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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?

#601

Post by bdcravens »

epolanski wrote: post #587

I went from being contacted once a day to once every two weeks. Market is definitely colder than it used to be. Much colder. Part of me thinks it's gonna stay like that for some time, some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely as the entry level got much higher.

> some of the weakest profiles may even have to change line of job entirely

This is what happened in the early 2000s. (ie, dot-com bust)

During the boom, companies were shoving warm bodies in chairs for those who could spell HTML, and paying them great money. People were coming from everywhere to get in on it.

Then it crashed, and those who couldn't cut it went back to car sales or whatever they did before. Those with chops mostly hung on and built the next phase of the market. (I was doing ColdFusion at the time, which was an easy language to learn. Those who were one-trick ponies suffered, and I regularly heard from "ColdFusion Developers" who were desperate as the one-trick rodeos went away)

I'm sorry to say, but if you're just a "front-end dev" you're probably in the same boat. Left a career to do a bootcamp? You may want to start calling those old colleagues.

(not saying this applies to OP necessarily, but I'm just an "old" dev who's seen this before)

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

#602

Post by noodle »

As someone on the other side, with open positions we're hiring for:

There are probably fewer job openings than there were, but I don't think my company or anyone in my network have changed HOW they're hiring, but we have definitely noticed a huge uptick in volume of applications. Earlier in the year, we were getting almost nothing. Now we're getting hundreds of resumes a week for each open position, and the bulk of each one of those resumes do not come close to even being in conversation range of the posted JD.

There's just a lot more to wade through from an HR and hiring perspective now, orders of magnitude more. It takes way more time/resources and is way more draining for the people involved.

I think my suggestion is, do what you can to stand out. Don't go overboard or anything, but if you're submitting your resume to an HR software or something, maybe try and find someone in the hiring chain on LinkedIn and email them directly either with your resume or just asking how its like to work there before you submit. Something like this.

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

#603

Post by JonChesterfield »

swat535 wrote: post #491

I can only speak to my personal experience of attempting to hire engineers. 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.

Most people are already employed. Some of them will move if your place looks likely to be an improvement. Limiting your search to the currently available will cut the pool drastically.

It's really easy to write a job listing that will be ignored. It'll still get lots of noise but not so much signal. It's probably also important where you post it, especially if your website doesn't pull a lot of traffic to the careers page by itself.

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

#604

Post by TheCaptain4815 »

Macha wrote: post #396
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 ind…

This would be such a fantastic use of LLMs. Each step you listed to curtail your list could be done fairly easily using a specific model (prob classification oriented). I wonder if there's a market for something like this.

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

#605

Post by Workaccount2 »

dorfsmay wrote: post #516
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…

Have you looked for a job recently? I don't know about you personally, but people in my social circles and employed think the job market is the same as it was from 2015 to 2020. They have no data point and assume their 2+ year old experience of looking for work is relevant today. The market is bad. I was getting calls from recruiters in 2020. I looked and found work (contracts) twice in 2022, the first time was not e…

It's strange because economically, tech is roaring back and the job market is tight as ever.

Are employers hedging against this perpetually 6 month away recession? Is there a shift from growth mindset to value mindset?

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

#606

Post by nonethewiser »

vsareto wrote: post #590
WinLychee wrote: post #553

I've gotten plenty, though I am a decent bit more senior than you. It's very hard to get an offer right now, but for sure you can get interviews. I think I've interviewed with ~10 companies for positions since June, and all passed on me, but it's mostly because I didn't take the time required to prepare. In hindsight nobody asked anything _super_ hard, but you cannot make a single mistake, or a suboptimal solution, o…

This is exaggerated, we just hired someone and don't give these kinds of tests or expect this level of correctness. I feel like this is fed by anxiety. I really doubt a large amount of ordinary companies have switched to FAANG leetcode + system design interview formats because of a downtown.

I think its fed by people trying to get good jobs. On average, better companies have harder technical assessments.

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

#607

Post by DonHopkins »

jacquesm wrote: post #448
m00dy wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think you made the GPs point very effectively.

So does his profile:

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=m00dy

    about: someone important...

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

#608

Post by bigbinary »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #530
pc86 wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intermediate/mid for sure, but if I get a resume from someone whose first programming job was 2018 and they're calling themselves senior, I'm throwing that in the trash unless like you said they're from VC-funded startups that are going to have massive title inflation and they're applying for a realistic (mid-level) role.

Sure, I guess my point is to consider the context of the person applying. If they are coming from a place with title inflation, it's not their fault that the company they worked for inflated titles. If you're exclusively hiring seniors and they are an inflated "senior", for sure you're under no obligation to hire them, but if you're open to intermediates, I think it's worth explaining how your titles might differ fro…

Anyone tossing resumes because of title/time spent not matching up with their expectations is out of touch

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

#609

Post by Workaccount2 »

blitz_skull wrote: post #435
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…

> 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.

The good old "They don't have 10 years experience, they have 2 years of experience 5 times"

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

#610

Post by baobabKoodaa »

artificialLimbs wrote: post #586
whiddershins wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We have a 14 year junior engineer. She refuses to learn new tech, is difficult to work with, and makes a mean bowl of spaghetti code. She does it so quickly though and has so much institutional knowledge that it’s pretty much mandatory she stays.

When did we arrive at a point where terms like "junior" became derogatory terms similar to "idiot" or "asshole"? No, you don't have a "14 year junior engineer". You have a senior engineer who is difficult to work with and is (according to you) bad at their job.
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