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Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

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Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#381

Post by FemmeAndroid »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #360
cientifico wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do, and quite frequently. After more than a 2 decades in software development (rails/web/...), for me to consider a developer to be a senior it needs to: * Communicate: For example: can explain tech concepts to non tech people, or inform on Monday that the sprint will be unlikely to be done in time. * Can estimate and adapt to changes. Be boring and predictable. * Can work/collaborate/teach with other devs. I got t…

You think it takes 5+ years to acquire those skills?! Man, I would be driven insane in an environment like that. Such a long time and a relatively low bar.

Not who you’re asking, but it can take almost no time, or decades. It has nothing to do with years.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#382

Post by Silhouette »

rsynnott wrote: post #317
whiddershins wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, no one calls someone with 5.5 years of experience a junior engineer.

Eh, maybe an "engineer", if they have junior, null, senior grades. A lot of places wouldn't consider that sort of experience level automatically senior; they'd have to be exceptional.

Not automatic but historically a good but not exceptional developer would expect to make senior after maybe 5-8 years of experience. Someone who was still needing close supervision - which is what "junior" traditionally meant - after 5 years would be exceptional and it wouldn't reflect well on either the developer or the places they worked at the start of their career.

Of course this is about the level the employee is capable of operating at in absolute terms but hiring is relative. In an employee's market someone might be able to land a "senior" role before they're really ready for it. In an employer's market the average candidate who gets hired as a "senior" might have 10+ YOE. We've gone from one to the other recently and everyone's expectations will need to adjust accordingly.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#384

Post by imiric »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #185
supriyo-biswas wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recruiters get a lot of flak here and elsewhere, but having recently interacted with a few for a recent job change, their incentives are aligned to have some skin in the game, and they can do the emotionally draining part of pushing the company to speed up the process for you without having to send multiple emails or waiting for months for your rejection.

When you say "recruiters," do you mean in-house recruiters or third party recruiters? Getting an in-house person on your side certainly is a great way to speed along the hiring process, but I've literally never had a third party recruiter send anything my way that ever came close to working out. It's gotten to the point where if I get an email from a 3rd party recruiter, I just don't look at it -- although I'm not su…

> I suspect a lot of it has to do with the type of companies that tend to hire 3rd party recruiters. Namely, startups, and typically early stage startups who don't have any in-house recruiting staff.

That hasn't been my experience. In a startup people often wear multiple hats, so it's not uncommon for CTOs or CEOs to be directly involved in the hiring process. Startups usually list their open positions on their site and screen applications via email, or post on the HN Hiring and other niche job boards. Startups certainly don't want the cost and communication overhead of dealing with recruiters, especially because it costs them much more to make a wrong hire at an early stage.

In contrast, large and mostly technically out-of-touch companies love 3rd party recruiters. They give them a bunch of vague role requirements, and let recruiters do the dirty work for them. If there are problems with filling a role, they can always blame the recruiting agency.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#385

Post by CoastalCoder »

noitpmeder wrote: post #111
Varriount wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the best luck with recruiters that have contacted me directly on LinkedIn. Conversely, I've had zero luck with the recruiters that contact me via phone call. My assumption is that this is because many of the latter are operating under the "if we get you hired we get XX% percent of your salary" model, and are thus inclined to submit as many applications as they can.

I think this is only really an option for some sub-spaces of tech. As someone in a middling HFT shop my linkedin inbox is flooded with recruiter spam. But most of my friends in frontend work don't get any of this.

> As someone in a middling HFT shop

Hey, since we're on the topic of HFT developers...

How do people break into that area?

I've done a lot of performance-optimization work, so I thought I might be a good candidate for some of those roles.

But for all the job postings I've seen in the past ~4 months, they want significant prior experience developing low-latency systems.

Is this just a temporary thing, where the pool of already-experienced candidates is sufficient?

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#386

Post by catsarebetter »

Have you tried niching down on a tech stack, an industry, or even the types of teams you want to work on? It's a good way to stand out from the crowd. You might have to turn away more recruiter screens, but it gives you a much stronger profile against everyone else with the companies you have strong fit in.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#387

Post by wildrhythms »

tap-snap-or-nap wrote: post #72
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #41

FED is finished . i would suggest moving into something with higher barrier to entry. last 4 FED my company hired are ex-sales/ex-whatever bootcampers (yes my company is cheap). remote working is the final nail. still few good FED jobs but you have 10,000s expert leetcoders fired by faang to compete.

I am amazed people are still getting jobs as FED

What do you mean? Who are they hiring instead? Or do you mean full-stack is the bare minimum now?

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#388

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #373
heavenlyblue wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Perks. We often meet directly with recruiters in person, and they have expense accounts and take us for lunch/drinks we don't have to pay for. This makes us want to keep using them over direct applications (yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates if you take us for lunch or drinks - check compliance limits before suggesting a ve…

I was briefly a dev lead responsible for hiring contractors. The company I worked for already had a contract with a certain recruiting agency - the same one I came in through. The brief stint I was at the company, the recruiter gave me tickets to the local professional baseball team that included access to premium suites and tickets to the local professional football team. But yeah I get it, having a free meal wouldn…

I work in finance and we have lots of mandatory training about to do about "gifts". Game tickets are a specific example used to illustrate corporate corruption...

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#389

Post by thaumasiotes »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #366
animuchan wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what the parent comment says: title inflation. I sometimes get even funnier CVs, where a person with 2-3 years of experience (usually from the Army) is already in a tech lead / architect position.

Tech is very strongly bi-modal or even tri-modal in terms of both compensation and skill. Some people with 2-3 YOE will operate better than some people with 10 YOE.

> Some people with 2-3 YOE will operate better than some people with 10 YOE.

That's true of every field, and doesn't really relate to the claim of bimodality. If ability followed a perfect normal distribution, it would still be true that some people with 2-3 years of experience are better than some other people with 10-15 years of experience.

Re: Ask HN: Is the market bad, or am I having the worst luck job hunting?

#390

Post by Macha »

yodsanklai wrote: post #378
rsynnott wrote: post #282

It's not a good job market, but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview. It might be worth asking friends or former colleagues, ideally people who actually are involved in recruiting (hiring managers etc) to take a look at your resume and LinkedIn profile and see if there's anything glaringly wrong with them. Is your resume in a weird format, or is it structurally weird/overde…

> _wild_ title inflation I'm wondering if it's important to put a specific title on one's resume. I assume many companies don't have any titles at all and everybody is just a "software engineers", whether they are a fresh graduate or 10 years of experience tech lead. What is more relevant is the scope of the job done which should be listed in a job description.

I think yes. While many companies have unprefixed titles, others have just plain "Software Engineer" as one step above graduate and even some otherwise decent companies will discard resumes applying for senior/lead positions when a HR drone does a first pass and decides "no senior level experience", even if your descriptions are full of business impact and leadership experience.
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