211–220 of 232 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't even know what I would do with that much money. Maybe have 4 or 5 kids.
Honestly in a high COL city in the US, having 4-5 kids would be doable on $300k TC but it wouldn't be easy to give them more than a middle class lifestyle at best. Elsewhere in the US in smaller towns, I could see it being much more feasible.
I'm surprised no one here talked about the junior side of the market yet. It's underrepresented on HN, but I would have still expected to see something. I'll share what I subjectively gathered from this job market. Senior devs, people with many years of experience, people who have had the chance to funnel themselves into something specialized are doing okay. It's still not as good as it once was, many still find them…
It's been about a year since I've had a big project, and my attempts to slide out of freelancer work and into the mines are all getting shafted. The longer I go without a big project, the more toxic my work history appears. At the same time, I can't find any big projects because either the ones who sent out the contract don't know the skillset needed or just don't post anything externally anymore.
I'm on the very tiny side where projects pay $200 to $300 on completion and take a day or two from acceptance to submission, not triple digit salaries for months long rewrites. The smaller you go the worse it gets.
My current job search has been the longest and most difficult of my career (5 months so far). Caveats: - I’m only applying with climate tech companies - I’m trying to transition back to engineering after a detour into product - I’m trying to pivot into more hardware-focused roles Most companies I apply to don’t respond at all, and I’ve had about 6 phone screens, two technical interviews, and one “we’d love to hire yo…
Having just been on the job market, my experience was that career pivots are much harder now. I initially intended to transition to a neighboring field after an education break - but none of the companies in that field would speak to me. At most I had a recruiter call with one who decided to reject. To complete this transition I had been planning on a massive pay cut. When I focused on areas I had some more credible…
Because in the last year you responded to Linkedin messages from Recruiters, this boosted your visibility in other recruiters’ searches.
That’s something I think every working person should do: if they get outreach from recruiters, respond to all messages. Maybe even jump on a call/interview.
Crappy I don't mean only job in bad companies, but sometimes job in good companies but a bad situation or project. For example one of my recent-ish experiences was in an excellent company but the project was pure firefighting, the people that knew the thing well were leaving, and the company policies were getting in the way of the project, so I got hired to "replace" people, this just sucked and in the end didn't work.
My learning about JavaScript employment is that, for the most part, it’s permanently a beginner’s area of software. If you have done that kind of work forever you have some hard choices to make: pretend to be an expert at really beginner things or wait a really long time for extremely rare opportunities to open. So I don’t do that work anymore. My 6 months of unemployment was largely self inflicted.
My other learning about software employment is that when you enter management your technical skills in a given language matter so much less. Other generalized factors become more important like strong communication skills, multitasking endurance, soft skills, a wide distribution of technical knowledge your developers won’t have.
Those recruiters tend to be internal recruiters working directly for the company, which I find less pushy/annoying to deal with, and they tend to be already somewhat keen on you by the time they contact you, because they have already decided you are an appealing candidate. They'll generally fast-track you to an interview, not make you fill in some long ATS application form, keep in contact regularly, etc. - it is a much better experience than cold "applying" via an ATS / workday portal and having that go into a black hole.
I'd say, if you're not regularly getting recruiters contacting you on linkedin every week, your profile isn't very good and you should fix it until you do.
It amuses me a bit when people complain about linkedin post in the newsfeed being lame (which they are), or reminiscing about the old days when people would have their email addresses next to loud warnings saying "do not contact me if you are a recruiter!!!".
It turns out, the only thing worse than being contacted by recruiters is not being contacted by recruiters. It only takes a second to respond with a polite "no thanks, not looking right now, maybe another time!", and it is far easier to start engaging with a steady stream of regular contacts than trying to create that stream when you need it.