivoting from systems software (Linux kernel) to webstuff. I have zero network here, if I wanted to do systems again I’d have an easier time of it.
They're derived from cognitive sciences research and they have a high false negative rate, but it's more valuable to these companies to capture the true positives.
If you've been working 10 years you're in the peak desirability age. A few more years you'll be nearly 40, after that people are much less likely to hire you.
Last time my job was threatened, I spent a few weeks brushing up on my algorithms, going through coding challenges, reimplementing the basics (in my case, a concurrent consumer-producer queue, an IPC mechanism, etc.)
I'm an experienced systems developer with a pretty good resume, I didn't want to look stoopid if I was asked any such question in an interview.
Worked pretty well. I wasn't laid off but I ended up changing job for something more fun than my then position.
I see this all the time, "coding interviews suck", "leetcode doesn't test if you're a good coder", but in the end it's better than nothing, and having worked at places without coding interviews there's almost no bottom to people's abilities. So a low, but existing, floor is a good thing.
The biggest issue IMO is lack of flexibility. Leetcode is a specific format with specific questions, but is not necessarily the work you'll do day-to-day.
What would be great is if companies offered multiple formats including leetcode, take home, pair programming, Github review, project review, just talking, etc.
There are several issues that leetcode solves that the other ones don't work as well with or have flaws that prevent their use in some hiring processes.
Leetcode has a single rubric. The same questions and the same answers. Conducting it has minimal additional effort on the employer's side. It does have false negatives, but it has fewer false positives.
Take homes are often similar to leetcode, but some less scrupulous companies have used them for unpaid work (note that this becomes more and more of an issue as the take home becomes more and more relevant to hiring company) the and unless the interviewer has done the take home themselves to benchmark it (this should take between 1-2 hours), it is possible that the request be "do this thing that will take 20 hours."
GitHub review requires that the person have a GitHub project of sufficient size, that it isn't just copied from someone else and that they have time to work on it. There's a joke in /r/adventofcode that shows a GH repo that only has activity in December.
With pair programming, project review, and just talking the lack of a rubic becomes an issue and it becomes more likely that biases get into the interviewing process and leads to possible issues of discrimination.
When mixing any of these so that some people do leetcode, others do pair programming then it becomes an issue that not everyone is considered using the same scale and those biases and discrimination issues become even more something that legal starts wondering about if they'll have to deal with a lawsuit.
If one person can do the interview with "just talking", then that should be the same criteria that everyone uses (no leetcode) and "just talking" has an abysmal false positive rate.
You're definitely correct, I've learned a lot while practicing leetcode. Especially about my chosen language (Python). I do feel I'm a better engineer because of it.
I don't think much of what I've learned will be useful in the day-to-day SWE grind. It's really quite interesting, but I cannot recall ever having to remember the skeleton of an iterative DFS before now.
I've taken away more useful lessons from system design studying. If I had my way, I'd spend more timing finishing "Designing Data Intensive Applications" (AWESOME book), instead of figuring out why my oranges aren't rotting correctly or trying to remember how to solve the coin problem using dynamic programming instead of a greedy algo.
On the plus side, once I've got a good memory base and can solve random Mediums and some Hards, I should be OK to pass basically any technical interview - barring random chance. Right now I took a break for xmas and need to go back to it, and that is the hardest part :)
I was in the exact same situation. What I did was take a web manager job at a non-profit. I run their Wordpress website. It isn't what I was hoping for when I left marketing in the SAAS space, but it's a start and I finally enjoy going to work.
I have complete autonomy in this role and am setting things up so I'm not just managing a WP site, but actually working on the code base and learning as I go.
My thinking is it's better to get paid to learn than grind Leetcode at home (which I did for six long months).
The only value of having a knee-jerk 'startup' going is to not appear unemployed.
If it's for the optics, then I'd just move the dates of my previous side-projects around and call it a faux-startup. It's not lying. It is work you have previously done as a side-project/school-project at some point. But saying you did it in the last few months helps give the appearance of being continuously employed and not being rusty.
SWE interviewing IS a fulltime job. When unemployed, it is especially important to use that time to: [1] Reflect on what job you want for your future & [2] Work on achieving that job. Together, they will take up ALL your time. Tech recruitment wants to have their cake and eat it too. You are expected to have an excellent primary project and have time for the months it takes to Leetcode. It's unrealistic and leads to a period of overwork for candidates.
Jugaad is never optimal. But sometimes, Jugaad is necessary.
I have a decent amount of savings and a side project I want to do which could potentially earn money. Are you saying if I quit my job and do this for a year or so, it'll fill a hole in my resume and not affect future interviews?
Everytime I read these comments I feel like I work in another industry. Who cares about the gaps in your resume? Truly, have recruiters commented in anything but passing? Your interviewers?
I've hired candidates with large gaps in their resume and their reasoning for the most part was I wanted time off or I went traveling or N other things that have nothing to do with work. We. Did. Not. Care.
Pass the interview. This is the only thing we cared about at Big Tech Co.
I have the same feeling, unless your response to the question about the gap is "yea I was on the run from the law for a while because I killed some people while robbing a bank, then I had to spend some time in prison but I had a really good lawyer" I dont know how much impact it really has
It's not so much the (closed) gaps, but the time since last job. The first job after you take a year off will be harder to get. After that, most people won't care.
I don't think it matters as much as people here seem to think.
You're the current CTO of a unicorn looking for a more technical role with stability so you apply to be a staff+ engineer at Google. Now the opposite: you've taken a year off to take care of an elderly parent. In both cases, your resume is one of the lowest signals we have. You're going to need to pass that interview.
HR folks aren't even looking this closely as long as you have a resume with the right prior experiences. And almost none of these resume concerns matter with a referral.
All else equal, people with resume gaps are going to get sorted to the bottom of the pile. Maybe at the high end of the market, the FAANG staff level, there aren't enough applicants so it's not a big deal, and they'll get to those applications eventually. At the lower end of the market however, there's more competition and more likelihood that someone else from the top of the pile will get hired before they get down to the bottom.
Are you working for FAANG etc? I work a mid-level IT job, there is competition. I have no evidence but it seems like candidates who are currently unemployed (especially for a long time) will end up at the bottom of the pile. That at least would make finding a new job harder.
I would only hope to use that as a substitute for paid employment if you actually incorporate, give yourself a title, put your company on LinkedIn and otherwise treat it like a business. Noodling around on a side project that you might monetize eventually is not a substitute.
I disagree. Incorporating, giving yourself a title, and a LinkedIn page are things anyone can do. People who "play business" spend tons of time on this stuff, along with designing company logos, hiring accountants (for their zero revenue business), and lawyers (for NDAs to protect their non-existent idea.) I've seen it first hand. They'll do anything to avoid actual work: building and selling a product.
I suspect what Anon means is: if you plan to tell people your side project was your job, you should start treating it as your job.
I play around with some side projects where I don’t give a shit about user counts or GitHub stars or commercial viability, doing perhaps 4 hours work per week. If I told people this was me at the height of my powers, I’d expect them to be unimpressed.
Yes, exactly, I'm saying that what will matter to future employers is how much you treat the project as a job, and not the project itself, no matter how interesting or challenging it is from the technical side.
It won't matter as much as you think. They'll probably spend 5 minutes discussing it, if that. If you have a demo or something to show for your time, that will be a plus.
Almost every single job I've ever gotten is because of a side project or because I incorporated a small company to legitamise a side-project I was hacking on.
Over the years:
I built a video capture system for the Commodore Amiga as a neat side project for that lead to me working on Transputers that formed the heart of a non-linear editing system (no interview)
The Transputers were really fast, so I wrote some neat 3D demos that ran on the Transputer boards in the Amiga & PC => contract work with SGI (no interview)
Wrote a demo for the SGI video capture system to scan a magazine at high resolution => machine vision & robotics that was changing the printing industry (no interview)
Wrote a C compiler for an 8-bit micro so I could learn C => leads to writing a C compiler for a 16-bit micro at a company (no interview)
Created a "smart home dashboard" for a side-project => leads to writing a mobile app to manage a WiFi router => leads to becoming Lead Firmware Engineer on the project (no interview)
I wrote some stuff on the Unity3D forums => game development job offer (no interview)
Ran a number of in-person developer meet-ups over the years => various jobs & offers & contract gigs (no interview)
Got asked by a friend to teach a class on device driver development at USC, video recorded it, he sent it to his friend at Intel => wind up teaching many, many week long, rocket-science level classes on Linux & Android & device driver development & board bring-up at Intel (no interview)
Recorded all of my lectures at Intel, shared them with a friend at Facebook who was trying to get in to device driver development => Which lead to me teaching a couple of classes at Facebook (no interview)
Asked to critique a ReactNative class at Facebook due to my other teaching there => Which lead to me consulting/contracting for Facebook for a few years (no interview)
Video tape my classes at Facebook, which get shared with people at Microsoft & Apple without my knowledge => end up consulting and teaching at both Microsoft & Apple (no interview)
Created a bot for a popular MMORPG coupled with machine vision and some AI techniques => contract job to detect bots in the self-same popular MMORPG (no interview)
I created a C# package and published it that done some fancy stuff with random numbers => company hired me to work on their project that used the library (that was an "interesting" interview)
I wrote some SONY PlayStation developer tools => leads to getting a job at a game development company creating a PSX game (no interview)
Create some tools to theme websites and pull data from a database => accidentally create an adult entertainment empire (no interview)
Document how the Gameboy works, write some developer tools, maintain some developer tools => multiple jobs developing Gameboy games (no interview)
Port MAME to a bunch of consoles, write emulators as side-projects for other consoles => hired to write emulator of their classic consoles for "big console development company" (no interview)
Hacked on some gstreamer code => connection with a guy at a Canadian who says "if you're ever looking to move to Canada..."
There's lot of other examples in my career where building a side-project leads to an interview or a straight-up offer.
I'm guessing #7 contributed to the fact that it took the author 1 year to find another job. If you're desperate, you can most likely find an _okay_ job in 3 months. If you don't have the luxury to wait for a "good" job, finding a job tends to happen faster.
I'm in similar shoes to the author here, and am glad to hear you show some understanding for this.
I interviewed with a quite promising company beginning of December, only to immediately get the written feedback (after the first call) of
"Well I know a lot of SWE in this town and none of them are struggling to find a job - so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, we've already signed a contract with someone else in the 5 days since we last spoke."
(To be fair to them - I had mentioned how frustrating it was to simply get "no" as negative hiring feedback and asked them to elaborate if at all possible)
I take it as a "well, bullet dodged" moment, but I am not going to lie and say it didn't sting.
This sort of thing is pretty common. It happens in both directions, if you're employed job offers line up, if you're available there must be something wrong with you. Highly frustrating. A couple of takeaways: unemployed < freelancers < has a job < has a prestigious job. So if possible and you're on the job market at least fill the time freelancing so you don't end up with the 'unemployed' status because hiring managers are going to see that as a way to excuse themselves, from that point forward they look at employing you as taking a risk, which, as a rule they are trained to avoid. VCs suffer from the same disability: the start-up that has a deal on the table will have multiple parties trying to get in on the deal, the start-up that is just pitching is probably somehow faulty or someone else would have given them a terms sheet long ago. They see no inconsistency in this. Also, you don't necessarily have to inform them of your feelings and the fact that you've been rejected more than once. Best of luck there!
