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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?

#211

Post by f1shy »

ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #198
f1shy wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh... that about "we have too few SW devs"... I've been hearing that for decades (literally) also about medical personell... Truth is, they just do not pay enough!!! As you say, 100k would be just fine for 5 to 10 years in some small city... but Munich, Berlin, Hamburg... you have to talk 140k for 15 years real experience.

>but Munich, Berlin, Hamburg... you have to talk 140k for 15 years real experience. Outside of FANGS & MANGAS, German companies would start laughing if you ask for that much for IC positions, even senior ones. That kind of cheese is usually reserved for management/corporate bootlickers high up the command chain.

Actually I had more that one offer for 140k. For example from Magna. But yes, it is not easy. And I have 20+ years of experience. Note, I do not say they actually pay that, but what they should pay, if they want to find the people.

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

#212

Post by CWuestefeld »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #107
Jenk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also not OP, and also similar experience. Most of my interviews are an hour or two of conversation, sometimes with a "I've been told I have to ask.. " techy question but never involves any actual code/whiteboard. Several times the interviewer has said something to the effect of "I won't insult you by asking you to do a tech test, it's clear to me that you understand the work" or similar. One occassion (some years ago…

Not quite as experienced as you (I’m in the 10-15 year bracket). I never ask LeetCode questions because it’s far easier on both sides to ask experience-based questions like “what do you like/dislike about ?” If I get superficial answers that tells me something. If i get well thought-out answers from people who have clearly spent time in the trenches that tells me something too.

I've been doing this for 30+ years, and I've found the same. It's not just whether the candidate can answer correctly, but how they answer.

Back when I was doing C/C++ interviews, I'd ask questions like:

What's the difference between single and double quotes? A meh candidate answers something about you need single quotes for just a single character. A good candidate answers about how the data type for a double-quoted constant is a char.

If I want to pass a variable into a function, and have its value changed by the function, what do I do?* A lousy candidate says "put an ampersand in front of it". A meh candidate says to pass a pointer to the variable. The best candidate will talk about the difference between call-by-value versus call-by-reference.

People really do reveal a lot about themselves not just in what they say, but the way they say it.

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

#213

Post by clnq »

brookst wrote: post #50
clnq wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, we'll need more engineers to help GPT-3.5/ChatGPT eat most receptionist, customer support, and similar customer-facing entry level jobs. That itself could become a very healthy and large industry.

IMO AI code will eat entry level software eng jobs before AI eats in-person jobs like receptionist. I would not want to be a “take this UI and add a new field” coder right now.

I don't think so for several reasons.

First, there's the uselessness of entry-level engineers. They are hired for their growth potential (that every human has, but language models don't) and are expected to grow into mid-levels and seniors. In most of the sw industry, entry-level roles are also not terminal, which means that such an engineer must get promoted at least +1L to keep working in the company. Someone (or something) perpetually stuck at the entry level is a bad value proposition for a sw company.

Secondly, the code that language models produce is buggy. They can, on occasion, produce amazing code and even entire codebases. But this is an exception, not the rule. You can generally prototype something or get an idea for something from language models, but you can only push very little of that into production. What good is code you can't use? You still need an engineer to oversee the language model's outputs.

Overall, if some company replaced their juniors with AI, that would be incompetent management.

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

#214

Post by greatpostman »

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.

This is the true path to financial success

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

#215

Post by rpastuszak »

I’m not looking for anything atm but using my (small) savings to learn and get some perspective on what to do in the future.

I’ve wrapped up the Fast.ai deep learning course and switched to studying the language of my country of residence. The rest of my time is calls with random people via my office/mentoring hours (https://sonnet.io/posts/hi) and learning how to live with a dog!

I try to code a bit and have some side projects I want to monetise or share, but tbh I’m struggling with getting them out because for some reason I’ve started to be overly critical of my work. I know it’ll pass.

I’m also exploring different ways of working, such as co-ops.

I’m a founder/SWE with 20 years of experience.

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

#216

Post by jonp888 »

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

Be sure to look into how you will handle Health Insurance.

You are required to have Health Insurance if you live in Germany, and for freelancers it is quite expensive(it will probably cost more per month than apartment rent). This can be a dealbreaker for people with limited financial resources who need some time to get their business off the ground.

