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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?

#371

Post by fxtentacle »

nsxwolf wrote: post #285
fxtentacle wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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, espe…

"maintain your insurance coverage" sounds like a pretty difficult thing to do for a hypothetical software engineer who just got fired because of burnout.

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

#372

Post by throw12903i81 »

It depends a lot on which streams you're casting in.

At the seed/series A stage (one I'm most familiar with), any company that raised money this year or is cash-flow positive is still hiring opportunistically. At Series B and beyond, it's really a function of the health and resilience of their business model.

Within this bracket, there's fewer total jobs available, but the "median quality" of jobs is better than it's been in a long time: most companies that are hiring are good companies, so if you were to pick completely randomly between offers, you wouldn't be too bad off. Comp packages have not come down ($180-200kish cash basis for a "senior" engineer).

For people who know how to analyze early-stage companies as a prospective engineering hire, this is paradoxically a great time to be looking.

From my perspective, it seems like many ex-FAANG employees are seeking stable comp at late-stage growth companies (which may be a buyer beware situation...). I think the hiring there has gotten much more competitive, but I have less firsthand experience fishing those streams.

My tackle box: laid off from Meta after <1 month of Bootcamp, 5ish YoE as a backend engineer. Meta would have been my first FAANG experience.

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

#373

Post by fxtentacle »

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.

The actual tax rate with 2 kids and 2 adults out of which only 1 works and earns €100k is going to be 18% if you don't declare ANY deductions.

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

#374

Post by fxtentacle »

f1shy wrote: post #142
kybernetyk wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this 100k gross or net pay?

Gross... and about the 1/2 goes away. Like 45%. Also depending on where you come from, you can be shock by the 19% VAT on almost everything. While food is cheap, some other things are more expensive (tech stuff). The gov. has good health service, and also education. But the education system has some interesting limitations, that may surprise you.

FYI you only pay 45% on the income that exceeds 277826€ annually. A typical rate for 100k€ income for a family of 4 would be 15%.

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

#375

Post by mekster »

ghostoftiber wrote: post #25

I feel like this should be a "Who's hiring" thread. But anyway - we're always hiring if you're into small consulting companies. We mostly do AWS, Azure, and not a lot of GCP (sad because I like GCP), and it's almost 100% K8s. You will have to be able to get a CKA, CKAD, or CKS at some point. Need to be in the US. Send resumes to Josh@BoxBoat.Com

How many valid inquiries do you get by posting in non "Who's hiring" thread?

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

#376

Post by MaxBarraclough »

ryandrake wrote: post #338
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

I suspect many interviewers reward using a question as an opportunity to showcase knowledge though, even if it means rewarding that kind of expansive verbosity. I suspect the this and also that you allude to is the candidate not wanting to be called out for failing to mention a corner case or tradeoff. Of course, conversations are rarely legalistically constrained to answering only the precise letter of a question asked; it's a matter of degree.

Forgive a painful mixing of metaphors: if the Workplace StackExchange is anything to go by, one interviewer's flying colours are often another interviewer's red flags.

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

#377

Post by notfromhere »

alexfromapex wrote: post #355
zamalek wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contracts don't determine what is legal and not legal. If the said person is found out then they would be in breach of contract and could be fired or sued. They would not earn themselves a criminal record.

They could earn themselves a criminal charge if the court decides what they're doing is fraud which it likely is if they have signed something saying they wouldn't work elsewhere simultaneously.

It's not fraud. If you are performing to expectation, no one is being defrauded.

Anti-moonlighting clauses are nonsense.

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

#378

Post by Eumenes »

godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #205
throw_aws_inter wrote: post #16

I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…

I will never again interview for Amazon unless I am about to be evicted and they are the only one left in town. Interviewed for a senior dev role, went through all the rounds, took days off of work to be available, and after the final round they just ghosted me. I had to follow up to find out they had chosen someone else. The amount of time I put into those interviews was absurd, reading up on all their principles, c…

I think I'd rather dig holes over working for Amazon - I've never heard anything positive out of that place.

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

#379

Post by roxgib »

ryandrake wrote: post #338
Sohcahtoa82 wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

This is what I've been told. The idea being that the questions are more like prompts, and you should go ahead and elaborate to show your knowledge? Of course sometimes a questions really is just a question.

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

#380

Post by underwater »

dxxvi wrote: post #110
throw_aws_inter wrote: post #16

I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…

This is my own experience: if the recruiters don't call me back, that means I fail. Calling them just makes me more stressful/sad.

It's also possible their top candidate is has competing offers, and the recruiter is waiting to see if they need to fall back to you.
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