Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 579 posts

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

#281

Post by nscalf »

SpeedilyDamage wrote: post #252
tvanantwerp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many CEO's are CEO'ing for more than one company? If they can do it, why not the plebs?

Because the plebs sign contracts saying they won’t. It’s not illegal, just highly unethical. It’s also not true, he does not know someone doing this.

Is it highly unethical? You're hired to do a job, if you can successfully do that job and another one, I don't think there is anything unethical about doing that. It's very common in lower wage positions, not sure why it's suddenly unethical in higher wage positions. I would say it's unethical to force people to sign a contract saying you own all of their attention during the day, even if you don't use it.

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

#282

Post by WrtCdEvrydy »

westmeal wrote: post #265
_dhruva wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over a video call, the interviewer asked a coding question and immediately put on headphones and I am sure was listening to music. There was no dialogue and I had to use visual cues to get his attention. I coded using C++ and pass by reference. He had never seen it in his life. He refused to believe modification on a reference would modify the value in the calling function! I hoping he would be willing to discuss or…

You've got to be kidding... that's literally what references are for. Insane.

We don't teach pass by reference these days.

Anyone you find in the real world under ~30 years old may not even be aware that you can pass a reference and modify it directly without having to make a method return a value.

It's super cool to have someone explain to you side effects yet you show them a method with a null return and run it for them showing that the value has changed and they are mesmerized.

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

#283

Post by mywittyname »

greatpostman wrote: post #214
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

It's a better path, for sure. But the true path to financial success is to own a large enough share of a large enough company that you can get paid a 100-1000x salary for one job, rather than a 2x salary for two.

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

#284

Post by endtime »

trentnix wrote: post #180
binarydreams wrote: post #165

Software engineer with 10+yrs experience and was on a break for 3+ yrs. I haven't done outbound yet ("applied" to companies). Mostly got referred to companies/startups through folks in my network. Remote work is an important requirement for the time being. So I spoke to 15 (remote-friendly/first) companies through my network (could've been more if I were up for onsite work), 4 started the interview process (rest had…

> One thing I noticed (although small sample set) was that the interview processes are very slow (like 1 round per week). Yep. And almost everyone is hiring by committee now. Because if the committee hires the wrong person, nobody hires the wrong person. And with all of these people involved, now you are subject to the calendars of the various very busy “stakeholders”. One company I engaged with had me talk to 11 peo…

> And almost everyone is hiring by committee now. Because if the committee hires the wrong person, nobody hires the wrong person.

At least in some cases, it's a reaction to some managers having made hiring decisions perceived by leadership as mistakes. Impersonal and bureaucratic as it might be, to the extent it keeps the bar higher I think it's a good thing.

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

#285

Post by nsxwolf »

fxtentacle wrote: post #238
whiddershins wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing on here that is in any way better than what I get in the U.S. would be the free daycare. Everything else is worse than what I earn as a fully remote employee, who could choose to live in any number of second or third tier American cities that are nearly as cheap as Berlin.

(and probably the healthcare system that doesn't bankrupt you)

It's pretty hard for a software engineer to get bankrupted by the US healthcare system. As long as you maintain your insurance coverage, your biggest worry is the annual "out of pocket maximum", which is the most you can pay in a year, and is usually very low end of 5 digits. There are gotchas with this with uncovered services (i.e., rescue helicopters) but in general, this whole bankruptcy concept is overblown, especially in our privileged market segment.

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

#286

Post by Izkata »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #241
CWuestefeld wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I just realized that my above model answer gets broken by the formatter. the first question should get answered with char-star, that is, pointer to char.

If you put a backslash in front of the asterisk it should be kept as-is instead of triggering the formatting.

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

#287

Post by Ancapistani »

the_only_law wrote: post #111

I was laid off a week before thanksgiving. Job search has been going pretty bad. Only a few screen out rejections and a handful of obnoxious crap recruiters have contacted me. No interviews yet.

I've been there.

The last time around was in 2020. It seemed like it took forever to get any response. Even when I was able to get through the interview process, it just stalled and I didn't hear back at all. I thought I was being ghosted.

I finally took an offer in late January. By March I'd had no fewer than five companies come back with written offers out of the blue, long after I'd forgotten about them.

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

#288

Post by mrcartmeneses »

UweSchmidt wrote: post #189
mrcartmeneses wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are likely to be successful going this route. Some advice (some of it obvious if you've dont it before and not specific for Germany but maybe it's useful): Have a profile on Linkedin and Xing, upload to sites like freelance.de and maybe to a bunch of agencies. Be ready to send a profile, listing as many projects as possible, i.e. different roles in a company could be separate projects. Make sure all relevant sear…

Thanks. Looking forward to it. I’m so done with England!

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

#289

Post by jenscow »

samhuk wrote: post #269
jenscow wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For remedial points, claim it's on a raspberry pi. Slowness due to React but you're re-writing it in Rust.

Then everyone would think I'm just a ChatGPT bot trained on HN ;) /s

Great! When can you start?

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

#290

Post by beastcoast »

distcs wrote: post #168
bluGill wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

since amazon has a policy to layoff the bottom 6% every year (numbers may be off), any good manager will be constantly looking for someone to hire into the bottom 6% role so they can keep their good people. Since they are not actually looking for someone who can do a good job they don't care if they treat you well.

I keep hearing this trope but this is very naive. A manager simply cannot keep hiring into bottom 6% role. All candidates are subject to the same type of interviews. Every interviewer has to give a "hire" decision for the new candidate. Then there is a bar-raiser interview in Amazon where the interviewer belongs to an unrelated team. They need to give a "hire" decision too. Unless all of this happens, a manager canno…

I saw this happen personally. I was in the interview loop along with the hiring manager, HM was not inclined but the bar raiser and other people on the loop, myself included, were inclined but as a downlevel (L7 -> L6). Candidate is hired, I start mentoring him, he gets dev-listed (aka Focus) within two months, is pushed out by month six. I can only assume the HM had an axe to grind against this candidate, and saw a H2F opportunity.
Post reply on HN