>"so if you've been looking for X months, surely there's something wrong with you - and anyway, we've already signed a contract with someone else in the 5 days since we last spoke."
I think letting them know you are currently unemployed is a mistake. Frankly your current state of affairs is not their business. You can always tell them that you are ok but looking for a better job. Very simple and understandable. Yes it is a lie but it is the only reasonable option. Telling perspective employer to sod off and not to stick their nose into your internal situation is not going to do you any good. Telling that you are out of job and looking will immediately put you into unfavorable position. Treat yourself as a business in this particular case. Businesses have zero problems lying to each other / their employees for as long as it does not break a law.
There's really no way to hide you're currently unemployed, or at least not employed in the tech field, unless you make up an entire fantasy world. Not only will you have to put the lie into your resume, and maybe provide fake references, but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job.
>"There's really no way to hide you're currently unemployed"
It is absolutely trivial.
>"but you'll also get tons of interview questions about skills and projects and challenges from your current job"
Your last job unless it is 10 years old should provide all of the answers. Any really identifying details should not be asked / answered as the employee is normally under NDA.
Same for references. Reference from "current job" can simply be refused. I can hardly imagine employee going to their boss and asking for a job reference while still working.
Anyways I am independent and run my own company. Maybe I am not up to date about how deep the US employers are able to stick their fingers up that proverbial hole.
While interviewing in the U.S. you'll get a lot of casual questions about your current job, such as what you like best about it, what skills you use there or why you want to leave. These will come from the recruiter, the manager and your future peers. These are both technical and social questions. Refusing to answer any of these questions would be very weird socially, and even very restrictive NDAs should allow you to at least speak generally about what you're doing.
>"While interviewing in the U.S. you'll get a lot of casual questions about your current job, such as what you like best about it, what skills you use there or why you want to leave. "
These fall perfectly into experience with last job. Does not have to be current. And all those questions you asked are trivial. Also I've never dealt with the recruiters. I have always searched and found perspective companies myself and no they were not Amazon big type. If I could not speak with the owner I would simply walk away - not my kind of place.
My first programming job in Canada - I just simply walked into the office and asked to speak to the owner (I knew it was small 20 person consultancy).
Since 2000 I am on my own but I still find clients and have interviews. Just a different type of interview of course.
> I had mentioned how frustrating it was to simply get "no" as negative hiring feedback and asked them to elaborate if at all possible
Don’t do this! You’re inviting feedback from someone who is basically a complete stranger, who has an undisclosed set of “standards” they’re judging you against, and who might not actually be very good at assessing talent. The odds of getting a “false signal” are high.
I've honestly made enough of a positive experience to recommend doing it.
Sometimes people just genuinely tell you things like "there wasn't enough detail about X on your CV, but we took a chance and called you anyway" - that tells me that I can improve my chances for a callback in the future by adding more detail (if I get that same feedback 2-3 times).
You're right though in that a looooooooot of hiring people also have no clue what they want to see.
Asking for feedback is okay if you're in the right mindset. Understand that unless you completely failed something, it's probably them, not you, and any feedback you get should be seen as likely rationalizing a decision they made for who knows what reasons. So as long as you don't take the feedback too hard or too personally, you might get some ideas for how to improve your chances with the next employer.
Just curious, what do you define as an _okay_ job? Would you be willing to pay the opportunity cost to take it?
For what it's worth, I thought the same. I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
Coming off my own job search, my take is that the era of remote work has fundamentally changed the entire process. I'm going on 24 years of professional experience and applied to more jobs in that search than in the rest of my career combined. Prior to this year, I've had exactly two applications that didn't result in an interview, and only 3 interviews that didn't result in offers.
In this past search, I applied to about 50 jobs and had 4 interviews. According to LinkedIn stats, most of those jobs had 30-200+ applicants. The results of those applications were:
~12 screens with recruiters that resulted in rejection
~ 8 rejections w/no conversations
~20 no reply whatsoever
~ 3 rejects in first round
- 1 second round reject
- 1 final round reject (a nearly 2 month process!)
- 1 offer for about 50% of my previous salary, but a more more interesting role
- 2 replies indicating a desire to move forward that came 6 weeks after my application, and after I'd accepted a job.
My takeaway is that it's a numbers game now. In the past, I was very highly targeted in my searches, but now that the doors are wide open to everyone across the country for many roles, it's about getting someone's eyes on your resume, and that requires a certain level of aggression in applying.
> Just curious, what do you define as an _okay_ job? Would you be willing to pay the opportunity cost to take it?
If I didn't have enough money to pay for food/rent, I would take the first offer. Fortunately, I've never been in that situation.
> I applied to over 50 companies and not all of them were FAANG by any stretch of the imagination. I'll admit I'm not the best at interviewing, which certainly was a factor. But even as I broadened my search to the "okay" roles, I still had difficulty landing work.
If you're thinking about the distinction between FAANG and not FAANG, then we are talking about completely different levels of _okay_. I'm talking about non-tech companies, where you'd most likely be working on internal tools or whatever. Maybe you'd be writing crappy Jira/Confleunce/whatever plugins. Or gluing together one internal system to another internal system, etc.
I consider _okay_ to mean a job that pays enough money to cover rent/food.
It would be great if you could share your insights about finding work at these non-tech companies, either here or at my recent post at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108841. I've applied to far over 50 places and would be satisfied with that sort of thing at least for the near term.
You're looking for a remote job. The sort of companies I'm thinking of most likely won't do remote. Maybe it's different now in the era of COVID, but I suspect they'll still be "asses in chairs, look busy" type places.
Go on monster.com (or any other job search site), type in "programmer" (or "<language> programmer" if you only have experience in a single language) and start applying. If you don't recognize the company name or what they do, that's good. If you're looking for a consultancy gig, then you probably want to look out for keywords like "government" or "client". If you're looking for a non-tech company, then you need to google the company name and see what field their in.
If you know Java, you can probably search for "Jira programmer" or "Jira developer" and find a pretty cushy gig writing those. If you know PHP, then search for "wordpress developer". If it's python, search "Django developer" etc.
Yes, remote only if at all possible. I'm surprised that non-tech companies care about looking busy, since tech is a cost center for them and I would guess they're hiring grudgingly at best.
I've looked mainly on LinkedIn and some smaller job boards, not Monster or Indeed or Dice or any of those.
Another thing is that I'm avoiding complex applications, the ones where you're immediately asked to create an account and once you do they ask you for a ton of information like every job you've had in your life. Are the jobs you're talking about often gated behind these applications?
> Are the jobs you're talking about often gated behind these applications?
Most likely, you'll start to recognize the different software companies use to track job applications.
My only experience was helping someone out when they got laid off. They had a mortgage to pay, a new born and a wife that quit her job to look after the new born.
Being picky about job application software wasn't a the top of our list. I think we applied to over 500 ads over the course of a few days, basically every single commutable job. I think from those, there were 20 interviews and 3 offers.
Some of the software automatically scans your CV and populates stuff. If it can't do it properly, restructure your CV until it can. You might need a few different CVs for different software.
I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you don't sound very serious. Or at least not desperate (which is probably a good thing).
If you're looking for a job full time, you should spend a few hours a day grinding leetcode and a few hours a day filling in those shit applications. Obviously I don't know you or you situation, I have no idea if this is good advice for you or not.
You can judge for yourself whether I'm serious or desperate or not. If your standard is 500 applications within a few days, then no. I can't even comprehend that. Are we talking like 10-15 applications per hour?
I don't care about the software as such, but so far I'm not desperate enough to provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong, just to maybe get the first 30 minute phone call from a recruiter. On top of this is the simple logic that any employer that puts up all these barriers is probably not really interested in hiring anyway. More work for less reward, so that my time would be better spent looking for more likely positions.
That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.
> Are we talking like 10-15 applications per hour?
Pretty much, around 5 minutes per application.
>provide detailed information about every job I've had since I was a teenager, every reference up front, agree to legal statements, or whatever else they might insist on, knowing I could be fired later on if I get any of it wrong
Either you're completely overthinking it and you can just omit a bunch of stuff, or you're applying to some job that requires security clearance and they use those questions to prescreen. I remember the application for some defense contractor was too painful and we gave up.
But if it's some standard jobvite or whatever form, just fill it in. Only include relevant tech jobs and your university education (if you have a degree) and move on.
If it's really that big a deal for you, shortlist 50 jobs from those job search sites. Then go to /r/slavelabour and pay someone $15 bucks to apply for you (given your CV and email).
> That said I'm willing to have my mind changed on this. Maybe all of these jobs are actually super eager to hire despite being so hostile to applicants.
It's more likely that at some point that bought a license for the applicant tracking software and they'll use it forever. They probably have it on some default settings so it's not the best for tech jobs. That doesn't mean they aren't serious about hiring.
But those job aggregator sites are a bit shit, they'll have listings for jobs that are already filled or no longer available.
We may be talking past each other. I'm talking about applications for unremarkable positions at large corporations where the application forms are either branded by the company or done through something like iCIMS, Taleo or Workday. You create an account and then you're faced with several steps asking for who knows what. The experience question might be "List all past jobs starting with the most recent" with no date limit. Later on you'll have to agree that you answered everything fully and honestly or you can be fired. Maybe I'm a fool for taking that seriously but the meaning is straightforward to me.
These are also the sorts of positions I think people are talking about when they talk about HR being a barrier, filtering on keywords, or how important it is to network around them before applying. So I don't think it's a matter of the company being stuck with software they can't do anything about, instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so. I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.
> List all past jobs starting with the most recent" with no date limit. Later on you'll have to agree that you answered everything fully and honestly or you can be fired. Maybe I'm a fool for taking that seriously but the meaning is straightforward to me.
This is the most standard thing ever. The ycombinator job board[0] works the exact same way. No one is going to fire you if you leave out that you worked at Pizza Hut when you were younger. They will fire you if you claim to have worked at Google but never actually did. Or if you claim N years of experience in some technology despite never using it. Just make sure your CV matches what you enter into the software and that you're not lying on your CV, that's it.
> I'm happy to hear if you have any insight from the recruiting side at these places.
I have experience working on the recruiting side of a fairly large company that used Jobvite (which is why I mentioned it, first piece of software I could think of) for their application tracking system. It asked you the same sort of questions, even some really stupid ones like your Myers Briggs personality type, despite me arguing very strongly against it.
Yes, HR would do some filtering, they probably filtered out good candidates and let many bad ones through to the next stage to get filtered by the hiring people. This shouldn't stop you from applying, who cares if you get filtered out by HR at X% of the time? You'll get through 100-X% of the time, and if you apply to a lot of places, that'll be a lot of people looking at your CV. An application should not take you longer than 5-10 minutes, it's not a big investment of time.
> instead the hostile and opaque application process mirrors their actual hiring process, or at least I assume so
Yes, the hiring process will be shit. But it's not intentionally hostile, it's "hostile" because that's the way it's always been and there's too much momentum to change it. I'm certain the Myers Briggs questions turned off many good candidates. I would immediately close a job application if it was asking stuff like that (assuming I wasn't desperate). But the company was genuinely looking to hire good people. I feel like you underestimate how difficult it is to change anything at a large company where tech is a cost center :).
