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Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

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Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#321

Post by hnfong »

elwell wrote: post #58
pubby wrote: post #23

I wasn't laid off, but am unemployed. I've found it very difficult to land any interviews, or even get a response from companies. Even what I thought were safe bets (like a job at a bank, writing CRUD apps) do not respond. I've only had one interview this year. It was with a FAANG. I easily passed and got an offer, but then layoffs were announced and they had to revoke.

You easily passed a FAANG interview?

Looking at GP's profile, lots of NES programming and general gaming work. I can totally see how HR in banks would prefer somebody with 10 years of Java or C# experience, familiar with {Vendor}SQL and an employment history in a related banking/finance sector (and screen out everyone else).

At least FAANG don't really care about those things. On the other hand if you know your way around assembly on esoteric hardware, the stereotypical FAANG whiteboarding questions like "reverse a linked list" shouldn't be a problem.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#322

Post by hnfong »

dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #298
throwawaydad12 wrote: post #254

I've been at this for almost 40 years, and it's shocking to me how little urgency there is to hiring over the last 5-10 years. I have a sinecure but still interview from time to time. Compared to (say) 1990, it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive. In principle, I'm likely someone that hiring managers are looking for, and really a pretty good deal. In practice, I'll probably just retire rather than throw my ha…

>it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive. I think it's this one of the parts that really ticks someone like me off. Most interviewers know almost upfront 10 minutes into into the interview if they are going to reject you, yet they can often drag on for an hour, under the guise of knowing, your 'approach' a problem.

Hiring decisions are generally not made by only one person. The interviewee might be performing poorly on one interview, but the interviewer doesn't know how it went on the others. Shutting off the interviewee 10 minutes into a one-hour interview session would backfire pretty badly unless the interviewer is sure that those 10 minutes was enough to determine the candidate definitely isn't hire-worthy (which is different from voting to pass on the candidate). The (Bayesian) priors of that happening should be pretty low if the screening process was working as intended.

Making the wrong call would entail the interviewee potentially feeling offended, which could be an issue if the ultimate decision was to make an offer to them -- they might reject the offer due to this experience alone. Not to mention it would be pretty awkward to work with a new colleague where you walked out on him as an interviewer. (In general you really don't want colleagues to know that you voted to pass on them)

In general if a candidate thinks they're getting nowhere they can suggest to stop the interview. Nobody can stop you from cutting it short and leave if those 50 minutes are important to you.

(Also, FWIW I don't think saving a hypothetical 50 minutes of interview time is what the GP was specifically referring to...)

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#323

Post by brailsafe »

inadequatespace wrote: post #316
brailsafe wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Variety of reasons, burnout, management style changing or expectations changing in a way that I can't keep up, I guess those are the usual ones and they're closely related. Most companies also just arbitrarily pick 2 week agile sprints with daily stand-ups, often increasing the amount of meetings as time goes on, and this is usually where things start going downward for me. There also tends to be a decrease in autono…

Damn, I’ve been there — at least in the situation where the manager concludes that micromanaging will somehow make the managee more effective, rather than in the very best case, hamstring it by bottlenecking on them and in the average case, deeply humiliate by trying to make the managee do things exactly the way they would (but be worse at it, because the managee is not them and could have their own different, person…

Yes, it's both. Thankfully I'm in a completely different timezone, so have reasonable grounds to not be in every meeting or available between specific big blocks of time. I have no interest though in trying to reduce my own motivation toward the work, so I simply said more this amount of meetings will reduce my productivity. I'm ok with how things are, but anything additional will displace other work from my day.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#324

Post by throwawaydad12 »

hnfong wrote: post #322
dennis_jeeves1 wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it's intensely time-consuming and unproductive. I think it's this one of the parts that really ticks someone like me off. Most interviewers know almost upfront 10 minutes into into the interview if they are going to reject you, yet they can often drag on for an hour, under the guise of knowing, your 'approach' a problem.

Hiring decisions are generally not made by only one person. The interviewee might be performing poorly on one interview, but the interviewer doesn't know how it went on the others. Shutting off the interviewee 10 minutes into a one-hour interview session would backfire pretty badly unless the interviewer is sure that those 10 minutes was enough to determine the candidate definitely isn't hire-worthy (which is differe…

I think reasonable people will give allowance to the hiring loop taking a day or two to synchronize on their earnest opinion of a candidate. I'm not bothered by that at all.

More disturbing are the cases where the hiring organization knows in advance that they _will not_ hire a candidate. IMO, it's unethical to waste someone's time on that.

In my personal experience, I had a FAANG drag me along for six months, passing screen after screen, only to be put off at the end for a "flaw" that was obvious from day one on my resume. I'll accept your judgement, but don't waste 50 hours of my time discovering something you could have learned in 60s by reading my resume.

