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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?

#411

Post by ivanhoe »

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…

What you're discussing has little to do with seniority - those are some personality traits that are great to have, but you either have it in you or not - people who are bad at explaining stuff will usually stay bad at it for the rest of life (but can still be fantastic in e.g. architecting things).

Being a senior dev is IMHO much simpler. It's all about being able to solve problems independently, without needing supervision, guidance or tutoring. If you can pass to a dev some business requirement, and know that they'll return with an optimal solution implementation, you've got yourself a true senior dev.

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

#412

Post by Varriount »

azangru wrote: post #259
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 would suggest to email directly to a company hr or apply directly through company's job portal. Apply to companies that don't advertise on linkedin or similar portals. This is how I got essentially all of my jobs and this is how I get leads even now. How do you find out which companies are hiring, please? It's like a catch-22 situation: in order to know that a company is hiring, you need to know that the company…

Have you tried Indeed, Monster, etc.? Or failing that, contact the companies you're interested in directly?

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

#413

Post by sentinalien »

wildrhythms wrote: post #383
RGamma wrote: post #308

So this is what neoliberal hellscape looks like from across the big pond. Feel sorry for you :/

Rest assured this is coming for the UK and Europe soon too.

The job market is already pretty bad in the UK

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

#414

Post by xmcqdpt2 »

username_my1 wrote: post #239
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 necesarly the only way as someone who often interviews candidates, if I'm getting bombarded by spam applications, the least you can do for me to take your CV seriously is a cover letter related to the job posting / company. I don't understand any candidate who sends out a letter without researching the company for 30 minutes and taking another 10 to write a thoughtful cover letter. if you're not willing to put th…

I've been on the interviewer side too and I must say that I had the complete opposite experience. I've never seen a cover letter help a candidate (they mostly don't get read at all), only hurt a candidate chances. I wouldn't even read them unless they had glaring issues (like it's way too long) in which case I'd bin the applicant.

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

#415

Post by supertofu »

What is your education background? I've noticed that more companies want front-end engineers with STEM education creds than they do front-end devs with non-STEM education.

If you have a non-STEM degree and/or a weak portfolio, your resume might be getting filtered out.

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

#416

Post by codeisawesome »

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…

We should replace the term ‘trim fat’ with ‘cut flesh’ because it’s ridiculous and demonstrably wrong IME to assume management knows which resources are fat and which resources are actually crucial muscle that they would be (funnily) forced to re-hire for the sake of the health of the business.

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

#418

Post by mooreds »

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…

Hahah, It's the old story of the elephant and the blind men. There are so many ways to be a senior engineer, and it is, in my experience, very company dependent.

I wrote a blog post about it: https://www.mooreds.com/wordpress/archives/2812 which got some great HN discussion a few years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20485006

tl;dr: being a senior engineer at a startup is different than at a consulting company is different than at a large retail firm is different than at a FAANG.

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

#419

Post by softwaredoug »

herbst wrote: post #335
jameshush wrote: post #46

Reach out to people you've worked with in the past. After having five years of experience, you should have worked with at least a handful of people who need someone to fix another broken website. These could be managers, people on your team, people on OTHER teams, vendors, salespeople you've spoken to, anyone. Ideally, you should ALWAYS keep in contact with people you've worked with, even if it's just emailing them "…

I would be totally weird out if some of my past co-workers suddenly reaches out to me with bullshit smalltalk to ask for a job. Or random people from my past sending me happy birthday ever year. I am probably not social enough to understand that, but that sounds like a lot of work just to stand out as kinda weird.

I personally get these and want to connect and help people if I’ve had any kind of working relationship with them. But maybe I’m weird.

It helps you also because most people aren’t sociopaths and will pay it forward. It’s a way for you to build your own network.

Your career is often only as strong as your network.

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

#420

Post by Varriount »

Archipelagia wrote: post #129

At my last job, I had a little bit of experience on the other side of the hiring table – our founder walked me through our hiring process, and it was really eye opening. Any posting we had immediately got a lot of responses. We heavily tailored our postings to appeal only to people we actually wanted (e.g. were super clear about requirements, or talked extensively about company culture), and we still got dozens of ap…

What do mass-sent resumes look like?
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