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Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

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Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#191

Post by matsemann »

iExploder wrote: post #104
ItsBob wrote: post #85

I thought I'd add a data point to this discussion. I'm in the UK and the traditional dev/tech job route was via something like JobServe, Indeed etc., where you see a role advertised via an employment agency and you send your CV hoping for a callback. I'm in a stable contract so I'm not looking but two weeks ago, I was contacted by two agents, one day apart, both unrelated to one another, completely out of the blue. T…

as a rule of thumb I ignore all UK agents, they have the attention span of a coked up butterfly. from my experience they try extract as much information out of you (your salary, last company, are they hiring, give me phone number to their manager or hr) and never call even if they scheduled a call. they never update you if the role you applied for have been filled in meantime, you simply get ghosted and your email ge…

Same. Sooo many Norwegian companies for some reason use UK recruiters. I'm boycotting each and every company doing that.

They're nothing but noise. Shotgunning messages to everyone. Calling me out of the blue while I'm at work. Just straight up spam and annoyances. We don't get much robo-calls here, so UK recruiters is the sole reason why I no longer pick up the phone from unknown numbers. It can sometimes be multiple a day. And blocking UK numbers doesn't work. If you don't answer, they call you a minute later routed through a Norwegian number.

F*ck every Norwegian company outsourcing their recruiting to these agencies. I don't think they understand how poorly it reflects on them..

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#192

Post by EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK »

Tao3300 wrote: post #95
physicsguy wrote: post #91

Things that disqualify CVs straight away for us: * Unclear if have right to work in country. This needs to be stated up front! Our company can't sponsor visas, so if based in another country unless it says something about the visa status, we basically have to throw it away. * Poor grammar, spelling, attention to detail on CV. I get some CVs through that are almost unreadable. I'm not saying if there's a single typo t…

> Big gaps in employment Really curious what you suggest as a remedy for this one. It seems to boil down to "sorry, you're screwed now" or "lie but don't get caught"

I once took 3 years off to play an MMO game (not joking). After that had to restart from the bottom of the salary ladder, but climbed back pretty quickly. This is a universal secret weapon - drop your salary requirements, like, a lot, to get hired. You can usually climb back.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#193

Post by robbick »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #185
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters get a lot of flak here and elsewhere, but having recently interacted with a few for a recent job change, their incentives are aligned to have some skin in the game, and they can do the emotionally draining part of pushing the company to speed up the process for you without having to send multiple emails or waiting for months for your rejection.

When you say "recruiters," do you mean in-house recruiters or third party recruiters? Getting an in-house person on your side certainly is a great way to speed along the hiring process, but I've literally never had a third party recruiter send anything my way that ever came close to working out. It's gotten to the point where if I get an email from a 3rd party recruiter, I just don't look at it -- although I'm not su…

I have had some good experiences with 3rd party recruiters. You obviously need to keep the fact that they will say whatever to get you to take the job they find. But equally they will push the company to hire you.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#194

Post by trhr »

Tao3300 wrote: post #118
stonks wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why working in crypto exchanges would show poor judgment? There are still technical problems to solve. I knew a principal engineer who heavily disliked blockchain because it uses a lot of energy for proof of work, but with proof of stake this should be better now.

> still technical problems Namely: - what schemes are still left for us to pull a lot of money into before they get recognized as scams - how do we get out in time to leave someone else holding the bag

I spent about three months consulting for some crypto company as a distributed systems engineer.

They paid me to design an eventually consistent, self-healing data store with a cache layer / write ahead log, with peers determined by paxos consensus, transfers metered by finops and govered with kademlia, and a storage layer capable of byzantine fault tolerance, which we implemented via signature chains.

See, they had this crazy idea that they'd make a cryptocurrency that they could sell to western digital, who could offer hard drives that "filled themselves up" with other people's data when idle. WD would obv make a buck and maybe sell these drives for much cheaper than the component cost. I'm not exactly sure of the economics. I think the idea was to have half the drives be "receivers" and half be "senders" and actually sell the "senders" for way more than component cost, but provide trivial effort file backup.

I think they're still building it. I dunno if it'll be a scam or not. I had fun though.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#195

Post by matsemann »

withinboredom wrote: post #189
matsemann wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is the skill required for the job? Or is it required mostly to stroke your ego about them having to crawl over some arbitrary glass to please you?

I'm not sure what that is about the second question. But there are always skills specific to any job. We have a profession that spans across infinite industries so there is always something new even though we're 'just writing software.' For example, I went from web-hosting software to fitness industry software. There is very little overlap in skills beyond 'writing software'. At hosting job, scale was the biggest iss…

But is the skill of interviewing a skill needed at the job? I'd wager not. So why are you selecting for it, and deeming those not good at it lazy? Sounds like a good way to bias your pool and throw away lots of good candidates.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#196

Post by happytiger »

withinboredom wrote: post #180
Dylan16807 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself. And now that you can recognize that skill in isolation, do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why? Do you think the people interviewing you could recognize that you were specifically bad at interviewing, and not at everything?