Hirers complain about not being able to find candidates. This is one huge reason why.

I've been thinking about charging $1000, up front, for a day's interview. Sounds like an arrogant, asshole move. But still, what would be better?

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#325

Post by maxnevermind »

piercebot wrote: post #122

I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously. All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field. Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through. Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but…

Can you elaborate. So you are working two supposedly full-time jobs but in reality working less than 8 hours in total, is that right?

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#326

Post by piercebot »

maxnevermind wrote: post #325
piercebot wrote: post #122

I transitioned from full-time employment to contracting in April 2022. I am currently over-employed and working two gigs simultaneously. All leads have come from my personal network or my reputation as a known entity in a relatively niche field. Only trouble I've had is invoice approval and waiting for money to be moved, but it has always eventually come through. Cashflow remains equivalent to when I was an FTE, but…

Can you elaborate. So you are working two supposedly full-time jobs but in reality working less than 8 hours in total, is that right?

Sure!

For the first job, I bill hourly for the time I spend working. Here, I develop web applications to validate machine learning models for a company; I help organize results in a way that allows ML engineers to easily "spot check" the results of ML runs on data through a web interface.

The second job I have is in the "web3" space developing applications that run on a specific blockchain in which I've specialized. Compensation here is based on milestones and paid out in cryptocurrency.

In both cases, I am transparent about the progress I'm making and compensated accordingly. The hourly rate I charge as a contractor brings in an equivalent salary to what I had as a full-time employee in about 900 hours per year, which works out to be about 18/hours per week if you assume 2 weeks off.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#327

Post by Jach »

inadequatespace wrote: post #317
Jach wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is largely mentality. Both for the initial plan and execution of saving up (and trying to do it fast, e.g. in 5-10 years) and then pulling the trigger and quitting. I pulled the trigger in late 2020 based on somewhat optimistic forecasting (more than the 4%/5% rule of thumb) that I might have enough for it to be indefinite at steady expense levels. TBH rocky markets this year have had me feeling like it'd be nice…

> gotten a low interest mortgage before quitting Meaning it would have been easier to with a demonstrable income stream? Or just incidentally, due to macro stuff and time raising interest rates over that same period

Both, though the latter is a bit mixed up with more wishful thinking like "why didn't I invest everything in Apple in [early year]". Life's too full of those to really regret individual ones too much though.

I figured I'd be ok liquidating ~$300k max for a cash purchase and skipping the mortgage, though if needed it's possible to get a delayed financing loan after, and at least a HELOC. But spiking prices everywhere made that more difficult or impossible in certain areas. And even if something is 'affordable' at say $265k, I find it hard to stomach the idea of paying that much when I think it is (and 2019/2020 records show was) worth only about half that. (In 2014 I actually had legal control of a house but opted to get rid of it, it had been refinanced and it took months to find a buyer at $170k to zero that out. Earlier this year zillow estimated it could fetch $420k, which is absurd to me knowing all about it, but seeing actual sales in the area I believe it.)

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#328

Post by erixM »

echelon wrote: post #35

I know this may not be the correct thread for this, and hope it doesn't come across as not being empathetic: I'm paying $100/hr (negotiable) for skills in { Rust/Actix webdev, Unreal Engine plugin development, computer vision, audio processing, signal processing, ML }. These roles will convert to salary/equity later on, once the project outgrows my ability to self-fund. We're building a cloud-based AI film and music…

Hi, your product looks great! I currently have 2 years of experience as a fullstack developer, mainly using React on the frontend side. I am not ready for your Rust/Actix webdev position at the moment, but, if I wanted to prepare for it in the next months, what advice would you give me? What would be the requirements to pass the interview?

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#329

Post by zhima009 »

kristopolous wrote: post #37

Let me show you the backdoor: Find a company whose open source projects you are interested in. Dive in and and start fixing things. Then if you really like it after a couple weeks start nudging around for a job. If you do good work they'll just give it to you, no bullshit funnel required. I like this method because you aren't just doing l33t coding exercises to work on some sight unseen codebase that makes you suicid…

Interesting, I've seen one guy used the similar method to get a remote job.

Re: Ask HN: How's the job hunt going? (For those laid off)

#330

Post by VirusNewbie »

azmodeus wrote: post #185
VirusNewbie wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup can confirm, after a decent contribution to a known apache project, had three well known companies reach out, two of which the engineering manager was the one reaching out.

Would love to know more. What project was it? Did you contribute wanting a job or was interested any way? Did you get a job through this strategy?

I contributed because the company I worked for needed new functionality, then I decided it was interesting to make it generic enough to release to everyone. I did it a little bit as something to throw on the resume, but no idea if it helped to get my current job.
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