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Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

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Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#131

Post by aix1 »

j33zusjuice wrote: post #91
tfsh wrote: post #36

Wasn't laid off (end of contract) but spent ~3 months looking and interviewing for jobs. Applied to about 30 positions, heard back from 3 and received 1 offer for Google. Didn't exactly give me confidence about the future when I may be looking for another job... YOE: 3

Dude. You got an offer from Google. How do you not have confidence for the future?! Google took you! Who cares what the places that didn’t take you think? *GOOGLE* thinks you’re good. That’s a hell of a statement. But getting a job at Google tells you that your overall skillset was not the problem. You just didn’t match the other positions as well as some others for some reason. FAANG level jobs are always hard to ge…

To add to that, hiring is very slow at Google right now. Kudos on getting an offer (even if you're not going to take it).

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#132

Post by f1shy »

fxtentacle wrote: post #99
throwaway908365 wrote: post #71

Have 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…

100k€ for 15 years of experience seems about right for me. If you factor in all the freebies and tax refunds and stuff, that's roughly equivalent to earning 1000€ per billable day as a German freelancer, or the equivalent of about $150 per hour in the US. Typical freebies in Germany include: - 13th salary as a Christmas gift (so +8.3% salary) - only half of your health insurance costs are included in the nominal sala…

Wait! the Christmas/Vacation "extras" are already factored in the 100k. The tax refunds may seem a big thing, but are actually not that much. Company not always pay for children daycare. You have to make sure it is, and even when they would pay, sometimes you just do not find a place that accept the kid, because there is lack of places in many cities.

About the retirement... I would be careful about big expectations. Everything is based in constant growth of the german economy. Any public retirement is basically a Ponzi scheme (not my words! but from a Nobel Economy laureate)

Also one very important thing about cost of living: Hamburg and Munich, for example, the cost of living means that doing 20k more per year, as compared with say, Stuttgart, at the end you get the same... or the way around, 100k in Stuttgart is like 120k in Munich. You really have to factor that into the equation.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#133

Post by donkeyd »

negamax wrote: post #41

Based on a small sample set. Seems like hiring is picking up. Most tech companies are still at higher valuation then pre pandemic times. They were profitable and hiring. Bold statement: Tech will pick up first. And companies who are making noise based on Elon's move at Twitter will strave for good workers and die

Tech hasn't slowed down. High-burn SV companies are slowing down and large SV companies seem to be cutting cost. Small, normal companies haven't been able to fill positions for ages though, so they might finally be able to catch some fish now. Not great for the salaries of those used to FAANG and high burn salaries, but nobody should have to worry about having a job.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#134

Post by olah_1 »

bitL wrote: post #128

I know a guy that left one FAANG recently which was laying off people, interviewed at two other FAANGs, got offers for senior remote roles for over $600k, accepted both and is now working two jobs at the same time. Given he was doing the previous FAANG together with a tough grad school, I think he'll be fine.

Is that legal? In the interview, you basically have to lie about your employment situation, right?

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#135

Post by silvanocerza »

Been laid off in September, interviewed for a month and accepted an offer at the end of October.

I'll be starting in mid January since am legally still employed with the old company until 31 December. Still employed since that's how we get our severance, so am enjoying the time off.

The thing that bothered me the most was that I had to update my CV, interview again and all the things related to that. I landed that job in March so I really didn't feel like finding a new one, I also liked the place.

I have a nice resume so was pretty confident I'd find something before the end of the year, so I didn't feel much anxious about it.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#136

Post by reilly3000 »

foldr wrote: post #88
chlmtt wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other users correctly disambiguated CLRS. I am not experienced with software other than the rudimentary syntax of Python and Scheme. Read a CS book years ago based on the latter. Anyway, I was just wondering if anyone had any kind of job for me. Maybe something like data entry. Would have to learn coding in earnest after I pick up algo design techniques from CLRS.

>Would have to learn coding in earnest after I pick up algo design techniques from CLRS. You're almost certainly better off learning to code first and then learning about algorithms once you've got a decent coding level. In a typical entry level coding job you can easily go a whole year without implementing any algorithm more complex than a binary search (if that).

Agreed. I would even say this is the order of importance for being effective in a real job:

1. Domain knowledge (understanding the problems you are trying to solve, for who and why they need solving)

2. Full stack awareness (understand computer hardware, networking, OS, HTTP protocols, UI etc. AND whatever the core components of your domain are. This is crucial for being able to reason about and debug a running system.)

3. Technical communication in written and verbal form.

4. Programming fundamentals. Honestly I feel much more than "fundamentals" is a waste of time for new entrants. If you haven't been paying attention, GPT-3 has taken away the need for programming acumen for most creators. Prior to that Google+Stack Overflow got a whole lot of us through gaps in programming language expertise. Leetcode is literally just a proxy for formal education/privilege and has no direct application in daily work with the exception of a narrow few areas.

If you are truly a nuts and bolts person, let that be your domain. You could write a better inventory, search, and/or checkout system (wow bolts are easily stolen aren't they?!). You could also take the abstract mechanical intuition and focus on robotics.

One shouldn't aspire to work at a "tech company" - most of those that you might think of are actually ad companies. Following the analogy of 100 year old media, Googlers are out selling classified and yellow page ads in Search/Display, Netflix is a magazine publishing house, Amazon is the Sears-Roebucks catalog (Mail order homes!), Meta, the newspaper of newspapers. If you like sales, marketing, and influence it would make sense to work at such a place. I cannot tell you how many people are surprised by this, but it is vastly larger than it ought to be.

If you want to call yourself a developer/programmer/engineer/hacker then show up to build something that will run for a long time and not injure people during its operation. Build something better. If that isn't your ethos or ethic, there are better ways to make money.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#137

Post by muzani »

LegitShady wrote: post #115
speeder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is just Amazon being Amazon. When they interviewed me the first time, the interviewer didn't show to work, so they asked another guy to interview me, he ended interviewing me in a language he didn't knew, to a position using another language entirely, the whole thing was a farce. Some years later Amazon recruiters contacted me, asked me to go interview in person. Then during the interview in their offices, they…

this seems like a hazing ritual to make sure only those willing to be abused make it in.

From being on various recruiting positions, I believe it's usually just incompetence or laziness.

Hiring tends to happen when there's not enough people. Only the people who can do the job are qualified to assess whether someone can do the job. So you have people who are already at double the workload having to take time to design and handle interviews and such.

And by the time you get everyone to sign off on hiring this guy at the extravagant tech salary, economic downturn forces you to fire a bunch of people. In a recession, the least useful people are probably HR.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#138

Post by OhNoNotAgain_99 »

silvanocerza wrote: post #135

Been laid off in September, interviewed for a month and accepted an offer at the end of October. I'll be starting in mid January since am legally still employed with the old company until 31 December. Still employed since that's how we get our severance, so am enjoying the time off. The thing that bothered me the most was that I had to update my CV, interview again and all the things related to that. I landed that jo…

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