There are many tech jobs out there that just ask you to send in a resume and cover letter and answer some questions. Saying it's technically possible to get an interview from sending out an unfocused 5-10 minute application to a big corporation using something like Taleo is not a strong argument in itself to do that.
I can respond to this having gone through a similar process in the past few years. There’s ok and there’s the (IMHO) more common bad. I turned down several offers myself, for reasons ranging from ‘not wanting to be the public advocate for something I didn’t believe in’ to ‘discovering the leadership were crypto scammers’.
The bar can get very low! Look into local low prestige consulting companies if you’re really desperate for something. I worked at one after moving to the US and the hiring bar was extremely low and I was working there a few days later
I agree. I was hired over a year ago to a similar place that's since been acquired by a Big IT Consulting Company. One benefit of that situation is that a) I can kinda just blend in and do my job quietly without attracting much notice, and b) the hiring bar was insanely low, the easiest interview-to-offer pipeline I have ever fallen through. I'm not planning to stay forever, but they're paying my bills and giving me work so for now, I'm content to stick it out, maybe through the end of next year even.
For both your and the GP's comment, it would be great if you could share some details on how job searching with "local low prestige consulting companies" works, either here or in a recent post I made at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34108841.
I was about to say the same thing. #2, #4, and #7 partially contradict each other.
I think you can go faster if you use third-party recruiters, as much as I often despise them. Try to pick out one or two individuals within recruiting firms that are not awful. They're out there. Recruiters are given the jobs that corporations need a warm body to fill now.
Yes, you can absolutely always quit that un-ideal job and completely omit it from your resume. I don't see the wrong role as a good reason to turn down a job when you have bills to pay.
My other feedback on this article:
I wish it generally talked about unemployment insurance. It can be a complicated process, and I wonder if the author had any success there.
#1 should is a part of the basic life skill of understanding the difference between coworkers and friends. I do have friends that started as coworkers, and they did a lot more than help with the mechanics of getting laid off. I do agree that it's not a life skill that is taught very well.
If you want to turn coworkers into lasting friends, you need to be proactive and invite them to do things outside of work.
#3, I'm just not sure I agree with it. Getting interviews is an excellent indicator. At the very least it means that your resume is attractive. I don't think it's very common for companies to waste their own employees' time interviewing people for roles they aren't serious about filling.
My rule of thumb is that if you get beyond the recruiter and talk to the hiring manager, the company is serious and intends to fill the role. Maybe they get around to it or maybe not, we all know how priorities can change.
#5 seems like a waste of time. Either you know someone who is a hiring manager or you know someone who can refer you through a company's referral system. I think those are the only two activities that are productive. I wouldn't want to get any of those requests in my LinkedIn Inbox.
Writing open source software is a waste of time with respect to job hunting unless you are looking to build a portfolio. Your time is better used physically applying for jobs (which takes a legitimately solid amount of time).
#6, totally agree with that. The author absolutely overshared, and should have known better. Corporations want to know that you can keep secrets. Transparency is almost never in the best interest of a company.
As I mentioned above, I'd only agree with #7 if you have runway/a spouse earning income.
I'd almost replace #8 with "enjoy being laid off." Spend some days doing activities meant for joy, especially if you've exhausted your job application pipeline for the moment. I'm almost hoping I get laid off, I love not working, and I loved all the stuff I got to do the last time I was laid off. I played two video games the whole way through and read an entire novel, which are things I rarely get through when I'm employed.
I've had very little luck with third-party recruiters myself, personally. My take is that because the job is theoretically easier to get, there is much more competition, and the recruiters are more ruthless in removing applications that don't meet the exact specifications from their client.
Also it pains me a little for you to say that reading one book is a big sign of having lots of free time. Maybe you're not a huge reader but I hope you normally do stuff you enjoy, reading or not, whether you're employed or not, if you don't mind my saying so.
I'm just not a huge reader. It's far down my usual list of free time activities.
Basically, the fact that I had enough free time to finish a book and do all the things I like to do higher on my list was one of the joys of unemployment.
> Don’t discount the physical aspect of loneliness either. If you’re like me, work is the primary shaper of your life. Work gives your life rhythm. It is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve. Then, one day, poof—it’s gone.
Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
> Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off.
There’s nothing wrong with being laid off. I was, last week. Saw it coming from a mile away. Told my new employer about it.
Here’s the secret for getting a job you’re happy with. Try to have competing offers. I would have had to take over a 60% reduction in salary if I hadn’t had one. But I did, and so it was merely a 37% reduction. I’m very happy with it.
This is an area where I have to give tptacek lots of credit. I sort of shuffled from job to job until he posted this nugget of wisdom, and it’s quite true. None of the points in the article applied to me because of a fundamental shift in mindset. It happened around 7 years ago.
I think the loneliness aspect is intertwined with the reason why most people don’t try to go interview while you already have a job. You see your job as something more. It’s not just a job; it gives your life rhythm.
Maybe so. But in my experience, the way to be happy is not to care so darn much about it. Do a good job. But try to get a better one. And when you’re on the market, try to get multiple.
The recent thread about the engineer who got their offer rescinded from two different YC companies is exhibit B. They mentioned that they stopped looking for new jobs after things seemed to be going well during the pre-offer phase. Don’t do this. You should be doing a breadth-first search of all possible opportunities: talk to as many people as possible, and spend your time weighted by expected outcome.
> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
People spend 8 hours + lunch and commuting every weekday on their job. It's almost 50% of the time you spend conscious during a week. Most people want more out of that than just a chore that needs to be done.
Embrace distributed WFH and you can spend 4 hours in the morning, have a nice picnic, play some basketball, have a couple beers, then retire to your room to do another 4hrs. Or just fuck off some days and counterbalance it by doing hyper focused 12hrs days some other time.
Also: unless you're genuinely curing cancer or flying food to starving African villages or something, 95% of software companies are pretty damn useless and any impact a SWE imagines is basically just a mental fantasy that helps one keep working. No one is genuinely happier because another API is created or some rich person has a better way of managing which products he's selling to other rich people. It's all basically useless and just a way to make money.
That wasn’t an option until a few years ago, and it being an option coincided with the crescendo of a 14 year bull market. Having a few beers before your afternoon shift isn’t likely to viable for long.
Haven't missed a deadline in more than a year, which is more than I can say for most of my coworkers. It turns out that work with a fresh morning brain for 4 hours, a long break, and then later on more work with a refreshed brain is much more efficient than sitting for 8 hrs in an office for no reason.
If I choose to refresh myself via mid-day beer, so what? The code doesn't care how long I sit inside an office. It cares how well my brain works.
(..yes, too much beer and it won't work anymore. Everything in moderation.)
Heh TBH in most cases I doubt an individual has much if any control over a) if there are layoffs, and b) if they are part of one. I've had the "privilege" of seeing the internals of a few large layoffs, and being caught in one, and from my experience they are usually tied to business decisions outside of the control of your average IC (currently interests rates are putting a major pinch on companies that hold a lot of debt for example) and performance is rarely an actual factor in who goes. In most the large layoffs I've seen the list of who is going is handed down from C or VP level execs with none of management below having any say (which explains why so many take out key resources). Only in one case have I actually seen managers select who to keep.
The whole "layoffs happen because employees are lazy, and affect lazy employees" is a nice narrative of your a business owner to keep the rank and file "motivated", but it's rarely an accurate portrayal of the situation.
Harsh words, but likely unfounded. You don't know their reason for being laid off, it could be that their company didn't product a profit (since in a bull run they don't need to), it could be that a competitor caught up to them, it could be that their division was no longer needed, and so on. Poor performance attributable to WFH necessarily is not very high on the list of why people are laid off, generally speaking.
Counter opinion: You're going to be one of many applicant because everyone else is embracing WFH trend too, so you are competing with everyone, especially with some much experience to show, or a portfolio of trending technologies.
It might be that a dev that has a money cushion and is willing and able to relocate can compete on a level others can't because competition would only be localized.
OP was unemployed a year. Time adds up, that's a lot of money.
> OP was unemployed a year. Time adds up, that's a lot of money.
Luckily my government gives me a full year of unemployment benefits at 2/3rds of my salary besides my savings. Obviously, I don't wish to test my luck regardless, but not everywhere is as cutthroat as the US.
More accurately: your government takes your money and then, maybe, gives it back to you in the form of unemployment benefits and the like, minus significant processing fees.
The alternative is to use the money the government doesn't take and save it for your future "unemployment benefit".
The government would give me more than I would be able to save myself in a year. Over multiple years, I would be able to save more efficiently than the government, true. That's assuming everything goes perfectly however, so I view it as a form of insurance: I make less in order to have less anxiety that I will not be able to provide for myself and my dependents if the overlords decide I am no longer worthy of my job. It's a tradeoff, but one that I will gladly make. As a social good, that money also goes into helping those that were not as lucky as me to be able to make good easy money. And perhaps one day I might be like them too, who knows?
I think the OP is saying that there’s no expectation that the company provide more than what they seek from you. Keeping it professional allows you to compartmentalize the fact that you are there because you add value and nothing more. You can form friendships. You can form guilds/clans/clubs/practices within. You can provide culture and mentorship beyond the duty of the role. At the end of the day though, it’s not a day care and you are there to provide value to the business objectives. My professional colleagues I deeply respect. My friends are sometimes idiots. That’s how I see it.
I think there's a benefit for some people in letting go a bit. Even if you love your job, you need to understand that the system we work in is purpose-built to exploit workers. It's great to be focused on your work when you're working, but once you're done for the day you should unplug as much as you can. Taking PTO? Don't check slack or emails.
I love what I do, but I've found that even still if I let that fact convince me to work more than what is required of me I will eventually feel burnt out and eventually depressed. Maybe this isn't the case for everyone, but it's life outside of work that brings true meaning and purpose to my life. Time with friends and loved ones, going outside into nature and having new experiences, these are all things that make me actually happy. Loving my work just means I'm not sad when I'm at work.
> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
+1 on this. His #1 is exactly why you should not let work, and especially work social events, become the "primary shaper of your life" - they can and will get rid of you anytime they think it might be convenient for them. It may not have anything to do with your skills or productivity, it may be just what someone high above you felt like doing for reasons that have nothing to do with you.
Being spoiled for choice with offers is great if you can manage it, but not very useful if you're OP who couldn't find something for a year.
Also, having a job gives you a basic social identity to use to interact with people, and positive cash flow lets you be expansive and outgoing. It's very easy to take this for granted, or assume focusing on work is ultra-materialist, if you don't have a lot of experience going without. I agree that it's healthy to not worry so much about the day-to-day minutiae of a specific job, but this is a lot different from the inevitable decline that comes with not having any job at all.
Just because this is a norm doesn't make it healthy. When your identity is rooted in something that can easily go away, it makes for a weak foundation. Lot of examples of jobs that are relatively short-lived (athletes, military, etc.) can show how difficult transitioning is when your identity is tied to your job.
We need to distinguish between being at some particular job and being in a profession or similarly in any job at all.
I think it's unhealthy to have your identity tied to your specific employer, job title and tasks that you do for them. You as a person should not be defined by the tickets in your current sprint.
However not having a profession or any job is much different and worse. Unless you're older and retired, or independently wealthy, then it means you're going to cut back on everything. You won't socialize with other people society deems successful, you won't date, you won't grow a family, you won't travel or do anything other than continue to exist. All parts of your situation will shrink and decline. You are running out the clock toward total destitution.
