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

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

#161

Post by tvanantwerp » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:07 PM UTC

olah_1 wrote: post #134

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?

How many CEO's are CEO'ing for more than one company?

If they can do it, why not the plebs?

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

#162

Post by lnsru » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

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…

13th salary?.. It’s actually Austrian thing being taxed less in Austria. Never had this in my dozen jobs in Germany. Xmas bonus yes.

Health insurance is expensive and low quality. One must pay for all modern treatments despite being insured. Or have another expensive additional insurance. Cancer will be treated for free, that’s right.

Tax refund is a bad joke. Spending 5000€ to get cents back. 50% taxes and mandatory insurance plus 19% value added tax (food less, fuel with additional taxes). So 2/3 earned go to the government. Nice!

No company from dozen paid for childcare. I know, that it might happen, but it’s rare. Some companies have on-site kindergartens. But well… the waitlist is long unless you are important manager.

Government retirement will be about enough to live in extreme poverty trying to save every cent.

Just got intrigued and opened immobilienscout24. No houses for 2000€ in Hamburg and Berlin for a family of 5. Rather old Reihenmittelhaus for 2500€ with current electricity and heating prices.

There is nothing comfortable about 100k€ annually. Especially for a family of five. It’s like 4500€ after taxes every month paying 2500€ rent and living from 2000€. Belarus freelancers also make this and have really comfy lifestyles.

Edit: with 3 kids it’s closer to 5000€ after taxes. Still does not provide any luxury.

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

#163

Post by throwaway908365 » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

mrcartmeneses wrote: post #120

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…

Do you have any advice for freelancing in Germany? I’ll be moving to Berlin in January, aber ich spreche nur Englisch und ich lerne Deutsch. Ich habe die EU-Staatsbürgerschaft und meine Frau kommt aus Berlin. I am a senior front end dev who has experience leading teams

Welcome :). Berlin in January is tough, even for German standards.

1. Just get a tax advisor who is fine speaking English with you. Just let him do everything in the beginning. Afterwards you can do more of that yourself. Try to be classified as Freiberuflich, not Gewerbetreibender. It helps if you have an engineering degree, but he can help you with that.

2. Do at least two gigs per year (Scheinselbstständigkeit).

3. Use HAYS and others to start it of.

4. Continue to learn German. Maybe do some German interview training or something to get in. There are teams working in English, but you will have an easier time overall.

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

#164

Post by ineedausername » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:08 PM UTC

gorbachev wrote: post #86

rvz wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

About that last point, imagine the horror of having the responsibility to maintain whatever the AI wrote 3 years ago. :)

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

#165

Post by binarydreams » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

Software engineer with 10+yrs experience and was on a break for 3+ yrs. I haven't done outbound yet ("applied" to companies). Mostly got referred to companies/startups through folks in my network. Remote work is an important requirement for the time being.

So I spoke to 15 (remote-friendly/first) companies through my network (could've been more if I were up for onsite work), 4 started the interview process (rest had hiring freeze or wanted to prioritize folks that got laid off from FAANG) out of which:

- 1 ghosted me in the last round

- 1 rejected in the last round without any reason/feedback (although I think I did pretty well)

- 1 rejected in the first round because they wanted me to stick to a specific programming language (in their leetcode round) that I am now rusty with

- 1 rejected me in the last round on fair grounds and were decent enough to give feedback. I believe I made mistakes out of being super desperate to land a job.

One thing I noticed (although small sample set) was that the interview processes are very slow (like 1 round per week). This might mean things like companies are in no hurry to hire and they have abundance of candidates applying for the same positions at different "expected CTCs" making it a buyer's market. I am currently interviewing another company who has scheduled the next round to happen after 2 weeks.

Also no inbounds on Linkedin from recruiters. I used to be swamped till like July/August. Probably means there's decent amount of hiring freeze and most of the recruiters are fired?

Tbh, even though I got rejected in a few places, I did not feel too bad because I did not "feel" like they were doing solid engineering work (I ask lots of questions about the tech stack, challenges, culture, etc. in each round).

I've decided to spend a few months upskilling myself till the situation gets better and take the hiring process slow (rather being desperate). Although lucky to be in a position to be able to do so.

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

#166

Post by whiddershins » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

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…

The only thing on here that is in any way better than what I get in the U.S. would be the free daycare.

Everything else is worse than what I earn as a fully remote employee, who could choose to live in any number of second or third tier American cities that are nearly as cheap as Berlin.

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

#167

Post by Xenoamorphous » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:09 PM UTC

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

Now that Google will be in your resume I'm sure you won't have any trouble finding jobs in the future.

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

#168

Post by distcs » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

bluGill wrote: post #149

hawski wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most certainly not, because they would not work long enough.

since amazon has a policy to layoff the bottom 6% every year (numbers may be off), any good manager will be constantly looking for someone to hire into the bottom 6% role so they can keep their good people. Since they are not actually looking for someone who can do a good job they don't care if they treat you well.

I keep hearing this trope but this is very naive. A manager simply cannot keep hiring into bottom 6% role. All candidates are subject to the same type of interviews. Every interviewer has to give a "hire" decision for the new candidate. Then there is a bar-raiser interview in Amazon where the interviewer belongs to an unrelated team. They need to give a "hire" decision too. Unless all of this happens, a manager cannot simply hire a new candidate. There is no way a manager can simply hire into the bottom 6% role to keep their good people.

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

#169

Post by f1shy » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

nbaugh1 wrote: post #78

gorbachev wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Can we stop this nonsense, please?

I'll get scared when someone shows me an actual deployed, running, and maintained app by something like chatGPT. Solving problems with code snippets is a tiny part of the job

We will be all dead and gone long before any of those points are a reality...

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

#170

Post by samhuk » Tue, Dec 06, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

hrunt wrote: post #114

samhuk wrote: post #53

Didn't get laid off but resigned around a month ago after a long stretch of non-stop work since I was basically a kid (worked through college, university, and straight after O_o). Basically for a little break and to focus on doing some real intense OSS. Been a wild, challenging, and rewarding 1.5 months so far. Applied to a couple places that were working on some interesting things, some even related to my own OSS, r…

Similar to you, I left my job about a year ago after working non-stop for 25 years (worked through college, software development, architect, director, eventually C-level, all at the same small company). My break was to focus on spending time with my children. It has been very rewarding. Initially, I thought I would take 6 months off and then get back into an IC role, but after a year, I am in no rush. I have played t…

Thank you for sharing. You are certainly at a different point in your life and career (I am but only a humble developer), however it was very nice to read your story about spending more time with your children.

I share that feeling of observing the industry. I think that some of the recent sentiments are a bit overblown about the tech industry. Some seem to think that it's all going to blow up because a few thousand FAANG rest-n-vesters got let go. (side-note: I know that not all who got made redundant were of that type, just adding flare!)