I got laid off last week. I have had ~40 linkedin messages so far. Turned that into ~10 initial calls. I am waiting to hear from ~7 hiring managers. I hope to have a job offer signed in the next month.
Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
101–110 of 579 posts
Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#102Have not been laid off and I am not living in the bay area, but in Germany. Still wanted to offer some perspective. ~15 years fullstack and DevOps experience, visited top local university, no degree. Mostly Python + some other languages. Have been interviewing for Lead SE/DevOps/SRE roles as well as some architecture positions. My findings about the German job market for developers: - Remote-work is here to stay. Alm…
>salaries seem to be too low. You are often getting low-balled because "it would not fit within the salaries of the other team members". Preach it! CoL in German cities is far too high for how low skilled dev wages are. 100k at 15 years work experience is an insult when you look at Munich/Berlin house prices and that new grads can get 60k. And DW posted a YouTube video yesterday about how Germany has a shortage of so…
I strongly disagree. Here's a family home with garden in the Berlin area that you can rent-to-own at 1900€ per month: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/135035667
So with a 100k€ annual salary, one working parent alone can buy the house and feed the entire family. You consider that an "insult"?
Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
For that kind of seniority/experience, what fraction of companies asked LeetCodey stuff? Was it easy or medium/hard problems? How much time did you have to spend preparing/practicing?
Not the OP, but with similar experience levels and I’ve never done a LeetCode interview, and even regular interviews are pretty light. I mostly contract though, and they generally offer me full time after a little while if I want it.
Not everyone can do this, but if you can manage to first do contract work, IMHO it's win-win for both parties. From the company's point of view: senior engineers are very expensive -- having a contract period lowers risk. From the employee's point of view: you get a good idea of what the company is doing / what your exact role would be before you commit.
In theory, it's at will employment yada yada. But in practice, it makes a difference.
Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#104Have not been laid off and I am not living in the bay area, but in Germany. Still wanted to offer some perspective. ~15 years fullstack and DevOps experience, visited top local university, no degree. Mostly Python + some other languages. Have been interviewing for Lead SE/DevOps/SRE roles as well as some architecture positions. My findings about the German job market for developers: - Remote-work is here to stay. Alm…
> Landing lead/lower management roles seems to be difficult if you have limited experience leading people. Those seem to be mostly staffed internally.
Because at most places lead/lower management is another word for yes men that have proven their blind loyalty to the CTO, usually for 2 or 3 years. They don't wanna hire a manager who may question the status quo, especially when it comes to architecture and best practices.
> The market value for a profile like mine in a big German city seems to be around 100k € including some small bonus.
That sounds low to me and attainable in Europe if you have 5+ YoE at the right places. It sounds to me like you are being lowballed. I'm getting similar offers with way less experience.
Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#105I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…
This is seemed pretty standard practice now, small companies, big companies, recruiters, FAANG. Actually Amazon for me was the best - I deliberately followed up a week later and they actively apologized and provided some feedback.
Could it be a deliberate test for being persistent? "Candidate does not jump through hoops to follow up, if they are not sufficiently interested we aren't either"
Then on the other hand, nobody ever got promoted for being nice to rejects. If their processes select for ambition (and they sure do), nothing that does not promise promotion will ever get done and that should qualify as explanation three times over.
Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Of course. My comment was about 'less programmers' getting hired. Not the extreme of 'All programmers' getting replaced by ChatGPT as you read incorrectly. Believing that programmers don't need to adapt and that managers won't need to reduce or do layoffs especially with programmers, is quite frankly a denial and delusion of what is going on with cutting costs in hiring too…
No, that will also not happen. More developers will get hired, because ChatGPT will not perform the higher function tasks most developers actually spend most of their time working on. The reason this will happen, is because ChatGPT will be more efficient in performing the lower function tasks and there will be more of a need to put all that automatically created code into actual use, integrate it with Enterprise Pack…
> What possibly will happen is that junior developers will have even harder time getting into the industry, because clueless PHBs will see ChatGPT doing all their work "for free". A few years later they're screwed, because nobody at the company knows how their applications work. Except ChatGPT...maybe.
Reads like what I said before. Some will be affected and less programmers will be needed,. Especially in particular, juniors and some seniors getting impacted.
I don't know where I said 'All jobs' as you once again brought out as you clear read incorrectly. I only said less programmers will be hired and these software engineering jobs will be more competitive.
The best course of action is to learn to adapt and it certainly applies to programmers. Pretending that they don't need to adapt is a delusion and denial of constant change. With or without AI.
Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not the OP, but with similar experience levels and I’ve never done a LeetCode interview, and even regular interviews are pretty light. I mostly contract though, and they generally offer me full time after a little while if I want it.
Also not OP, and also similar experience. Most of my interviews are an hour or two of conversation, sometimes with a "I've been told I have to ask.. " techy question but never involves any actual code/whiteboard. Several times the interviewer has said something to the effect of "I won't insult you by asking you to do a tech test, it's clear to me that you understand the work" or similar. One occassion (some years ago…
Not quite as experienced as you (I’m in the 10-15 year bracket).
I never ask LeetCode questions because it’s far easier on both sides to ask experience-based questions like “what do you like/dislike about ?”
If I get superficial answers that tells me something. If i get well thought-out answers from people who have clearly spent time in the trenches that tells me something too.
Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
>salaries seem to be too low. You are often getting low-balled because "it would not fit within the salaries of the other team members". Preach it! CoL in German cities is far too high for how low skilled dev wages are. 100k at 15 years work experience is an insult when you look at Munich/Berlin house prices and that new grads can get 60k. And DW posted a YouTube video yesterday about how Germany has a shortage of so…
I strongly disagree. Here's a family home with garden in the Berlin area that you can rent-to-own at 1900€ per month: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/135035667 So with a 100k€ annual salary, one working parent alone can buy the house and feed the entire family. You consider that an "insult"?
We are talking about someone with 15 years experience though. 100k @ 15 years is too low when new grads now start at 60k.
So you hire someone who has 14 years of extra experience and brings a lot more value to the company and only pay them 40k extra?
That's why I'm saying it feels like an insult.
Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#109I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…
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Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?
#110I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…
This is my own experience: if the recruiters don't call me back, that means I fail. Calling them just makes me more stressful/sad.