I'm making this point because it's easy for people who are having a successful career to say, oh, of course I'm not my job, while missing entirely that they see themselves as a person who has a good job and will likely get another good job if their current job ends. They don't mean that they see themselves equally as a software developer or a dishwasher or on the street and it's all the same to them, so sharing the perspective that you are not your job in a discussion about extended unemployment is maybe not very appropriate.
Whether this latter reality is healthy or not, I don't know, but people have identified themselves as successful based on their trade or other social categorization for thousands of years, so at least we can say it's not new.
Part of the distinction I was trying to make is that it's dangerous to have one's identity tied primarily to any singular thing. In western culture, it just seems like a job/profession is the easiest identifier.
Will Storr writes about this much better than I can explain it here. But his point is essentially that the healthiest approach is to have your identity tied to many disparate parts of your life so that if one falters, the way you view your status doesn't hinge on that one failure. Just like you stated that "people identified themselves as successful", is a measure of status. If your esteem/status is based on that one domain, you're putting yourself at greater risk. It doesn't matter if a buggy-whip maker was the best tradesman around, he's status is still at risk when cars become popular.
The other part is that I believe research shows it's typically unhealthy to have one's social circle centered around work because those aren't very tight bonds. Again, it's a point to spread your social circle across shared interests and values rather than a job.
What I'm really talking about when I'm talking about the threat of extended unemployment is the threat of losing socioeconomic class. So much depends on class: where you live, what you eat, where you worship if anywhere, where your kids go to school, who your friends are. Almost everything. It's very difficult to diversify your social and professional network outside of your class.
In most cases switching from one tech job to another will keep you in the same middle-to-upper-middle class even if you have to take a relatively large pay cut. You can even lose your job without something else lined up and it's not a big problem as long as you're confident you'll find something similar soon.
All of that is at risk with extended unemployment or being forced to indefinitely work for lower pay in a different field. Consider all the life changes someone might have to make if they have to change from being a software developer making $150k to being a rideshare driver making $40k, after six months, a year, or five years. I don't know about buggy-whip makers but probably they'd be okay with losing their jobs if they were guaranteed equal work in the new car factories. What they really dreaded was having to work for less pay in the new factories, or becoming day laborers or similar. This is what motivated the original Luddites.
I don't think we disagree on much here. When you say "socioeconomic class", that is largely valuable because of the status it confers. When your status changes to a lower rung, it hurts. Will Storr is saying having your entire status/esteem wrapped in a single measure like socioeconomic class is unhealthy. It is much healthier to have your status spread across multiple domains so that if you lose your position in socioeconomic class, your entire identity isn't shaken.
We probably do disagree on the buggy-whip/factory point. Being a craftsman carries more status than being a cog in a factory. The reason why Henry Ford made $5/day a thing was workers were leaving in droves because the work was miserable and monotonous. High pay compensated for miserable work and lower status. I've known people who go from being "somebody" in a particular field (like the military) to being a "nobody" in a different field (like a factory). Even though they got paid better in the latter, they yearned for the former because of the lost status.
What your replies seem to confirm is how much we as a society base our identities on work, sometimes to the exclusion of so much else.
I'm referring to class as a person's conception of themselves, and others' conception of them, as someone who can live the life they're living and can expect to continue living that life. Losing this doesn't just mean the loss of some sort of social authority, of having an impressive job title at parties, but also and more importantly it can mean almost everything in that person's life changing for the worse, indefinitely: worse neighborhood, worse housing, worse medical care, worse food, worse schools and college funds, worse retirement, worse jobs, worse hobbies, worse transportation, worse life expectancy. That would devastate anyone, and it's not so much about how a person self-identifies but about how much they can afford.
By that same measure, anyone who lives in a lower socio-economic class would have a lower sense of well-being. This is true for people with extrinsic work orientation, but not to those with intrinsic orientation. Again, a lot of it comes down to one's relationship with work.
People who are forced to receive worse medical care, for example because they can't afford necessary medicine anymore, are tangibly worse off than they were before. It's not a sign of an unhealthy relationship with work if someone is upset at not being able to buy medicine. Framing it that way is unhelpful.
Also, if you can't find a job in a year then maybe you need to lower your standards somewhere. Even as a self-taught, very junior (at the time) engineer it only took me 4 months to receive (competitive) competing offers.
> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously. Be professional — but that’s as far as it goes.
I think that’s the wrong message to take away from this. The author’s problems wouldn’t have been solved by remaining more distant from his job and coworkers - he’d just be lonely all of the time!
The real answer is that you need to cultivate relationships and a life outside of work, too. By all means, become friendly with and get to know your coworkers, but don’t let work be your only source of relationships.
> Exhibit A of why not to take your day job too seriously.
This can be more difficult when you have been part of transforming a company for 20 years instead of job-hopping every few years. When you have advocated for changes and they have been implemented, there are parts of "you" in the company.
Also the CV looks very empty in this case, even when having implemented many interesting things.
By that argument he could have taken a job at McDonald's flipping burgers and would be better off than 'zero'.
He did take a pay cut. 37% can be felt by anyone earning an income. It's often the decider if you have money left over after living expenses or not.
Let's say you earn 200K. 100k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 100K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 40K a year for retirement.
Let's say you earn 37% less. That's 126K. 60k goes away for taxes et al (I am simplifying here), leaving you 66K for expenses. If your living expenses are 60K for rent, food, transportation, fun, family, you can save 6K a year for retirement.
Your savings just dropped by 85%, putting your retirement in danger.
Not saying OP shouldn't have accepted the offer. But let's not pretend this wasn't a significant pay cut.
It was $400k to $250k. Significant, but given the recession, it’s a nice position to be in.
There’s a fella on TikTok named Frank Niu. He made $500k at Netflix, and his job was basically to run around fixing things when they broke. It was a nice reminder that the good times can be very good, and the bad times are worth scaling back one’s expectations appropriately. I doubt he’d still be in the $500k bracket if he were still working, but you never know.
Also, don’t scale your living expenses! It’s tempting, but my current employer almost didn’t make me an offer because they assumed I was living at a $400k lifestyle. In reality we were just paying off our house and driving the same old car.
I'm not the person you're asking, but the answer seems to be quite obvious (unless you think they're lying about being happy about the situation)— they were making more money than they need by at least 37%.
The last 5-10 years have seen crazy money. I think most of us will see pay cuts sooner or later. Definitely when you get in your 40s+ you're likely to get a pay cut for each new job, unless you're management or architect or similar.
> “When faced with two choices, flip a coin. When it’s in the air, you’ll know which side you’re hoping for.” —Former gangster Arnold “The Brain” Rothstien
Basically, you'll know which direction to take, after taking your first step (or you'll learn to fly, after being pushed from the nest).
In my case, this was exactly that. I got laid off from my previous job (after almost 27 years). It was entirely expected (for years), so I'd had a lot of time to prepare.
When I learned Hard Truth #9 (If you are over 40, it will be rough. If you are over 50, prepare to be humiliated -and not get a job), I was fairly panicky, at first, then, I realized that I had plenty of savings to retire early, and I already knew of some nonprofits that could use my expertise, so I didn't need to stop working.
I really wanted to retire -not to play golf, but to work harder than I ever have, in my life, doing stuff that is appreciated, effective, and untainted by bad management and "fuck it -let's ship."
So I was forced into it.
A number of companies didn't get my work, but I seriously doubt they miss me. They certainly didn't seem as if they would, during the recruiting process, and I probably would have been laid off again, tout suite.
>>It's sad to see people again and again sell their life.
Why? I don't find that sad at all - some people really enjoy their work, and it becomes a big part of their identity. What better way to spend you life than doing something you truly enjoy and provides you an income to be comfortable and take care of your family/friends?
I know a lot of doctors, they have spent their entire lives taking care of people, saving lives and generally doing good things. Most of them have a very, very hard time retiring when the time comes - it is who they are. I know several in their eighties who continue to practice because it brings them joy.
While not an MD myself, if I won the mega-millions tomorrow, and was set for life, I would still write code for someone or something.
I'd still interact with computers in some way shape or form if I were a millionaire, but I also hope that such an amount of money and free time would expand my scope of personal fulfillment to some other unknown areas of life and consciousness beyond IT work.
Ironically, I think your MD example provides the exact sort of comparison that should trigger some critical introspection for most tech workers. Most of us are not exactly saving lives with the time we spend in front of the keyboard.
There is a difference between having passion for your profession and selling your life to one specific company.
If you have passion, you don't need to care where to follow it. But OP seemingly traded a fulfilling privat life with friends for a company with coworkers.
I work to live, and if I quit I would not be lonely at all because I have hobbies and a social life that is intentionally completely separate from work.
But not everyone is the same. Some people derive great value and pleasure from their job.
Another hard truth… You learn who will help you in a crisis, and it will surprise you. People you thought had your back become scarce, while some weak connections really go to bat for you because of some small courtesy you did years prior.
Going through the experience once makes you more empathetic to folks in a similar boat.
> You’re probably going to have to fake enthusiasm for the AI-enabled TikTok outfit generator you will be working on. No, it’s not going to make the world a better place. Yes, it might even make the world a worse place.
This is how the world becomes a worse place - perhaps if working for the company developing this is life or death for you or a loved one, I can see why.
Thank you for posting this. I really dislike how not wanting to work for companies that are actively harming the world is often portrayed as some sort of selfish luxury.
Being laid off can and will forever change your career risk tolerance. When I got laid off in 2008, I stayed at the next job probably 10 years longer than I should have because of effects of being laid off.
That's a good point, and I had a similar reaction. I got laid off from my first job out of college in late 2006. Unemployed for 3 months, found a role with a new company 2 hours away, moved, and stayed there over 12 years because I didn't want to take the risk of moving. That, and I let myself be too intimidated by the interview process.
I eventually got laid off from there and found a new job after a ~2 month stint of unemployment; stayed with my new company for about 18 months and then changed to my current job of my own volition to find something I was happier with rather than sitting around being miserable.
On the other hand, the aftermath of this layoff is making it pretty clear to me that going I got this field was a mistake and I was trying to get a career going for five years that was just going to end up nowhere. This might be what I need to get out for good.
7 years later after getting laid off and I'm still paranoid about performance reviews and layoff rumors in the press. I never used to be nervous about talking to people about my work but it really affected me.
Good article. Well written and to the point. It's sad how bad the employer / employee world is today.
I have been providing computers services independently since 2007, but had a cerebral hemorrhage in 2017. Which I wrote short book about(It needs some work still)[1]. My NDE came without the typical experiences that you read about, but something within me had changed, I had a really hard time being dishonest and hiding parts of myself from the world (this is how I see it, others might see it differently). During my recovery, I didn't know if I could return to providing services independently, and had some interviews after being out of the work world for about 15 years, and man, had it changed.
My brutal honesty about myself and the world didn't go over to well in those interviews. But it made me realize how messed up parts of the world are, and how the employer/employee relationship is really slavery to forces outside myself. A good book on this is "The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity"[2].
Obviously, its not so easy to extract oneself from this relationship, I had something to fall back on as I redoubled my efforts to continue my services independently. Obviously, not all employer/employee relationships are slavery, but the corporate world and the politics behind it feels like slavery to me.
It feels like we are gradually moving away from centralized systems like these as more and more people realize whats important. COVID seemed like a big wake up call for many.
