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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?

#391

Post by giaour »

heavenlyblue wrote: post #266
mightykipper wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on sector, you may find you only get traction through recruiters. I work in finance, almost everything is through third party recruiters and there are two reasons for this. 1. We are only allowed to hire through either an approved recruiter or the company job portal. The company job portal gets so many applications for each job it's absurd, and we have to sift these ourselves to some degree (HR are meant to…

> 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 have seen people who make $250K a year be swayed by free muffins. It has nothing to do with money.

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

#392

Post by beowulfey »

otikik wrote: post #321
firefoxd wrote: post #63

I hate to say this, stop applying. Find a recruiter on LinkedIn. This is what it has come to. There are thousands of resumes being sent at my company, yet the recruiter can't find anyone. Why? Because no one is applying through her link. The regular resume channel is reserved for bots at this point. Contact a person and you have more chances.

Not completely disagreeing with the OP but before going the recruiter route make sure you have exhausted the social network route. Your resume has way more chances to be considered seriously if instead of just sending it to the company inbox someone already working for that company recommends you. If you have any friends, family or ex-colleagues working on a nice place, tell them that you are looking for a position a…

I would say an order of magnitude more likely, even. People always underestimate just how much even a tangential social connection improves your chances.

(FWIW, this is also why I think recruiters work.)

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

#393

Post by ragnot »

iExploder wrote: post #128
expertentipp wrote: post #107

Bots and scams. Housing, dating, job search - these three have become hopeless "marketplaces", hopefully we are at the tipping point and they will collapse. I compile Latex CV for every job application and make an extra effort to apply directly to the company. Every time they have direct one to one communication with an experienced professional with relevant education, and they... insist on digging into inconsistenci…

the ideal candidate has 3-4 years of experience in exactly everything you need so you dont need to train. has no idea what they are worth so you can underpay. and doesn't have a family so they can sit in the office 24/7. this is what the job world has become and it's not going in the right direction.

Bingo

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

#394

Post by Varriount »

idrios wrote: post #370
Uptrenda wrote: post #275

I believe the market really is just bad right now. When I was job searching it probably took me 3 times as long. I noticed that there were hundreds of applicants per role when normally I'd have noticed less than 20 maybe? Even at my current company they told us that hundreds of people were applying. That's how many you have to beat just to get in the door. I think it's caused by a number of factors: (1) Investors are…

At least in regards to competing against hundreds of applicants, I think that's driven by how easy it is to submit a job application now, and by the fact that so many roles are remote. I'm job searching as well at the moment, and a friend I talked to said he had genuinely applied to at least 1000 jobs, in basically any city in the country, before landing the role he has now. Said he submitted 20 applications/day, 5 d…

I'm curious though - how many of those applications were for recently posted positions? I ask because I assume that the older a job posting, the more likely its position has been filled but the posting hasn't been taken down.

If you apply to 1000 positions, but 700 are from those "zombie" job postings, then you've really only applied to 300 positions.

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

#395

Post by thriller »

I was laid off in December, a week after a rallying speech from the CEO declaring all jobs were safe.

I was surprised at how difficult it was to get an interview as I have a somewhat unique skillset. But understandable if 50-150 are applying.

It took seven months before I found something, by which point I had to bullshit about the gap in employment (left to spin up my consultancy!).

Agree with some of the comments here. Find a good recruiter who is a straight shooter, they will be able to get you an interview or tell you what you're missing.

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

#396

Post by Macha »

Uptrenda wrote: post #275

I believe the market really is just bad right now. When I was job searching it probably took me 3 times as long. I noticed that there were hundreds of applicants per role when normally I'd have noticed less than 20 maybe? Even at my current company they told us that hundreds of people were applying. That's how many you have to beat just to get in the door. I think it's caused by a number of factors: (1) Investors are…

I will say as someone who's been involved in the hiring side, the 100s of applicants number is true but also misleading. Especially if you take public applications on linked in or someone. You'll get a lot of people who are unqualified, and I don't mean stuff like "3 years of experience and the req said 5" or "Only worked in scala but we're hiring for python devs", but rather "This person is a cashier and has not indicated anywhere they would have gotten development experience", or "This person is a fresh graduate applying for a team lead role".

Then if there are still too many to interview after that first filter there's the easy ways to cut down numbers further like "This person has no visa and has not started any visa process to work in our jurisdiction" or "this person's entire career is in a single tech stack that is not our tech stack while there's other candidates with our tech stack or a track record of adopting new ones". Could these people work out? Possibly. But it's an overhead that when there's extra candidates, they need something to stick out to make it onto the shortlist. If there's others that have all the same pros and an already valid visa/citizenship or the right tech stack, they'll get on the shortlist first.

After those two processes, the number of applicants per role are not that crazy.

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

#397

Post by shagie »

darkwater wrote: post #206
hamburglar wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m confused by the question. Are you under the impression that the term “full stack” didn’t exist in the early ‘00s? I recall the term already being an overused joke by then. It basically just means that whatever stack you got, the person can work on all parts of it.

Never heard the full stack term in early '00s, but I was very very junior so it might be me, anyway I'm pretty sure that nowadays "full stack" has a specific meaning (basically only related to web development) and that it was different back in the day

Full stack back in '00 was typically LAMP. Linux, Apache (httpd), MySQL, and Perl, Python, or Php.

As a full stack developer, you were expected to be able to do system administration for Linux, setup and configure Apache httpd server, work with MySQL (create tables, know SQL), and work in a language that typically started with 'P'. The way that CGIs (and Php) worked implied that you did front end and backend work as necessary... though front end didn't have the same degree of complexity that it does now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAMP_(software_bundle)

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

#398

Post by radiator »

m00dy wrote: post #371
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…

honestly, I'm a senior developer and I don't give a fuck about collaboration.

This does not compute.

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

#399

Post by openplatypus »

Currently at WeAreDevelopers congress in Berlin. It is conference that is heavily skewed towards businesses advertising their hiring efforts.

Have no comparison to previous years but it looks like there is tons of jobs offers.

And the compensation seemed to increase as well. It is now SV level, but we are talki Europe, where 100-130k puts you in top 5%.

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

#400

Post by ehnto »

arghwhat wrote: post #345
Aeolun wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That depends entirely on their skill. I’ve seen people with 10 years of experience that were still junior.

One should definitely have outgrown a junior title after say 3 years of relevant experience, as that is more than sufficient time to be trained into a normal (non-senior) status. It could last longer if your company does not have a normal title (i.e., they consider junior == !senior), but someone with 10 years of relevant experience should have earned a seniority title of some sort.

I think you have found the issue to be honest, I think most people are expecting to be "senior" in place of "not junior" as soon as they prove they are good programmers. The senior title has been quite diluted by that.

Seniority is about experience and not skill in my opinion, we see many talented developers who don't qualify as senior because they simply haven't experienced enough situations. I expect a senior to have some war stories and a breadth of notable situations that they can walk me through, to demonstrate their ability to predict common issues and pitfalls, and to show how their experience helps their troubleshooting and informs their choices.

If I had told 20 year old me this, 20 year old me would have balked. 20 year old me was an excellent programmer, but he didn't know shit about long term software development.

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