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Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

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Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#71

Post by throwaway908365 »

Have not been laid off and I am not living in the bay area, but in Germany. Still wanted to offer some perspective.

~15 years fullstack and DevOps experience, visited top local university, no degree. Mostly Python + some other languages. Have been interviewing for Lead SE/DevOps/SRE roles as well as some architecture positions.

My findings about the German job market for developers:

- Remote-work is here to stay. Almost all companies are okay with full-remote, those who are not, want ~2 days in the office per week.

- Companies are starting to do leetcode-style interviews. Sometimes some FizzBuzz level to check basic understanding, going up to harder problems unrelated to the position. Unless they are very hard, you will just get used to that.

- Remote or hybrid meetings with multiple participants are horrible for interviewing. The delay makes you come across slow and is very distracting, when you need to look sharp.

- If you want to earn money in Germany, you have to join a bigger company.

- Bigger companies do their development in Java with a minority being MS shops. Python is for data science and DevOps.

- The missing degree is mostly not a problem. Sometimes the CTO's PHD makes it one.

- Landing lead/lower management roles seems to be difficult if you have limited experience leading people. Those seem to be mostly staffed internally.

- The market value for a profile like mine in a big German city seems to be around 100k € including some small bonus.

- There are many offers under that number. I think I would get hired almost instantly if I would accept offers for 80k €.

- All-in all IT does not seem affected by the downturn yet.

While these numbers are not directly comparable to the US (lower cost of living, better social security, health-insurance included and not tied to your job etc.) my subjective feeling is, that I am getting taken advantage of here. Salaries seem to be too low. You are often getting low-balled because "it would not fit within the salaries of the other team members".

For the time being, freelancing is the way to go in Germany, even though you are fighting against regulations.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#72

Post by IshKebab »

throw_aws_inter wrote: post #16

I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…

From what I hear Amazon is a terrible employer even for highly skilled positions, so maybe it's for the best.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#73

Post by jvermillard »

throw_aws_inter wrote: post #16

I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…

same experience with Amazon a while ago, same with Microsoft, looks like ghosting is common

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#74

Post by nicolas_t »

mrjin wrote: post #26
throw_aws_inter wrote: post #16

I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…

I would say not that bad if you take it from a different angle: what if you managed to get there and then laying off started?

Wouldn't that be better? They'd get a severance pay?

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#75

Post by samhuk »

awesomegoat_com wrote: post #62
samhuk wrote: post #53

Didn't get laid off but resigned around a month ago after a long stretch of non-stop work since I was basically a kid (worked through college, university, and straight after O_o). Basically for a little break and to focus on doing some real intense OSS. Been a wild, challenging, and rewarding 1.5 months so far. Applied to a couple places that were working on some interesting things, some even related to my own OSS, r…

Good luck with your search. I think I will be soon in the same boat and happy to hear that your time was (at least partially) rewarding. I have 13 years of non-stop work for big tech and I cannot wait for the day I resign. Hopefully, sometime in the next 3-4 months. :-D It is better to be unemployed if you can afford it.

Thank you. Good luck with the future. It's a big leap of faith.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#76

Post by amelius »

f6v wrote: post #44
rvz wrote: post #9

One may suggest to 'learn to code', but it is not enough this time. Perhaps now one may say, it is time to 'learn to adapt', since with the recent release of ChatGPT now gives the excuse for managers to be more motivated to hire less engineers and programmers as the cheap money has essentially evaporated. So this time it is indeed different and I would expect less engineers to be hired and more programming jobs to be…

GPT took our jaaaawbs! proceeds to building a time machine to get a job in 2015

Don't forget to patent the transformer algorithm.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#77

Post by golergka »

throw_aws_inter wrote: post #16

I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…

No post body was provided.

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#78

Post by nbaugh1 »

gorbachev wrote: post #22
rvz wrote: post #9

One may suggest to 'learn to code', but it is not enough this time. Perhaps now one may say, it is time to 'learn to adapt', since with the recent release of ChatGPT now gives the excuse for managers to be more motivated to hire less engineers and programmers as the cheap money has essentially evaporated. So this time it is indeed different and I would expect less engineers to be hired and more programming jobs to be…

ChatGPT is not going to eat all the jobs. Can we stop this nonsense, please?

I'll get scared when someone shows me an actual deployed, running, and maintained app by something like chatGPT. Solving problems with code snippets is a tiny part of the job

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#79

Post by calvinmorrison »

enraged_camel wrote: post #65

I primarily write Elixir these days. At first I was worried that there wouldn't be a lot of Elixir jobs, but the ones I did apply to have mostly gotten back to me and I've been interviewing. I have 5 years of experience with the language, FWIW.

There's a motorcycle parts store that's on elixir in my area. Almost learned elixir just for that

Re: Ask HN: How is the job search coming along for people who got laid off?

#80

Post by speeder »

throw_aws_inter wrote: post #16

I interviewed for 1.5 months (!!!) for AWS for a senior position, went through all the stages through the end. Then silence. I kept emailing the recruiters responsible for my interview, I kept getting out-of-office replies. Then I contacted some higher ups I found, told me they assigned my interview to other recruiters. No replies from them though. I have emailed them a bunch of times including the higher up. Then th…

That is just Amazon being Amazon.

When they interviewed me the first time, the interviewer didn't show to work, so they asked another guy to interview me, he ended interviewing me in a language he didn't knew, to a position using another language entirely, the whole thing was a farce.

Some years later Amazon recruiters contacted me, asked me to go interview in person. Then during the interview in their offices, they literally forgot me for several hours in a random room of the building, the employees left at the end of shift, and left me alone in the floor with nobody in it, and I had no idea where the exit was.

I really need a job and been applying to lots of companies, but I won't apply to Amazon again.

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