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.
I was interviewing for a job in the middle and towards the end of 2020, and regardless of my chances of success or interest, I asked the interviewers how work from home had gone for them so far.
I encountered this sentiment most of all - 40 year old dads who were suddenly stuck at home with the wife and kids, working from an improvised home office.
When I asked about returning to the office, most of them were clearly looking forward to it, with a sentiment of "Of course working from home is less efficient and comfortable, what do you mean?".
It was quite a surprise for me, who had finally gotten away from the noisy open-plan offices and meetings where everyone shouted at each other until the loudest person "won".
I'm 40+ year old dad as well. I don't feel stuck at home with wife and kids. I don't want to ever return to the office. I'm in managerial position and know that WFH is not any less efficient or less comfortable. I find office to have more distractions. Sentiment is shared across the team as well.
I found that most such people didn't originally plan for work from home, so their experience was predictably horrible. Also during the pandemic daycare/schools were closed, adding to the problem.
Meanwhile me and other young dads who did plan for remote work have now a designated room for an office and children at daycare/kindergarten for most of the day.
Until my child was old enough to attend daycare it was indeed chaos, but with just one you can get used to this. It's much like having a co-worker who likes to chat a little bit too much.
I planned for this as well, 2 months before Covid happend, so a bit lucky. Anyway it works great and I don't want to go back. The thing I don't subscribe to is the "co-worker" part. you see if my child cannot attend daycare because she is sick, I cannot work full. we have an agreement at my work that in such cases we go into "50% or best effort"mode. I guess it depends on the child and maybe the job, but I cannot code/think/debug while a 4 year old wants to be entertained, also I don't want to sit her in front of a tv/mobile just to calm her down, so 50% it is
I would guess that if we further split 40 year old dads into introverts and extroverts, the sentiment would also split into loving wfh and being happier working away at the office.
Have you compared and contrasted Java and C# (especially with regards to let's say larger frameworks)?
Both of those put a strong emphasis on types, but only one of those (it's Java) is the sort of language that really attracts developers that love types like AbstractWidgetBoundaryFactoryWrapperFactory.
I can definitely understand the "Citizen Kane" effect of looking at a modern Java framework and going "yeah looks just like any other language, except with types and IDE support". Java didn't get there from nowhere. It got there after 20 years of being overly verbose and frustrating to work with.
To everyone saying "well it doesn't sound that bad", let me just point out:
For a standard that supposedly started out as "we need a short code to refer to an airport", there is now a IATA code (QYG) that represents the concept of any railway station in Germany.
Before the development of decent migration systems it was incredibly common for database structure - including stored procedures - to be treated independently of source code in a repository.
True, of course. There were also undoubtedly a lot of production systems that didn’t even use version control for non-database code. Industry practices certainly evolve over time. But it’s difficult to imagine a scenario where a team is aware of version control, uses it for the things they realize are code, but somehow doesn’t realize that stored procedures are code.
These sorts of places also tend to have database admins in one team and programmers in another team. All database changes go through the database team with tickets or whatever. It's a huge pain in the ass to navigate and enable quick changes.
It's a common thing to miss. There's a reason SQL injections are (unless things have changed recently) among the most prevalent classes of web exploits.
You joke, but I have literally never had as great of a success at work as that one time my team didn't end up building the software.
We had great ideas about scheduling and caching and task priorities...
...and then we asked the customer what they wanted, and they wanted none of it.
So we built none of it, and produced a solution that just did the stupidest thing, and did it without any edge cases, without ever crashing, reliably, as a cronjob, once on Sunday night.
Some people would be disappointed that they couldn't put this on their CV because it didn't involve FancyTech #413, but damn it, I am still proud of that stupid thing.
I interviewed a (junior) candidate once that had tried and failed at a hackathon to build an Rails system that connected restaurants and shops with excess food to charities that gave food away to those that needed it.
I asked him what he’d done to work around the technical difficulties, and it turned out that he’d set up a Wordpress site with a phone number of the guy running the scheme, and a Google sheet to manage contact details.
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.