It's important, now more than ever, that people find what's important to them and start taking small steps in that direction as it seems like concentrated industries that are too big to fail are starting to collapse.
100%. My last layoff was in 2011, but at that time they closed the entire office I was in at the time (50 of us laid off). We helped eachother find places to interview and met up once a week to have lunch. I ended up working remotely with 3 of my old co-workers.
"If you had asked me right after I got laid off how long it would take me to get back to work, I would have said three months – including two months of vacation. It took me a year."
That is fascinating. I'm glad they shared this experience. It is very different than my own experience. I'm trying to imagine what that would be like, to go a year looking for a job.
Here in New York City, at the end of 2022, I am still seeing very strong hiring of software developers. I was recently hiring at FutureStay.com. And I recently had a friend lose their job and they found another job after 6 weeks, of which 3 weeks was pure vacation.
The one group that I see struggle is new developers who have just graduated from dev bootcamps. Some of these developers struggle 6 to 12 months to find a software development jobs.
But of experienced software developers? Going a year without finding employment? I heard of such stories during the recession of 2001, though I never saw it among my personal circle. And this was very much true in the aftermath of the crisis of 2008 -- it wasn't till about 2011 or 2012 that things got back to normal. But even then, when I went looking for a job in 2010, it only took me 4 weeks to find a job.
A year without a job?
I will say the industry has gotten slower about hiring, with more and more rounds of interviews. In the extreme case, some companies now have 9 or 10 rounds of interviews, which is far past the point where the Law Of Diminish Returns sets in. By contrast, when I was hired at WineSpectator.com in 2010 the CTO interviewed me for 2 hours and then hired me on the spot, I didn't have to talk to anyone else. Likewise when Mark Herschberg, the CTO of ShermansTravel.com, hired me in 2011.
I feel like the industry is driving away possible talent by adding in so many layers of testing and recruitment.
There is absolutely no good reason why an experienced software developer should go a year without a job. That such a thing can happen suggests something is broken with our current hiring processes.
Only exception was first half of 2009 when it seemed like the world had ended.
Otherwise, for experienced people, something is wrong. Not trying hard enough, applying to wrong companies, terrible resume, interview very badly, demanding a job above skill level.
> Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off.
I don’t understand this assertion, unless “laid off” now means “fired with cause”. People are laid off all the time, for no reason other than the company wants to reduce their labor costs.
Perhaps the author is assuming that the company is also making a judgement about their skills, e.g. that they’re somehow not up to some arbitrary standard? (I think that it is very easy to make this assumption, especially when laid off the first time.)
Anyway, there should be no need to give a potential employer a reason about why you were let go other than the position was eliminated.
yes and no - unless companies laid off everybody, or an entire division/location for example, they already made some sort of decision on who would stay and who would go - if you find yourself in the 'let go' category, than someone likely made a judgement about you already and found you less desirable than the 'keep' category - thats just the unfortunate reality.
"Laid off" should be one of the safest reasons to give for leaving an employer, right up there with giving birth to a child or taking care of a sick loved one. Layoffs from big companies are in the news now and there's rumors about how employees were chosen, but by and large saying you were laid off from some random company shouldn't mean anything other than that employer restructured and you had bad luck. Certainly you as a job applicant are under no obligation to speculate during an interview about why you specifically were let go.
Of course someone made a judgement, you just don't know what criteria they used, so it could be anything from "didn't like his face" all the way to "had the highest salary".
Furthermore, how does it help in any way to assume that the reason for the layoff was because of a personal shortcoming? And why should we assume in advance and without evidence that a potential employer won't consider us because of this?
IME it's arbitrary criteria - either last hired, first fired, or most expensive people, or older people (illegal, but they use other proxies for age to hide it), or most of a division because they're pivoting/no profitable, or you don't want to work 100 hour weeks sitting on the floor near your new CEOs office, or...
Getting laid off from some places is a badge of honor, IMO.
I would love to read a European, perhaps Swedish version of this article. 12+ months of unemployment insurance is standard here. I guess it doesn't take the loneliness away, but might make unemployment less traumatic.
Looking at the internet, it looks like Sweden supports 300 days of unemployment benefits that max out at 1200 SEK/day (about $115 US). In the US, one can receive up to 210 days of unemployment with a max benefit of $145/week.
So yes, there is unemployment insurance in the US, and it pays almost 30% more than in Sweden. There is a HUGE gotcha, though, and that's the cost of health insurance. Unless the former employer is subsidizing, that costs about $400-700/month. There are, in general, far fewer social welfare services to rely on as well.
I think you just compared a daily rate to a weekly rate, if I'm reading correctly? Which would make the US rates very small in comparison, especially combined with health insurance as you describe.
I really liked the article, one of the few on this subject that doesn't feel like self-help or a humble brag. So kudos to the author.
That said, like you, I wonder if this is an American thing. It feels to me as if many Americans are one job away from total collapse, like their country is only ok for people with a good employment and an utter nightmare for everyone else, with no safety net at all except your own savings. With that in mind, a year without a job prospect would indeed seem like living in hell.
>It feels to me as if many Americans are one job away from total collapse, like their country is only ok for people with a good employment and an utter nightmare for everyone else, with no safety net at all except your own savings.
Yes, that is pretty much correct. Many many Americans, even ones considered well-off, live a threadbare existence. To Europeans it's unfathomable what can happen in the United States but it's just as bad as you think if not worse. There is literally no bottom in this society, there's no limits to the depths you can fall.
> Very few of us are going to bat 1.000 during our careers, especially with the industry reshaping itself under our feet.
This feels like it may be an iceberg. Could you expand more on what "reshaping" you're seeing? Are you referring to the mass layoffs specifically or is there some broader context to this comment?
I think SWE is a very young field. Just 50 years ago GOTO was commonplace (apparently?). In any case I think the future hold some interesting prospects, with copilot and gpt and all.
Not OP, but the significant change I see is FAANG can't hire simply to keep talent away from their competitors anymore. Not sure what overall percentage of people working in those jobs were hired for that reason, but they'll likely never see that kind of salary again.
>Do not disclose the current status of your interviewing process
Not sure exactly what this means but it's pretty common for recruiters to check your timeline and try to work around it. For instance, they'll try to expedite you if you already have offers on the table or relax the timeline so it fits with interviews.
I strongly recommend only sharing minimal information about your job search with employers. Don't share when you started looking, because if it's been a while then you'll look bad. Don't share that you think you're far along in the process at some other place, because if that falls through then you'll be embarrassed if it comes up again or it might look like you were lying to put pressure on them.
The fact that an employer could speed things up for you if you have active prospects elsewhere is a little insulting because it's the flip side of saying we know we can put you on the backburner because you're unemployed and struggling.
You can say whether you're actively or passive looking, or if you have a firm offer on the table, or if you're especially interested in employers in some particular area if it makes you look good with this employer. Otherwise don't bring your search up and politely deflect questions if you can.
> Companies may be looking to reset expectations around compensation and working conditions. Offers are extended, but with extremely unpalatable terms compared to prior jobs. For unsavvy candidates, this won’t become apparent until late in the interview process.
...
> The sooner you accept that you will have to do the interviewing equivalent of eating your vegetables, the less you will immolate yourself and, by extension, the opportunity in front of you by dying on some absurd hill. Suck it up and play the game. Sounds obvious? If so, I will politely refer you back to the title of this post.
Those comments seem dissonant. The second sounds like someone who has blindly bought into the first like it's a truth. It's a political struggle and we can do much better.
The hill isn't at all absurd; people before you fought for it and won it before - that's how you ended up on top of it. They didn't do that by accepting defeat as some inevitability, but by seeing the world and imagining something better. (They did the same with technology - how will you be an entrepenuer if you buy into this reactionary, depressive, defeatest attitude?)
Now it's your turn. The future of our society, in significant respects, depends on it.
It depends on you. Your predecessors built everything good that you have. Now it's your turn - no cavalry is coming; there's nobody else. It's you and me. With a little vision and daring, it's incredible what can be accomplished - just look at the world we live in.
I'm about to get laid off, there's sliver of hope that something might come through before the end of the week but we all pretty much know now that the company is finished. I dedicated the last 7 years of my life to this and I'm disappointed that the investors don't share our optimism and confidence in the future of the company.
I've been laid off before and I share the OP's perspective that it can be a cathartic singular moment in life that presents an opportunity for re-invention.
Getting laid off absolutely sucks and it could potentially happen to anyone, thus it's important everyone has some sort of nest egg.
And please... network, network, network! I know not everyone has this opportunity, but if you leave a good lasting impression and make friends with strong coworkers, over time they will get promoted to higher and higher positions making it incredibly easier to find a job when needed.
> You will have to interview for jobs where you will use a language you despise. Maybe even Java. Definitely Javascript.
No.
Or rather, maybe?
I have been fortunate enough that in a couple decades in this industry, including two major downturns, I've never been in a position that I /must/ find a job on a particular timeline to pay the bills. While my life situation helps with this, I do recognize that luck is a major part of it.
As a result, this line in particular fails to resonate with me. If I take a job doing something that makes me miserable, I will be miserable. Maybe I can put up with it for six months, but what's the point? During those six months, between working full time and being miserable, I will not be effective at looking for a long-term role I enjoy. Better to take a personal bridge loan and keep looking for something that works for me.
We're software engineers. If, like me, having someone pay you to build cool shit is about as good as it gets -- hold out for that, don't settle for doing what you "despise" instead.
I think you're in a more fortunate position than many.
> Better to take a personal bridge loan
You often won't be able to get a loan without verifiable steady income.
> Maybe I can put up with it for six months, but what's the point?
To bring in income. Pay for living expenses. Pay off debts. Provide for family. Start/increase/replenish savings.
> hold out for that, don't settle for doing what you "despise" instead.
People with families and multiple financial responsibilities beyond their immediate needs often have to do things they "despise", if even/only for a short while.
Your post, while not having anything specifically 'wrong' in it, comes across as a bit privileged. You recognize that luck is a part of it, and you recognize your own life situation helps, but you still tell people to 'hold out' for 'building cool shit'. Not everyone can hold out, for a multitude of reasons.
This is totally fair, and I was trying to acknowledge my understanding of these points. But I do have to take a bit more of an aggressive stance on some of this -- by simple virtue of being software engineers successful enough to be laid off in bulk, rather than dismissed for cause years ago, we are in an elite group. Over the previous years, we've had great opportunities, including the opportunity to save enough money to ride through hard times. The amount one needs to save, and the amount of hard times one can ride through, absolutely varies with life situation; and a black swan event like medical bills can destroy any amount of savings. But I do feel like the vast majority of folks looking to get a second, third, or fourth job as a software engineer (as opposed to that first job) should be able to hold out for something that is at least not "despised." And I do hope that those reading this who are mentally responding "nope, I'd have no options" might consider the value of having those options, and perhaps adjust spending vs savings rates while they have an opportunity to do so.
Agreed, and I may have been a bit too quick in the reply.
I think age and life situation play a much bigger part in this than people recognize, and I'll go out and say "especially younger people". You can pay lip service to it, but if you're in your late 20s or early 30s starting a family, your financial obligations and priorities are vastly different from an empty nester or single person in their 50s.
