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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?

#201

Post by papichulo2023 »

Traubenfuchs wrote: post #71

Have you considered moving to Europe? Germany, Switzerland, Austria? With my senior salary and depending on frugality I can save between 1000 and 2000 € a month in Austria and have a very pleasant life. If you ask if there is gonna be leetcode bullshit in the interviews, most people laugh in your face because the idea is so alien to us. People want to hear about your authentic experiences and see you solve real world…

In my expirience, EU companies dont hire people from USA. They seem to prefer people from middle east and latin america.

Reason? I'd say 90% is because they usually have higher salary expectations so they dont bother interviewing them.

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

#202

Post by wholinator2 »

pSYoniK wrote: post #175
mrcnkoba wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you describe the process of learning the skill of being interviewed?

I had 7 jobs in the last 9 years. I've quit all of them. I interviewed at probably 50-60 places during this time and I'm currently moving to my next role, so I'll begin the 8th job in 9 years. To practice interviewing you need to firat get details about the job and company and develop a list of questions. If I really wanted a job I'd get 30-40 questions prepared, from job specific to behavioral ("tell me of a time yo…

I'm curious what the experience/incentive has been to change jobs so quickly. Was it a cluster of redundancies that is inflating the number or do you plan to stay at a job for no more than 1 year + a little? Do your interviewers find this suspicious or negative? I've always been told that if you switch jobs too fast then no one will hire you cause they know you'll leave as soon as you get up to speed.

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

#203

Post by dumpsterdiver »

SCUSKU wrote: post #174
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?

You'll have to forgive me here, I was only drawing on one experience when talking about being on the other side of things. So I am generalizing based only on one experience, however, with that said, I think the unfortunate reality is just that we as humans do bias toward wanting to hire people who are in fact able to communicate well and demonstrate their abilities to you. Even if someone is really smart, you have no…

> I think the unfortunate reality is just that we as humans do bias toward wanting to hire people who are in fact able to communicate well and demonstrate their abilities to you

I mostly agree with your assessment, except I don't think that it's unfortunate at all. If applicants are so dense that no one can get along with them, those people, imo, should be removed from the team.

It doesn't matter that you can 10x everyone around you, when you are bumming a team consisting of hundreds of people out.

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

#204

Post by hamburglar »

darkwater wrote: post #160
scelerat wrote: post #25

Same here. 22 years experience full stack; leadership roles. Can't get an interview. Taking an ML class. I think telling some recruiters I had a baby on the way was a mistake.

Out of curiosity, what's your definition of "full stack", if you started working in the early '00s?

I’m confused by the question. Are you under the impression that the term “full stack” didn’t exist in the early ‘00s? I recall the term already being an overused joke by then. It basically just means that whatever stack you got, the person can work on all parts of it.

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

#205

Post by skrebbel »

firefoxd wrote: post #63

I hate to say this, stop applying. Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.

Fwiw: I’m an employer, and sometimes people ignore the “how to apply” instructions on our site (which say to email to jobs@) and reach out straight via eg LinkedIn and I always file those in my “can’t follow a simple instruction” pile.

Not to say that what you say will never work, but I think it’s worth pointing out that at some companies, application processes might exist for a reason. For me, having all applications in a single place is key to actually being able to deal with them effectively.

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

#206

Post by darkwater »

hamburglar wrote: post #204
darkwater wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what's your definition of "full stack", if you started working in the early '00s?

I’m confused by the question. Are you under the impression that the term “full stack” didn’t exist in the early ‘00s? I recall the term already being an overused joke by then. It basically just means that whatever stack you got, the person can work on all parts of it.

Never heard the full stack term in early '00s, but I was very very junior so it might be me, anyway I'm pretty sure that nowadays "full stack" has a specific meaning (basically only related to web development) and that it was different back in the day

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

#207

Post by fullstackchris »

misja111 wrote: post #198
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? 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.

I don't know, why should we have to be "motivated" to get a job, when the company can just get rid of us at any time? What's the point?

Seems like a double standard.

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

#208

Post by dmaa »

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…

BTW what is it with recruiters being overwhelmingly British also outside of Britain (say, German speaking tech space)?

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

#209

Post by fhaldridge7 »

jameshush wrote: post #46

Reach out to people you've worked with in the past. After having five years of experience, you should have worked with at least a handful of people who need someone to fix another broken website. These could be managers, people on your team, people on OTHER teams, vendors, salespeople you've spoken to, anyone. Ideally, you should ALWAYS keep in contact with people you've worked with, even if it's just emailing them "…

I would it very strange to get happy birthday messages from former colleagues. Do people really do this?

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

#210

Post by lordnacho »

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…

3rd party recs aren't entirely aligned with either the employee or the employer, but that fat cheque is a massive incentive that makes things happen. I've heard of recruiters who placed portfolio managers and ended up getting seven figures due to the compensation arrangement.

The thing about 3rd parties is they are really useful if you're already on the inside. If you have all the relevant CV points, they will get you interviews. This is the flip side of why people get ghosted by them: if they don't think you'll be easy to place, they won't bother with you, and in fact they think the employers will stop taking their calls if they push the wrong CVs.

Another thing about recruitment is that not everyone is good at it. There's a lot of young ones just out of uni who give it a shot, and suck at it. Badly organised, don't know the business, waste a lot time for a lot of people. I've got a bunch of LinkedIn contacts who are in various unrelated businesses because they started off in recruitment and couldn't bill enough to stay there. If you don't field a lot of calls the ones you do talk to might be these noobs who are looking for leads.

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