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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?

#401

Post by ZephyrBlu »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #389
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In most fields this is extremely rare. In tech it's relatively common.

The difference is the kind of environment you're working in (E.g. high growth tech company vs non-tech company) and the learning rate in that environment, which is where the modality comes into play.

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

#402

Post by ttarr »

octagonal wrote: post #289
iExploder wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

as a rule of thumb I ignore all UK agents, they have the attention span of a coked up butterfly. from my experience they try extract as much information out of you (your salary, last company, are they hiring, give me phone number to their manager or hr) and never call even if they scheduled a call. they never update you if the role you applied for have been filled in meantime, you simply get ghosted and your email ge…

I won't resort to naming and shaming here but if you ever get contacted by a UK agency that 'resources vividly', immediately request a removal of your contact info per GDPR or you will get phoned daily for months on end.

If you're referring to Vivid Resourcing, they're truly horrible, I got interrogated by them for 30+ mins and they disappear, happened twice so it can't be a one off!

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

#403

Post by vsareto »

Silhouette wrote: post #382
rsynnott wrote: post #317

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

This is why software is not a serious profession: it has no consistency in progression and recognition.

I think I would drive myself mad if I tried to live up to the crazy expectations of senior from most internet commenters.

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

#404

Post by ThunderSizzle »

azangru wrote: post #367
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…

Surely there's a step between a junior and a senior?

We typically use programmer, developer, or software engineer as synonyms as a whole, but I tend to view those titles as more junior/intermediate/senior.

A programmer can program code good enough, but that doesn't mean they are good at solving the goals business requires and communicating it.

A developer can program and develop a small enhancement with good communication. Sometimes can also break things down so other developers or programmers can work on it to.

An engineer an orchestrate an entire new project and can identify multiple areas where developers and programmers can be involved. A good engineer will do so while maintaining great communication with the users to ensure they get what they want.

An architect is someone who comes up with a plan to build something without any real care about budget, labor costs, or labor skills - both in software and in buildings.

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

#405

Post by itsmeste »

cientifico wrote: post #341
whiddershins wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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…

Couldn't agree more.

I had colleagues with 20+ years of industry experience who couldn't communicate efficiently, extending every short call to 1h+ meetings, require long and recurring discussions for the smallest details, or define tickets that always had to be reworked. The same people were often off by magnitudes with their estimates and reluctant to suggestions to improvements in their tooling (i.e. linter plugins for their IDE when necessary).

On the other hand, I had teammates with ~5 years of industry experience who outpaced the whole team, delivered optimal quality, were empathic, held workshops for other devs, and still had enough time/power to work on things like refactors.

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

#406

Post by geonnave »

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.

In (Brazilian) Portuguese software engineers are usually graded Júnior, Pleno, or Sênior, where "Pleno" means something like "full". It is used for these intermediary situations where neither Junior or Senior applies.

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

#407

Post by kleinsch »

Paul-Craft wrote: post #199
esquivalience wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't understand this comment and wondered whether you had misread the parent. The point is that they are posting job openings and getting thousands of applicants per role i.e. They are oversubscribed.

That literally cannot be true unless the supposed "more or less qualified" applicants actually aren't qualified. Now, I suppose it's possible that thousands of people are lying on their resumes just to get a chance to work at Dropbox, but given this year's layoffs, I find it far, far more likely that people on the hiring side have gone off the deep end. You can disagree with me on that, and that's fine, but stay with…

This seem pretty simple to me. Dropbox opens a role. They get 1000 applications. They hire one person. 999 people post on forums that they're getting rejected everywhere they apply.

Going more macro, there are 1000 people out of work applying to every job. There are only 100 jobs open across all companies. The same 1000 people apply to all of them, only 100 get hired. 900 people post on forums they can't get a job.

This doesn't need to be a conspiracy theory. If there are fewer jobs than there were last year (particularly in sectors like junior dev and FE eng) there are going to be people who don't get hired.

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

#408

Post by batch12 »

mightykipper wrote: post #224
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.

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…

> yes recruiters, this 100% works, we won't use you if you're shit regardless but we'll 100% entertain looking at your candidates

Maybe 99%. This doesn't work on me. Any swag I am sent from a recruiter gets handed to someone else. I turn down dinner and drinks because I feel like I'm being manipulated. The harder a vendor or recruiter pushes here, the more uneasy I feel about using them. I don't want to hang out with people who only want to be around me so I can give them something.

Edit: Sadly, I think this doesn't help me from the perspective of being recruited, but I can't help not being comfortable playing this game.

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

#409

Post by smeyer »

VoodooJuJu wrote: post #349
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…

>but it doesn't seem normal to spend six months applying and only get _one_ interview. At this point in time, it's completely normal for people breaking into the industry.

But someone with 5.5 years of experience isn't a person breaking into the industry.

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

#410

Post by scarface_74 »

xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #388
scarface_74 wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The company I worked for already had an exclusive contract with the recruiting agency.

We weren’t going to hire contractors outside of that agency.

Heck, my manager asked me did I know someone with the same skillset I had, I had a friend who was looking for work and asked for a rate of $80/hour. They wouldn’t hire them directly. I had to negotiate with the recruiter and my manager until we also settled on paying the agency $120/hour to hire my friend so he could get $80.

No my manager also wasn’t responsible for choosing the agency. That was chosen on higher levels.

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