By almost any measure, a software engineer with 20+ years of experience - especially someone who perhaps didn't have kids - should probably have months of years of savings to tap in to to weather a downturn. But I've also known folks with 10-15 years of increasing experience who still struggled financially, and it was usually a mix of having kids and limited forward planning that kept them in a 'paycheck to paycheck' lifestyle - often, not even a terribly extravagant one.
Most of the bad decisions I've made have come during times when I was in very bad financial situations. The stress contributes to poor decision making, and it was often something I wasn't even aware of in my early days. I just thought that's "how it is". Even getting to the point of having 3-4 months of savings seemed outrageous and out of reach to my younger self.
And yes... the black swan of a medical situation can deplete savings enormously quickly. Even relatively small hiccups we've had over the years have ended up taking thousands out of pocket that were unexpected. Having, say, $30k in savings can help you weather a lot of unforeseen setbacks - car issue, housing issues, moving expenses, etc. A medical condition may drain that 'overnight'. There may be loads of billing delays/etc which may drag it out over months, but the 'debt owed' may be immediate.
My wife got sick and within a few days, we're in ER with double pneumonia and she's struggling to breathe (scary). $4k owed. I blacked out from covid shot - ambulanced to ER. Another $4k owed. Older me can weather those costs now. 25 years ago those sorts of expenses would have been crippling. And these are tiny compared to other things that can happen - my family has generally been quite fortunate with respect to health conditions and medical issues over the years. I know others who are far worse off.
I started programming c/c++ then perl/python and i hated java initially, but it actually taught me CS. Java has very mature and powerful libraries, e.g. rxjava and guava.
Kudo's for reminding everyone of the idea of hard truths and the kind practice of sharing them.
We could all get better at facing unpleasant reality; so much more damage is done by being avoidant, mainly to our own character.
The key question is why recruiting is maladaptive, whether the market is hot or cold.
The answer lies in why no one has really addressed the question: recruiting is spoiled by a culture and practice of secrecy.
The goal is to be fair and avoid recruits gaming the system, but the practice ends up nurturing toxic judgments, tending towards the paranoid and the extreme. Paranoia excludes supposedly non-compliant untrustable people evidenced in resume gaps, and extremism excludes supposedly toxic people evidenced by ancient social media posts.
Like defense procurement, the secrecy that is necessary ends up concealing and preserving toxic practices. In both cases, programmatic application of objective standards could dis-intermediate, so the recruiters/procurement bureaucracies resist and claim essential wisdom.
I was laid off in 2010 and I can relate with a lot of these points. Especially how long it took me to find a new job. Despite what I thought was a great CV it took me nearly 6 months. I thought I’d find a job easily when I got laid off.
It was an incredibly humbling experience - reaching out to tens of companies and barely getting any responses. Took me 3 months to just secure my first on-site.
I’ve generally always gotten jobs from reach outs while employed - making me feel special - when in reality it was my skills simply lining up with some open headcount at that time.
When you’re laid off suddenly it’s a whole different ballgame. It’s largely luck trying to find matching roles with open headcount. In a downturn this is especially rough (like now).
It taught me some things: don’t stay anywhere too long (it restricts your network), make sure your skills are not too niche, and ensure you are following industry trends so you remain widely employable.
I was laid off 3 times in my almost 30 years career. Every time it was difficult experiences, but I got some lessons from that.
I still member of two active "ex-..." communities. Those are most helpful and useful, especially when other people are getting there after me and it was a perfect cause to get back in touch, meet for drinks or get back on track with common hobby.
After first one I always open my piggy bank and do the things I wanted for a long time but had no time to do. Like getting a sailboat skipper licence and do a couple of gigs like deckhand on a voyage, repair or long haul. Or travel for a distant destination for a month.
Time between jobs is always great to get in touch with own body and mind, like doing a health checkup or visit short-term psychology group.
And of course it is a perfect time to spend more time with parents, relatives and friends.
Honesty really has no place in corporate interactions. The author is way too old to be learning this lesson. The reason you are applying is that you "are passionate about X because of Y" even if you don't give a flying crap about what the org does.
I would just add one thing here, aside from echoing the comments on the great writing. Everyone needs to focus on saving when they have a job for uncertain times. I've found it incredibly helpful in the last year with some savings in the bank, to ward off the uncertainty and chaos around not having a job, and taking it a bit easy so to say.
Saving at least 20% or so of every paycheck is good standard advice for rainy days. But, also not to keep any debt.
Lastly, it's not that terrifying these days to not have employment in the software industry. Things will turn around as long as you work on developing your skills. Staying positive is good advice for the short and long-term. Because everything will work out, and we usually stress a lot more than we really should.
I've survived several layoffs, a couple firings and a couple quittings and I don't really identify with much of what the author says here in any of these situations.
I've never considered leaving a job for any reason to be "lonely", nor does it take very long to find another position that suits me well. If I let one of the recruiters I talk to know that I'm looking for work, I've usually got multiple interviews within 3-5 days.
The only thing I'd really agree with is the bit about honesty and transparency - I've definitely been a bit too honest about my faults before and it's cost me an interview or two.
I don't know if I'm an odd duck, or the author is just very poor at networking - but it seems like the latter to me.
It very much depends on their specialty. Some niche position are available once a year or less, in my country, while regular developers are hired by the thousand every month.
At the first round of layoffs from a startup, we (the laid off, not the company) started a Slack for those affected. Subsequent rounds added more people. It made the whole thing less lonely and kept up a decent network.
Regarding #6: I've found through experimentation that it's totally OK for me to just be opaque about my identity online. I'm not anonymous at all, just that if a prospective employer were to Google me, they'd not find my meager internet presence. It's not that I'm hiding anything, but in the spirit of #6, not hiding something doesn't mean you have to advertise it either. I've never had an employer give enough of a shit to see my social media accounts. And while I admit this is probably a position of privilege in some ways, I feel like almost anyone in SWE or wanting to get into SWE is better off this way anyways.
Again, it's not about deception. If I were asked, I'd say I don't have any professional internet presence (which is true, I don't. This is me as a person here, not me as an employee.) I of course will link my GitHub, but links from my internet presence only point in the direction of my GitHub, and not the other way around. So if you were really curious, you could dig. Nobody cares to do that, though. I think employers that search are mostly just looking for blatant red flags to try to simplify their lives, and thus it's mutually beneficial to keep a lower profile online even if you don't do anything wrong.
Of course, in my case, it also helps to have a super common name :) But still. Being "just" a pseudonym most places is fine.
Though I don't actively hide my presence on-line as my professional email address and sarcastic writing style never changes, I do love the shock of some co-workers when they find I have no accounts for linkedin, twitter, facebook, github etc and generally create new throwaway accounts every time I get a new laptop.
It comes as quite a shock when I find an old comment or post that I recognise and now don't agree with and because of this rarely judge others history, lets face it we have all posted comments we wish we could take back in hindsight.
Plan for early retirement even if you don't want it. You may want to work forever, but the jobs may not want you. Already an issue for older ICs and I expect it will just get worse.
I think when I hit 50 my fire went out. I'm not 1/10th of what most HNers are I trod my way through jobs IT or not. As long as money comes in and I can bear the job. I like technology but it can drain you and at some point burn-out is a possibility if you can't recover like you could decades earlier.
Certainly save money now and always especially if young like 20s. Stuff money away learn how to invest. Even if you're older save like your life depends on it right now. Even for emergency funds I'd suggest a year's worth not as cash but something just as easy to liquidate that won't lose much value.
Yes I'd say plan to retire as soon as you possibly can. Or switch gears to part-time work since younger workers will become increasingly annoying to you. You may like them but generational culture clash is natural.
I'm less than ten years from retirement. I still need to work for those ten years, and probably afterward. Yes, I get a lot of ageism, ableism and sexism in my job searches. I don't look my age, fortunately, but having over 20 years in my field makes people want to lowball me or hire a "cheaper" (less experience) person. It's very annoying.
I just got laid off and I went through a layoff in the early 2000s and it was brutal. Had to do contract work with tech I didn't like and now with the added pressure of having kids that I have to care for financially it's definitely more stressful.
One thing I'm doing different this time around is that I'm building a project that could be useful for some friends and might actually scratch an itch. It allows me to get back in the latest technologies and adds something to my portfolio.
Was laid off in March 2020 (senior dev/lead), took 1.5 years to find another job. Share author's disbelief in "job market in unbelievably strong", "people quit jobs because they are unhappy and hop to better positions", "employers cannot have enough IT workers" and similar statements.
By extension wondering how accurate overall job market statistics are; "Employers are scrambling to find workers" while layoffs have been in full swing for months now.
Love most of the advice I see here, but there's a few quibbles I have here.
> You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.
One trend I've been seeing is the MANGAs have been moving away from leetcode crap - in my org at one of them, I think almost the entire org is against leetcode questions as an insufficient form of candidate assessment.
> Come up with a more, uh, positive reason for why you’re interviewing instead of disclosing that you were laid off.
Honestly, as an engineering manager on the hiring side, I haven't seen any negative perception in these times when candidates disclose they were laid off - its become so common as of late & often not due to the candidates' fault that it's a non-issue for us. I know a manager trying to extend a formal offer to one such candidate who revealed that they were laid off. I especially appreciate honesty in a candidate when they admit they don't know something & try to set the conversation around working with the info they have as presented to them, creating space for an open conversation around questions being asked instead of viewing it as a Q&A session. Those tend to be the candidates who get the highest marks from me.
When I was at the spot before covid, I felt very venerable and desperate at the same time. I was junior and just started my career. At the beginning of job search, I tried to tell people the true story behind. However, once I opened that, it immediately became a gossip where the recruiter was more interested in the details than my competency for the job.
I survived it eventually after 6 months but I wish I knew all the truths before that.
I wanted to get back into more hands-on work on something. Being laid off (well, not like a usual one, but I do not want to talk about that here) was not part of that plan, of course, but I still wanted to move on anyway. It opened me to accept dealing with the interview process more, which I always found unpleasant and tedious in the past. With that, compounded with not having to go through that for 8 years, sort of stuck with me. I started interviewing before being laid off.
After getting through a few of them already, I feel a little more comfortable of the process itself, even if it meant I ended up with rejections. At least with a little boost of confidence around it (that and seeing my financial runway), at least now pushing myself on this has changed my attitude.
For what it is worth though, my own interest is to work with something that I can improve on what I improve on. Except for a couple of industries, I'd do anything almost, hopefully with an emphasis on Java, as I think the space is a bit more exciting than the many years before now (or that I stopped caring over trends and just want to write programs :))
> Companies may be looking to reset expectations around compensation and working conditions. Offers are extended, but with extremely unpalatable terms compared to prior jobs. For unsavvy candidates, this won’t become apparent until late in the interview process.
This seems like something that will become especially prevalent this time around given the much higher level to which salaries were pushed during the bubble.
I don't know why people attach themselves to their work so much. It's just a job. When you have money, what's wrong with quitting to live your life for a bit? I got burned out but only stayed to see the numbers in my account go up. That's no way to live.
I don't even like tech anymore, maybe it's more fulfilling to start a farm or coffee shop
This is good, and/but is one dimension. A few from me:
- Have perspective. Several years down the line when you're in a new company/career/life, you will recognize this layoff was a necessary thing to happen for you to "get there."