> do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why? I do, yes. IME, candidates that take the time to learn the skill will take the time to learn other skills required for the job. If a candidate can't be bothered to learn a skill to get a job, why should I hire them for a senior position? If it's entry-level, that's a different story.

How does this logic cope with someone who puts intense levels of effort into developing interview skills, but not the depth of development or design skills to be a continued success post hire?

Nothing is easy.

Everything in a balance.

Downturns always reveal the important of relationships — the true gold and what is always worth investing in and collecting.

This is my fourth downturn. Nothing — nothing — has fundamentally changed.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#197

Post by aa1234556 »

iExploder wrote: post #128
expertentipp wrote: post #107

Bots and scams. Housing, dating, job search - these three have become hopeless "marketplaces", hopefully we are at the tipping point and they will collapse. I compile Latex CV for every job application and make an extra effort to apply directly to the company. Every time they have direct one to one communication with an experienced professional with relevant education, and they... insist on digging into inconsistenci…

the ideal candidate has 3-4 years of experience in exactly everything you need so you dont need to train. has no idea what they are worth so you can underpay. and doesn't have a family so they can sit in the office 24/7. this is what the job world has become and it's not going in the right direction.

[dead]

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#198

Post by misja111 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #140
SCUSKU wrote: post #101

I was laid off in August 2022, and it took me 6 months to find a new job. I was able to land a decent number of interviews but I interviewed poorly and didn't get any offers. Doing interview prep actually helped a lot -- now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself. I found my current job through the January HN Who…

> now having been on the other side it is very apparent when someone hasn't prepared and practiced interviewing. It really is a skill in and of itself. And now that you can recognize that skill in isolation, do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why? Do you think the people interviewing you could recognize that you were specifically bad at interviewing, and not at everything?

> do you use it as a major factor when choosing candidates? If you do, why?

Definitely. Motivation is of major importance in whether a new employee will be successful or not. And if a candidate obviously has put a lot of effort in preparing for the interview, then this indicates that he/she is motivated to get the job.

Ofc it is not the only factor to take into consideration, but surely an important one.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#199

Post by Paul-Craft »

esquivalience wrote: post #127
Paul-Craft wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands, eh? I'd assume you're not actually hiring "thousands" of people, which means that a very large percentage of those "more or less qualified" applicants are not passing the interview rounds. Since it's logical to assume that you'd actually want to hire someone for those open roles, it's not too hard to see where the disconnect is. Of course, I don't mean "you" in the sense of you, personally, and I don't int…

I couldn't understand this comment and wondered whether you had misread the parent. The point is that they are posting job openings and getting thousands of applicants per role i.e. They are oversubscribed.

That literally cannot be true unless the supposed "more or less qualified" applicants actually aren't qualified. Now, I suppose it's possible that thousands of people are lying on their resumes just to get a chance to work at Dropbox, but given this year's layoffs, I find it far, far more likely that people on the hiring side have gone off the deep end.

You can disagree with me on that, and that's fine, but stay with me for a second here... if there's an open role, presumably they'd be better off with someone filling it than having it stay open for months on end, right? And, given that the candidate pool has been recently enriched with people who were recently employed and would not normally be out on the job market (remember, these are "more or less qualified" candidates, at least according to their resumes), I have a hard time believing the disconnect isn't that companies either think it's a good time to go unicorn hunting, or they don't actually want to hire at all for some reason.

But, again, unicorn hunting only works out in a tiny percentage of cases, because the supply of unicorns is low, and the real unicorns probably are not the ones out there pounding the pavement. I can't even begin to explain why any sane company would post a job listing in good faith and then never hire anyone for it, given that they're supposedly inundated with reasonable-looking candidates.

So, what's the deal here? If you have the explanation, I'd love to hear it, because I've been on the hiring side, and you can damn well bet I wouldn't devote my time to resume screening and interviewing if I didn't think we were actually going to hire anyone.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#200

Post by MrDresden »

ulfw wrote: post #32

The market is bad. I've been unemployed for 9 months, almost no interview invites and the ones I did have led to nothing (also to no alternative hire of someone else for the allegedly position). And I've got almost 20 years of Product Leadership experience, Stanford, Google, myspace, Booking and Trip.com Groups, that stuff. The market (in my case APAC: HK/SG/AU) is shit and frankly not really worth engaging in right…

My humble advice would be to take any job that gets offered (as long as it isn't sweatshop conditions or unrealistically low wages) and then simply continue the job search.

Once in a job, you are more employable. And employers are for sure not entitled to their worker's unquestioning loyalty. So I see nothing wrong with moving positions if a better one presents itself.

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