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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?

#331

Post by parentheses »

tarokun-io wrote: post #257

Interviewed with about 28 companies for almost 3 months, without a single offer! I was starting to get really worried about money and burned out from interviewing. In the past I've never interviewed with more than 2 or 3 before getting an offer I now this is incredibly privileged. I'm not humble-bragging, just observing the change in the market. As things usually turn out, during the last week of the 3-month search I…

I'm glad things are finally coming through. Best of luck. I had a similar experience looking for a job a few months ago. I got lucky with timing and joining a company that's optimizing for longer-term cash flow.

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

#332

Post by parentheses »

wickedsickeune wrote: post #266
tarokun-io wrote: post #257

Interviewed with about 28 companies for almost 3 months, without a single offer! I was starting to get really worried about money and burned out from interviewing. In the past I've never interviewed with more than 2 or 3 before getting an offer I now this is incredibly privileged. I'm not humble-bragging, just observing the change in the market. As things usually turn out, during the last week of the 3-month search I…

Thanks for sharing. If I may ask, when was the last time you looked for a job? I'm saying this because maybe you're having trouble due to ageism that you didn't encounter before.

Ageism is often conflated with higher compensation expectations.

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

#333

Post by vl »

rajin444 wrote: post #191
rvz wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What possibly will happen is that junior developers will have even harder time getting into the industry, because clueless PHBs will see ChatGPT doing all their work "for free". A few years later they're screwed, because nobody at the company knows how their applications work. Except ChatGPT...maybe. Reads like what I said before. Some will be affected and less programmers will be needed,. Especially in particular,…

Who’s going to write new code to train the model? Who’s going to figure out why the code generated by the model is slightly off? The performance gains from chatgpt are going to be amazing from a quality of life perspective but overall not a huge change (except maybe in some niche roles). Programmers are not spending much of their time figuring out code that chatgpt can generate.

The question is not who, but how many people are required to write code to train model?

You are like a peasant arguing about security of their job in the beginning of 20th century after seeing a tractor. Sure there are farmers now, but much fewer of them is needed.

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

#334

Post by simne »

simne wrote: post #262

I'm in Ukraine. What I seen from begin of war, there are extremely few positions for juniors - different sources say, 60-2000 cv's per position. For experienced people, things slightly better - at 1 years exp, 5-20 cv/pos; 2 years exp ~1:1; 5+ years exp, there are much more positions, than candidates.

Rumors said, no new projects opened, and all people hired to support (and if you fortunate, to grow) old projects.

But don't forget, we are at war, few months ago more than quarter of Ukraine considered occupied by Russians, and we still are not safe from strikes on infrastructure (about week ago we survived blackout for near 20 hours).

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

#335

Post by throwaway908365 »

fxtentacle wrote: post #237
throwaway908365 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - 13th salary as a Christmas gift (so +8.3% salary) My 100k number is all-in. > Also, with a bit of searching, you can rent a house with garden for €2000 per month even in large cities like Hamburg or Berlin. As a result, an 100k€ annual salary will be enough for you alone to comfortably bankroll a family of 5 - something that's almost impossible in the bay area due to high rents and insane costs of living. That is…

Yes of course. A 100k€ annual salary won't let you retire early if you are the only one working in your family and you want to buy a nice house in a nice area of the city. But then again, would that work out if you were to work in San Francisco for $200k annually?

Think about it this way: I am in the top earning 2%. It is only possible to buy such a home if you have a partner, who makes similiar numbers and then together decide to dedicate your life to it. The 98% of the rest cannot do it. Ergo I am either not earning enough or we have to accept, that you cannot really buy property within a top-tier city in Germany. In the end the whole debate turns into young vs. old and heritage vs. salary.

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

#336

Post by throwaway908365 »

j33zusjuice wrote: post #200
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…

Not to mention the 42% paid in taxes every year, assuming the €100k is gross, not net. €58,000 seems like a low take-home, even with all the caveats you gave.

This is not how taxes work. 42% is the marginal rate, not the effective rate.

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

#337

Post by throwaway908365 »

whiddershins wrote: post #166
fxtentacle wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100k€ for 15 years of experience seems about right for me. If you factor in all the freebies and tax refunds and stuff, that's roughly equivalent to earning 1000€ per billable day as a German freelancer, or the equivalent of about $150 per hour in the US. Typical freebies in Germany include: - 13th salary as a Christmas gift (so +8.3% salary) - only half of your health insurance costs are included in the nominal sala…

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.

You have an easier time earning money in a high-cost area and are then able to move to a lower-cost area when you are retiring. I on the other hand, can not do the opposite. Additionally, while we Europeans like to make ourself feel better through the "US health insurance bad" meme, there are some US regulations, that make the difference even greater (e.g. there is no such thing as a 401k in Germany).

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

#338

Post by ryandrake »

Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #309
MaxBarraclough wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I agree it's good for a candidate to demonstrate a solid understanding of evaluation strategies, but t…

Agreed. In fact, I had an instructor in college that would have marked you down if a quiz/test asked this question and you wrote an entire paragraph describing call-by-value versus call-by-reference. On the final, he said "Each of these questions is answerable in 1-3 sentences. If you're writing 1-3 paragraphs, you're wasting my time and I will subtract points even if your answer is correct."

We need your professor to coach interview candidates. On the "interviewer" side of the table, I can't tell you the number of times I've asked a question that should produce a quick, simple answer, and instead got a 5-10 minute stream-of-consciousness word salad out of the candidate. Or a huge run-on sentence this-and-that-and-this-and-also-that-oh-and-this... without coming up for air. It's so common, I must assume that these kinds of replies are being taught to candidates as some sort of best practice.

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

#339

Post by EmilyHATFIELD »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #212
ARandomerDude wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why would using pointers be better than references ? At least a reference cannot be null?

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

#340

Post by foepys »

icedchai wrote: post #324
treewalking wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They use pass by value but objects are reference valued.

Yes, I understand... But the result, practically speaking, is objects are passed by reference, just like I said. Methods/functions can modify their parameters.

But you cannot change the reference itself which is possible in languages like C, C++, C#, and many more.
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