- It's going to take a while. Every job I ever got, took waaaay longer than it should have. Things happen. Roles get filled internally, headcount goes away, etc. Job finding is inherently filled with friction, so if it takes 6 months or more, don't interpret that as "I am bad/this will never work" - it's just the nature of the beast.
- Be in sync with your family on what matters. My wife was very clear that she was going to be fine if it took me longer to find a role I was really excited about. We were lucky that we could afford that, and it's good to be explicit.
- There's no stigma in layoffs but you can generate your own stigma in how you talk about it. Don't be bitter and do provide some color. My answer why I was looking was "the company took a big revenue hit with COVID and had to reduce headcount. The strategy was to cut from areas that were further along in technological maturity, such as (my area.) We lost a lot of senior tech talent, including myself. I am really grateful having worked there, though!" This is 100% true to what happened and how I feel, and it's a great answer because it makes is clear I wasn't fired because I was bad, and shows some maturity and perspective.
- Be aware that your next job may not be your perfect job. It should be good enough that you MIGHT want to stay there, but at the very least can be a launching pad for your real next role. When you are laid off, the question isn't "do I see myself here the next 10 years" but more like "am I pretty sure this will be an interesting / worthwhile year and a half"
- Don't be negative. The author posted some spreadsheet about how rough his job search was and then was surprised that a company wasn't interested in him. I don't think this is the same as "truth can hurt you" - more like "companies are on the lookout for red flags, and if you are the kind of person who complains in public, maybe you are going to be a negative culture fit." That's doesn't mean they want yes-men, but there's a big difference between people who feel an obligation to dissent (strong positive) to perceived complainers. Complainers are poison.
Speaking from personal experience the "there's no stigma in layoffs" bit is not always true. Many places have asked me why I was laid off upfront with an assumption that it was due to performance reasons unless I'm able to prove otherwise.
I've been in that loneliness before, and don't want anyone to have to suffer it.
One thing we can do to help is have each other's backs by providing references. I've made it clear to colleagues who get laid off that I don't care what the corporate policy says: I'll give you a reference. It's a moral duty.
Gosh it's so hard these days. So much of the past 10 years was easy speculation and I have certainly let that go to my head. Even as a fresh grad, I had people beating down my door. Suddenly, it's all quiet. I'm reduced to working at the grocery store- a humbling experience for sure.
I have gotten laid off, fired, or otherwise managed out so many times in the last year or so I am writing off the whole year on my resume and calling it a “personal development” year and not listing any short term positions on there. 2021-2022 was just a complete disaster for job stability relative to most of my previous career where I was doing 2-3 years minimum in a role. My personal recommendation in addition to TFA is enroll in COBRA and get an in-network therapist. I thankfully managed to survive off of credit cards, debt, and help from the parents, but if the recent role I landed ends up being a dud not sure what is next for me. Thankfully it seems to be going relatively well.
> You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.
Really? I would think contributing (significantly) to an open-source project would look better than spending time on leetcode, though I've never tried leetcode.
That would require the hiring staff being able to evaluate your contribution. Unlikely, unless the job you're interviewing for is interviewing because you made a useful contribution to a software that they use themselves.
In my experience interviewing, nothing on github or your resume will be read. The only thing that will be read is what you type into coderpad during your interview.
> “When faced with two choices, flip a coin. When it’s in the air, you’ll know which side you’re hoping for.” —Former gangster Arnold “The Brain” Rothstien
In the TV series Boardwalk Empire, he said that. I can't find any evidence he ever said it in real life.
I just had the fourth layoff of my career earlier this month.
It doesn’t get easier per se, but you do start to develop a process, and having a process makes the whole ordeal a lot less daunting.
Perhaps the most daunting part for me right now is that I’ve spent the better part of a decade getting hired by people I worked with before, and this is the first time no one in my immediate network has a req open. Still, the value of a network is paramount: To paraphrase another comment here, do good work and be good to work with, and you will have people out there looking for a reason to get you in the door.
> Hard Truth #3: Interview invites are a poor proxy for your desirability
Just because you’re getting a lot of offers to interview does not mean that you are a hot commodity.
Hard disagree. Interviewing is expensive as all hell from the company's perspective. Any company interviewing a rash of candidates is engaging in a weird strategy.
Getting an initial interview is a positive sign that (on paper) you're qualified. Further interviews with the company become a blended signal of your qualifications and being a culture match with the latter becoming more dominant with more rounds.
As someone recently laid off, I strongly ressonate with points #1 and #5 and the amount of platitudes and empty words (but to be honest, some people were truly earnest/helpful on helping me get through this) involved in this makes the whole experience almost feel like being gaslighted by (almost) everyone. I was already quite aware on how unaunthentic and fake things are in the corporate world but this layoff (and several others in the industry right now) was really something else.
And then companies wonder why employees are more and more "mercenary"...
You’re probably going to have to fake enthusiasm for the AI-enabled TikTok outfit generator you will be working on. No, it’s not going to make the world a better place. Yes, it might even make the world a worse place.
Let's be honest, whatever you (any of us) as a SWE were working on previously was probably making the world a worse place also, regardless of what you thought when you first started working on it.
In my opinion the last decade (or two) of tech can be summed up as "the road to hell is paved with good intentions."
I had this article left on my screen to read after making a cup of tea. Wife was a bit confused, she'd only read "8 Hard Truths I learned when I got laid"...
>You’re going to have to grind Leetcode. Yes, even the dynamic programming problems.
Why there isn't this much problem with having to learn yet another JS framework,
get familiarity with database of the month, learn some tool like docker/k8s/ansible/vagrant/blabla or yet another proprietary toolchain like AWS/Azure/GCP
but foundational cs/programming knowledge is top hated thing, that people even call it "discriminatory for people with families" or something like that
Because companies tend to let you learn those on the job. Nobody complains if I don't quite know Flask in interviews if I know Django. Certainly nobody cares if you know the details inside out or want to refer to docs.
Algos is a skill you do not use on the job and companies are extremely picky about you getting the correct answer.
For 99% of the roles out there, needing to drop into algorithms all the time is an anti pattern that demonstrates lack of knowledge of your tech stack. I’ve had to clean up a lot of code written by people who wanted to show off their algo knowledge to solve a problem that should have been addressed with a few lines of SQL.
You're assuming that that awareness of how to solve a problem and immediate hands-on-keyboard test for materially different success rates while actually employed. My experience is that by the time you've gotten the job, most of the crammed-in Leetcode specifics have leaked back out and you're in the same place as somebody who knows the thing from school or from using it in prior projects, but didn't have it in their fingertips during the interview--you're looking it up again, because you know what you need but don't have the details top-of-mind.
The insistence on being able to spew out code-first answers to contrived problems during an interview situation is silly gatekeeping, but it makes the people who pass feel good, and that's why it persists.
My feeling is that the fundamentals are difficult in their own way: requiring math, logic, creativity, seemingly arbitrary constraints. Learning the flavor of the month on stack X is often just learning their jargon, keywords, and matching common patterns one probably already knows.
All that said, sentiment against stack churn is significant and a common theme here on HN.
Because after a successful, productive, 5-10 years at a company you tend to forget the algorithms you don't use. I can remember enough about the knapsack problem to talk intelligently about it. I can't remember how to do the dynamic programming. In 90% of cases given infinite time I can eventually arrive at the solution to most med-hard questions. However, you don't have infinite time. I find problems like optimizing how much water goes into buckets to the point I can solve it in 4 minutes with variations so far below me it doesn't even register on my radar. For the record, I have over a decade in this industry. Having to do these problems makes me feel like that hard earned decade may as well had not happened.
For those of us with lives, hobbies, etc grinding leetcode is exhausting. Moreover, you can't just grind it. You have to grind it to the point you literally can brain dump answers in an interview.
Interviewers rarely care about your accomplishments. No one cares you did staff eng. at XYZ, managed engineers, have familiarity with all sorts of frameworks, etc. This is the only industry where every time you look for a job you're treated like don't have a resume. I think many (if not most) people are insulted by this because the people in charge are belittling them. I would bet even Knuth would struggle to tackle a modern programming interview. That's a problem.
In my experience you're overstating the need to be able to instantly brain dump complex algorithms, except maybe at the FAANG level where I have no experience. It's far more important to be comfortable solving any simple coding challenge on demand in front of people in a high-stakes situation like an interview.
Luck is vital in the interviewing game, from moment you apply for a position after finding a company, to the multiple rounds of interviewing.
My thought is, don't rush. Keep and spend more time on learning and doing what you wanna do, go deeper on the holes of knowledge (not for the sake of interviewing).
Good things need time and patience. It's the only thing that i can do, and i can't do more about it about the interviewing game.
Truth be told, most of the dynamic programming problems in Leetcode are relatively straightforward: find the recursive relation or state transition equation in general, identify the initial condition, and then build up the transition from bottom up. What's much harder, at least to me, are those ad-hoc LeetCode-Hard problems that require insights or clever tricks.
My advice if you're currently prepping: Don't worry too much about hard problems. They're much more rare. While true you may get an interviewer who hasn't properly calibrated their question, but more often than not, it's easy or mediums. Invest your time into telling a convincing story about your previous experiences, the impact you made at companies, and how great it'd be to work with you.
During a downturn, Big Tech doesn't send out a memo to increase the difficulty of algo / DS questions. It's being more picky about culture fit, skill match, prior experience, recommendations from current staff, etc..
It's more do we hire Bob who is qualified and could learn embedded software for hardware devices or hire Jill who is just as qualified but has experience in the space. Previously we'd hire both. Now we hire Jill.
> It [work] is the gravitational center around which the other activities in your life revolve.
Don't let work be most important part of your life! Companies encourage you to, so they have another cheap way to lock you in. Years of work from home showed me that your (social) life shouldn't mainly happen at work. Better find friends at hobbies/meetups/etc.
I was laid off in February 2020 and it took me almost a year.
I didn't feel like I needed to keep that I was laid off a secret; but I disagree about doing the 8-hour take-homes. They indicate unreasonable bosses and I always walked away. When I was more naive and did those kinds of things, I would often get no callback, not even a "thanks but no thanks."
Thank you for writing this. I have the sinking feeling I will be laid off within the next 6 months and I am already starting to get worried about the job search ahead. This is great preemptive information, now I need the "so you're about to be laid off..." post for someone who hasn't had to interview for a job in 15 years.
This is why people do LC problems daily and interview regularly. You will find that you need to constantly play the game if you want to stay in the game. It's a sliding scale of preparedness. Those out of step with the interview meta and out of practice will find it more painful.
The biggest mistake is losing your job, then having to prep to get a new one.
Not a lot in here about being on a visa: you can do everything right, but your life can be uprooted by work authorization being artificially limited to x days after you’re laid off. Getting on a more permanent visa isn’t actually possible for a lot of devs.
OP is a really good writer / articulator and I found this to be a great piece - with that in mind the fact that he took a full year to find something tells me he must’ve had red flags elsewhere, or was just really fussy or had a high bar?
>You might have to pay for coffee at the office. And it may even be drip!
Uh, no. If you're paying for your own drip coffee, you're working at a convenience store, not in an office. Coffee is for closers and people who write software.
Getting laid off is a great introduction into class solidarity with your fellow workers. We have literally nothing in common with the capitalists at the top. You are closer to homelessness than you are to being a billionaire.
