Ask HN: Is the Job Market Actually Bad?

I feel like someone has to be getting past these systems, and I get the feeling it's not the people these companies want to be hiring.

Even just finding appropriate openings has been next to impossible. Every company seems to be looking for either a generalist (lots of full-stack) or a senior in an exact specialized bucket and stack. My role at Microsoft was a sort of specialized databases/compilers/functional programming hybrid, but without clear buzzwords no one seems interested. What was once a frequent stream of corporate recruiter messages dried up a little over a year ago too.

My suspicion is that things are a lot better for non-remote positions in the usual hubs.

Everyone had to start doing that to get through the often dumb-as-a-brick ATS system filtering that became farcical - I remember applying for one position that was around building care and management systems for pregnant mothers - EHR, practice management, claims benefits, etc., all of which I had over a decade of experience in. "Name something that might stand you out from the crowd." "In addition to all this I've also delivered 12 babies as a paramedic". Twenty minutes later "we are looking for candidates whose experiences and skill sets are more closely aligned with the role we are looking to fill". That was my push to realize "I need to do something to ATS optimize my resume and plan otherwise I'll be unemployed for months."

> Employer-wise, everyone wants a unicorn that will lick their ass but isn't willing to pay

"Principal Product Manager. Must have 10-15 years experience, much of it in healthcare domain, including leadership and team ownership. Salary range: $90-130K".

Yup.

The jobs advertised on there are real...

I'd been on the job market four months. Every day I did the rounds: Levels, Wellfound, YC/jobs, Glassdoor, Indeed, LinkedIn.

It is what it is, as a crappy jobs market.

Wellfound? I didn't ever hear from anything from their job ads.

And I'm pretty certain that whatever Wellfound/AngelList was, it has become a company that just markets resume writing services, resume review services, all sorts of other services that draw in your money somehow.

Why do I say that?

120+ applications on Wellfound since then. Crickets. Absolutely nothing.

One day I got an email, "Your profile has been viewed!". Weird, never seen an email like that from Wellfound. Indeed, "You have 1 profile view in the last 90 days".

Huh. 120+ applications, 120+ times me answering filling out Wellfound's content questions on "why you would be a good fit for this role", "tell us about x and y and z", no interviews, no contact, only ONE company has ever even viewed my profile (and for what it's worth, it's not a company that has any positions open).

Well, maybe my answers suck, you say. Maybe my resume isn't as impressive as I think it is.

But similar answers and the same resume get me fairly steady hits on every other site I mentioned, I've got to multiple final rounds, I've been explicitly told I was hirable, I was just the number two, I was "in the top three".

And to be clear, many of the companies I see on WF are advertising on other sites too.

My suspicion? WF does take job listings, but they also harvest them from other sites - the job is real, but there's no-one from the employer reviewing the applications to their "phantom" job... and meanwhile all people like me are doing are providing content for WF to harvest and train models for their AI-driven resume writing and review service and other products.

My AI video interview? Viewed... zero times.

Huh.

In Europe C# fills the role of Java.

You're just in an American echo chamber.

Now the number of senior C# engineers in Europe who couldn't fix a broken deploy on IIS or SSL cert problem on a windows server? That is rather high in the windows field too.