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

#217

Post by Arubis »

cosmic_quanta wrote: post #4
chlmtt wrote: post #2

I used to work at a hardware store. As in literal bolts and nuts type of tech, not software related:) Recently lost my job. Originally from Kazakhstan. Thinking of going back if I can't find anything else. No credentials to speak of other than the fact that I could probably think my way out of an undergrad level abstract algebra or real analysis problem if cornered. Maybe topology, too. Native speaker of both Kazakh…

I don't have any work for you, but it would have helped if you had described your software engineering / computer science skills in more details. I'm not familiar with CLRS.

Sibling comments addressed actual disambiguation. For validation, it _is_ confusing, since CRLF is carriage return/linefeed

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

#218

Post by dahart »

swyx wrote: post #150
a-bit-of-code wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For that kind of seniority/experience, what fraction of companies asked LeetCodey stuff? Was it easy or medium/hard problems? How much time did you have to spend preparing/practicing?

just chiming in for others that i've had a job specifically waive a coding test because they saw me livecode in front of 2000 people and my fave amazon interview story was a guy that walked in with his laptop open to my blog saying "this is just a formality i've read your work" lol TLDR why leetcode in private when you can work in public* (*yes yes, not everyone can work in public, but i bet a fair amount of you can…

Last time I had a coding test during a job interview, I was left alone for an hour with a laptop that was screen-shared with a number of interviewers that was unknown to me. It felt a little like live coding in public but without any audible feedback. That might stress some people out I’d guess, but it felt chill to me. I did my usual thing, even used StackOverflow for some quick syntax & library tips, and finished the program (a Tetris-like game with an AI player, in Python). Got the job. It was pretty fun TBH, even with a lot of experience, I’d prefer the live-coding interview over talking through database schemas or whatever.

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

#219

Post by single_identity »

fxtentacle wrote: post #102
ChuckNorris89 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>salaries seem to be too low. You are often getting low-balled because "it would not fit within the salaries of the other team members". Preach it! CoL in German cities is far too high for how low skilled dev wages are. 100k at 15 years work experience is an insult when you look at Munich/Berlin house prices and that new grads can get 60k. And DW posted a YouTube video yesterday about how Germany has a shortage of so…

I strongly disagree. Here's a family home with garden in the Berlin area that you can rent-to-own at 1900€ per month: https://www.immobilienscout24.de/expose/135035667 So with a 100k€ annual salary, one working parent alone can buy the house and feed the entire family. You consider that an "insult"?

First, 100k EUR is _before_ tax which I believe you might be confusing here. After tax you get maybe 50-ish % of that so you end up with something like 50k EUR per year. In no European country that would be enough to "buy the house" and even more so in Germany.

Secondly, I'm genuinely interested in your thoughts here. What if you:

* Lived in the EU

* Being salaried 100k EUR (which is probably around 90th percentile)

* Worked for a _global_ company with a _global_ product deployed on a _global_ market with _global_ competition

And now some of your colleagues are from the US and you:

* have the same responsibilities as they do

* have the same skill-set needed for given position as they do

* have the same impact, or potential for it thereof, as they do

* have to go through the same agony of being and staying among top performers

And yet your US colleagues are salaried 2x-3x as much as you are. Without taking RSUs into a picture because that's a very rare thing to have in European companies.

What are your thoughts about this? Do you attribute this difference solely to the cost of living?

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

#220

Post by yobbo »

sandos wrote: post #209
teux wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can I ask if you know how average costs in Scandinavia hold up to that? Working in Norway atm making ~90k€ equivalent after some time, but I took the paycut from the US because of quality of life/healthcare/state pension, etc. Still, it’s a very good salary here, I’m in the top few % of all Norwegians. But it was a huge paycut. I’m definitely happier than I was in the US but I have been considering moving a bit furth…

I think Sweden might be worse in all of Europe though. 90k€ is unheard of here for developers, unless you are managing a team or a middle manager or something. Well ok, maybe its a thing in Stockholm actually. Living in a slightly smaller city, now way Jose. I am applying currently, don't know how that will turn out, but he manager even said that Swedish developers are cheaper for the company than people from Germany…

10-20 years of experience in software engineering means around net €30k in Sweden, even in Stockholm. Tax and social security fees are the highest you will find, which means the cost of this might be around €70k-90k to the employer.
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