> Most capitalists are not billionaires or even millionaires,
Yes, they are, if one is referring to the capitalist class (the haut bourgeoisie), those who relate to the economy primarily through capital to which other’s rented labor is applied, not “everyone with some, however incidental, capital”. Heck, even most of the middle class (petit bourgeoisie, who either apply their own labor to their own capital or who otherwise are supported significantly by both labor and capital) are at least millionaires. The working class, who obligatorily depend on renting out their labor to capitalists may have some incidental capital and not be millionaires, but they very much are not capitalists.
I'm referring to the capitalists as thought of in 21st century economics, not some outdated 19th century Marxist/extreme left-wing echo chamber (lol, 'haute bourgeoisie', are you even listening to yourself?). People who deploy and risk their capital to produce services or products are capitalists. e.g My local grocer is a capitalist or my grandfather running a family farm is a capitalist. I can tell you for sure my grandfather is not a millionaire, I'm not so sure about my local grocer, but I doubt it.
Reading your other comments, you've aggressively decided to dismiss the historical definition of the capitalist class because it doesn't suit your worldview. In that case there's essentially no conversation to be had because you're already operating from an alternative reality.
Because... I wrote the comment, and in the context of my comment, I am referring to the traditional idea of a "capitalist class". There's also no new revised understanding of "capitalists" that includes everyone with a small business. Even in "21st century economics", a capitalist is still traditionally considered someone who owns the means of production at the absolute top of the supply chain (the owners and controllers of capital). Your local grocery story owner is still literally buying his inventory from a supplier. You follow that supply chain long enough, there's more than likely a billionaire at the end of it. That's the actual capitalist.
Again, a capitalist is someone who deploys capital to provide a product or service. Not someone who is at the top of a supply chain. This is only the definition in Marxian 19th century economic theories. Saying that it's the historical definition shows lack of intellectual diversification.
Supplying yourself X & Y goods from the market to produce Z good or service does not make you a labourer. By that logic is someone who owns a car factory NOT a capitalist because he needs to supply himself steel from another capitalist whose factories produce steel? Or is the steel factory owner NOT a capitalist because he needs to provide himself with tools from another capitalist? That makes completely no sense.
You're saying a lot to say nothing, while being wildly incorrect with anything you do say. That's pretty impressive, considering you could just google your way out of this ignorance. Anyway, enjoy your alternate reality.
It's pretty hilarious that you've managed to mention Marx multiple times and throw in an "extreme left-wing echo chamber" unprovoked. Turn off the Fox News buddy, take a deep breath. The woke cancel culture isn't out to get you and the government isn't trying to implant chips in your arm.
Reply: Points out that the Marxist drivel is drivel
Commenter: Suprised Pikachu face “You must be watching too much Fox News to be bringing up Marx !11!!1” (No matter I don’t even have Fox News in my country, being from ex-Soviet block, but that’s Americans for you). And what’s wokeness and government wanting to implant chips have to do with Marxism? You seem a bit confused.
Anyway, very banal reaction, mostly inducing a yawn.
But no worries, keep the meltdown you’re having for everyone to see.
My experience was a bit different. Got laid off the week after thanksgiving. Being laid off was absolutely panic inducing. Got a new job before Christmas thanks to intense focus and the decision to accept a 3% paycut
The article makes me wonder if a support group (nonprofit) for laif off tech professionals with the goal of alleviating the loneliness. It could be as simple as a weekly call with others who have been laid off.
I can relate to #2 the most. My job search was 11 months, and this was in 2021 during the supposedly ridiculously good market. I think I had 50 applications and 7 on-sites before getting an offer
I don’t understand the thinking behind #7, especially when it contradicts #2-#4… Surely if the job market is so tight, it might be worthwhile to take what jobs you can get?
I was laid off once and didn't find much in common with anything in this article. I had two offers, not interviews, within a day or two of being laid off. Then 2-3 years later, after their outsourcing strategy imploded, they called me offering me that job back - this was the best part. Knowing they were making a mistake from day one and finally confirmation when the Cap Gemini losers were all shown the door. Maybe this is all different if your skills are more niche, but if you know something common like Java, I don't see any reason to have any break in your employment after a layoff unless that's what you want.
Yes, that was me during the dotcom boom. When I decided to get a new job, I had 2 offers after an intense 2 weeks of interviews.
However, once I was in my 40s, it became considerably harder to get a job. I'm now 59, and my career has never truly recovered (and yes, I have reasonably up to date skills). All I can get are contract jobs.
Part of the problem is that I am introverted and on the autistic spectrum. I have never interviewed well, and for various reasons, have not maintained a network of people who I can contact to get interviews. And even when an old acquaintance does come thru with an interview, I still have to get thru the leet code questions. Being highly recommended by an employee usually has little influence on whether I get hired.
At my age, I actually handle the social part of interviews better than ever, but now I have to deal with age discrimination.
Don't overstep the learning, though. Hard rule #6 in an environment with normal, real people, who actually care about what they work on, is a toxic rule.
I disagree with some of this greatly. Some of it is 100% spot on.
1. Getting laid of is usually pretty liberating. Everyone knows the company isn't generally doing well, the air is hot with friction, and you probably know you're working yourself into a corner. Getting laid off has happened to me two and a half times now. The first time was in the 2007 crash, and the company was hemorrhaging money and everyone knew it but didn't want to admit it. The second time I happened to quit the same week the CEO was planning layoffs. He teared up thanking me for saving him from having to fire anyone. The third time was one of the worst work experiences I have ever been in, but I didn't realize it until it was over. I called my wife and was excited, not downtrodden. Every day for the next two weeks was full of lunches and drinks and I had to insist on being allowed to pay every time.
2. This is just good advice. The only things you should spend money on when interviewing are dry cleaning and resume paper. I think my longest stretch was about 9 months, and my wife was forced to go back to work during that time despite just having a baby.
3. Yes and no. Some people don't interview well. Based on the author's other writing, he seems like the kind of person who might not interview well. In my career I think I have a close to 30% offer rate on interviews (but I'm very picky about applying for jobs). Yours may be higher, or much lower.
4. This is just always good advice. Set a bar for yourself, be willing to negotiate, and realize that work environment is about 500x as important as what technology you are using. I once got a job at a perl (yay!) shop where I worked for literally 1 day because the environment was so toxic.
5. Most offers for help come from people who don't know how to help. The author's approach here of direct asks is fantastic. Most will flake on you, but those that follow through are true friends.
6. Yeah this was a bad move. Don't talk about your exes on a first date, and definitely don't bring up the ones that swiped whichever direction the bad one is before your first date.
7. If the economy keeps going the way it is headed, ditch this advice in its entirety. Take that job, grasp it tightly to your breast, and don't let go no matter what happens. The job market in a down economy could be romantically described as falling somewhere between a chop shop and a meat market, and the hiring incentives for managers can be pretty twisted.
8. This has taught me to have a healthy relationship with my career. That post-layoff feeling should be bottled and sold next to the stickers that neophyte programmers put on their macbooks. There's nothing more seductive than confidence, and the clarity that a layoff brings is the best test of confidence there is (up there with a cold sales call, a VC interrogation, etc). If you can internalize a realistic understanding of your own skill level and marketability, you'll be an attractive hire, teammate, leader, etc.
I was laid off four months ago. I haven’t started my job search in earnest yet, so maybe my opinion will change, but being laid off has been amazing for me. Here are my thoughts:
1) You should not be broke if you’ve worked a few years as a software engineer. You’ve been earning good money and it is important to save during the good times so you’re prepared for the bad. I’m not saying this necessarily applies to OP, but it’s generally good advice to keep some money lying around for a rainy day.
2) If you feel secure financially and get laid off, it’s a great time to do something time consuming. I have a toddler, so it’s been a lot of fun to hang out and bond with her. Friends have made video games or picked up a new hobby. Most people I know who got laid off who felt secure financially love it.
3) Your network is your best asset. After the layoff, multiple old contacts reached out with job offers. I was very grateful for these, but declined them for the reasons above.
TLDR: being laid off can be a blessing if you’re financially prepared.
That is a big lesson I learned. I worked at a job for 8 years without looking elsewhere and when I got laid off I was really stuck because the market and interviewing circuit had completely changed.
I'm not sure it's a good trade-off to interview constantly even when you have a job just to remove a bit of the learning curve if you lose your job unexpectedly.
I recommend it. For me, unused skills will become inaccessible relatively quickly, and interviews require a specific set that aren't used at all in any of my jobs over the years.
Once, I did heavy interview prep because I was bored with my job at the time, I got good at it, and landed another better job.
A year later my company deleted entire orgs of people, and I quickly realized that I was in bad shape when my third rejection rolled in.
Interviews are high pressure situations. Better to be used to the flow, coding, and conversation style (again, think "sales") than to be caught off guard, worrying about whether you've solved a Leetcode question fast enough to satisfy another human with their own grading quirks.
Oh, and that person is standing between you and a steady paycheck. That's the part I have to practice anyway, solving stupid university final problems when my livelihood is on the line.
It's a good idea to practice if you're trying to get up the nerve to make the jump to a better job. But during a job search, you'll either get so many rejections that you'll get back up to speed quickly enough without needing to also obsess about it while you're employed, or you're hireable enough that you didn't need to worry about it either way.
Would anyone here find it useful if I offered to teach algorithms and data structures, specifically catered towards leetcode kind of problems.
The approach would be (writing it from memory, will revise it if there is any feedback):
First master the basic data structures and be able to manipulate them rather quickly. We will write many small programs to ensure that a one can perform most of the common operations on a given data structure straight from memory.
Then we will write transformations, i.e. being able to convert one data structure into another.
Next up with be problems that requires a combination of data structures.
We will spend a good about of time in graph problems, the usual data structures used to store / manipulate them and understand some of the basic graph algorithms ( MST, Traversal, Shortest Path, etc.)
We will briefly spend some time on sliding window problems.
Dynamic programming, Greedy and divide and conquer techniques are rather simple, but we need to distill it down to a science so that we can code them eyes closed :-)
Order complexity, how to think about it by looking at an intermediate step and calculating how many operations are needed to get to next step. We will dig a little into the mathematical aspect of it.
I've got a couple hundred LC's under my belt but I would still definitely appreciate something like this. Do you have a discord in mind or something else?
Currently gainfully employed still, not sure if being laid off is a requirement but I'd like to keep my skills sharp just in case.
Discord would be great.
The parent comment was -1'ed perhaps because it came across as selling.
Was trying to help folks here as I have recently gone through the ordeal of getting into a FAANG company.
I have hired (interviewing team member, or hiring manager) hundreds of engineers.
If you are hearing "let me know if I can help" (number 5) you might be doing something wrong. You should be hearing some version of " I will talk to my boss" or "I will call for you" or "XXX person I know is looking".
I have a list of about 30 people who if they call me I'm going to go out of my way to get them a job. That means make a spot for them on my team. Or I will reach into the non overlapping parts of our networks to see if someone is hiring.
Im going to do this because they are good, because they don't suck, because they will get the job done. They will make me look good as the person who brought them in/onboard.
Those of us who survived the bubble did so on hard work and a network. We brought along the people we thought were the best, who we got along with, who would get the job done.
Its the new year, it is the perfect excuse to figure out who your network is, and what they can do for you. Make a list of folks you know, call them up, tell them your thinking of changing jobs. If you don't hear a lot of "send me your resume"/"is your linked/site in up to date" then you need to make some changes.