491–500 of 1001 posts
We started a hiring 2 weeks ago, the top engineers are taken off the market _before_ we even get a chance to interview them! (usually within 3-5 days).
We had to accelerate our process and nearly double our offers to have a fighting chance. So at least from where I'm standing, the market is pretty aggressive at the moment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> whereas everyone else would call that person [with 5 years experience] a junior engineer I’ve met people with 3 years experience who I’d consider more senior than myself (8 years). Some folks just learn really fast and/or don’t do much else other than work. Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.
It's such an old-fashioned way to look at skills and experience. Tbh there should be real ways to measure all this but there aren't. If you can code by your own without handholding, are you a junior at that point anyways?
I may be a competent framer that can stud out the plans for a house, but I may not totally understand why the walls are positioned that way or how the roofline will work with the landscape to avoid water issues later. They're just different skill sets, I'd actually also expect the architect who can design the house wouldn't be particularly useful with a framing nailer.
Ive never actually liked drawing solid lines between skill levels because it is so contextual, but here's the closest I can get.
Any developer should be able to write code when it's already known what it needs to do. The next level for me is being able to write code with an eye towards testability, maintenance, and flexibility based on where you expect requirements to change later. I'd expect a senior to be able to go beyond that, starting from a set of product requirements and designing the code to work for those needs. Beyond that it starts to get really gray, and you likely lose more of the earlier coding skills, but that's where I'd be looking for someone who can help define what the product requirements even are, considering technical risks and limitations of how they might even build and host the product.
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…
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…
I call it do you have 10 years of experience? or do you have 1 year of experience 10 times?
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 have seen people who make $250K a year be swayed by free muffins. It has nothing to do with money.
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…
No one says everyone with 5 years of experience is a senior, but most likely is mid.
From the interviewer side of the house, the purpose of interviewing is to hire the least risky candidate - not the best candidate.
As you get closer to senior job titles, a longer duration of employment in the latest position is more desirable.
If you have three or more jobs in that 5.5 years, you may be a more risky applicant. It isn't necessarily the case that you do from your post here ("I held a job as a front-end dev"), but switching jobs frequently is not uncommon and may catch up with people in time as they try to move up. For more senior positions, initiative and projects may last longer than the length of a job hopper's tenure and can be seen as a negative as they are less likely to see the project through to completion and the company may need to hire someone in the middle of the project.
If you have had multiple positions, companies with a longer onboarding process it may be that you won't even get to being a positive ROI before your feet start itching again for a new position.
In companies with faster onboarding (dump into the pool and see who swims) a less risky applicant will have a close match to the skills and responsibilities listed on the job description. This entails making sure that each job application that you send out (my reading of the post is that you only have one) emphasizes familiarity with their technology stack rather than just a list of tech that are tossed into a line on the resume without care for order.
If applying on job boards for listings that do not specify a company or are "an exciting opportunity with a client", you are applying to a 3rd party recruiter and not an actual job.
If applying on job boards for companies themselves, realize that these jobs may be scraped, unmaintained, or otherwise not representative of the current jobs that company has open. I have seen jobs listed on indeed for positions that were posted in January and closed in February showing up months later. Likewise, job listings on the company's current career page may have openings that are not on Indeed.
Make sure that you're applying for jobs that are a fit for your experience. Job boards are notorious for having poor search criteria for experience. Doing a search for entry level jobs will pull up principal engineer positions and searching for senior jobs will find entry level ones. Mass applying to everything that shows up will result in a higher percentage of rejections.
If you only have one resume, create one resume for each type of position that you are looking to apply for. Create one resume for React developer, one resume for Angular developer, one resume for Php developer - and then send the relevant one. If you are sending a "5 years of React experience" to a position that is looking for someone to work in their Angular application, there will be a subset of applicants who are less risky than you (based on the resume) that are selected for interviewing.
While not applying for jobs, use the job requirements for positions that you've applied to (or interest you) as a guideline for personal projects to work on to keep skills fresh or to learn sufficient information about that technology stack to be able to competently answer questions if you are interviewed.
Make sure that you are also looking at public sector employers. State and local government tends not to advertise on career boards but rather on the state's workforce development board.
Make sure you are applying to non-remote jobs. Yes, everyone wants a remote job. The applicant pool for such positions is much larger than the local jobs and instead of competing with people who live in the area or are willing to move there you are competing with everyone who can legally work there.
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…
I haven't looked for jobs in nearly 9 years now. Is a LinkedIn profile essential nowadays? I have dropped all social media and LinkedIn is one of the most invasive. I really dislike how it notifies you for everything
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…
> whereas everyone else would call that person [with 5 years experience] a junior engineer I’ve met people with 3 years experience who I’d consider more senior than myself (8 years). Some folks just learn really fast and/or don’t do much else other than work. Not sure time is relevant to your skills or title after about 2-3 years.
I cannot disagree with this more. In my own experience, I've never met anyone with less than 5 years of experience that I'd call "good". And I've worked at several places in SV, FAANG included.
The market is bad. I've been unemployed for 9 months, almost no interview invites and the ones I did have led to nothing (also to no alternative hire of someone else for the allegedly position). And I've got almost 20 years of Product Leadership experience, Stanford, Google, myspace, Booking and Trip.com Groups, that stuff. The market (in my case APAC: HK/SG/AU) is shit and frankly not really worth engaging in right…
My humble advice would be to take any job that gets offered (as long as it isn't sweatshop conditions or unrealistically low wages) and then simply continue the job search. Once in a job, you are more employable. And employers are for sure not entitled to their worker's unquestioning loyalty. So I see nothing wrong with moving positions if a better one presents itself.
don't hate the player, hate the game...